{"id":2321559,"date":"2026-03-10T15:16:45","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T15:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2321559"},"modified":"2026-03-10T15:16:45","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T15:16:45","slug":"ashley-judd-says-kiss-the-girls-uses-sexual-torture-as-entertainment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/ashley-judd-says-kiss-the-girls-uses-sexual-torture-as-entertainment\/","title":{"rendered":"Ashley Judd Says &#8216;Kiss the Girls&#8217; Uses Sexual Torture as Entertainment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<!-- do not apply CSS styles to this element! --><\/p>\n<div class=\"pmc-paywall\">\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\t<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/ashley-judd\/\" id=\"auto-tag_ashley-judd\" data-tag=\"ashley-judd\">Ashley Judd<\/a> is reconsidering one of her earliest box office hits. In a recent <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/reel\/DVpXTdlDkWT\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Instagram video post<\/a>, Judd noted how her relationship with 1997\u2019s \u201c<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/kiss-the-girls\/\" id=\"auto-tag_kiss-the-girls\" data-tag=\"kiss-the-girls\">Kiss the Girls<\/a>\u201d has \u201cevolved\u201d over the years due to the film\u2019s depiction of violence against women.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\t\u2018\u201dKiss the Girls\u2019 centers on male sexual violence and the torture of women\u2019s bodies,\u201d Judd wrote in her caption. \u201cAt the time, we often framed stories like this around female resilience\u2014the strength of surviving. Many people still say that\u2019s what the film means to them. But I\u2019ve found myself asking a different question: Why is sexual terror against women something we package as entertainment? Why is it profitable?\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\t\u201cKiss the Girls\u201d was adapted from James Patterson\u2019s 1995 novel of the same name and was directed by Gary Fleder. Morgan Freeman starred as forensic psychologist Alex Cross, while Judd played a doctor and kickboxer who is abducted by a masked serial killer who calls himself Casanova.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\t\u201cThank you for loving the movie, thank you for loving me in it,\u201d Judd told her fans in the corresponding video message. \u201cThank you for making it such\u2026 I was gonna say pivotal, but I would even say a transformative moment in my career.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\t\u201cI want to talk about the movie in a way that has become more clear to me over the years, and I invite you to consider [this] for yourself. It\u2019s okay to love the movie and come up to me and say it\u2019s your favorite movie,\u201d Judd continued, doubling down on questioning \u201cwhy filming male sexual violence\u201d and \u201ctorture of the female body\u201d is considered entertaining. She also said the movie contains \u201cvery misogynistic dialogue,\u201d which is \u201cexcruciatingly not okay.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s the resilience after male sexual violence. It\u2019s resilience after male sexual torture of the female body and I go\u2026 why is that entertainment? Why is that a capitalist enterprise? Why do we create entertainment and earn money off of such a subject?\u201d Judd asked. \u201cSo we\u2019re valorizing my [character\u2019s] resilience in the movie but we\u2019re not necessarily critiquing or wrestling with or holding at arms\u2019 length why\u2026 the movie is about trauma, and it is traumatizing\u2026 To me, this is not entertainment. It\u2019s collective denial\u2026 and making entertainment out of sexual terror.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\t\u201cKiss the Girls\u201d was a box office hit for Paramount Pictures in 1997, grossing $60 million worldwide on a budget just under $30 million. Freeman returned as Alex Cross in the 2001 sequel \u201cAlong Came a Spider,\u201d which was an even bigger box office hit with $105 million worldwide.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/www.instagram.com\/embed.js\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p><em> \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em> \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source variety.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ashley Judd is reconsidering one of her earliest box office hits. In a recent Instagram video post, Judd noted how her relationship with 1997\u2019s \u201cKiss the Girls\u201d has \u201cevolved\u201d over the years due to the film\u2019s depiction of violence against women. \u2018\u201dKiss the Girls\u2019 centers on male sexual violence and the torture of women\u2019s bodies,\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2321560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[385206,449755],"class_list":["post-2321559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-ashley-judd","tag-kiss-the-girls"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Ashley-Judd-Says-Kiss-the-Girls-Uses-Sexual-Torture-as.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2321559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2321559"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2321559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2321561,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2321559\/revisions\/2321561"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2321560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2321559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2321559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2321559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}