We Have Body Image Issues Because We Were Told This Photo Was THE WORST A Woman Could Look
I went viral again on TikTok for talking about the Jessica Simpson Mom Jeans Fiasco of 2009
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We Were Told This Was The WORST A Woman Could Look: Jessica Simpson in 2009
If you’re in your 30s or 40s, and maybe even younger, you’ll remember this photo of Jessica Simpson. She looks really good here, even if you don’t like her jeans or wide animal-print belt, so it’ll probably shock you that she was called fat and ugly for probably a good one- or two-month news cycle because she dared to show up looking like this to perform at a festival. With shameful hindsight, we can see that she looks fabulous, from the perfect hair to the hoop earrings to the bangin’ bod.
Yeesh. Times like this I wish the ants would take over and end us, humans are the worst. Anyway…
THIS IS WHY WE HAVE BODY IMAGE ISSUES!
Also…
The Jessica Simpson Body War Is a War On All Of Us
It’s hard to believe now, but this image of Jessica Simpson was considered unspeakably, daringly fat in 2009. Can you believe this heresy? But it’s the truth. You may have forgotten about this image, but I’m here to remind you how we dragged her.
The prevailing tabloid winds were like HOW DARE SHE NOT LOOK LIKE A RACK OF RIBS? HOW DARE SHE GAIN ANY WEIGHT?
Headline after headline absolutely dragged her. One outlet wrote “Jessica Puffs Up,” regarding this image. Over on TikTok I made a video about this (don’t judge me, I’ve been bored, but also I saw a tweet about it that haunted me) and the views are soaring.
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There are two main types of comments I’ve been getting on this video
1. “My memory of this photo was that she was absolutely massive, and seeing it again blew my mind, because No, she wasn’t.”
2. “I remember this. It made me feel horrible about myself.”
Those are two real comments from my video. I mean, if you have eyeballs and you’re looking at how cute she is above, those comments seem crazy, but it’s how we felt at the time.
What’s perhaps worse is that Jessica Simpson is in the news again for being very thin. The word Ozempic is being tossed around. She’s gone on the record as saying she’s been every size there is. I say let her live.
This gorgeous woman is a happily married clothing mogul who successfully pivoted from an exploitative singing career, a shitty gaslighting starter marriage, and a reality TV career that was obsessed with getting bikini shots of her. A pivot like that is NOT easy to do. All while in the public eye. So why are the tabloids and gossip content creators still waging a war on her body? It’s a deranged obsession.
The war on Jessica is a war on all of us. In fact, most of us are still trying to undo the harms of 90s and 00s zero-fat culture.
The Body Positivity Movement Owes Jessica Simpson
The body positivity movement owes Jessica Simpson a debt of gratitude because she has been taking it from the press for DECADES over her body size. Like seriously, people have had children and those children have had children in the decades (!) she’s been taunted by tabloids and gossip sites.
What I love and admire about Jessica Simpson is she does not hide when she’s different sizes, I mean, why should she, even though she probably feels like doing so cause she’ll make headlines no matter what she does? She actually talks about this and even what I’m going to call “the jeans fiasco” in her recent memoir, Open Book.
Everyone expects her to look exactly like she did when she played Daisy Duke in Dukes of Hazzard a generation ago. Yep, we’re expecting her to look the same after having kids, the same as she did in the year 2005.
If you think this is absolutely diabolical, that’s because it is. The disgusting ethos of pop culture and frankly, the standards of male gaze that even women enforce, demands YOU NEED TO BE SEXY FOR ME and how dare you if you don’t. Don’t be too fat, too old, too ugly.
And now we have to talk about 1. Visible Bones and 2. Her “Mom” Jeans. Those are two things I never thought I’d write in one sentence and yet, here we are.
The Visible Bones Era
Try and remember back to 2009. All fashionable jeans were low-rise jeans in the era of True Religion and 7 For All Mankind, and basically they were supposed to hang off your hips. You had to have visible jutting hip bones to effectively carry off this look. Otherwise you (and me) looked like the Michelin Tire marshmallow man squeezed into a premium-denim tube.
I call this the Visible Bones era. The lens we were looking at everyone through was an extremely distorted thinness lens. If your bones, your collarbones, your hipbones, your chestbones and ribs were not visible: you were FAT. Nearly everyone looks fat through that lens, by the way. I include myself in that.
If you doubt my historical analysis of this thin obsession, let’s recall a decade back (late 90s) from this Jessica Simpson Mom Jeans photo (2009) when this Visible Bones shit really caught on fire. Some geniuses actually marketed the show Friends with this tagline “Cute Anorexic Chicks.” That was the billboard, I kid you not. Can you effing believe the audacity?
High-Waisted Jeans
So in this “Cute Anorexic Chicks” climate which was still going strong 10 years later, Jessica shows up to a festival in a bold look: High-Waisted Jeans. You’d have sworn she was the leader of some sort of satanic cult the way the press vilified her. They were merciless. “Disgusting Mom Jeans!” the headlines decried, like as if she committed the worst sin imaginable.
Which she did, by not looking sexy AF in the eyes of the tabloids, I suppose. That’s always a sin in Hollywood, and why actresses are cast aside on their 30th birthday like a used tissue. Why do Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone (and Anne Hathaway and Scarlett Johansson before them) have such relatively low-key careers right now compared to a decade-plus ago? Because they’re all over 30, that’s why. Meanwhile Florence Pugh has had an amazing streak over the last 7 years…because she’s still in her 20s. Let’s see where she is in 5 years from now, not that I wish her career any ill will, but these things repeat themselves.
Back to the jeans. The irony is that once again, we owe Jessica Simpson because eventually she/we normalized this high-waist silhouette and it looks AMAZING to our eyes in 2023. But at the time she was absolutely ridiculed for an outfit that is basically jeans and a tank top and a funky belt. She looked perfect and we were very very stupid.
Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones’ Diary
In the late 90s and early 00s, you looked awesome and worthy of attention ONLY if you were ultra skinny: like Calista Flockheart of the hit show Ally McBeal or later Paris Hilton or Nicole Richie of The Simple Life. You had to have very slim arms, slim hips, slim everthing. Or you could be perceived as a fatso that no man would want, like Renee Zellweger who put on weight to star in Bridget Jones’ Diary.
Every single press interview asked Renee about how she felt about putting on weight for the role. The subtext of their questions: What is it like to be fat and ugly instead of hot and skinny?
It is impossible to state how skinny you had to be to be a star back then, but I think Visible Bones sums it up quite well. Many of us are still reckoning with this to this day. What looks and is totally normal still looks fat to us when we look in the mirror.
I’ve had to work very hard to see everyone, but mostly myself, through a different lens. A lens of body positivity where you don't have to have VISIBLE BONES to look good. In fact, I’ve never had visible bones (like most of us of menstruation age) but back then, I really wished I did. We all wanted to be skinnier. Like Ally McBeal, the cast of Friends, like Jessica Simpson as Daisy Duke. As my friend Jessica often says (uh, no relation to Jessica Simpson 😂 ): What a sin.
Thanks for reading that, I hope you enjoyed it!
Warmly,
Helen
P.S. I also wrote about Intuitive Eating and how I healed myself from diet culture. You can read it here, it’s called “If I Only Knew This About Weight Loss 5 Years Ago”
P.P.S. I also made a video about the Jessica Simpson Body War on YouTube. Guess what, unlike TikTok where this video went bananas, over on YouTube no one cares because the YouTube algorithm hates midlife women creators, a lesson I keep learning again and again, lol.