Streep traced her understanding of empathy through two childhood memories. At six, she placed her mother's half-slip over her head to play the Virgin Mary in a living room nativity scene, and the intensity of her focus was so powerful it pulled her siblings into the trance. At nine, she drew her grandmother's wrinkles on her face with an eyebrow pencil and genuinely felt the weight of her grandmother's age in her bones. This capacity to feel as someone else, Streep argued, is not just useful for acting — it is the doorway to moral transformation. She discussed how the character men most admired had shifted over her career from Linda in The Deer Hunter (a quiet, submissive woman men wanted to date) to Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada (a demanding leader men could identify with). This shift, she said, represented a profound cultural evolution: men learning to look through a woman's eyes rather than merely gazing at her.