There’s a clear difference between how A-list men and women are treated in Hollywood. For female celebrities, as they age, society expects them to do so gracefully or not age at all, but in the next breath, will take issue with which ever option they choose.
Naturally, Sarah Jessica Parker has had enough of the unnecessary pressure put on women in the spotlight.
In a recent interview with Allure, SJP opened up about how exhausted she is of the damaging dialogue that never seems to be targeted at men.
“We never talk about that with the other sex,” she told the publication, referencing how male celebrities aren’t typically advised to look younger, adding, “We don’t say to them: ‘Here’s a cream to pretend this didn’t happen.'”
Looking back on a makeup-free photo taken of her in 2021, the And Just Like That… star pointed out that said photo also included her friend, Andy Cohen, and he didn’t face any comments on his appearance like she did.
“Andy has a full head of beautiful grey hair,” she said. “But no one mentioned him, sitting right next to me. Not a soul. I’m not angry, it’s just an observation.”
“Some of it hurts for a minute, it smarts. And some of it confounds me because of the double standard that is so plainly illustrated.”
She then opened up about how exhausted she is about being praised as “brave” for embracing her natural grey hair.
“It became months and months of conversation about how brave I am for having grey hair. I was like, please please applaud someone else’s courage on something!”
While most women agree with her take on the double standards of society, it turns out that her fellow Sex and the City co-star Kristin Davis, shares the same opinion.
“It can be extremely stressful to be ageing and to be compared to your much, much, much younger self,” she said in an interview with New Beauty.
“If I was from a regular life, I would feel fine; I would feel great,” she said. “I’m healthy, I’m strong, I’ve got this little three-year-old son, and I carry him around and it’s all good—but, no, I’m on television, where every bit of my physical being is analysed.”
She continued: “I also became famous when magazines were king, and every week there’d be an article saying I was ‘pear-shaped’.”
“That was difficult, and no amount of working out could change my shape or how those articles were written… they just loved to compare me to Sarah Jessica, who, at the same time, no matter what she did, was always going to be a very tiny thing,” she explained.
For Davis, there was a time when the ’90s hit show was in its peak, where strangers even stopped her from buying sweets because tabloids had labelled her pear-shaped figure as something she shouldn’t want.
“I also grew up feeling insecure about my body. I don’t know why, but I did. One time, right when we started filming in the olden days, I was walking home from set and I stopped at the corner bodega to buy some M&M’s, which is my go-to stress food,” she revealed.
“I go to pay, and the woman behind the register said, ‘I can’t sell these to you.’ I thought she was going to say she was kidding, but she didn’t, so I left that bodega and went to the next bodega down the block, and I bought four big bags of M&M’s and I ate them all.”
She concluded, “It was just very stressful back in the day… we had the extreme body stress, but now we have the age stress. Both were, and are, very hard things to deal with.”
There’s clearly a long way to go before Hollywood stops vilifying women for simply being human, but here’s hoping that helpful dialogue like this will help get the ball moving.
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