I'm sick of ‘Poor Jen’ sexism on repeat. This is The One Where Aniston Was Just Fine

Sure, searing government-toppling, Pulitzer prize-winning investigative reporting is all very well. But if I’m entirely honest, my favourite kind of journalism is: “So-and-so shows us round their lovely house and explains how their interior designer convinced them to go for a Golden Girls vibe mixed with Captain von Trapp’s mansion for their gated house in Manchester.” How a celebrity designs their home is so much more revealing than anything you read in gossip magazines – plus, I really like looking at other people’s wallpaper choices. So when the latest copy of Architectural Digest arrived with the coverline “At home with Jennifer Aniston”, tools were immediately downed and the afternoon schedule cleared. In a state of something close to bliss, I gazed upon photos of Aniston’s Bel Air home, which has handpainted wallpaper (an actual thing, apparently) and a marble bath twice as big as my bed. “Jennifer Aniston,” I thought, looking at her garden, which has a pagoda in it, “has a pretty sweet life.”

Except we now know that I could not have been more wrong, because it turns out that, despite the handpainted wallpaper, Aniston’s life is a gigantic human tragedy, a veritable wastepit of emptiness. Shortly after that article was published, Aniston and her husband, Justin Theroux (AKA the other, other Theroux), announced they were separating, and a cry went up in media outlets around the world: “Activate the ‘Poor Jen’ autobutton!” Whatever sighs of pleasure I may have emitted when reading about Aniston’s “Asian-inspired pocket gardens”, they were nothing next to the orgasmic grunts of excitement the tabloids made as they, on autopilot, hammered out headlines like, “Why CAN’T Poor Jennifer Aniston Keep A Man?”

I have a theory about Aniston and how the narratives about her led to the latest wave of feminism. Let’s call it The One Where The Media Overplayed Its Sexism. For a while the Poor Jen storyline stuck, when it was first deployed during Aniston’s divorce from Brad Pitt and the Brangelina scandal, and then during Aniston’s ensuing relationships with men far beneath her, including Mr Stay Puft, AKA Vince Vaughn, and the Human Grease Stain, AKA John Mayer. She was held up as a doomy warning to all single thirtysomething women, and for too long a lot of women bought it, or at least bought the magazines that peddled it.

But this hand got overplayed. In a manner similar to Kylie Minogue, Britain and Australia’s closest equivalent to Aniston, the media have always played a double game with Aniston, presenting her, on the one hand, as an aspirational glamour figure and, on the other, as a pitiable desperate spinster. Watching the Friends re-runs, it’s striking how much better Aniston looks today than she did in the 90s, and I love seeing photos of her, her Friends co-star Courteney Cox and their female friends on their apparently 17 annual holidays a year together. Well, they can afford it: Aniston reportedly earns $20m a year from Friends alone, which kinda puts the “poor” in “Poor Jen” in to perspective.

So Aniston is popular, gorgeous and rich: all the things, in short, that women are told they should be. Yet it turned out that, in the media’s eyes, all this isn’t worth a pile of beans if she isn’t also shacked up with some man. And just like that, Aniston went from seemingly validating the media’s sexist attitudes to single women to undermining them. She went from being the representative of all single women’s alleged loneliness to representing the garbage single women have to put up with: the constant insinuation that nothing you do or have is good enough if you’re not married, even if you earn more than $20m a year and have your own pagoda. Do magazines talk about poor Leonardo DiCaprio or Jake Gyllenhaal, still not married? Poor Antonio Banderas, all those divorces? No they do not. Is it any wonder the generation that grew up with Poor Jen found feminism again?

And can we talk about these men Jen apparently can’t keep? Pitt was last spotted in GQ magazine lolling about in knitwear and saying things like, “I’ve never heard anyone laugh bigger than an African mother who’s lost nine family members. What is that?” Meanwhile, Theroux collects human teeth. And Jen is supposed to be sad she no longer has to live with these muppets?

Some starry-eyed fools have suggested that Aniston should get back together with the now-single Pitt, AKA the man who left her for another woman and then felt the need to tell a magazine: “[Before] I wasn’t living an interesting life myself. I think that my marriage [to Aniston] had something to do with it.” People, please: living with a giant ball of hair would be a happier ending for Aniston than ending up with a man who treated her so disrespectfully.

So you enjoy your Asian-inspired garden in peace, Jen. At last, you can get Justin’s midlife crisis motorbikes out of your beautiful driveway and fill that space with a Buddhist rock pool. Because I’ve seen Aniston’s house and while money might not buy happiness, she is honestly doing just fine. Jen can’t keep a man? More like the men can’t keep her.