Susan Sarandon weighed into ongoing battle for the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this week, saying that it is “sexist” for Hillary Clinton campaigners to argue that women must vote for their candidate simply because they are women.

Last month, the actress was forced to calm a Twitter storm when she clarified that she would not be voting for Donald Trump if her favoured candidate, Bernie Sanders, ended up losing the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly just ahead of the New York primary earlier this week, 69 year old Sarandon, a devoted supporter of the left-wing candidate Sanders, was asked whether it was sexist to believe that women should automatically vote for Clinton out of feminist solidarity.

Susan SarandonSusan Sarandon is a vocal supporter of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton's rival for the Democratic nomination

“Yes, of course,” she replied, in light of what she describes as a “shaming of women” if they admit to supporting Sanders. “It’s sexist to imagine that a woman is doing anything based on her gender. I mean, you have the right to choose everything.”

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“I think it really does women a disservice to think they would be influenced by gender and not the issues,” she said about the current political climate in this election year.

Sarandon also believes that older women, not necessarily so in touch with the social media age, are afraid of speaking of up and voicing contrary opinions because they don’t want to deal with the attacks. “That’s been hugely disappointing, especially when it’s done by people who you think are feminist icons. That they would be that out of touch of where we are today,” she said.

“This is why young girls have had this discussion of even using the word feminist, and now are starting to come around and are rebranding the word feminist, which had such a negative connotation for so long. Those gals are way past, ‘This is what you do because you’re a woman. Don’t you want to support a woman?’ Then I would be supporting Sarah Palin across the board.”

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