You may have noticed, if you’ve ever glanced upon a tabloid cover while standing in line at the grocery store or flipped past Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight, that the media is quite fascinated with the contents of Jennifer Aniston’s womb. This goes back quite some time now, ever since Aniston’s marriage to Brad Pitt, but things really went into overdrive following the couple’s 2005 divorce when the Friends star was portrayed as a sad victim of home-wrecking, while her ex started churning out child after child with Angelina Jolie.
Over the course of the past decade, every time Aniston wore a loose or ill-fitting outfit, or mistakenly placed a hand near her stomach, the speculation machine would start up again. And after the latest round of headlines, stemming from paparazzi shots taken while she was on vacation in the Bahamas with husband Justin Theroux, Aniston is fed up and is not taking it anymore.
In a lengthy blog post for The Huffington Post titled “For the Record,” Aniston addressed not just public media scrutiny and harassment by paparazzi she faces on a daily basis, but the unhealthy nature of celebrity news culture as a whole:
If I am some kind of symbol to some people out there, then clearly I am an example of the lens through which we, as a society, view our mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, female friends and colleagues. The objectification and scrutiny we put women through is absurd and disturbing. The way I am portrayed by the media is simply a reflection of how we see and portray women in general, measured against some warped standard of beauty. Sometimes cultural standards just need a different perspective so we can see them for what they really are — a collective acceptance… a subconscious agreement. We are in charge of our agreement. Little girls everywhere are absorbing our agreement, passive or otherwise. And it begins early. The message that girls are not pretty unless they’re incredibly thin, that they’re not worthy of our attention unless they look like a supermodel or an actress on the cover of a magazine is something we’re all willingly buying into. This conditioning is something girls then carry into womanhood. We use celebrity “news” to perpetuate this dehumanizing view of females, focused solely on one’s physical appearance, which tabloids turn into a sporting event of speculation. Is she pregnant? Is she eating too much? Has she let herself go? Is her marriage on the rocks because the camera detects some physical “imperfection”?
Aniston goes on to say that if she ever does decide to become a mother some day — and not out of some need to feel “complete” — she will be the first to let us know. In the meantime, let the woman eat a damn burger in peace.
(Via The Huffington Post)