Why, in my fantasy life, Annie Leibovitz is my best friend and travels with me everywhere I go

I was spending the day with a friend of mine recently when she showed me some pictures from a recent family trip. I noticed almost immediately that there weren't any pictures of her, and when I asked about it, she said, "I don't like having my picture taken."

I get it. I really do.

Because that was my attitude most of my adult life—until a few years ago, I HATED having my picture taken and looked pretty awkward almost every time I was forced to do it, which I talked about in my "Who is the girl in the picture" post. I'm still not great about posing for photos now, but I'm working on it and try my best to have a good attitude, which I think is crucial to taking a good photo.

Lately, though, I'm beginning to wonder if it's about more than just having a good attitude. Over the past few months, I've had the opportunity to have my picture taken by more than one professional photographer, and I am always shocked by how good the results turn out. (The photo of me above was taken by one of those pros.)

As a result, it started to occur to me that maybe the reason I hate having my picture taken is because I don't have a professional doing it all the time. In fact, it's usually my husband or one of my friends taking my picture, and they usually do it quickly—in between talking and hanging out—without really thinking about it.

All of this had been in the back of my head when I saw a new photo of a friend on Facebook and actually thought, "Wow, that doesn't even look like her. She is so much more attractive than that." And that's when it hit me—the reason our photos don't look as good as the ones we see in magazines is simply because we don't have a professional photographer following us around all the time.

Maybe this sounds obvious, but I have witnessed too many people—men an women—bemoaning the way they look in pictures for me to believe that people understand this is the case. I think we all want to look like a celebrity every time we have our picture taken even though we don't have half the resources that most of them do.

And then I saw something that made me sure that taking a good photo doesn't usually happen by accident but rather requires some serious effort as well as a professional photographer.

I was watching Letterman a few weeks ago when Courtney Cox was on the show talking about a recent trip to St. Bart's. While she was there, Letterman held up this photo of Cox from that trip:

Letterman oooohed and aahhed over Cox's amazing physique, but she resisted the compliment, explaining that she doesn't normally look like that and that she was doing everything she could to look her best when the photo was taken.

"Well, Dave," she said. "You know when the paparrazzi are there, so that's not real . . . I mean that's real, but I was working it pretty hard . . . We made a joke about it. Let's see how Sports Illustrated we can get. And I really was like . . . I sucked in, I moved my body, and my arms are streched out. I don't walk like that!"

Cox even claimed that Letterman would be horrified if he saw the way she sits on the beach when nobody is looking and imitated herself seaside, hunched over and limp.

Whether you believe it or not, her message was clear: people don't normally look the way she did in that photo. And for some reason, I believed her. I believed that she could suck in her gut and pump her arms and legs in such a way that put her best features on display.

Do I believe I could strike the same pose and appear as hot as Cox does in her string bikini? No way, but I do believe that trying to look good and believing you can look good goes a long way towards accomplishing that goal.

And while writing this post, I decided to Google "Courtney Cox at the beach" to see if there were any pics of her looking the way she described, and believe it or not, one of the first pictures I came across was one of Cox looking the same way she imitated herself looking on Letterman . . .

Is she still beautiful? Absolutely. But she also looks real because she's not posing for the paparazzi.

It's easy for us to imagine that the beautiful people look beautiful all the time, but the truth is, when they're just being normal and goofing around with their friends and an iPhone, they take crazy photos too.

The only difference is that their bad photos never show up on Facebook.

Waxed, plucked, and greased: Okay, she's ready. a.k.a. Theatre of the Grotesque

A few weeks ago, I was channel surfing one night when I came across Courtney Cox on Letterman. Though I'm not a fan of Cougar Town, I've always thought Cox seems like a smart, sophisticated actress who hasn't yet reached her full potential. So I stopped on that channel to hear what she had to say.

Unfortunately, I was so distracted by how she was dressed I had trouble listening.

She was wearing a super short low-cut dress, and her legs were bare. Not only were they bare, they were also slick looking—as if they had been greased up for appearance.

Immediately I thought of For Your Consideration, Christopher Guest's satirical mockumentary about Hollywood. I didn't like the film as well as his others, and I don't think that's because it wasn't accurate. I think it's because it was too accurate. When you see Best in Show—his best in my opinion—you laugh the whole time. Not just because Guest did such a good job spoofing the Westminster Dog Show, but also because his characters are so ridiculous that you don't take them too seriously. Yes, they are exaggerations of real people you know, but they are not real people. So you can laugh at their unusual behavior without feeling too bad about it.

But in For Your Consideration, the characters seem just like real actors. Though their behavior is unusual to the point of being incredibly odd, they don't seem unbelievable, which is what makes the movie so hard to watch. It's almost too real. You can't laugh at the weirdness of it because it's not much an exaggeration, and laughing at real people seems cruel. And instead of enjoying the film, you leave the theatre feeling bad for these people, which is probably why the movie—billed as a comedy—didn't do as well as Guest's other films.

In one scene, Catherine O'Hara's character is being interviewed on a late-night talk show because she is getting some serious Oscar buzz (which is where the movie gets its name). Before the late-night appearance she looks like a normal middle-aged woman—she has wrinkles around her eyes and mouth and on her forehead, she dresses appropriate for a woman in her mid-fifties, and she has limp dirty-blond hair. . .

