Showtime's "Shameless" star Emmy Rossum shared a mortifying experience with her peers at a Hollywood Reporter roundtable discussion that occurred when she was still moving up in her acting career.

"I've never been in a situation where somebody asked me to do something really obviously physical in exchange for [a job]," Rossum prefaced. The implied "pay-to-play" situation was brought to her attention when her agent made the embarrassing phone call.

"There's a big movie and they're going to offer it to you," said the agent. "But the director wants you to come into his office in a bikini. There's no audition. That's all you have to do." Assuming the part demanded a young woman dressed in scantily-clad attire, Rossum stood corrected. "We really love your work, but we just want to see how tight your [buttocks] is."

Actors and actresses having to look a certain way or get intimate with a big movie producer in order to get ahead has been a part of Hollywood lore for ages. Yet, the fact that the moral ambiguity of industry misogynists continues to degrade women is troublesome.