Lay Off Jamie Lynn Spears and Jennifer Love Hewitt, Already

I never cease to be disappointed in our talk show culture and in the entertainment reporting (using the term loosely) that indulges in sick fantasies and shameful delight in the sufferings of the American celebrity caste. When the schadenfreude descends on the backs of spoiled, indulgent, and irresponsible brats of Hollywood like Lindsay Lohan or Robert Downey, Jr., it's hard to work up much of a sense of empathetic pity, even if one acknowledges that addiction is a disease, and that these poor young people are in the grip of something much bigger than themselves, and much more than they probably bargained for the first time they binge drank or snorted coke. But when the victim of the celebrity gossip death cult has done nothing more than fail to conform to the sick, anorexic standards of beauty that pervade Western culture, or when the victim is a kid in the public eye who made a tragic and life-altering but common mistake, it really exposes the worst, most envious and petty elements of our misogynistic media.

I walked through a check out line recently and saw the magazine cover that was the culmination of a weeks' worth of printed consternation and hand wringing: Is Jennifer Love Hewitt fat? Of course there's no way to judge the damage done to young women everywhere by posing these assinine questions. The photos of Love-Hewitt that made news--google them if you must--depict a young woman that any rational person would consider thin, attractive, and healthy. Suddenly thin women all over America were being told endlessly that they were fat. And what message is sent to the millions of men and women who really are overweight? Not only are you also fat, but regardless of how much weight you lose through healthy diet and exercise, you will still be "fat" as long as you are larger than Love-Hewitt's self-reported size 2, as long as you can strike an awkward pose in a bikini, as long as your skin doesn't hang from your collarbones like a wet blouse on a wire hanger. By the standards of People and Us only a few of us can ever escape being "fat". And yet the Hollywood waifs who take this seriously are also subjected to ridicule for their bulimia, while their bony portraits (more beach photography) become the staple for more speculation about the extremes of celebrity womanhood. There's really no right answer. If you are a woman, your body sucks, and you should hate it, hate yourself, starve, live in perpetual torment about how others view you.

But the gleeful hatefest going on this week in regard to the younger sister of Brittany Spears may be even worse. She is 16, and to put it euphemistically, has found herself in trouble. Right now, in high schools all across America, there are girls in the same situation. For years parents and educators have struggled with the solutions to the crisis of teen pregnancy, and the debate rages still about abstinence education and birth control, what's the best route for young couples dealing with this situation, how to deal with their teen hormones, and all that. We'll probably never solve the problem or end the debate. But I hope all sane people can agree that ridiculing teenagers who get pregnant is not the best way to deal with the problem. But anywhere on the radio dial today, you'll hear nothing but laughter and scorn for a sixteen year old girl who got knocked up. Jesus, that's a knee slapper.

I was in my car tonight and heard a talk show host put in his place--on ESPN Radio, of all places. The host, whose name I don't care to remember, was interviewing Brian Finneran, the injured wide receiver of the Atlanta Falcons, and thought he would end the segment with some light banter about a pregnant teenager, because we all know that's the funniest goddamn thing in the world. And this asshole was promptly put in his place by Finneran, who said (and I'm paraphrasing), "Well, my girlfriend, now my wife, and I dealt with that same problem during our senior year in high school, and I'm not going to get on that bandwagon. It's a tough thing to go through, and if her mother wants to write a book about how to get through this, I think it would do a lot of good." My god, I thought, at least there is some humanity left in our world, and the host, clearly reminded that this is a real issue affecting millions of real people, got serious and completely changed the tone of his remarks.

Because sometimes we need to be reminded that it's not only Jennifer Love-Hewitt they are calling fat, it's our mothers, our wives, our sisters, and our daughters are calling names and making fun of, it's women everywhere, some of whom will internalize the messages they receive about their bodies, and it will make them sick, just as surely as the bird flu or nuclear waste will make them sick. And when they laugh and joke about young kids in trouble, they are ridiculing young kids everywhere who again, will internalize those messages and learn to hate themselves as a result of it. This kind of garbage is toxic waste, and it needs to stop being churned out by media corporations, and it needs to stop being trivialized by all of it who pass by it every day. I'm not calling for censorship, I'm just asking that people who get paid to write and talk about this nonsense stop and think for just a minute about what it all means. At the risk of being a humorless politically correct stick in the mud, it's not some big joke, and the things people say have real consequences.

So can we lay off Love-Hewitt and Jamie Lynn Spears, for crying out loud? And don't even get me started on "watching a woman grow old in the White House". My god.

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