Facebook
X
LinkdIn
Copy Link
Back in the 20th century, there was a trend for beautiful female film stars to compare themselves to comical or unattractive animals. Michelle Pfeiffer insisted that she looked like a duck; Uma Thurman claimed to resemble a hammer-head shark. Not just actresses; there was a song by Pink, in which the then 23-year-old, size-six blonde babe with the snub nose and big eyes beat herself up for not being conventionally pretty like Britney Spears.
It’s not so popular now: stars caught on how patronizing it made them look. But a new annoying thing that pretty entertainers do is trawl social media for sympathy after the evil heritage media has picked up on some slightly unusual aspect of their appearance and made mild fun of it.
They’ve stopped pretending their job is akin to being a child cobalt-miner in Africa, as Kristen Stewart (who claimed in 2010 that being photographed by paparazzi was like “being raped”) and Gwyneth Paltrow (who said that being written about bitchily was like being a soldier in the trenches, 2014) did. No, savvy enough to understand that such extreme bellyaching would get little sympathy in these hard times, today’s attention-seeking pin-ups merely mewl on Instagram about how those nasty people over there are being beastly to them. But whining about one’s lot is dreary from anyone; from someone fortunate enough to do a thing they love for a living, it’s truly pathetic.
Still, that hasn’t stopped one Aimee Lou Wood (no one needs three names, by the way), an actress in The White Lotus – another television show that every bore and his dull dog is currently wetting themselves over – for having the ab-dabs after Saturday Night Live made fun of her teeth. If you hadn’t heard of this cutie before, I’ll just fill you in that her teeth are all perfectly present and gleaming white, with a tiny gap and slight prominence of the front two. She looks like the bookish best friend in a rom-com, which means very cute indeed.
You’d think being on a hit show in a profession with an unemployment rate hovering around 90 percent might make one bouncy, jouncy and full of DGAF energy. But such is the mistrust among Wood’s generation of resilience in any form that she must act out an elaborate pageant of hurty-feelings when her teeth are made fun of, starting with an Instagram flinch calling it “mean and unfunny.”
That led to a virtual group hug from online bum-suckers and fellow celebrity snowflakes – Cara Delevingne, Georgia Jagger and Jameela Jamil – coming to her defense. Afterwards, Wood smarmed, “On a positive note, everyone is agreeing with me about it so I’m glad I said something instead of going in on myself.”
SNL has since apologized for the sketch – which is the worst thing you can do when you hurt someone’s feelings, as that means you’ve robbed them of yet another chance to pull themselves together and grow the hell up.
What adds to the risibility of the situation is that Wood admits to being hugely amused by the SNL episode in question until the point “she” appeared in it, especially the savage mocking of the liberal bête noire Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It reminds me of the member of the Frankie Boyle audience who was outraged when he told a joke about disabled children; this was a person who’d paid actual money to watch a man famous for telling rape jokes. Isn’t it just a tiny bit hypocritical only to be outraged on your own behalf?
Wood justified her particular situation as the Kennedy routine being “punching up” while the one aimed at her was “punching down.” But how can making fun of a beautiful young actress on the hottest show around be punching down, and making fun of a man generally considered insane be punching up? These things are all in the eye of the beholder.
Amusingly, betraying a soupçon of snobbishness, Wood added that “I have big gap teeth – not bad teeth” – take that, you Trump-voting hillbillies!
As for getting ragged about her teeth, Wood should see mine; I’ve got about ten left, with my front two gone and another couple of highly visible ones AWOL. It happened in the summer, and I planned to get it fixed but then I was having such a good time that I thought I’d put it off till the autumn. Before I knew it, it was the festive season and I thought new year, new teeth – and then I had my bit of bother and now I’m in a wheelchair, dentistry doesn’t seem a pressing issue. Anyway, the point is that people often back away from me like I’m planning to kill and eat them, or at least ask them if I can spare a dime, but I’m not moaning on social media about being mocked. I just suck it up – literally.
To return to topic, beautiful and successful actresses generally used to be hard as nails (that’s why Marilyn stood out, sadly), adventuresses and heartbreakers and man-eaters; not confessing in GQ interviews, of all places, to being “a bit sad” as Wood has. Wouldn’t it be refreshing, just for once, to hear a modern showbiz fox say something along the lines of what the young Ursula Andress came out with when asked why she posed nude for Playboy: “Because I’m beautiful?” Or Brigitte Bardot shrugging, “I have always adored beautiful young men. Just because I grow older, my taste doesn’t change. So if I can still have them, why not?”
Beautiful people are born with a great advantage; even tiny babies prefer photographs of them. But they’d be advised to grab their chance with both hands and enjoy every unfair, gorgeous moment; their looks will go, and it’s like losing a fortune – cosmetic surgery doesn’t help, any more than Monopoly money can replace your blown bank balance.
So beautiful people should revel in what the good Lord gave them, shallow and smug and unassailable, unspoiled by hissy fits and hurty feelings and all those other dreary details of life which affect mere mortals in this clown-show of a modern world. Because their day in the sun will be over soon enough.
