What bugs me is that movies don’t reflect how interesting and vibrant women are. We don’t treasure women as they get older.

Clayburgh criticizes the film industry’s narrow, youth-centered portrayal of women. The first sentence targets representational failure: movies often flatten women into limited types rather than showing their complexity, energy, and interior lives. The second sentence broadens the critique to cultural values—women’s social and artistic “worth” is too often treated as declining with age, reducing opportunities for older actresses and impoverishing storytelling. Coming from an actor known for intelligent, adult-centered roles in 1970s American cinema, the remark also reads as a defense of mature female experience as inherently dramatic and worthy of attention, not a niche or a liability.