Helen Mirren attacks 'racist and sexist' trade unions "I was never a left-winger, actually," she told Time Out. I was a pretend left-winger because it was more interesting than being a right-winger. I never really embraced the ideology because socialists were so sexist and racist. Not the ones I hung out with, but the unions. The printers" union,: no blacks in the printers" union; no women in the printers" union. "They were all "Up with the workers!" Yeah, but only this lot of workers. I felt very uncomfortable with that. Dame Helen, now 67, also spoke of the so-called "pornification" of society, with young women today making sex tapes as a "passport to fame and fortune." Saying one just has to make a sex tape today to "make a fortune," she acknowledged teenage are unlikely to take notice of lecturing politicians over social norms. She added she was "not horrified" by modern girls behaving the way boys used to, with 16-year-old growing up and out of it. Speaking of feminism, she said her beliefs were not ideological or political, but just so "f----- obvious" she did not even view it as a "cause." Dame Helen, a friend of socialist actress Vanessa Redgrave, has previously told the Daily Telegraph about how her upbringing affected her beliefs, with her Russian socialist father fighting the Blackshirts in the East End. "My mother always told me that you cannot be independent as a woman if you don't earn money," she said. My father said it as well.