The Appeal of Jennifer Aniston
What makes Aniston’s recent Huffington Post article against the tabloids so remarkable isn’t that she wrote it, but that it took this long. Since shooting to stardom through her performance as Rachel Green on Friends over two decades ago, Aniston has been the focus of intense speculation. Rumors of her relationships, weight, health, fertility, and age have decorated the checkout aisles of America for almost two decades, creating a stifling amount of coverage and content about a woman long after she stopped being a regular feature on television.
She’s endured an astonishing amount of abuse and invasion by desperate photographers and reporters, all in search of information they have no right to in the first place. Aniston lays bare the stress it can cause in the 2012 documentary on the subject Sellebrity.
In the Post article, Aniston speaks to more than the privacy complaints:
If I am some kind of symbol to some people out there, then clearly I am an example of the lens through which we, as a society, view our mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, female friends and colleagues. The objectification and scrutiny we put women through is absurd and disturbing. 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. Sometimes cultural standards just need a different perspective so we can see them for what they really are — a collective acceptance… a subconscious agreement.
This extrapolation of her suffering under such scrutiny into a larger portrayal of how nonfamous women are also analyzed and questioned is not unwarranted. Throughout the coverage of Aniston by these magazines, there is a distinct and obvious narrative built around her as purely relatable to a hypothetical army of desperate, lonely women the editors of these magazines clearly believe is their prime base.
As Aniston posits, women who see themselves in her — or at least in the way tabloids have painted her — are themselves responding to an eternal weight to be married, be skinny, and have a baby. Far from numbed-out mass consumers many believe them to be, let’s assume the sustained interest in Aniston is the driving force itself — that the people buying these magazines are doing so not because they see themselves in her supposed struggles, but because they also see themselves as unfairly judged by a nonstop state of questioning over the status of their body and their heart. The people attracted to Aniston as a public figure aren’t drooling masses with nothing better to do — they simply relate to someone who is constantly being surveyed for her ability to fulfill empty societal benchmarks because they feel they are under the same pressure.
It’s often assumed the selling point of gossip rags is voyeuristic, that their readers are depressed, self-hating schlubs who will pay to see the denizens of modern Olympus torn down for chubby beach bodies or possible drug addictions. Seeing the supposed shortcomings of the rich and famous, goes the argument, makes us feel better about our own failings. As Ryan Linkof wrote in The New York Times
The tabloids may test the limits of the ethically or legally acceptable, but they are often doing so in the service of a popular desire to see behind the facade of public life. They rely on the appeal (a very human one) of seeing elements of our societies that are often shamefully hidden away from view.
It’s often suggested that very appeal is self-driven and meant to make the readers feel better about themselves. In an uncharacterstically honest post , StarWipe — The Onion’s satire of celebrity news coverage — attempted to speak directly to this supposed audience:
Yes, we know that people seemingly long to see America’s Rachel welcome a baby into her loving, well-lotioned arms. Watching the curve of Aniston’s abdomen for telltale signs of baby-containing has become a bit of a national pastime, perpetually trapping Aniston in a state of pregnant-non-pregnancy with a kind of Schrödinger’s fetus. And it makes a sick kind of sense! Aniston has for so long been thrust into being the symbol of lovelorn single women who bravely persevere against the odds to be restored to a state of heteronormative love and marriage…Jennifer Aniston’s uterus is not your uterus. What happens to and in Jennifer Aniston’s uterus has no bearing on what will happen to and/or in yours. Jennifer Aniston is, in all likelihood, nothing like you at all. That is okay.
This argument — that the obsession with Aniston and other celebrities is merely wish fulfillment — is too simplistic, too general, and too cynical. It assumes a craven populace desperate for fame can merely oggle the luscious bodies and gifted lives of celebrities to live vicariously through them.
As Aniston suggests in her post, however, there are larger societal forces at work than mere jealousy. What we likely see in the constant coverage of Aniston and her personal life is not a woman trying to fulfill the many obligations a modern patriarchal society puts on a woman. What we see is a woman being judged for doing those things, not doing those things, or doing them in the wrong way. People aren’t relating with her struggle to have a baby — they’re relating with being pressured to have a baby.
The distinction might seem empty, but its’s the difference between buying the frame and buying the painting. The jealousy theory suggests these consumers are bought and sold on the narrative alone — that they’ve bought wholeheartedly the idea that a woman needs all the hallmarks of domestic life in order to be happy. But if they have self-awareness — if we don’t constrain and generalize the mostly female audience for these magazines in the same way these magazines do to their subjects — it means they are responding to their own pressures by seeking out relation.
This is more than speculation. Back in 2012, Livescience spoke with evolutionary psychologist Daniel Kruger about the possible reason we’re wired to be obsessed with celebrities:
“There’s a few different reasons for that…One is just learning what high-status individuals do so you might more effectively become one, and two, it’s basically political. Knowing what is going on with high-status individuals, you’d be better able to navigate the social scene.” Whether Brad Pitt is on good terms with his ex Jennifer Aniston isn’t likely to affect the average person’s life one way or another, of course, but the social tendency to care is deeply ingrained, Kruger said.
