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Jessica

Vozel

Read Jessica's bio and previous columns here

December 5, 2007

Extra Pounds OK for Kevin James, But Not Jennifer Love Hewitt?

While I don’t generally feel sorry for celebrities who face scrutiny as a result of their public role, in certain situations that scrutiny has consequences that extend beyond the psyche of an individual celebrity to the psyche of the young people who idolize them.

While vacationing with her brand new fiancé, Jennifer Love Hewitt, a former teeny-bopper who managed to stay relevant with her relatively successful television show The Ghost Whisperer, was photographed frolicking in the water and on the beach in a bikini. Like Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson and Tyra Banks before her, Hewitt’s body came under vicious attack by gossip bloggers and other celebrity gossip junkies who apparently want women – at least celebrity women – to look 20 until the day they die. Truth be told, she looked gorgeous in the pictures, and it’s ridiculous, not to mention damaging, that anyone would say otherwise.

While not even celebrities who are used to negative attention want to be told that they look awful in a bikini, that is not the issue here. After all, Jennifer Love has taken the whole debacle in stride, writing in her MySpace blog, “I love my body” and “I'm not upset for me, but for all of the girls out there that are struggling with their body image.”

In those lines, she gets it right. Those who really suffer are the young girls dealing with body image issues who see people dissing a phenomenally attractive young woman and internalize that even looking like a millionaire celebrity is not enough.

Perhaps one could argue that celebrities are inclined to face more scrutiny, and thus normal people would not be judged in the same way by their peers – at least not to their faces. But when a young girl surfing the Internet comes across blogs with hundreds of disparaging comments against a beautiful woman, they most likely aren’t going to take time to consider that standards for celebrities are different. They’re going to see that hundreds of people are calling Hewitt unattractive for very specific reasons – too much cellulite there, too much curvature there.

Say, for the sake of argument, that celebrities really are held to higher standards, and it’s not so much that they’ve gained weight but that they’ve changed from an idolized ideal to something resembling “normal.” Do we really value the celebrity pedestal so much that we feel the need to eviscerate every woman who doesn’t remain exactly the same as she always was? Perhaps it is the fall in which spectators revel so much, which explains why they escalate the process by throwing an elbow or two out there to knock them off.

Certainly many of the critics of Hewitt’s body were females who likely have dealt with body insecurities themselves (few women are exempt) and gain a certain satisfaction from bashing other women, particularly women who were once held up as a model of feminine perfection. It becomes a vicious cycle perpetuated by the same people who feel victimized by it.

There is another side to this, however. What to make of the many men who commented on Hewitt’s decreasing desirability? They likely have not faced the same body image pressures. Simply put, there’s power in putting others down, and both genders capitalize on it in their own ways.

It must be mentioned, too, that there is a slew of lovable male celebrities out there who have a few extra pounds on their frames, like Seth Rogen, Kevin James, etc. would not be subjected to the same vitriol. This and the above reason explain why body image is a feminist issue. Whereas famous men are judged by their humor, their talent and, to some extent, the celebrity women they sleep with, women are judged on looks first and everything else second.

Think before you spew hateful, hurtful things about another person’s body. Not only do the effects go deeper than one may realize, but doing so reflects on our society in some unflattering ways that can’t even compete with bad camera angles.