As tempting as it is to daydream about rolling around in
mountains of money and snorting Valium in your own private jet, I don’t
think I’d really want to be a female celebrity for anything in the
world. Maybe not even if it meant I could have Ryan Gosling’s baby.
Because for all their money and privilege, female celebrities are
treated like trash. It must be so confusing to live in a world where
your behaviour and bodies are policed so rigorously and yet where you
can also expect punishment whenever you play exactly by the rules as they’ve been laid out.Oh wait, we already live in that world. The only difference is that when famous women stray from the strictly defined roles prescribed to them, their humiliation comes less in waves and more in a giant tsunami.
Recently, Beyonce Knowles uploaded some photographs of herself enjoying a relaxed birthday on a yacht. But lo! Was there TREACHERY afoot? Eagle eyed social media users, intent as they were on liberating the TRUTH from the dark and hostile wasteland Beyonce had buried it in, wasted no time in pointing out some of the virtual nip/tuck the musician had undergone. Tabloid websites latched on to the images feverishly, appearing to enjoy enormously being able to once again humiliate and mock the women whose images are ritually exploited to gain them market share profits.
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(Above: The Instagram photo at the centre of the controversy)In a disappointing twist, one of these websites happened to be Buzzfeed. Leading with the headline, HERE IS MORE EVIDENCE THAT BEYONCE IS PHOTOSHOPPING HER INSTAGRAM PHOTOS, one could be forgiven for thinking the article itself had been puked onto a keyboard somewhere deep in the bowels of the Daily Mail’s orifice. Sadly, no. This is really happening - Buzzfeed, with all its pro-feminist tributes, combing through a famous woman’s photographs and obnoxiously circling all the times she’s ‘lied’ about what her body really looks like.
It’s not the first time a generally pro-woman website has leapt at the chance to reduce women to their body parts and throw them to the internet wolves. Heck, it’s not even the first time Buzzfeed has done it. When Jezebel offered a $10,000 bounty for unphotoshopped stills from Lena Dunham’s Vogue shoot, their readers were rightly disgusted by what was seen to be a blatant attack on Dunham. No one truly believed that Jezebel was interested in using the photos to make a positive statement about Dunham or women’s bodies. Instead, it was widely regarded as a grim move designed to add to the persistent and unnecessary scrutiny inflicted on a woman whose body does not conform to the general Hollywood ideal of acceptable femininity.
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