It's life, J-Lo

Lenny Ann Low
September 23, 2008 - 3:31PM

The cover of OK! magazine featuring Jennifer Lopez

COULD a dose of reality be sneaking into gossip magazines? Have weekly celebrity organs, winded by ceaseless huffing-and-hawing over luminaries deemed too fat, too old, too skinny, too Botoxed or too in love to be believably married (and therefore architects of plots masking their true sexual preferences/religion/volume of narcissism), gone soft?
Early signs are encouraging.
In a victory for women with normal thighs everywhere, Jennifer Lopez's participation in a Malibu triathlon more than a week ago is prominently, and positively, featured in almost every tattle rag. Photographs of the 39-year-old actress and singer, resplendent in form-fitting bike shorts and a wetsuit during different legs of the race, are published in OK!, Woman's Day, New Idea, NW, Famous and Who without a single snarky comment. No sneers damning her thighs. No taunts condemning her rear.
This is colossal stuff. Not just because fame has appeared at times to rest on a skinny posterior and trunk supported by tiny, stick-like legs, but also because the favourable reaction heralds a new direction in gossip reporting.
JLo may be a very famous, very rich, and by all accounts, very happily married woman but she is not afraid to wield areas of her body that are wider and heavier than the average celebrity's entire being. In public, in a triathlon, in a pair of body-hugging bicycle shorts.
Meanwhile, after weeks of fraught analysis of the style merits of her colossally baggy jeans, the mags have welcomed Katie Holmes's Broadway debut in Arthur Miller's All My Sons. Who reports ticket sales are "healthy", possibly record-breaking, while Grazia declares Holmes "wonderful in her role" and playing "a huge range of emotions very confidently" after the play's first preview last week. In the tone of a big sister fighting off schoolyard bullies, Grazia says Holmes, "has had to deal with a barrage of bitching, with rumours about poor ticket sales and her lack of acting ability" along with protesters picketing the theatre with "Free Katie" posters and shouts of "Scientology kills".
Then there's Britney. OK!, NW and Who report Spears threw a truck-themed birthday for her sons, Jayden and Preston. While the boys buzzed about on motorised cars with personalised number plates and tucked into a truck-shaped cake, Spears, normally tagged as "tragic", looked "like a very proud mommy", reports NW, and "cut a stylish figure", says Who. But Famous demurs, publishing a cover story titled "Brit Branded A Homewrecker: How She Stole Her New Man".
Seemliness, it seems, has only a short reign in celebrity reporting.