Goldberg took issue with the introduction for a Hot Topic about women “aging gracefully.”
It wasn’t a cactus army or the developers of Diablo, but a question she was meant to ask her cohosts on The View just officially landed a spot on The Whoopi Goldberg War Room’s terror watchlist.
The 68-year-old Oscar winner balked at one of her lines on Monday’s episode of the talk show, as she introduced a Hot Topic regarding her Ghost costar Demi Moore and actress Kate Winslet speaking out about beauty standards for women.
“I’m supposed to ask this really dumb question: Is this the new aging gracefully?” Goldberg said, with her face signaling light confusion to the audience.
Wasting no time, panelist Ana Navarro, 52, turned the focus to a pair of women in the audience who were over the age of 80. “Someone should go ask those two ladies,” Navarro said as the audience applauded.
Goldberg eventually elaborated on her stance, observing that, while “apparently this is a big deal,” she thinks the key to aging gracefully is a conscious choice each person must make for themselves.
“We don’t have a choice. Either we feel good or you’re depending on somebody else to tell you what you are. I always thought it was more important for you to feel like you were hot enough for you,” Goldberg said, while Navarro praised her colleague for regularly talking about her experience with menopause throughout her career.
“Nobody wanted to hear it, nobody wanted to know what went on past a certain age. I kept doing it anyway, yeah, because it was the most ridiculous thing that my body had ever done to me. It was insane,” Goldberg said.
“For years, women of a certain age have been told that they don’t function, that they’re not sexually active, that they have no interests. I love when people tell me what I’m feeling. People who haven’t gotten to a certain age have no idea what my body is doing,” she continued. “It doesn’t mean that anything else stops.”
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Sara Haines, 46, also cited an uptick in “dangerous procedures” women are having in their twenties as cause for alarm, and an indication that more work is needed to boost self-esteem among the populace.
“You can’t control everything. We don’t know what our lives are going to be on a daily basis,” Goldberg finished. “Impress yourself the same way you’re trying to impress somebody else. You have to be as invested in you as you are in other people, because if you invest in you, you do stuff for yourself.”
Elsewhere during the discussion, 35-year-old cohost Alyssa Farah Griffin also brought up Moore’s new film, The Substance, which has received critical praise as a parable about the dangers of age anxiety — particularly in Hollywood, as Moore plays a veteran actress who resorts to a black-market drug to create a new, younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) to violent, dangerous results.
“It’s not like I ever officially left, but I understand the sentiment and appreciate it because there hasn’t been a project or a role that has come along that has been this dynamic for me to really dive into and sink my teeth into,” Moore previously told Entertainment Weekly of the role, which many labeled a “comeback” for the 61-year-old, though she never really went anywhere in the first place. “I went through a period of even questioning whether this is what I should still be doing. In the last four years or so, I felt that it was a personal question that I wanted to explore and see. Was this where I should be putting my energy? When you plant seeds, you wait to see what grows.”