Breaking: Jennifer Aniston NOT a victim

On the front cover of Grazia magazine last week was a picture of Jennifer Aniston looking tanned, toned and gorgeous with a smile on her face. Emblazoned across it was the headline “Jen- to blame for Courtney’s split”. I fully expected this week’s Grazia to follow up with the headline “Jen – also to blame for Israeli Palestinian conflict, Northern Ireland and 9/11”.

Jennifer Aniston seems to fill the media’s need for a perpetual victim. The woman had one failed marriage and no-one lets her forget about it. Look at Elizabeth Taylor – eight marriages later and no-one is calling her a victim. What’s the difference? Why is every woman’s magazine promoting Jennifer as life’s loser in love? Perhaps she’s single because she doesn’t suffer fools gladly (save for John Mayer) and she would rather be alone. For most women’s magazines it appears that alone equals lonely. As far as I can see Jennifer Aniston is a successful woman with a great career, she’s financially solvent, has good friends and has dated a lot of extremely attractive men. I don’t see a whole lot to feel sorry for.

It seems that despite feminism, despite the fact that opportunities for and attitudes to women are supposed to have changed, lots of women are still subjected to 1950s expectations when it comes to relationships.  It appears that if a woman is single in Hollywood, she’s most definitely unhappy and breathlessly waiting for a new man to come along. For example, Renee Zellweger and Jennifer Aniston are the perennial losers in love, George Clooney and Colin Farrell are perennial playboy bachelors.

Grazia is only one of the magazines culpable in this regard but to be honest between this and the fact that they feel the need to feature a diet in EVERY single issue of the magazine, they’ve gone down in my estimation a tad.