Does Drew Barrymore Deserve Credit For Doing The Right Thing A Little Too Late?

ET phone home, Drew phone your publicist!

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For those of you not on X (née Twitter) you should be so proud of yourself. It’s still the fastest place to get up to date news, but it is a nightmare over there, I won’t lie. And since you aren’t on Twitter, that also means you may not be familiar with what’s going on in the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, but surely you’ve heard about Drew Barrymore’s role in it, right? Right?

If you haven’t, Madame Barrymore’s show has been on hiatus since before the strike started, but last week, she decided she wanted to bring it back because people need jobs, and they want to get back to work. While she’s right, people needing jobs and people getting back to work defeats the whole purpose of the strike because those same people want to be paid a fair wage, and as long as she has been in the business, she should recognize that. People like Viola Davis, The Rock, and Quinta Brunson have come together to create funds for the strikers and help pay bills, and even take care of insurance.

Of COURSE people were quick to hop in my comments to say her life wasn’t perfect, even though I never said it was, and that she lived in a small apartment with her mother, and that she was used an abused by the industry—which makes all the more sense that as a person with the resources to protect others now, it would behoove you to use those resources!

But Drew’s approach really pissed people off, and well—the internet let her know it.

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Admittedly, like the internet is often wont to do, we had our fun with publicly shaming her after she made such a strange decision. And as usual, as a handsome, clever bisexual queer black man of colour, some people did not understand that this tweet was satire, again.

Like, I’m sorry—but where the hell have people been that they don’t get this joke? It’s funny and I won’t apologize!

Imagine not getting such an iconic reference? I feel sad for those people!!!

Thankfully, it wasn’t long before she came to her senses and took to Instagram

And when she did, credit was given where it was due. It takes guts to be wrong as hell on the internet, get dragged, and say “you know what, I was wrong” instead of just deleting all the evidence and never addressing it again.

However, some people don’t think she should have been given credit because she never should have made the mistake in the first place. Now—that’s fair. She shouldn’t have dismissed the pleas of trusted people (and workers) around her. But she did, so where does that leave us?

a dummy

It’s not like she pushed the abusive husband of her best friend down the stairs at their school’s fundraiser, killing him instantly, forcing the four other women in her friend group to carry a secret and altering the trajectory of their lives as they know it. She made a bad decision and turned it around before it really and truly affected anyone.

Are people not allowed to make mistakes and grow from them? Obviously some things you can’t come back from, but in the grand scheme of things, especially as an unproblematic white woman celeb (we have so few of them!) who gave us Ever After, Never Been Kissed, and BOTH Charlie’s Angels movies—can the woman live?!

And now that I mention it—Bill Maher did the same thing, but fuck him!

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