J.Hew Wore a Bikini This One Time
Jennifer Love Hewitt has gone through a tremendous amount of shit in the past couple of years–after daring to appear in a bikini with a fabulous body that was, nonetheless, less-than-Hollywood perfect, she was soundly mocked and ridiculed and called fat. She defended herself, said she was happy with her curvy body and proud and felt beautiful, told the haters to shut up and the curvy girls to stay gorgeous, and then suddenly she bowed to the pressure and lost a shit-ton of weight from that body she was so proud and happy of, and was showing up in tabloids going “I FEEL SO FABULOUS AND THIN NOW!”
And now she’s back on the cover of Us magazine (looking nothing at all like herself–who is this person, and what has she done with Jennifer Love Hewitt’s face?) because she’s struggling again–apparently she’s called off her wedding, is very sad, and the part that got me, is apparently incredibly insecure about her body:
Hewitt — who was famously mocked in 2007 when photos surfaced of her looking particularly curvy in a bikini — also struggled with insecurity issues.
Said Wick, “She would try on clothes over clothes. She would not have lights on or mirrors in the dressing room. It’s sad because she had a beautiful body.”
Two things: Will Jennifer Love Hewitt’s obituary include the Story of the Bikini? And secondly, I have always thought I understood how horrible it truly must be to be immersed in the Hollywood culture and have not only demands placed on your body, but criticism heaped upon it daily, all over the media. But I don’t think I ever really thought about the kind of lasting effect it could have on you, to endure something like the firestorm that erupted over the size of her ass. Call her a hypocrite, sure, for saying she was happy with her body and then spinning around and dropping some pounds, but I am not sure I could have withstood that kind of pressure and hate and derision spewing my way, either.
Posted by jenfu
Filed under: Celebrities, Fatism, Gossip, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Magazines, Media
She’s always been a beautiful woman, and even with the “extra” weight, she looked great. But Hollywood has this horrible habit of brainwashing gorgeous women into becoming skeletons of themselves. Not only does it make their bodies look awful, but it makes their faces appear older- a little meat on the bones makes a face fuller and more youthful.
How sad to face such pressures, it must be crushing at times. I expect that she’ll regain the weight, and hopefully her feistiness about it too.
The more time a powerful woman spends attending to her sexual attractiveness, the less time she can devote to having more agency in her life.
This is so ridiculous. I’ve always though JLH to be one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. I would give a kidney to look like her.
But this really just shows how all women are pressured and how we all are insecure with our bodies. Its just overtly public for her, and other celebrities.
It would be wonderful if we could tell ourselves, our female friends, and women all over the globe that the weight of some B list celebrity doesn’t effing matter.
I think the worst part of these stories is that women talk about them in both pro and negative ways but they’re still talking about it. So we perpetuate the problem and make weight a topic worthy of discussion.
I wish that there would be some sort of revolution where women just stopped watching their movies, and their tv shows, and their braindead gossip rags. When Hollywood execs asked ‘what happened to women at the box office’ we’ll all say ‘well, I discovered that my life is more interesting than anything these women can produce. Furthermore, I can probably whittle myself down to a size zero by eating low fat protein macro diets, colonics, and disordered eating but I CHOOSE not to and I don’t want to watch, read, or hear about women who do.’
Cindy – that is the most perfect grouping of words I’ve read. It should be on tshirts, billboards, magazines, and so on.
Call her a hypocrite, sure, for saying she was happy with her body and then spinning around and dropping some pounds
I’ve always thought it perfectly possible she was being honest both times – heck, maybe she wore a bikini that day BECAUSE she was feeling good about her body, but after all the flack over it she lost her confidence and no longer trusted her own self-perception and felt she “had” to lose the weight. :(
Ok, really, pleeeeeeeeease put the full post back in RSS. I am THISCLOSE to unsubscribing now because I’m annoyed that I have to click to read the full deal.
Hey Kyle, this is the first I’ve heard that the RSS thing is a problem for anyone! We’re doing a partial RSS feed because of our portal site and I think we’re still working out the kinks. I’ll do a post soon and see what the consensus is on this!
Call her a hypocrite, sure, for saying she was happy with her body and then spinning around and dropping some pounds, but I am not sure I could have withstood that kind of pressure and hate and derision spewing my way, either.
I’m one of the people who called hypocrite on JLH, but I didn’t call her a hypocrite because she lost the weight. I called her a hypocrite because she complained quite vocally about the media’s scrutiny of women’s bodies and then had the nerve to appear on the cover of a magazine, newly thin, asking for positive scrutiny of that same body. Once you open the door and invite in media scrutiny of your body, you can’t simply ask them to please leave when you get fat again.
Celebrities, especially women, are under HUGE pressure to be thin. It takes A LOT of guts to not give in to it. Especially when you’ve been in the industry since you were very young (I believe JLH was a child when she started working). It severely screws up your head.
There are a lot of people whose livliehoods depend on celebrities. Agents, managers, assistants will often use the guilt card. They may have even told JLH that her show could be canceled because of the “negative press,” and all the actors, crew members, designers, etc. (basically the hundred or so people who work on any given show) would be out of work, and did she really want to be responsible for that? This is the kind of shit they pull on a regular basis. It doesn’t surprise me at all that she gave in to the pressure to lose weight, or that her handlers exploited it for all it was worth.
Ashlee Simpson is also defending her sister Jessica’s weight gain:
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=29917611&blogID=466896416
Albeit, she naively asks when did a woman’s weight become newsworthy (when hasn’t it) it looks like there is another body image-challenged Jenny on the block…
Yeah, I find the Jessica Simpson thing quite ironic, considering her whole career is based on nothing more than her looks (because she obviously can’t sing or act!). There’s rumors that the whole weight gain is now just a strategy so that her “weight loss success story” will appear on magazines just as she goes on tour with her new album. If you can’t get publicity for your album, at least she can get publicity for her figure is the mentality at work here, it seems.
The funny thing about the photos on the first link is JLH seems to look so much happier in the “before”.
In the UK, there’s a TV presenter called Fern Britten who was well known for quite some time for being “fat and sexy”. Then (with painful predictability) she reappeared in Ryvita adverts having lost lots of weight ostensibly through diet and exercise… and it turns out she’d had a gastric band. Then just lately I saw a magazine with the headline “Fern: ‘losing weight hasn’t made me happier’”.
…And what can you say? I felt quite sorry for Fern Britten, I always thought she seemed rather lovely and she also, apparently, wore a bikini at the beach. A similar thing happened with the Pop Idol winner Michelle McManus. She ended up going on pretend-doctor Gillian McKeith’s show and apparently becoming “an inspiration to women everywhere” for losing weight. She inspired me way before that, and though it appears she’s still pretty large and mainly took up diet and exercise, I still feel all sad that for many women in the media, it’s really all about the weight.
Also, I never felt terrible for JLH after seeing her in a Halloween costume one year which was a fat suit. She may have been eating ice cream, too. That really bothered me. It seemed like she was saying that we ought to lay off the normal-sized “fat” girls, but the REALLY fat ones are fine to make fun of because they’re ewww gross.