Ashley Judd--Gloriously Puffing Away
I have always had a crush on Ashley Judd.
Yeah, yeah. I've been married for 30 years now, three kids and all that heterosexual stuff. But we're talking Ashley Judd here. Can you blame me?
The woman is gorgeous, a kick-ass actress (literally--have you seen her new show, Missing?), Harvard educated and now, a champion for women, girls and the entire human race as she takes on the crushing cultural standards that determine our worth based purely on physical appearance.
Seems a number of our esteemed media took Judd to task recently for appearing--prepare to be horrified--"puffy" in photos taken with her husband while they attended a basketball game.
First, are you kidding me? I should look so bad. And I daresay that every person with the nerve to criticize the woman likely looks worse on their best day than she does scrubbing the bathroom, not that she scrubs her own bathroom. I'm just saying.
For her part, Judd, who admits to routinely ignoring everything written about her, good or bad, has made an exception this time, responding with an intelligent missive decrying the lunacy of any standard that damns a person for daring to, God forbid, age or look anything less than perfect.
"Why was a puffy face cause for such a conversation in the first place? How, and why, did people participate? If not in the conversation about me, in parallel ones about women in your sphere? What is the gloating about? What is the condemnation about? What is the self-righteous alleged 'all knowing' stance of the media about? How does this symbolize constraints on girls and women, and encroach on our right to be simply as we are, at any given moment?"
And there's the rub. For women, being "simply as we are" is rarely good enough for the world at large. We're supposed to spackle and paint ourselves into a presentable state daily, after recognizing that our natural state is, of course, unacceptable.
Continued on the next page
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