I think it might be time to look at how, exactly, female celebrities are covered in the press, because there is a striking gap between the feminist progress we see in the real world and the retrograde fairy-tale storyline in the celebrity press. Jennifer Aniston recently made her contribution to the most overused modern genre, the open letter, writing one about the recent speculation that she might be pregnant: “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,” she wrote.
Aniston is right in that. Since her divorce from Brad Pitt — an event that will doubtless be studied by future history GCSE students as one of the defining moments of the 21st century — she has become a female symbol of some sort. As a single woman, she was pitied by the tabloids and her dating life was depicted as a tragic substitute for marriage. (By contrast, the similarly aged, similarly divorced and similarly dating George Clooney was depicted as a merry bachelor living the life of Riley.) After Aniston married a man — Justin, who will always be known to me as Louis Theroux’s cousin — the tabloids were momentarily flummoxed: how else to condescend to an extremely successful, wealthy, talented and obviously happy woman? Ah yes, of course — by speculating whether or not she was pregnant. I think of the celebrity press as the worst kind of nosy neighbour, the one you meet every year at your parents’ Boxing Day drinks. Basically, I’m thinking of Una and Geoffrey Alconbury from Bridget Jones’s Diary. As with Una and Geoffrey, in the celebrity media’s eyes, a woman has never quite done enough to stop the questions. If she’s single, when is she getting a boyfriend? If she’s got a boyfriend, when is she getting married? If she’s married, when is she having a baby? If she’s had a baby, when is she having another? And another? And another? As Aniston writes, the insinuation is that a woman is incomplete without creating a nuclear family. Poor Gwen Stefani, having recently divorced Gavin Rossdale, with whom she has three children, has been on the cover of one particular US magazine this year claiming that she’s pregnant with twin girls. Spoiler! She’s not. She’s just dating some country-and-western dude. But the fact that she’s in a relationship and not producing any babies has driven the celebrity media so wild that they’re hallucinating sonograms.
Some columnists criticised Aniston, saying that she brings such speculation on herself by appearing in movies about motherhood and occasionally doing fashion shoots. By all means, if you can make that argument without your head exploding, carry on, although what the connection is between a woman posing for a photo and her uterus being the object of non-stop speculation remains, I must confess, a mystery to me.
It’s easy to be a snarky columnist and make fun of Aniston — and Emma Watson, Lena Dunham, and any other female celebrity who occasionally engages in feminist issues but doesn’t always live the life of a radical feminist. But their gestures and words matter to a demographic a lot more important than jaded journalists: teenage girls. More to the point, what Aniston says on this issue is right, and if we’re now going to say that any woman who has posed in Vogue, made a movie about motherhood or once dared to go out in a crop top isn’t allowed to speak about feminism, well, we might as well all give up, because the demand for purity is the opposite of making actual progress.
So, is it wrong to care whether a celebrity is pregnant? Look, it’s nice news when someone you’re interested in is expecting a baby. But is it wrong to think, by extension, that a woman — whether it’s your best friend, the prime minister or an A-list celebrity — is incomplete without having a baby? Yes, it is. Sorry, Una and Geoffrey.
