Women being pitted each other another in Hollywood is an old tactic, but it’s not real at all.

MacLaine is criticizing a long-standing Hollywood publicity and power dynamic in which women are framed as rivals—through casting narratives, press questions, award-season storylines, and studio politics—so that attention is diverted from structural inequities. By calling it an “old tactic,” she suggests it is deliberate and instrumental: competition is manufactured to keep women divided, easier to manage, and less able to bargain collectively for roles, pay, or creative authority. Her insistence that it’s “not real at all” rejects the idea that antagonism is natural between women; instead, it is a narrative imposed from outside that distorts relationships and reinforces sexist assumptions about ambition and scarcity.