But when she shows up for her late-night appearance, she's wearing a too-short, low-cut dress and has had a massive makeover—botoxed skin, plumped lips, waxed legs, blown-out bleached blonde hair, the works. . . .

She looks absolutely insane.

But the message is clear: if a woman wants to be a star, she's got to follow these rules no matter how old she is: show off her bod and make herself over in the image of a twenty-year-old. No, she can't look like an ingenue and may not even look good anymore, but she can stretch and tweeze herself to death trying.

This is why I thought of For Your Consideration when I saw Cox on Letterman: because she was made up almost exactly like O'Hara's character—same low-cut mini-dress, same shiny legs, same pushed-up cleavage. Sure, Cox pulled it off and looked good, not insane. But that's not the point. The point is that we make these women fit a mold that not everyone can or needs to fit, as Tina Fey rightly pointed out on Saturday Night Live this season when she explained that she had to have every hair removed from her body before she was allowed to appear on air. And I've noticed in the years since I've seen For Your Consideration that nearly every actress who appears on late-night television looks this way.

(The Daily Show is the one exception, and I couldn't help but notice that Kristen Wiig looked like a normal person when she appeared there last night in a sweater and jeans . . .

but looked like a frightening Elvira version of herself when she appeared on Letterman earlier this week in a short, tight black dress and goth-like makeup. . .

)

Cox is 47 next month, and she looks phenomenal for her age (or for any age), but I'm still horrified that she feels like—even at this point in her career, even with all the millions she earned on Friends—she still has to look like a sexpot every time she steps in front of a camera. It also reminds me how accurate Guest's film was—if she wants to continue to succeed in Hollywood, she's got to play by these rules.

I have no solution to this problem. I can tell you to turn off any late-night program that makes woman parade across the stage like some Stepford version of a bombshell, but you probably won't do it. Still, I can suggest this: at least be aware that women are required to look this way if they want to succeed in one of the most profitable industries in our country, and ask yourself, what does it do to the rest of us?

Curvier . . . Rounder . . . Better!

191 pounds

The internet has been buzzing all week about two stories The New York Times ran after the Golden Globes, and since both relate to the issues on this blog, I want to talk about them.

First, the Times ran an article that quoted an anonymous stylist dissing Christina Hendricks' dress (pictured above).

The stylist said it was the wrong dress for her and added that "You don't put a big girl in a big dress." Thankfully, the blogosphere went crazy over the idea that Hendricks is big.

As CNN explained in an article about the controversy today, "Some were upset by the post, particularly by the use of the word 'big.' 'They bothered me because they called her a big girl because she's by no means a big girl—the only thing big about her is her chest,' said celebrity blogger Cara Harrington. Another blogger, fashion editor Vanessa Raphaely, said that by calling Hendricks 'big,' the Times was 'stretching the definition of the word.'"

I couldn't agree more.

If you look at pictures of Hendricks, it's easy to see that she has tiny arms, a small waist, and a thin face. But what I love about Hendricks is that she has significant curves—hips, thighs, and a bust—that we can all admire.

And I also agree with the bloggers that The New York Times was foolish to print a quote that refers to Hendricks as "big" because it's a term that carries only the ugliest of connotations. Technically, a person can be big and still gorgeous, but unfortunately, in our society, big has come to mean bad (unless you're talking Extra Value Meals).

Like I've already said about the word "fat," the word "big" should probably be avoided as a way to describe a person's body. I remember a few years ago, a friend of ours described another friend—a man—as a "big guy," and this comment was not only poorly received, it sent said guy on a crazy, lo-cal diet.

At first I felt like people were overreacting a bit in their criticism of The New York Times. After all, they weren't the ones who called Hendricks big. They were just reporting it.

But maybe going after the Times is not such a bad thing. If more of us complained about these types of comments and the people who report them, maybe the media would be forced to re-evaluate how they talk about and depict women's bodies.

At the same time, I do believe that the other criticism of the Times' coverage of Sunday's red carpet is unwarranted.

On Monday, the Times fashion reporter, Andy Port, said in a post called "A Rounder Golden Globes" that she thought that three actresses—Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, and Kate Hudson—looked like they had "put on a little weight."

Bloggers and commenters unleashed on Port for this observation, but I think they failed to get her point. In the article, Port describes these women as "sporting sexier curves," and then goes on to say that "Instead of a Barbie-doll circumference, there was suddenly, amazingly, a womanly roundess to their frames. More Marilyn than Twiggy, that's for sure."

Call me crazy, but it seems to me that Port is applauding this change rather than criticizing it. That's why she uses words like "sexier" and "amazingly." And her comment that they are "More Marilyn than Twiggy" has to be seen as a compliment because even today, even when we see far too many models with unhealthy BMIs gracing the covers of our magazines, most of us would still rather look like Marilyn Monroe than Twiggy, right?

God, I hope so.

And if that's Port's point, she's not the only one who's pleased. If she's trying to say that Aniston, Cox, and Hudson's new bodies might just mean that our perceptions of beauty are finally changing in our society, then I could not be happier.

Yes, Port could have been clearer about that point, but I'm still glad she said it.

Of course, he irony of this whole brouhaha is that if anyone reminds me of Monroe it is the stunning Christina Hendricks.