I really don't give a rat's ass about celebrity marriages or breakups, and neither should anyone else. I think the obsession about celebrity couples is that these couples give people benchmarks, however unrealistic they may be, against which to judge their own marriages, despite the fact that celebrity marriages take place in such a fishbowl it's impossible to believe that they in any resemble the lives most of us live every day.
But the Brad Pitt/Jennifer Aniston split is taking up so much of the 24-hour news cycle, one exhausted from too much tsunami coverage and hungering for a good sex scandal, it's almost impossible to stay away from it -- especially now that Rebecca Traister in Salon has focused on the part of the story that DOESN'T have to do with Pitt fucking his co-star Angelina Jolie on the set of their recent film shoot -- the discarding by a man of a woman who is not ready or willing to reproduce on demand:
But now that the marriage seems to be ending, the press is gleefully dancing on a grave that they have dug: one that contains the corpse of a marriage that does not bear fruit. It's a regressive and scary message to women: No matter how rich, thin, beautiful or talented, what really makes us attractive -- after a few years of marriage anyway -- is our ability and willingness to reproduce on demand!
In highly speculative weekend coverage of the story, both the New York Post and the New York Daily News put the breakup on their covers; their tut-tutting could barely be suppressed.
The Daily News noted that after Aniston's hit show, "Friends," ended last year, "both fans and Pitt began pressuring Aniston, 35, to have a baby. Pitt made it clear to anyone who listened that he was ready for a change of life and to have children." The News story reported that the couple had a nursery built into their Beverly Hills home, and even suggested that the issue of children "really hit home" when Pitt's ex-fiancée Gwyneth Paltrow had a baby and started cooing everywhere about the all-consuming fulfillment of motherhood. The paper conceded that Aniston acknowledged that she'd like to have children and sometimes wore a fertility medallion. (Then again, wouldn't you throw on a fertility medallion -- or 12 -- if you had millions of people practically threatening to behead you unless you produced an heir?) "But," the story went on, "Aniston also set up a brutally heavy four-film work schedule that would leave her little time for motherhood in the next three years." An accompanying article quoted New York family therapist Jane Greer as saying, "It was really inevitable ... It was really just a matter of time."
The rest of the early coverage was in the same vein. The Star, quickly amending an on-stands cover headline that squealed, "Brad & Jen Back On: It's Baby Time!" posted an online story reporting that "He wanted children, while she was pursuing a full-time career as a film star after a 10-year successful run playing Rachel on Friends." As if to suggest that 10 years of superstardom really should be enough to satisfy any ambitious young woman. By Sunday, the Post's "Had to Be Dad" cover story was quoting unnamed sources who said that "Aniston doesn't want to take the time off to have a kid -- and she doesn't want to endure the physical effects that giving birth will have on her sexy body."
Traister even notes the tabloid coverage which indicates that Pitt's attraction for Jolie was not even her legendary rack or "fuck 'em, then kill 'em, then eat 'em" sexual demeanor, but for time with her cute-as-a-button adopted son, Maddox.
No, in this time of The Handmaid's Tale gradually but inexorably coming to horrifying life, Jennifer Aniston, an actress with a preposterous amount of fame arising from a ridiculous long-running TV series and a middling movie career in which she has often been better than she's given credit for, seems to have chosen career over children, at least for the time being:
Aniston's career is at a stage that's perhaps more delicate and pressing than even her blessed biological clock. She has 10 years as one of the most successful sitcom characters in television history to wipe out if she wants to become a viable movie star. And she should act fast while she is still a known quantity, and can still draw on her looks and fantastically fit body. She has four movies on deck and yes, that has meant time away from her marital bed -- and all its baby-making potential -- to shoot them. All while her husband, 41, who began the game as a full-blown movie star and "the Sexiest Man Alive" and once deigned to guest-star on her sitcom, has lowered the burner on his career and turned more attention to things like architecture and his Jolie-inspired humanitarian pursuits. In a particularly poignant fuck-you to Aniston, photographs in one of People's sidebars ("Separate Lives: The year they drifted apart") show Pitt kibbitzing with Nelson Mandela and architect Rem Koolhaas while Aniston shoots a film with Hollywood punch line Kevin Costner.
Let me repeat: The trials and tribulations of celebrities has so little to do with actual people that in some ways it's ridiculous to extrapolate their foibles into the larger population. But when you figure how many women study People and The Star and other gossip rags and TV shows the way Nicely-Nicely Johnson and Harry the Horse studied the Racing Form in Guys and Dolls, you have to wonder about the message -- reproduce or else! -- that's being drummed into their heads so relentlessly in the rush to judgment of someone who may simply have wanted to accomplish life's tasks at times that are right for her.
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