Jennifer’s been in the acting game for a while — even longer than you probably realized, tbh. She’s been working since she was ten years old. Here she is in her Party of Five era, which she starred in from age 16 to age 20.
Obviously, the entertainment industry has a terrible track record when it comes to the treatment of women, and it’s through the floor when it comes to young women specifically. And now, Jennifer is getting real about what her experience was like as a teenager.
In a recent appearance on Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast, Jennifer broke down how it felt to be sexualized by men in the entertainment industry at the age of 16. “In my thirties, I went back and looked at that time again and I was like, ‘Oh my God’,” she said.
“There were grown men talking to me at 16 about my breasts just openly on a talk show, and people were laughing about it. I don’t even remember that. I really didn’t take that part in, but in hindsight it was really strange I think to become a sex symbol sort of for people before I even knew what that was.”
“People would openly walk up and be like, ‘I took your magazine with me on a trip last week.’ I didn’t know what that meant, you know what I mean? It’s kind of gross. I think later it sort of hit me more, kind of the things that I probably went through somewhere. But at the time, it felt very innocent and exciting and fun.”
Jennifer also said that, after she appeared in the 1997 hit horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer, people would make jokes to her like “I know what your breasts did last summer.”
“Everybody would laugh, and so I would laugh because it was supposed to be funny, I guess,” she said. “It didn’t register with me that this was a grown man talking about my breasts on national television.”
Jennifer added that she doesn’t “blame” those who made the jokes, because “it was a culture that was fully accepted. They were allowed to believe that that was appropriate, I answered the questions, laughed right along.”
“I have no problem with them for doing it. But when you sit and you look at where we are now versus then, it’s really mind-blowing.”
You can listen to the entire interview here.