Catty gossip bloggers are known for going after their least favorite celebrities over weight, but it’s not often that you see that kind of trash talk thrown at people for no reason in The New York Times. However, yesterday two different times blogs published some pretty questionable comments about a handful of actresses and their “curves” at the Golden Globes. Nope! Not Mo’Nique. More like Jennifer Aniston and the woman that every single one of my guy friends would marry faster than you can say “Joan”, Christina Hendricks.
The piece that first started to raise eyebrows was by Andy Post (a fellow female writer who was making her NYT blogging debut! Congrats, girl!) who wrote in the T Magazine blog:
Maybe it’s just me, but I could have sworn that some of the ladies who showed up at the Golden Globes on Sunday had put on a little weight. It’s almost criminal to name names, because the very actresses whose body-mass indexes have been the subject of endless tabloid speculation are the very ones now sporting sexier curves. You could definitely see the difference if you concentrated solely on the upper arms. Instead of a Barbie-doll circumference, there was suddenly, amazingly, a womanly roundness to their frames. More Marilyn than Twiggy, that’s for sure.
Above the text there were three photos: Aniston, Kate Hudson and Courtney Cox. Poor skinny bones Lisa Kudrow didn’t make the cut, I guess! Better hunker down with the cookie dough in Malibu with the girls next time you want to have your arms closely examined by some crazy person desperate to make a statement at their new job, LiLi!
It was after that that people picked up on a comment made in another blog, Cathy Horyn’s On The Runway, where she debating which Golden Globes dress was the watercooler talk-worthy one. Pretty standard post-award show material until she ruled out “pretty Christina Hendricks in Christian Siriano’s exploding ruffle dress. (As one stylist said, ‘You don’t put a big girl in a big dress. That’s rule number one.’)” Another unnecessary and cheap criticism.
This kind of vicious style is always passed off as “being brutally honest”, as if anyone has been done a favor by someone voicing their hideous little thoughts about people in an extremely public face. Between the women of the world who look like Hendricks and thank goodness that there’s a sexy representation of their body type on television to everyone who had to take a second look at Aniston’s arms today, this is unfair.
Clearly we know by now that there’s no such thing as responsible blogging practices, but there are certain places you expect to see that stuff. Thankfully there are also places you can go that raise the bar and don’t feed in to gross negativity. Typically the NYT is one of those places, so why did they let this slide?
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