Daily Inspiration Quote by Ashley Judd

Judd’s line lands like a rallying cry dressed in plain language: “take pop culture back” assumes something has been stolen, not merely degraded. The theft she’s naming is agency - who gets to define what’s “cool,” whose bodies are marketed, whose inner lives count, and how early those scripts get handed to kids. By saying “it’s up to us,” she refuses the convenient scapegoat of “the media” as some distant machine. The subtext is participatory guilt: audiences, parents, advertisers, platforms, and celebrities all vote with attention.

“Quality and dignity” is carefully chosen. It’s not a demand for puritanism, but for standards that don’t equate value with sexual display, cruelty, or humiliation-as-entertainment. Coming from an actress, the phrase also reads as insider testimony. Judd is pointing at an industry where women are routinely asked to be the product, not the storyteller, and where “quality” is often used to excuse exploitation (“prestige” nudity, “edgy” violence) while “dignity” gets framed as uncool or prudish.

The inclusion of “both boys and girls” is the strategic twist. Instead of positioning misogyny as a women-only issue, she flags how pop culture trains boys too: to perform dominance, to consume women as status objects, to confuse emotional range with weakness. It’s a culture-war sentence that tries to sidestep the culture war - reclaiming moral language without preaching, and insisting that media criticism is not censorship but stewardship.