Feminism against Jennifer Love Hewitt

Feminists blame "body shaming" on the patriarchy, but a more plausible cause is feminism itself.

Written by Bo Winegard

Blame feminism.

After photos circulated of Jennifer Love Hewitt walking the red carpet in a black dress with spaghetti straps, boorish discourse ensued. Hewitt, once a young, sultry actress, now appeared a plumper adult. A mother. More mature and wiser, but also less alluring to those who had admired her as a teenager. To many of them, she had committed the sin of being a finite human and not some timeless work of art.

Jejune jokes and belittling comments about her weight filled the comment sections beneath tweets of her photographs.

Many opined that these crude comments and attacks on Hewitt were the inevitable work of patriarchy, of men dominating and humiliating women by holding them to impossible ideals. These patriarchs, we are told, sexualize girls, then scorn them for aging. They dehumanize, reducing the vast subjectivity of a woman to a fleshy body—a mere ornament to be ogled.

This is what we might call the feminist thesis of discourse about women. The feminist thesis claims that impossible standards of beauty are weapons of male control, used to denigrate and subjugate. This thesis is widely promoted, especially among educated elites, but it is implausible.