While Jessica Simpson hasn’t been that adroit at “grabbing headlines” since the height of her early 00s popularity when Nick and Jessica: Newlyweds served as one of MTV’s first major stabs at reality TV outside of The Real World and The Osbournes, it was an era that apparently stuck with, of all people, Natalie Portman.
As she gears up to promote the forthcoming release of Vox Lux, in which she plays a moody pop star named Celeste, an article called “Natalie Portman finally fulfills her Madonna-fueled, teenage pop-star dreams in ‘Vox Lux‘” for USA Today states of her fraught emotions about pop music and the industry as a whole, “But she also remembers the virgin/vixen paradigms lobbed by the music industry as the millennium neared. ‘I remember being a teenager, and there was Jessica Simpson on the cover of a magazine saying ‘I’m a virgin’ while wearing a bikini, and I was confused. Like, I don’t know what this is trying to tell me as a woman, as a girl,’ she says.”
The metaphor for this virgin/vixen paradigm herself, Jessica Simpson, instantly came out against this blatantly passive aggressive comment with the response, “I was disappointed this morning when I read that I ‘confused’ you by wearing a bikini in a published photo taken of me when I was still a virgin in 1999. As public figures, we both know our image is not totally in our control at all times, and that the industry we work in often tries to define us and box us in. However, I was taught to be myself and honor the different ways all women express themselves, which is why I believed then—and believe now—that being sexy in a bikini and being proud of my body are not synonymous with having sex.” In short, Simpson, constantly deemed “the ditzy blonde,” put the frequently high and mighty Portman in her place, which rarely happens when considering she is one of the few actresses still somehow able to get away with classic displays of white feminism while others are not.
Portman, clearly not wanting to lose her stature as poised, elegant and Black Swan perfect, was quick to put the kibosh on any escalating Swiftian bad blood. Thus, Portman responded to Simpson’s “disappointment” with, “Thank you for your words, I completely agree with you that a woman should be allowed to dress however she likes and behave however she likes and not be judged. I only meant to say I was confused—as a girl coming of age in the public eye around the same time—by the media’s mixed messages about how girls and women were supposed to behave. I didn’t mean to shame you and I’m sorry for any hurt my words may have caused. I have nothing but respect for your talent and voice that you use to encourage and empower women all over the globe.”
How rapidly the brunette was willing to concede to the rightness of the blonde, almost making a separate statement unto itself about how readily the brunette bows to her trope of meekness and modesty, letting the blonde serve as the over the top representation of bombast and bubbliness. Simpson, incidentally, was the one to freely break the mold of the “dumb blonde” or “blonde bombshell” stereotype she has generally been content to be mired in by eloquently countering against Portman’s antithetical to current feminist trends callout. In her rebuffing of the idea that a woman can’t be both a virgin while still dressing in a manner that overly literal men would call “cock teasing,” Simpson has shown herself to be the more evolved feminist in this scenario. For a brunette, Portman sure ain’t comin’ across as soundin’ so learned in this case. And if she isn’t at least that, she might not have as much luck as she has in the past with “determinants and consequences of female attractiveness and sexiness.”
It was in this study of determinants that the long-standing and unspoken competition between blondes and brunettes for, well, seed that it is stated, “Evolutionary theory suggests that men should be attracted to those women whose physical characteristics signal the ability to conceive and deliver offspring [insert vom emoji here]. Among those physical characteristics theorized to reflect female fecundity and, therefore, to enhance women’s physical attractiveness to men are age, breast size, hair color, waist-to-hip ratio, and body weight relative to height. Consistent with this theorizing, researchers have found that: (1) younger women are perceived as more attractive than older women; (2) women with moderately large breasts are perceived as more attractive than those with either small or extremely large breasts; (3) blonds are perceived by men of European descent as more attractive than brunettes.”
Well then, one can safely assume that, despite both women having “settled” with someone and delivering their requisite offspring, Simpson would, at this point seem to be the likelier candidate to bounce back in the dating pool should a divorce from Eric Johnson predictably ensue. And while Portman has long been deemed as the rare bird of “hot smart girl” as a result of her much paraded Harvard education, it looks as though the domestic life has dumbed her down a bit. At the very least, though, she will always have the “integrity” of being able to say she never appeared scantily clad in anything, except, of course, this.
