Renee Zellweger Has Something To Say About The Rumors That She De-Squinted Her Eyes
Last month, The Huffington Post published an op-ed piece from Jennifer Aniston where she took a big, sloppy, non-pregnant shit all over the tabloids for constantly talking about the goings-on in her uterus and for saying she’s got a baby in her belly when she’s really just the remnants of a burrito. Well, Aniston has now handed over the op-ed piece pen to Renee Zellweger and it’s her turn to shit all over the tabloids, the media and the internet.
I poured out a box of Lemonheads almost 2 years ago when Renee showed up to another event looking different. A thousand blog posts were born from those pictures of Renee and so she responded by saying that she’s glad everyone thinks she looks different, because she’s happier and healthier and maybe it’s showing. Renee’s true feelings have been boiling for almost 2 years and she finally let them all out in a piece titled “We Can Do Better” for HuffPo.
Renee starts off her piece by saying she knows she’s lucky that she gets to make a living doing what she loves and it’s “worth the price paid in the subsequent challenges of public life.” She writes that she usually doesn’t see the point in commenting on silly and stupid gossip stories, but sometimes her silence and denials are taken as “an attempt to cover up the supposed tabloid ‘exposed truth.‘” Renee points out a tabloid article from October 2014 that said she put her eyes under a plastic surgeon’s scalpel. Renee says that article was just one of many from the tabloid press and “folks who practice cowardly cruelty from their anonymous internet pulpits.” If by pulpit, she means a half-broken office chair that’s got Snickers stains on it, then she’s got me pegged.
Renee goes on to say that she’s not writing because she’s been “bullied” or because a critic from Variety wrote about how it’s weird that she’s playing Bridget Jones again since she no longer looks like the Bridget Jones from past movies. Renee says that she’s writing to put out the truth and because she finds it disturbing that the mainstream media is now trying to pass off tabloid shit as real news. She also writes that she did not get any plastic surgery. (She probably just ate a ton of Japanese sweet potatoes):
I’m writing because to be fair to myself, I must make some claim on the truths of my life, and because witnessing the transmutation of tabloid fodder from speculation to truth is deeply troubling. The ‘eye surgery’ tabloid story itself did not matter, but it became the catalyst for my inclusion in subsequent legitimate news stories about self-acceptance and women succumbing to social pressure to look and age a certain way. In my opinion, that tabloid speculations become the subject of mainstream news reporting does matter.
Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes. This fact is of no true import to anyone at all, but that the possibility alone was discussed among respected journalists and became a public conversation is a disconcerting illustration of news/entertainment confusion and society’s fixation on physicality.
She ends her piece by suggesting that the mainstream media should keep all the smegma-covered gossip in the trash piles of the tabloids where they belong and instead cover real social issues:
What if immaterial tabloid stories, judgments and misconceptions remained confined to the candy jar of low-brow entertainment and were replaced in mainstream media by far more important, necessary conversations? What if we were more careful and more conscientious about the choices we make for ourselves, where we choose to channel our energy and what we buy into; remembering that information — both factual and fictitious — is frequently commodified as a product, and the contents and how we use it are of significant personal, social and public consequence?
Pic: Getty