Ashley Judd Hits Out at Media

The tale of Ashley Judd and her puffy face - by Trisha Doyle.

No, it’s not a song from the Clinch Mountain Boys or even the chaps who penned ‘I’m On A Boat’. It’s the ongoing ‘saga’ of Ashley Judd’s kisser which most celebrity news machines – currently without a celeb wedding or better yet break-up to hone in on – have decided to shine their investigative lights on.

In case you missed it, Judd appeared on a Canadian talk show in March and debuted what journalists widely described as ‘pillow face’ – the term applied to people who excessively use facial fillers. Judd’s new look was ideal material, perfect to riddle with delicious galleries of ‘before and after’ pictures and ‘when plastic surgery goes wrong’, a chance to gaze unashamedly at bodies we both revile and aspire to be like.

For most, the next natural step would be an exclusive deal with the highest paying media outlet for a tell all piece on what went wrong a la trout pout supremo Leslie Ash. Except in a world where our understanding of what’s natural and isn’t skews, Ashley Judd has instead hit back. Rather loudly.

“The Conversation about women’s bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at (and marketed to) us, and used to define and control us. The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted.”

So began a diatribe against the control and policing of women’s bodies, who decides what’s ‘okay’ and what’s not and Ms Judd came out fighting. She goes on to describe the debate around her face as an assault on womanhood: “The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about.”

She put down the puffiness in her face a combination of factors – steroids due to an illness, age and weight gain. Whether it’s true or not really doesn’t matter now – for some the story will be how eloquently she hit back at her critics, attempting to shame those outlets and its consumers into the realisation that body talk around the female form in the mainstream is designed to polarise us – punish us on the one hand for not being sexy/thin/beautiful/curvy enough (insert your ideal here) and then give us space to demonise those who step outside the ‘model’ of perfection. This will inevitably be the minority. The majority will simply be questioning how she’s still lying about it.

You can read Ashley Judd’s full article here. What do you think? Is the rant too much? Or was she right to call it as she saw it? Let us know in the comments.

Trisha Doyle for stylesiren.ie

Category:

Siren

Tags: Ashley Judd, Beauty, Comment, Trisha Doyle

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