Jennifer Aniston blasts 'sport-like' body shaming in blog post
Jennifer Aniston has had it with the way tabloids use her to continue a cycle of unfair ideas of beauty.
In a new blog post, published by The Huffington Post July 12, Aniston railed against the scrutinizing celebrity culture that judges her body and the paparazzi that swarm her and her husband Justin Theroux.
Since she does not participate in social media, she decided to write her thoughts publicly on the site. And those thoughts amount to a veritable take down of the way society makes women feel through the lens of celebrity news.
"The objectification and scrutiny we put women through is absurd and disturbing," she wrote. "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... 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."
Her ferocious words, which steam with emotion about the "stalking" that she endures, comes just a month after rumors, yet again, swirled in the tabloids about a possible Aniston pregnancy. Her representative at the time flatly denied those rumors, but it seems like Aniston wanted to address it personally, and on a broader scale.
"The sheer amount of resources being spent right now by press trying to simply uncover whether or not I am pregnant (for the bajillionth time... but who’s counting) points to the perpetuation of this notion that women are somehow incomplete, unsuccessful, or unhappy if they’re not married with children," she wrote. "In this last boring news cycle about my personal life there have been mass shootings, wildfires, major decisions by the Supreme Court, an upcoming election and any number of more newsworthy issues that 'journalists' could dedicate their resources towards."
In the end, she says how tired she has grown of the media circus that uses her to forward the damaging narrative of beauty standards and implores the world at large to recognize their own personal worth, no matter specific life decisions.
"[W]e are complete with or without a mate, with or without a child," she wrote. "We get to decide for ourselves what is beautiful when it comes to our bodies. That decision is ours and ours alone. Let’s make that decision for ourselves and for the young women in this world who look to us as examples."
It's not the first time Aniston has spoken passionately about beauty. When People named her 2016's World's Most Beautiful Woman, she had some choice words about her own definition of what it means to be beautiful. In an interview with the magazine, she praised icons like Gloria Steinem as being beautiful "for many reasons, besides her exterior."
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Topics Beauty
I have done neat stuff all over these United States from sailing lessons on the Puget Sound to motorcycle maintenance on the backroads of upstate New York. My professional experience extends from newspaper reporting in the mountains of Eastern Oregon to fixing espresso machines throughout Kentucky. I also have kept a cat alive for 10 years.
