I am full of admiration for Jennifer Aniston and Renee Zellweger for their recent essays written for the Huffington Post about the objectification of women and how we all need to work together to turn the tide and change the narrative. “Stop buying the bullshit” is their ultimate message and they have both written eloquently and calmly about the way they are portrayed by the media and how this is “simply a reflection of how we see and portray women in general, measured against some warped standard of beauty.” It really is quite astonishing that all our efforts to create an even playing field for our boys and girls crash and burn when it comes to how we view women in the public eye. This objectification of women that Jennifer Aniston says is “absurd and disturbing” has been going on far too long, but hopefully the fact that powerful, intelligent and most importantly, influential women are finally standing up for their rights and letting everyone hear their rational voices will make a difference. With any luck our daughters will listen. They are finally challenging the warped system that the media has created and hopefully it will open the flood gates for others to do the same. Perhaps we are at the tipping point. I really hope so.
Renee Zellweger suggests that “maybe we could talk more about why we seem to collectively share an appetite for witnessing people diminished and humiliated with attacks on appearance and character and how it impacts younger generations and struggles for equality and about how legitimate news media have become vulnerable to news/entertainment ambiguity, which dangerously paves the way for worse fictions to flood the public consciousness to much greater consequence. Maybe we could talk more about our many true societal challenges and how we can do better.”
Jennifer Aniston says “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”?
She makes her views very clear and her overall summary is an important message for all the women we know in the world “we are complete with or without a mate, with or without a child. 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. Let’s make that decision consciously, outside of the tabloid noise. We don’t need to be married or mothers to be complete. We get to determine our own “happily ever after” for ourselves.
She’s right to challenge tabloid practices – however much she accepts they’re not likely to change any time soon. She doesn’t mention social media in particular, which has increased the selfie-indulgent demands for perfection and serves to highlight the immense issues we are facing in terms of how girls (and boys) feel about themselves.
She believes that “what can change is our awareness and reaction to the toxic messages buried within these seemingly harmless stories served up as truth and shaping our ideas of who we are. We get to decide how much we buy into what’s being served up and maybe some day the tabloids will be forced to see the world through a different, more humanized lens because consumers have just stopped buying the bullshit”.
So lets collectively “stop buying the bullshit”. That would be a very good start.
