Must be Wednesday–another none-too-young actress is complaining that Hollywood is "sexist" because it won't case women her age as romantic leads.

This time it's Emma Thompson, age 56. According to Time:

“When I was younger, I really did think we were on our way to a better world and when I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women and I find that very disturbing and sad,” she said in an interview with Radio Times magazine.

The actress, who plays a 77-year-old prostitute in the film The Legend of Barney Thomson, said there’s more pressure for women to look a certain way and take on certain roles than when she started out.

“I don’t think there’s any appreciable improvement and I think that for women, the question of how they are supposed to look is worse than it was even when I was young.

A couple of months ago, it was Maggie Gyllenhaal doing the complaining:

“There are things that are really disappointing about being an actress in Hollywood that surprise me all the time,” she said during an interview for an upcoming issue of TheWrap Magazine. “I’m 37 and I was told recently I was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55. It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made me feel angry, and then it made me laugh.”

Other agesim complainers have included Patricia Arquette, Meryl Streep, and Cate Blanchett.

Indeed, the Wrap featured an entire slide show of 17 movies displaying  the horror of romantically pairing older male stars with lovely young things in their twenties instead of ladies the men's own age. Case in point: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) in which 43-year-old Daniel Craig slipped between the sheets with 26-year-old Rooney Mara. Couldn't they have stuck Julia Roberts (Craig's exact age) into the movie instead? Of course they would have had to do some plot tinkering: such as changing the title to The Fortysomething Woman With the Dragon Tattoo–and also trying to make it plausible that a middle-aged lady would have a tattoo in the first place.

And now the ACLU is calling for an investigation of "gender discrimination" in Hollywood.

Even worse, the problem appears to extend far past directing gigs. A study by San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film shows that women made up only 17 percent of directors, writers, executive producers, producers, editors and cinematographers who worked on the top 250 domestic grossing movies of the year

The findings drive home the point that men continue to construct the vast majority of the visual and aural worlds featured in U.S. films,” said Dr. Martha Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at SDSU.

The same institute also found that there are fewer jobs for leading actresses available, since female characters made up just 12 percent of protagonists in the top 100 domestic-grossing films of 2014. This figure is three percent below 2013’s study and four percent below the number in 2002.

The idea seems to be that there's a category of films called "top 250 domestic grossing movies"–so all you need to do is have the government set up a gender quota system requiring  that 125 of them star female protagonists (and are also directed by women) and bingo! Problem solved!

Maybe it's not fair that Daniel Craig, George Clooney, Bruce Willis, and other male actors manage to come off as sexy on the screen well into their silver-fox years–while no one really wants to see Emma Thompson, talented as she is, trying to play a femme fatale frolicking in the hot tub (even Julia Roberts is long past her Pretty Woman years). But it's the way most people react to sex differences. It may not be ideologically correct to view a 56-year-old woman as way less alluring than a 26-year-old woman, but it's certainly biologically correct. Youth correlates with fertility in a woman far more decisively than in a man. 54-year-old George Clooney is undoubtedly perfectly capable of producing offspring; 56-year-old Emma Thompson just isn't. This is something that the people who actually watch movies (in contrast to the people who merely bloviate about movies to the media) understand perfectly well.

Emma Thompson is in fact a much-lauded actress who has survived quite well at the box-office (unlike many a youthful beauty of lesser talent). She's done so by not trying to take roles designed for women thirty years younger than she. Emma Thompson the professional thespian can be taken a lot more seriously than Emma Thompson the ideological mouthpiece.