Dame Joanna Lumley scoffs at ‘fashionable victimhood’ and says ‘women used to be tough’

Dame Joanna Lumley has claimed that victimhood is the “'new fashion” for women.

Discussing the Me Too movement, the actress and presenter said that in her early days in the entertainment industry women took a “tough” approach to unwanted advances, but this has now changed.

Dame Joanna has claimed that victimhood is now the “fashion” for modern women and branded it “pathetic”.

She told Prospect magazine: “If someone whistled at you in the street, it didn't matter, if someone was groping, we slapped their hands.

“We were quite tough and looked after ourselves… the new fashion is to be a victim, a victim of something. It's pathetic, we have gone mad.”

Dame Joanna, who began her career as a model before earning parts in James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and The New Avengers, has previously been candid about her views on modern cultural trends and called for a return of the “stiff upper lip” attitude.

Part of 'being human'

Earlier this year the 76-year-old star said that many people were “claiming the mental illness bandwagon” and that “the mental health thing is being overplayed”.  She argued that what many people said were signs of mental illness were simply emotions which are part of “being human”.

She also warned in a 2021 interview that gender parity in the entertainment industry may never happen, as women will always be pressured to be beautiful “because in the whole long time that human beings have been alive, women have always had to look good for men to like them”.

The actress has suffered from the problems that she has commented on, previously revealing that she was forced to strip for a role in the 1970s and suffered "a complete nervous breakdown" early in her career.

She overcame this and is now a household name thanks to BBC comedy Absolutely Fabulous in the early 1990s and her work campaigning on behalf of Gurkha veterans, and has recently starred in the BBC sitcom Motherland.