Jessica Simpson is a woman with a body, two things that should give no one else the right to comment on how she looks.
This week, the 43-year-old singer posted a throwback picture of herself on her Instagram Stories from when she made the decision to go sober. “6 years ago,” she captioned the image of her sitting on a couch in a pink tracksuit.
The original image, which was posted to her Instagram in 2021, was taken on 1 November, 2017, the day she decided to get sober. “This person in the early morning of 1 Nov, 2017 is an unrecognisable version of myself,” she wrote. “I had so much self discovery to unlock and explore. I knew in this very moment I would allow myself to take back my light, show victory over my internal battle of self respect, and brave this world with piercing clarity. Personally, to do this I needed to stop drinking alcohol because it kept my mind and heart circling in the same direction and quite honestly I was exhausted.”
At the time, Simpson was celebrating her fourth year of sobriety, and said that during the process she began to love herself more and respect her own power. “I have made nice with the fears and I have accepted the parts of my life that are just sad. I own my personal power with soulful courage. I am wildly honest and comfortably open. I am free,” she added.
It’s a touching post, made even more powerful now that the singer has celebrated her sixth year sober, however *some people* decided to focus on how Simpson looked in the image instead of her accomplishment - even going as far to comment on her weight, saying the singer has “denied” using Ozempic to aid weight loss.
It’s not the first time Simpson’s body has been the subject of public fodder this year. Over the summer an image of Simpson from 2009 went viral after many TikTok users were in disbelief that the singer had been scrutinised for “gaining weight” when she was a size four (UK size 8). Blaming the abhorrent Y2K fat-shaming culture that made us believe people like Kate Winslet, Britney Spears, and even Renee Zellwegger in Bridget Jones were “overweight”.
Whether or not Simpson has gained or lost weight should never be any concern of ours. It’s been nearly 15 years since those first images of Simpson went viral, so why is her body still being treated as if it’s fair game for ridicule?
Simpson herself addressed the 2009 images in a 2020 interview with GLAMOUR US. “I felt good up there, I felt confident, and then it ruined the stage for me, and the stage was my home,” she said. “It broke my home. I’d already had broken moments within a home where I had to walk out of a marriage, but my stage has been like my home since I was, like, a child. That’s where I could be honestly alone with myself. I’m so happy that times are changing now and more women are accepted for who they are. People are flaunting themselves at every size, because that’s how it absolutely should be.”
Yet, even three years after making these comments, Simpson is still facing debate regarding her weight. It all stems back to the patriarchal society we unfortunately still live in that sees women and our bodies as objects of public consumption. We’re told that women can’t be too fat, nor can they be too fit. They can’t have wrinkles, but they need to age gracefully. We can have power, but not too much power. We need to work, but it’s also our responsibility to look after the home. It’s an endless wheel of contradictions that we can’t seem to pull ourselves off of.
Women are human. Jessica Simpson is human. As humans, our weight will fluctuate throughout our lives, and our looks will change. It's just unfortunate that society makes it impossible for women in the public eye to get older. Simply put: we can’t win. And until we stop scrutinising women for entertainment value, nothing will change.
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