Hollywood royalty Jennifer Aniston has penned a blog that rallies against persistent tabloid scrutiny of her figure and those unrelenting pregnancy rumours.
She may have been voted as the world’s most beautiful woman for a second time by People magazine, but it appears that Jennifer Aniston has had enough of the body scrutiny. In a scathing blog on Huffington Post, titled “For the Record”, the actress puts the record straight by saying, “I am not pregnant. What I am is fed up. I’m fed up with the sport-like scrutiny and body shaming that occurs daily under the guise of “journalism”.
In the two days since the post went live, many Hollywood actresses, including Olivia Wilde, Anna Paquin, Nikki Reed and Margaret Cho, have chimed in support of the actress’s views.
“The objectification and scrutiny we put women through is absurd and disturbing,” says Aniston in the post, which in 48 hours, has already racked up 36,000 likes on Facebook. “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.”
Aniston’s blog coincides with the Mayor of London moving to ban advertisements that promote an “unrealistic or unhealthy” body image from London’s transport system. This decision comes after an ad for protein powder showcased a slim, bikini-clad woman and the words “Are you beach body ready?”.
“As the father of two teenage girls, I am extremely concerned about this kind of advertising, which can demean people, particularly women, and make them ashamed of their bodies,” says Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.
“It is high time it came to an end,” he continues. “Nobody should feel pressurised while they travel on the Tube or bus, into unrealistic expectations surrounding their bodies, and I want to send a clear message to the advertising industry about this.”
The perpetuation of an unrealistic ideal of the body beauty is something we all have to deal with, both as beauty industry insiders and consumers. Of course, we don’t want our daughters, our nieces, our next door neighbours’ kids to believe that they “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…” as Aniston suggests.
The question is: where does the blame lie? Who exactly do we point the finger at to stop this cycle of unattainable, unrealistic beauty?
So yes, Jennifer Aniston has a point, and it is a very good conversation for someone so powerful to air out into the open. But then perhaps, as Piers Morgan, British television presenter and editor-at-large of the US edition of the Daily Mail, suggests in his The Daily Mail column, Aniston is part of the problem too.
“There’s another reason why the media objectify and scrutinise famous women, and why little girls get confused about beauty and body image. It’s this: female stars like Jennifer Aniston deliberately perpetuate the myth of ‘perfection’ by posing for endless magazine covers which have been airbrushed so much that in some cases the celebrity is virtually unrecognisable,” says Piers.
Have your say: Do you think the current ideals of beauty are unrealistic? And what can we all do to bring our expectations back to reality?