What Ashley Judd shows on screen as an actress has nothing to do with her potential performance as a politician.
Last month, Seth MacFarlane told Hollywood women he “saw their boobs.” This week, Ashley Judd is being criticized for showing hers.
Taylor Bigler (citing such reputable sources as MrSkin.com), lists the films where Judd has “flashed just about everything on screen.”
Judd has been considered a possible Senate candidate in her home state of Kentucky—she would displace Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. Bigler’s article joins a growing chorus of attacks against Judd before she has officially announced—Karl Rove’s “American Crossroads” has already run an ad attacking her as a pro-Obama Hollywood liberal.
Judd is mostly known as a Hollywood actor, less known by most for her articulate feminist activism. As an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky, she reports being inspired by taking classes in women’s studies, as well as Images of Women in 17th Century Art and Literature. So she’s probably rolling her eyes at the latest attack on her body, rather than on her stand on issues like mountaintop removal and the Violence Against Women Act.
Such attacks are not new to Judd, nor are her articulate responses. When criticized for having a “puffy face,” she wrote in the Daily Beast that such attacks were “pointedly nasty, gendered, and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day, in ways both outrageous and subtle.” The essay was rightly hailed as a “kickass feminist essay”—I think it’s an inspiring manifesto. I had to look up some of the bigger words Judd used. Puffy or not, Ashley Judd is not just a pretty face.
Both MacFarlane and Bigler’s comments can be defended as “just jokes,” but author Jean Kilbourne tells us that “violence is inevitable when you turn a human being into a thing.” Whether intentional or not, attacks on women’s bodies also get women to shut up—feminist author Soraya Chemaly says such attacks silence women, and “make the public sphere seem dangerous.”
Judd and other feminists have long spoken out against the objectification of women. Ironically, Judd and other feminists are often silenced by—you guessed it—objectifying them.
A hundred years ago this week, the Women’s Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C. suffered jeering and harassment as they walked—I imagine much of this jeering focused on the women’s appearance, rather than on the pros and cons of women being given the right to vote. A century later, can we start focusing on what women say, instead of how they look?
It’s not clear whether she’s running for Senate (last week, she invited her 159,000 Twitter followers to join a mailing list, hinting at breaking news). But Judd’s ideas deserve to be heard, rather than being silenced by snarky, sexist, irrelevant comments about her body.
Ben Atherton-Zeman is a feminist, actor, and husband performing a one-man play “Voices of Men,” working to end sexual and domestic violence. Video clips available at http://www.voicesofmen.org
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