Lily Tomlin isn’t buying what Beyonce‘s selling—which, in her opinion, is sex, and a lot of it. Asked in a recent interview with PrideSource what she thinks of the “Partition” singer as a modern-day feminist, Tomlin said Bey is part of a culture that makes young girls “too sexually available.”
“She is a pretty popular woman and she’s married to a very powerful man, but she’s still selling sex,” the 74-year-old comedian explained. “She’s selling a lot of sex to teeny-boppers.”
Told by the interviewer that the Beygency might take offense at her comments, Tomlin replied, “Oh, s–t. I like her! I don’t dislike her! But I don’t pay any attention to that because—I mean, she’s fantastically beautiful and dances, but, you know, it’s very suggestive. If I was a 10-year-old, I would try to emulate her like most 10-year-olds do.”
She went on to say that her issue isn’t really with Beyonce but with society being “so sexualized” with girls and women. “I shouldn’t even talk about Beyonce because, hard as it is to believe and as much as she is present in the culture, I’m not terribly conversant with Beyonce,” Tomlin, a noted feminist, admitted. “If you played her songs, I wouldn’t necessarily recognize them. I’m familiar with her image and how incredibly vivacious and sexual she is to watch, so I just chalk it up to the culture.”
“Jay Z and Beyonce are their own thing,” she added of the superstar couple, parents to daughter Blue Ivy, 2. “I mean, they come swathed in a culture that is wide and deep, and that’s great. They make a lot of money. I don’t know what else they do.”
Perhaps taking the Beygency warning to heart, she joked, “You’re gonna put words in my mouth! The whole Beyonce thing is gonna come after me.” Then, referencing the infamous elevator incident between Bey’s husband, Jay Z, and her sister, Solange, Tomlin said: “They’ll send Solange after me. I’ll be in the elevator and they’ll beat the hell out of me.”
Later in the conversation, the PrideSource interviewer quipped that Ms. Frizzle of The Magic School Bus—a character voiced by Tomlin in the 1990s—could probably take Solange. “Say I said that,” Tomlin replied, laughing. “Get a whole thing going where Beyonce’s people are gonna come after me because I said, ‘Ms. Frizzle could take down Solange in an elevator.'”
