Pamela, Demi, and the Red Carpet Trap

Notes from award season on aging faces, shrinking bodies and 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?”

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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.”

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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. So let’s connect some dots.