Actress Kate Beckinsale has said that the media "deliberately twisted" her comments about how her high IQ had hampered her career, making her come across as "superior or arrogant".
During an interview with The Howard Stern Show on US radio station SiriusXM, the British actress said her IQ score had been tested as 152 as a child and that it may have been a "handicap" in her career.
The Pearl Harbour actress explained that she was asked to respond to the question by the interviewer about her IQ and that people had been triggered by her response.
Taking to Instagram, Beckinsale explained the situation to her followers.
Beckinsale said: "Tell the truth? Refuse to answer the question? Lie? Pretend it was lower? I told the truth and some journalists have been triggered by this," she said.
"Are we really jumping on women for answering a question truthfully about their intelligence or education? Are we really still requiring women to dumb themselves down in order not to offend?"
She added that she had attended an all-girls school where she did not have to worry about "raising my hand making me possibly unfeminine", and later attended Oxford University, where "intellectual debate was not only encouraged but the entire point of attending".
She added: "I am very aware how lucky I am to have had those experiences.
"When I said it has been a handicap in Hollywood it's PRECISELY because being female AND having an opinion often has to be quite carefully packaged so as not to be offensive or, as in this case, deliberately twisted into signifying ones perceived superiority or arrogance."
Beckinsale suggested the response to her comments, which she claimed had "spun" her words into "bragging", made it "abundantly clear" this is still the case.
"As a woman truthfully answering a question about my own IQ I have been the subject of a few articles trying to shame me for it. This is EXACTLY what I mean by a handicap.
"It’s really important to me that NO percentage of women let alone 60% (Grazia magazine, 2019) should feel they need to lie or dumb down under any circumstances so as not to be a target."
To illustrate her point, she shared a photo of a headline from the Grazia article which read, "I Dumb Myself Down On Dates So I Don’t Intimidate Men, And I Hate Myself For It".
The article referenced a survey in which more than half of respondents admitted they had "dumbed down" on dates.
