![30th Santa Barbara International Film Festival - Montecito Award - Jennifer Aniston Jennifer Aniston Huffington Post op-ed about sexism in media](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/jennifer-aniston-huff-po.jpg?quality=85&w=2400)
Jennifer Aniston has been the subject of tabloid headlines for years, whether it’s about her divorce with Brad Pitt, remarriage to Justin Theroux—or any number of very personal topics. This time, she’s had enough.
“I am not pregnant. What I am is fed up,” she wrote in a scathing op-ed column Tuesday for the Huffington Post. She shared the frustration she feels with the constant public scrutiny of her life, down to what she eats and wears. But, she says, the problem with that doesn’t end with her own feelings.
“The objectification and scrutiny we put women through is absurd and disturbing. The way I am portrayed by the media is simply a reflection of how we see and portray women in general, measured against some warped standard of beauty…The message that girls are not pretty unless they’re incredibly thin, that they’re not worthy of our attention unless they look like a supermodel or an actress on the cover of a magazine is something we’re all willingly buying into.”
And celebrity news, she says, is a vehicle for perpetuating this damaging view of women. She points to her own experience dealing with recent pregnancy rumors, which she says “points to the perpetuation of this notion that women are somehow incomplete, unsuccessful, or unhappy if they’re not married with children.” Pregnancy—and anything having to do with her life—will be her choice and not “because I feel incomplete in some way, as our celebrity news culture would lead us all to believe.”
“We don’t need to be married or mothers to be complete,” she writes. “We get to determine our own “happily ever after” for ourselves.”
She doubts that celebrity tabloid coverage will change overnight, and instead urges the changes to the culture to come from all of us. “We get to decide how much we buy into what’s being served up, and maybe some day the tabloids will be forced to see the world through a different, more humanized lens.”
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