Maxim condemned after ‘unsexiest women’ list surfaces with surprising first-place winner: ‘Ridiculously cruel’
More like “Unsexy and the City.”
Netizens are ripping on a controversial 18-year-old Maxim article that listed the most “unattractive” women in showbiz — with “Sex and the City” star Sarah Jessica Parker topping the Mount Rushmore of alleged off-putting celebs. The unflattering ranking came to light via a Reddit post that raised eyebrows online.
“In 2007, Maxim thought it was clever to publish a list of ‘Unsexiest Women Alive,’” the Reddit poster wrote. “Here are the 5 women they selected.”
SJP was named the “unsexiest woman alive,” with the men’s mag describing her as the “least sexy woman in a group of very unsexy women,” per an article from the time on Today.com.
“How the hell did this [racehorse] Barbaro-faced broad manage to … star on a show with ‘sex’ in the title?” it read, per news.com.au.
Coming in second in this not-hot 100 was Amy Winehouse. The “Rehab” singer, who died four years later of alcohol poisoning, was lambasted for her supposed “openly hemorrhaging translucent skin, rat’s nest mane and lashes that look more like surgically attached bats.”
“Grey’s Anatomy” star Sandra Oh placed third on this famous person “face mash,” which the Maxim scribes attributed to her “cold bedside manner and boyish figure.”
“Self-righteous bellyaching and rapid postnuptial deterioration” landed pop sensation Madonna in fourth place, with the mag comparing her to “Nosferatu” actor Willem Dafoe.
Britney Spears, who was in the throes of her highly publicized meltdown at the time, rounded out the so-called cosmetically catastrophic quintet due to her perceived weight gain and turbulent personal life.
Maxim derided the pop princess as “filling chicken-grease-stained sweatpants on the cover of every trashy tabloid and gossip blog on the Internet” and having “gained two kids, two useless ex-husbands, and about 23 pounds of Funyun pudge,” per Pajiba.com.
The body-shaming hit list came out as a veritable Razzie Awards to the mag’s Oscars, its Hot 100 list, which was released earlier that year.
Coming in first place on that list was Lindsay Lohan, followed by Jessica Alba, Scarlett Johansson and Christina Aguilera.
Thankfully, even the oft-merciless Redditors were horrified by the derogatory piece. “Excuse the f–k out of me?” sputtered one commenter, while another wrote, “Never understood the criticism for SJP’s looks.”
“All these women are hot? Wtf,” exclaimed a third.
Some chalked up the list to the ridiculous beauty standards of the aughts.
“We don’t talk enough about how ridiculously cruel the 2000s were to women’s bodies,” said another. “Jessica Simpson could not dare to add half a pound without some low life tabloid turning it [into a] headline.”
“So, two Jewish women with prominent noses, an Asian woman, a 49-year-old woman, and a woman who had recently aged out of her sexy-baby marketing,” rued one critic. “Let’s call it like it is, none of these women fit into the Eurocentric-blonde-hair-button-nose-big-boob-flat-tummy-‘good-genes’-barely-legal category, so sadly I’m not surprised.”
Others thought the article was especially hypocritical given how most of the writers behind said countdowns generally weren’t easy on the eyes themselves.
“It should be mandatory for anyone who publishes articles like this to post a picture of themselves beside their work,” declared one appalled reader.
Pajiba writer Kayleigh Donaldson pointed out that the article was even reviled at the time, writing that many media outlets deemed it in “shockingly poor taste and stunningly sexist” despite celeb body-shaming being in vogue.
“Everyone engaged in this circle of human bear-baiting, with this handful of women held up as the acceptable targets,” she wrote. “The word ‘trainwreck’ had never been more utilized in the media vernacular.”
Sarah Jessica Parker spoke out about how much the article upset her.
