Ashley Judd speaks out against the harsh words directed at her “puffy” face when she was battling a sinus infection last month.
The actress explains in a Daily Beast essay that she typically ignores anything written or spoken about her, but colleagues and friends urged her to listen to what was being said. What she discovered were cruel accusations that she had gotten plastic surgery because her face appeared to be “puffy.”
She chose to address the speculations and accusations because “they were 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.”
She was further upset when she realized women were joining the ongoing “disassembling of my appearance.” She feels an additional betrayal from those whom she considered to be professional friends.
She feels the obsession with women’s faces and bodies is abnormal and yet is becoming the norm in society. “We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abuers, or as abusing other girls and women.”
Judd goes on to express how she feels the harsh criticism of women is a losing battle. “I ask especially how we can leverage strong female-to-female alliances to confront and change that there is no winning here as women.” She feels it doesn’t matter if women age naturally or use surgical assistance, either way, women will receive brutal criticism.
She also hopes that sharing her thoughts can generate new questions like why does a puffy face even warrant a conversation in the first place. She insists that the conversation about her is a feminist one, because it has been misogynistic from the start. Judd asks who makes the fantastic leap from being sick, or gaining some weight over the winter to concluding she had plastic surgery? She says that only in our culture would people make such a leap.
Judd wants the insanity to stop because it isn’t about her, it’s about all girls and women, and even boys and men. She says that we are all equally objectified and ridiculed and this affects each of us. She asks for everyone to join in and help change the conversation.
Photo via Gary Gershoff/George Pimentel/WireImage
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