Both the reasons Kruger cite involve understanding the “rules” to being succesful. Following the ups and downs of Aniston and others allows us to see what works and what doesn’t in our society. It allows us to see what traits are valued and what are not. But Aniston — having “failed” to have a baby, having publicly gone through multiple breakups with likewise high-powered men — seems to be the exception. Why would people constantly follow someone who seems to be “losing” at every game the tabloids and society want her to play?
Maybe it’s because she does it anyway. Maybe because — in her lack of child, in her refusal to seem catty with Angelina Jolie — we see someone not to be mocked or even pitied. What we actually see in Aniston is someone constantly judged, constantly ridiculed, and constantly held to archaic, male-designed standards who frequently ends up doing whatever the fuck she wants anyway.
Which, somewhat ironically, would make Aniston the real life embodiment of Rachel Green.
If it’s been some time since you last watched an episode of Friends, it can be easy to misremember Rachel as a ditzy, entitled shopaholic. But the very inception of Rachel in the show’s universe is her act of rebellion against this concept. Rachel abandons a wedding her parents organized to an orthodontist she barely likes.
Storming into the Central Perk in search of her old friend Monica, Rachel reveals her own growing repugnance with the consumerist, shallow lifestyle she has been steered towards her entire life.
Well, it was about half an hour before the wedding and I was in the room where we were keeping all the presents and someone had bought us this beautiful Limoges gravy boat. And I realized I was more turned on by this gravy boat than by Barry. And that’s when it hit me how much Barry looks like Mr. Potato Head!
This call to adventure for Rachel is fairly profound. She’s not merely rejecting Barry — she’s rejecting the va;ue system she’s been taught to follow. Soon she’s cutting off her parents financial help and working as a waitress, foregoing the unlimited resources she’s used to in the name of independence. Throughout the show’s run, this supposedly empty-headed character is given further and further agency over her own world — eventually building her own high-powered career that could rival many of the men she seeks.
What’s more, however, is she’s still embued with the values towards that consumerist lifestyle that gave her joy. We still see her embrace high fashion. We still see her have questionably sudden sex with dopey, vapid men. But the most important lesson of Rachel Green is that she can embrace all of these things without fear of judgement once she made the decision (and the means) to do so on her own.
It’s an attribute reflected in her romantic life. According to an analysis by Splitsider’s Mike D’avria, Rachel had simultaneously the most sexual partners — 14 — of the main cast, but also the highest percentage of serious, monogamous relationships. It suggests the independence of a sexually-empowered women — Rachel is also the only one of the six to admit to a homosexual experience — yet the desire for the same kind of traditional boy-meets-girl she was supposed to have with Barry.
Rachel is inherently a character in flux between two poles — the restrictive values she was raised with and her own innate desire for autonomy. She is — for all her love of Madison Avenue fashion — a character of rebellion against the insane demands she has always known.
To put it another way, what makes Rachel relatable is not her struggle for what a girl is supposed to want or do. It’s how she responds to the pressure to like those things in the first place.
Aniston “succeeds” as a tabloid target not because people can project on her their own desires, as if their readers were a hypnotized army of dolts unable to see the powers of misogyny at work. The reason she works is because the readers plainly see how wrong the publications judgements of her are. The appeal isn’t look at poor Jennifer unable to find love but, in fact, look at poor Jennifer constantly being asked to live up to other people’s expectations of her.
This doesn’t make tabloids good. Gossip rags are enforcers of these rules who prey on the privacy of individuals for the sole purpose of debasing them. Occasionally, they strike some truth — namely the National Enquirer’s uncovering of John Edward’s dastardly affair with a director while his wife battled cancer. But it’s wrong to believe anyone has a right to the private lives of individuals, or that much of the information typically gathered adds to public life or discourse in any meaningful way. Even if there readers know this and respond to it kind, the persistence of tabloids perpetuates poor body image and false expectations which damage millions of young women like a drumbeat over their entire lives. As Aniston puts it:
I used to tell myself that tabloids were like comic books, not to be taken seriously, just a soap opera for people to follow when they need a distraction. But I really can’t tell myself that anymore because the reality is the stalking and objectification I’ve experienced first-hand, going on decades now, reflects the warped way we calculate a woman’s worth.
It’d be wrong, however, to project that debasement on to their readership. Surely many of their readers are rubberneckers, people desperate to see trainwrecks of any kind. But the longevity of Aniston in these magazines must mean something else — there must be some other instinct at hand that keeps people reading about her. So instead of assuming she is merely the favorite of a brainwashed army of consumers admiring the cage in which she’s placed, let’s embrace the likelihood that they see the bars around their own lives and hope they, like Aniston, can survive while fighting against them.
