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10 Female Celebs Who AREN’T Feminists

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Ten famous women champion female empowerment on their own terms, and refuse to wear the feminist label anyone tries to hand them.

A wave of pop culture debate over the meaning of feminism has forced entertainers, musicians, and political figures alike to state where they stand, and the answers haven’t followed the script. TheThings’ video “10 Female Celebs Who AREN’T Feminists” rounds up prominent women who back female autonomy and equal treatment in practice while flatly refusing to call themselves feminists in name. The through-line is consistent: these women say the label carries baggage they don’t want, even when their actions look feminist on paper.

• Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda album cover reignited the debate over whether hyper-sexualized imagery from a woman is commercial exploitation or feminist self-ownership.
• Kellyanne Conway, White House counselor, has explicitly called modern feminism “anti-male” and “pro-abortion” while rejecting the term outright.
• Kaley Cuoco (Redbook, 2014), Shailene Woodley (TIME), Salma Hayek, and Lana Del Rey (The Fader, 2014) have each publicly distanced themselves from the feminist label in their own words.

The Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus Flashpoints

Few images set off the “is this feminism” argument faster than Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda cover art, which shows her in a pose that critics called objectifying and defenders called a woman controlling her own image and profiting from it. That split — sexualized imagery as exploitation versus sexualized imagery as autonomy — is exactly the tension the video uses to open its case, and it’s the same argument that follows Minaj through much of her career, as detailed in other coverage of the pressures surrounding her public persona.

Miley Cyrus gets grouped in for what the video frames as “tone deaf” feminism — public moments where her gender commentary in pop culture drew backlash rather than praise, complicating her standing as a feminist voice even as she pushed messages of female empowerment elsewhere. Both cases illustrate the video’s core argument: being visibly pro-woman in the public eye doesn’t automatically earn, or require, the feminist label.

Kellyanne Conway’s Explicit Rejection

No figure in the video states her position more bluntly than Kellyanne Conway. The White House counselor has said outright that she doesn’t consider herself a feminist because she views the contemporary movement as “anti-male” and “pro-abortion” — a rejection rooted specifically in the movement’s modern political associations rather than in any disagreement with equal treatment for women.

Feminism today, in Conway’s own framing, is “anti-male” and “pro-abortion” — and that’s precisely why she won’t claim it.

Conway’s stance sits apart from the entertainers on the list because it’s explicitly political rather than personal, and it echoes a broader pattern of conservative-leaning women in public life who argue the feminist label has been captured by a narrower ideological agenda than the plain idea of equal rights.

Hollywood’s “It’s Not You, It’s the Label” Camp

Several actresses and musicians in the video make a version of the same case: they support equality, they just don’t like what “feminist” has come to signify. Kaley Cuoco told Redbook in 2014 she was “never that feminist girl demanding equality,” reasoning that she’d personally never experienced inequality. Shailene Woodley told TIME she prefers “sisterhood” to feminism, arguing “you need balance” between men and women rather than a movement she felt tilted the scales.

Salma Hayek put it just as plainly, saying she’s “not a feminist” but “believes in equality,” while Lana Del Rey told The Fader in 2014 that feminism was “just not an interesting concept” to her compared with subjects like space exploration. Meghan Trainor and Demi Moore round out the group by opting for “humanist” instead — a label they say better captures wanting fairness for everyone rather than a movement built around one gender’s grievances.

Autonomy Without the Label

What ties all ten women together isn’t disagreement over whether women deserve equal treatment — it’s a refusal to let one word define how they express support for it. Some, like Woodley and Cuoco, object to feeling excluded from balance with men; others, like Conway, object to what they see as the movement’s political capture; and others, like Minaj, simply live the contradiction out loud through their own image and choices.

That contradiction is the whole point of the video, and it’s not going away — every time a new album cover, interview quote, or political soundbite forces the question again, expect another name to get added to a list just like this one.