Ashley Judd says medication caused her face to appear puffy lately, not plastic surgery as many assumed – and she’s far from pleased that people assumed that.
The Missing star wrote in The Daily Beast:
“The Conversation about women’s bodies exists largely outside of all 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. 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.”
Judd continues to explain that as a general rule, she has refused to read media articles related to herself, because, “I do not want to give my power, my self-esteem, or my autonomy, to any person, place, or thing outside myself.”
“I thus abstain from all media about myself.”
When it came to the controversy over her unusually puffy face while promoting her new series, however, the actress got wind of it – and felt that there were underlying issues critically important to her and impossible to overlook.
“We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women. A case in point is that this conversation was initially promulgated largely by women; a sad and disturbing fact.”
“If this conversation is going to be had, I will do my part to insist that it is a feminist one, because it has been misogynistic from the start. Who makes a fantastic leap from being sick, or gaining some weight over the winter, to a conclusion of plastic surgery?”
“Our entire culture, that’s who. The insanity has to stop, because as focused on me as it appears to have been, it is about all girls and women.”
Do you think that Ashley Judd has a point about body issues, or is she making too much out of it? Share your thoughts in the comments below.