There are a few reasons why you might have heard of Kate Hudson. She is a pretty good actress, she is the daughter of Goldie Hawn, and the wife of Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson, all of which may pique your interest, depending on how much you dig Hollywood starlets, Private Benjamin and/or hard rock.
Beyond her career and family connections, though, it's possible - even likely - that you first noticed Hudson in August last year, when a picture of her in baggy summer clothes and a sun hat, looking apparently emaciated, cropped up in the international celebrity press. Having only ever been of very occasional interest to the British celeb-mag scrum - Heat, Closer, Now, et al - Hudson was suddenly piping hot. For a moment it didn't matter that some of her more recent films, including Alex & Emma, had bombed. In terms of media attention, Hudson's change in appearance made her prime fodder, interesting enough to appear on magazine covers and be pored over intensely.
All of this seems to have made her angry. Last week, Hudson won a libel suit against the UK edition of the National Enquirer magazine, which implied that she had an eating disorder. Legal action against other publications hasn't been ruled out.
And it is a victory that should, in theory, send a massive warning shot across the bows of the celeb press. After all, treating female celebrities' bodies as public property, to be pored over and scrutinised to an obsessive degree - their weight fluctuations discussed in minute detail, the state of their fake tans, manicures, depilation and hair extensions rigorously unpicked - has become their main stock in trade. If stars can sue them for suggesting that they have an eating disorder, then, boy, are those guys in trouble!
While female stars' bodies have always attracted attention (I'm sure that the first Hollywood vamp, Theda Bara, for instance, got occasional stick for her unapologetic plumpness), never has there been such open season on these women's appearances. This week, Closer's cover includes pictures of Victoria Beckham, Nicole Richie and Superman Returns actress Kate Bosworth, above the cover line "Scary new trend: shrinking to a size 00." The magazine Now has a similar coverline, while inside it helpfully points out Trinny Woodall's crop of underarm hair. And, for their market rival, Heat, any celebrity flaw - be it bad skin, wrinkled hands, lipsticked teeth, or, their runaway favourite, extreme skininess - is not just fair game, but gold dust. I remember that the first ever copy of Heat showed the soon-to-be Big Breakfast presenter Kelly Brook licking her co-star Johnny Vaughan on the cheek. As with Brook's presenting career, it was not a success. As soon as the magazine started picking women's bodies apart, though, sales soared.
There was a time when a female star's biggest worry was that she would be pictured looking a few pounds overweight in, say, the Daily Mail, and systematically eviscerated for being undisciplined and allowing unsightly dimples to besmirch her once-unblemished skin. Now, though, that concern has been joined by the worry that she will be pictured looking a few pounds, or more, underweight, and accused of being ill, stupid, irresponsible, a bad role model and neurotic. Female celebrities have, I guess, a window of about three pounds within which their weight is allowed to fluctuate. Breach that and it's knives out.
Not that this is how the stories are generally presented. Instead they're often drenched in faux-concern for the women involved, whether it's a bikinied Fern Britton (accused last year of risking her life, and therefore her childrens' future happiness, by being overweight) or a hot-panted Victoria Beckham (also accused of risking her life and, again, her childrens' future happiness, by being underweight). This tone seeks to justify the stories by implying that they are just being written out of concern for the celebrity's health.
Which, of course, is ridiculous. Because the real reason that women love these pictures is the intense schadenfreude they provoke. This impulse used to be sated by pictures of celebrities-gone-fat, but, as the population at large has got, uh, ever larger, the enjoyment of looking at such photographs has been trumped by looking at "skinny-pics". While photographs of fat stars remind us that the cake habit we're fostering may be a problem, those of women who seem to disappear when side on (accompanied by captions that emphasise how silly/ill/self-obsessed they must be), make that second Crunchie bar of the day slip down all the better. Ha, readers can think, she's been depriving herself all that time and - instead of having the desired affect of looking hot, hot, hot - everyone thinks she looks like crap!
The problem being that such enjoyment is, inevitably, fleeting. Because what this scrutiny of female celeb bodies actually adds up to is a constant reminder to women that our own looks are a source of scrutiny; that our bodies, too, are public property, to be discussed and criticised by friends and family. And, indeed, that they will often be the main thing that we are judged upon. This last point is rammed home by the current raft of female stars who seem to feature in the British press for no other reason than their weight loss. Why, for instance, is there so much coverage of US former child star Mary-Kate Olsen? Is it because her film career is taking off in Britain right now? Nope. It's because her weight was recently said to have plummeted. And why has Nicole Richie become so ubiquitous? Is it because her series The Simple Life is wowing audiences, or because her recent novel was critically acclaimed? No again. These women have a profile in Britain because of their bodies.
And the overall affect of these stories is to infantilise women. Their tone carries the implicit suggestion that women need to be told how to take care of themselves and that we can't make up our own minds about how to treat our own bodies. This is emphasised by the fact that celebrities such as Olsen and Richie are rarely granted any achievements, history or significance, except as physical beings. And, in that sense, it's as if they were newborns.
All of this was summed up in the recent article in Grazia magazine that crowed of Victoria Beckham, she "plunges to the size of a seven year old". This story was followed-up by the Mail last week, which found four women who also have the waist-sizes of seven year olds and were invited to reveal what they think of Posh's looks.
Of course, people are always going to look at other people; we are always going to compare and contrast ourselves, and that fascination is natural. The sheer intensity and misogyny of the current focus on women's looks seems corrosive, though. It would be nice to think that Hudson's libel win might at least stem this trend for a while, but that's naive. While pictures of "flawed" celebrities continue to sell gossip mags, the cycle of female schadenfreude and resulting self hatred will keep whirring on. The fact is that in terms of magazine sales, and, indeed, advertising sales (it does, after all, take quite a glut of products to even attempt to live up to the ideal that's being sold) these photographs really are worth their weight. And whether the celebrities they feature will ever be valued for anything other than their weight seems unlikely.
