By now it’s likely you have heard about actress Ashley Judd’s rebuttal last week in “The Daily Beast” responding to the media scrutiny of her “puffy face.” In March the beautiful actress appeared on a Canadian talk show in support of her new show “Missing” and the tabloids accused the star of undergoing plastic surgery based on the puffiness of her cheeks.
Judd’s rep explained that the actress was taking high doses of medication to curb a sinus infection and the flu, but the media — and later, the general public — continued to criticize Judd’s appearance. In her eloquent rebuttal, Judd explains that she rarely takes any stock in media scrutiny, but she calls the March incident “different":
“I choose to address it because the conversation was pointedly nasty, gendered, and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day, in ways both outrageous and subtle. The assault on our body image, the hyper-sexualization 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.”
Judd goes on to explain that our society’s obsession with appearance has gone too far, with both women and men regularly objectified:
“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.”
I encourage you to read her rebuttal, which is a reminder to all of us of our intrinsic worth and beauty as children of God. Major kudos to Judd for including this line below, which we should all embrace as we face varying degrees of scrutiny and judgment from those around us:
“The only thing that matters is how I feel about myself, my personal integrity, and my relationship with my Creator.”
As a single woman with an online dating profile, do you feel pressure to be pretty? Do you sense an expectation for some kind of Catholic Barbie — a woman with an hour-glass figure and a penchant for the Liturgy of the Hours, someone who rocks High Mass in high heels?
And as for you CatholicMatch men, do you harbor an unrealistic expectation of physical beauty? Does your profile mention appearance at all? Do you personally feel any pressure to look a certain way?
Leave a comment and let us know!
Further reading
Check out the 24 comments from CatholicMatch members in response to Jessica's blog post "Would More Men Date Me If I Lost Weight?"
