Pamela Anderson Did Not Catfish You
ICMYI: The men are not alright with makeup-free Pam, and other thoughts on famous women aging and shrinking under the Hollywood gaze.
Hollywood awards season wrapped itself up with a shiny gold bow after the Oscars last Sunday. And as I’ve been sifting through the coverage over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about bodies, of course. This is both my constant professional hazard and a necessary part of anyone’s awards show engagement. The entire red carpet industry exists to package up famous women’s bodies and serve them to America for consumption and critique.
It’s about the dresses, sure, but it’s also about what the dresses represent: “The red-carpet gown is its own kind of body horror. Heavy and sculpted, a skeleton within, it morphs and molds and constricts the body to its will,” writes Rachel Tashjian for the Washington Post. “There were some absolutely gorgeous dresses on Sunday night’s Oscars. But at what cost did we see them?”
This year’s award season brought us the incredible shrinking Wicked stars. We were served Demi Moore rejecting the measuring stick and celebrating her enough-ness and then a few weeks later, we saw a…measurably even thinner Demi appear.
And we were shown Pamela Anderson daring to skip makeup at the SAG Awards even though it led men on the Internet to think she looks “old” and “worn out.”
These might seem like unrelated stories; some women are getting pushback for being too thin, another for looking too old. But they are actually all the same story: Women’s bodies need to be contained, controlled and restrained. “The ideal woman today is very thin, white, highly feminine, and projects a certain frailty without actually being ill or disabled,” writes Kate Manne of the red carpet’s “arms race for sinewy arms and hollow clavicles.”
Women’s bodies also need to be sexually available and, perhaps most crucially, “naturally” beautiful. Every famously beautiful Hollywood body represents an enormous investment of time and money in dieting, exercise, cosmetic interventions, and other beauty labor. The reason we can get mad both when actresses look too skinny and when they look too old—or fat or otherwise not beauty standard-compatible— is because we never, ever want to grapple with the reality of that effort.