Joyce Fegan: Body hatred a ‘we’ problem lived out as a ‘me’ problem
Jennifer Lopez in 'Halftime': While she was busy making dozens upon dozens of movies, becoming the highest-paid Latina actress en route, writing songs, and dancing as if it were a function of her autonomic nervous system, we got busy finding ways to tear all of that down.
We all have our handful of people that we take recommendations from: for the book; the movie; the TV series; that long read; the documentary.
One such recommendation that came my way this week was the new Netflix documentary about singer/dancer/actor/philanthropist/entrepreneur: . My trusted recommender was effusive about its brilliance, which made me even more reluctant to watch. I procrastinated in pressing play.
I've watched it twice. I am now the recommender — people either came back with a similar reaction upon watching, or were already wise to the abilities of this 52-year-old Latina mother of two.
As a girl growing up though, I had drunk the Kool-Aid served to me by the racist, misogynistic American media. Unchecked.
J-Lo was literally the butt of jokes, her buttocks, or "glutes" as we'd now call them, in our current wellness culture, were mocked and objectified in the name of casual sexism and even more casual racism.
While she was busy making dozens upon dozens of movies, becoming the highest-paid Latina actress en route, writing songs, and dancing as if it were a function of her autonomic nervous system, we got busy finding ways to tear all of that down.
We went for her backside.
So as a white teenage girl, that's where my eyes and attention went to. The singing, the dancing, the acting — not relevant. What she looked like, how she was treated because of what she looked like became the international J-Lo narrative, one created for her, that she had to participate in too.
There's a clip in the documentary where she's at a big awards show and the camera pans to her. A puppet dog is sat to her left, shouting into her ear. The joke is about her backside. She plays the good sport — because imagine the abuse if she hadn't? Her reputation for being a "diva", a strong side story to her buttocks, would have overtaken even the gluteus maximus jokes.
Then there are the endless interviews on red carpets, on chat show sofas where she's left in the position of having to defend her flesh. Her response is a mix of vulnerability and disgust, and shame, all loosely cloaked in the facade of good sportsmanship.
It would be hard to imagine a situation where Stephen Colbert or David Letterman were interrogating Garth Brooks or Bruce Springsteen or Jay-Z about their forearms over and over again.
One other element of the J-Lo narrative was her "promiscuity", what we would call our love life. Donald Trump has five children with three different women, J-Lo has two with the same man.
George Clooney was a man of many partners, but he was the most eligible bachelor. But we know the standards are not uniform when it comes to gender rules.
Our focus on her intimate partners, her buttocks, and her apparently demanding nature, that word diva fit neatly on glossy magazine covers and in word count-tight headlines, were simply to distract from her actual nature — that of a multi-talented woman of colour. How dare J-Lo take up this much space?
In , she is correcting the record, rewriting the narrative.
These pop docs are, of course, the most robust form of journalism. The star has hired the camera crew, the director. You can't expect independence.
But in this documentary, even when you lift up the rose-tinted glasses, you're still left with a 52-year-old woman holding herself several feet off the ground on top of a pole, in a pair of platform shoes, as she films a scene for her movie Hustlers, where she plays a savvy New York stripper.
You also see a Latina woman who goes head to head with the institution that is the NFL as she refuses, at the 11th hour, to remove children's cages from her performance at the Super Bowl halftime. She's warned that the request to remove the cages is coming "from the top". She doesn't budge. The show went on.
And you'll also see a woman whose staff are all long-timers, some 20 years. They mustn't have found it hard working for a "diva".
And when she isn't nominated for an Oscar, for that movie , as she was hotly tipped to be, she is temporarily forlorn, but it's her that picks up her far more forlorn staff. She just got back to work, preparing for the Super Bowl performance.
A year later, she's singing at the inauguration of President Joe Biden, and a year later she signs up with Grameen America, the non-profit that extends micro loans to low-income entrepreneurs.
The goal is to deploy $14bn in loan capital to 600,000 low-income Latina entrepreneurs by 2030. Chances are good that won't make it into an episode of or inform a red carpet question.
Not that J-Lo's perfect, nor everyone's cup of tea by a long shot, but her documentary joins a growing list where high-profile women who were publicly shamed rewrote the narrative.
There's Monica Lewinsky and her 2015 comeback in the form of her TED Talk — .
There's Taylor Swift's one in 2020, . The usual body and relationship hyperfocus followed her around too. "Who are you going home with tonight?", asks a female showbiz reporter on a red carpet. Britney Spears, the same. Only she didn't create it.
In 2021's , we can't accuse her of self-promotion or pop propaganda. We can only accuse ourselves of misogyny.
And sure what harm? They're all resourced megastars.
But it's the trickle-down effect.
This week, two-time Oscar-winner Emma Thompson was doing the media rounds for her new movie, , where she plays a retired widow who hires a much younger sex worker (Daryl McCormack).
The 63-year-old goes completely naked on screen. She's described the role as "life-changing".
But in the publicity interviews, Emma Thompson also admits to having "never liked" her body. It's not a pity party for one, it feels more like a statement on behalf of a gender.
"The conversations I have with women, they will say: 'I do actively hate my body, actively'.
"I have never liked my body. Ever. And I never will because those pathways are so deeply carved in my brain," said Thompson.
She hopes the movie will go some way to carving a new neural pathway for others.
If people watched it and thought: "'I could feel about my body like that, I could inhabit it like that, I could feel joy in this place about which I am so vile, so judgemental, so hateful'," says Thompson.
She calls our individual body hatred "misogyny". And she's right. Body hatred is a "we" problem lived out as a "me" problem.
"What a waste of our time, what a waste of our energy, our passion, our curiosity, our humanity in this misogyny", she says.
She's right. But what are our chances of changing it? It's not as simple as "just wearing the damn shorts" when we're up against a culture that scrutinises a woman's flesh, above all else.
How we treat J-Lo, or whoever's current, or next, is how we are treating everyone.
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