Talk about an empowered woman!!! Over 30 years ago Meryl Streep made a statement that I honestly can’t make even today: “I can’t remember the last time I really worried ab out being appealing. It was a really long time ago.

Now THAT is a Smart Sensuality Woman talking. She is inherently confident, proud of herself and her accomplishments but not obsessed with vanity. OK, Meryl, I’ll try to be you when I grow up.

Meryl Streep made news this week on multiple fronts. The actress told Ellen DeGeneres that she was “really shocked” to earn an 18th Oscar nomination for her performance in ‘August: Osage County’. “You read the papers and they all say, ‘Oh she doesn’t have a chance,” Streep said. “I’m old news.”

The Smart Sensuality activist side of Meryl Streep has been at work, too, in the month of January. Streep made a speech at the National Board of Review dinner on January 7, in honor of good friend and actress Emma Thompson for her portrayal of Mary Poppins’ creator, PL Travers in the Disney film ‘Saving Mr Banks’.

In her speech, Meryl Streep called Walt Disney a ‘gender bigot’ and added that he had ‘formed and supported an anti-Semitic industry lobby’. But the setup also saluted feminism at its best. Streep lets loose and Vanity Fair has the entire speech:

Here’s a letter from 1938 stating his company’s policy to a young woman named Mary Ford, of Arkansas, who had made application to Disney for the training program in cartooning. And I’m going to read it here in Emma’s tribute because I know it will tickle our honoree, because she’s also a rabid, man eating feminist, like I am.

Dear Miss Ford,

Your letter of recent date has been received in the inking and painting department for reply. Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that task is performed entirely by young men. For this reason, girls are not considered for the training school. The only work open to women consists of tracing the characters on clear celluloid sheets with India ink, and then filling in the tracing on the reverse side with paint, according to the directions.

When I saw the film, I could just imagine Walt Disney’s chagrin at having to cultivate P.L. Travers’ favor for 20 years that it took to secure the rights to her work. It must have killed him to encounter, in a woman, an equally disdainful and superior creature, a person dismissive of his own, considerable gifts and prodigious output and imagination.

Bravo Meryl Streep, a quintessential Smart Sensuality woman. Of course, a furor from opposing sides ensued after Streep called Walt Disney an anti-Semitic gender bigot. The great-niece of Walt Disney supported the actress. Abigail Disney, 54, an activist and filmmaker wrote that although she has “mixed feelings” about Walt Disney, she “loved” Streep’s comments about her famous relative.

Anti-Semite? Check. Misogynist? OF COURSE!!Racist? C’mon he made a film (‘Jungle Book’) about how you should stay “with your own kind” at the height of the fight over segregation.’King of the Jungle’ number wasn’t proof enough!! How much more information do you need?”