A second divorce sees the former Friends star Jennifer Aniston replay her old role: female failure personified
I’ve just realised something huge and awful on Jennifer Aniston’s behalf – it will never ever be over. “It” being the torrent of intrusion, accusation, speculation and weirdness that comes with her second unofficial career as International Totem for Supreme Female Biological and Relationship Failure.
Aniston has just given an interview explaining how tiresome and sometimes painful it is to have her life reduced to not having children and not being able to “hang on to a man”. (She is divorcing her second husband, Justin Theroux.) She talked about baby-shaming, split-blaming and the perception of non-mothers as “damaged goods”, hinting that not becoming a mother may not have been planned: “They don’t know what I’ve been through medically or emotionally.”
Aniston added: “I have worked too hard in this life and this career to be whittled down to a sad, childless human.” Quite. Though, let’s face it, sympathetic interviews like this are also part of it “never being over”, as is what I’m writing now. Sensitive, cruel, sisterly, thoughtful – whatever the nature of the approach, it all helps to reinforce what may come to be known in country and western circles as The Ballad of Poor Jen.
In a glittering egalitarian future, society may be as interested in the sperm counts of famous men as it is in the wombs of famous women, or maybe even neither. However, right here, right now, this doesn’t help Aniston much. In the collective imagination, the music has stopped, and “lonely, panicking, childless Jen” is running around trying to find a seat that no longer exists. And we ᴀssure ourselves that it’s not rude or mean to stare, because, after all, she’s a celebrity and well rewarded for her distress.
Why does this happen and only to women? Aniston’s Friends co-star Matthew Perry doesn’t have children but no one seems “worried” about his poor doomed testes. However, maybe this is the deal when women’s lives don’t turn out to be formulaic enough for other people’s tastes. If women exist outside rigid societal templates, by choice or otherwise, they must endure perplexity, scrutiny, ridicule, even downright hostility, both from men and, sadly, other women who are frightened of becoming them or intent on validating their own life choices.
Perhaps this is where Aniston could take some small comfort in performing a valuable public service for women in similar circumstances. After all, if someone like her (high-achieving, celebrated, wealthy) is constantly subjected to sub-medieval bilge (“You’ve not got a man. You’ve not got kids. So you’re a big old lady-failure”), then it helps to expose how fundamentally ludicrous it all is. Clearly this is the zenith of the chauvinist-denouncer A-game, all they’ve got – which, in the context of any woman’s otherwise big, busy, happy, fulfilled life, really isn’t that much. So, yes, maybe it will never be over for Aniston, but I’m sure that she, and all the other women, can cope.
It’s no holiday for parents who can’t even feed their children
Why go abroad, when you could holiday in hell in the UK? The anti-poverty charity the Trussell Trust is appealing for more food bank donations to help struggling families during the school holidays. While the figures for adults using food banks slightly decreased last summer, they sharply increased for children. This seems logical: families lose free school lunches and clubs and must organise extra childcare and more meals.
This echoes revelations that the government is secretly drawing up plans to examine if Tory austerity policies contributed to the huge rise in the use of food banks. (Gosh, could there be a connection?) It also raises the regular issue of the ruinous financial effect of lengthy school holidays on struggling families and how this is all but ignored. Usually, when school holidays are in the news, it’s about people wanting to take their children to Disneyland in term-time. While the inflated cost of breaks during school holidays is an issue for many families, it isn’t for others, because they couldn’t afford to go anywhere anyway. Not only are foreign trips beyond their pockets, so is life generally.
The government response – the announcement of a £2m fund for disadvantaged families during school holidays – has to be a joke. Two million isn’t going to go very far considering the number of parents on benefits. Is it inconceivable that these parents could at least receive extra payments during holidays instead of what happens now, the problem semi-officially ignored and dumped on charities?
For too many families, school holidays are not about unwinding and having fun – they’re about extra expense, stress and children going hungry. Sometimes, the heat is on and it’s not about the sun.
Mid-operation selfies reveal our vanity now knows no limits
Smile for your tasteless selfie? A surgical team in Buenos Aires has been suspended for taking selfies, mid-operation, and posting them on social media, complete with patient, surgical masks, bloodied gauze, the lot. A case of “nurse, pᴀss the iPhone 8”?
In another recent incident, an “Instagram model” caused a furore by posting pH๏τos of herself with her ᴅᴇᴀᴅ father in his hospital bed, complete with broken-heart and crying-face emojis.
In 2017, Israeli writer Shahak Shapira satirised the disrespectful behaviour of people at the Berlin Holocaust memorial by placing graphic concentration camp images behind their grinning, cavorting antics – some were even doing yoga poses.
However, it would seem that nothing – surgery, death – is enough to deter some selfie-takers.
There has rightly been a great deal of coverage about the physical dangers of selfies – people posing on bridges or cliffs, falling off and being maimed or even killed. However, what about taking our moral temperature? Generation Selfie isn’t all bad. (Why shouldn’t people be their own favourite celebrity?)
But there has to be a limit or have we all become so besotted with our own images that cameraphones work overtime, while moral compᴀsses vanish?