It’s a sign of how anxious the right wing is about the possibility that Ashley Judd might run for Senate against Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that the attacks on her have geared up before she’s even formally entered the race. There’s the American Crossroads ad trying to frame her as out of touch with a series of relatively anodyne and contextless quotations. And now, the Daily Caller, which has been trying to frame Judd’s feminist beliefs as fringe, has launched the stupidest salvo against her at all: arguing that Judd, because she has done nude scenes for her work as an actress, “has—literally—nothing left to show us.” In an exceptionally gross piece, Taylor Bigler, the Caller’s Entertainment Editor (Entertainment, in Caller parlance, apparently means surfing Mr. Skin and publishing clickbait trash gossip) writes:

We are used to knowing just about everything there is to know about serious political candidates. But will Judd be the first potential senator who has — literally — nothing left to show us? The actress has bared her breasts in several films and has had some raunchy sex scenes in others. According to MrSkin.com, which bills itself as “the largest free nude celebrity movie archive,” Judd has flashed just about everything on-screen. It seems like she was particularly liberal with nudity early on in her career…Judd did a lesbian sex scene in 2002′s Oscar-nominated “Frida” and has nine other films categorized as “sexy” by Mr. Skin, meaning that there is at least one racy scene in those films.

It may come as a surprise to the Daily Caller, but actresses don’t generally take their clothes off on-screen as an expression of some sort of groovy seventies lifestyle, or as a way to have sex with people who are not their spouses or partners. Rather, getting asked to take off some or all of your clothes is, for a lot of actors, a frequent requirement of the job, and something that until recently, tended to be asked of women more frequently than men. When men do get fully naked on-screen, they’re often protected to a certain extent by the comedic framing of the scene, whether it’s Jason Segel stripping down in Forgetting Sarah Marshall for a scene in which his character expects to surprise his girlfriend and ends up getting dumped by her after he refuses to get dressed, or Will Ferrell going streaking in Old School. There’s a separation between actors and their bodies—no one considers men who get naked the sum of junk, the kind of person who, in real life, would pound a lot of beers at a frat party and take off, flapping in the breeze, down a suburban street. Ferrell can get down to his BVDs and still be happily married, raise money for cancer charities, and play the straight man in movies like Stranger Than Fiction. We know that Michael Fassbender is not actually the sex addict he portrayed in Shame in the same way that we know that he doesn’t actually have the capability to manipulate metal with his mind possessed by another one of his characters, X-Men‘s Magneto.

But with actresses, that division appears to be less certain. If a woman takes off her top in a movie, much less baring it all, Mr. Skin and his ilk will be there to catalogue it to make sure people who only want to see her as, in the parlance of that site, “breasts, butt, bush, underwear, sexy,” can skip the parts of her performance that would give her character humanity and context, and would remind us that she’s a woman playing a part. The movies Ashley Judd’s taken her clothes off in tend to have that kind of context, whether she’s playing a woman in love with a mentally ill man who claims to be a veteran in Bug or in Norma Jean and Marilyn, a biopic of Marilyn Monroe, a woman who, in real life, was devoured by audiences’ inability to see both her body and her mind simultaneously. If an actress goes nude for roles frequently, as, say, Lena Dunham has, she’s likely to be the subject of speculation about whether she’s some sort of exhibitionist, rather than whether her nudity enhances her roles, as if there’s no possible creative reason she could have for taking off her clothes or doing sex scenes. It’s a bizarre suspension of logic that applies to all other on-screen actions: no one thinks that Judd’s been married to a southern lawyer pulled into a racially-tinged trial, as she was in Time To Kill, or that she’s killed the ex-husband who framed her for murder as she did in Double Jeopardy, or gives her credit for knowing how Washington and politics work because she’s playing the First Lady in the forthcoming Olympus Has Fallen.
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American Crossroads, a conservative Super PAC run by Karl Rove, made a serious of hilariously bad investments in 2012 Congressional elections. Their dismal success rate, and Rove’s total and utter clowning of himself on Fox News on election night, hasn’t kept them from spending rich people’s money. And the next person they’re going after? Ashley Judd, who is considering a run for Senate in her home state of Kentucky:

Conservatives complain about Hollywood liberalism, as if that’s a coherent thing, but it’s an utterly meaningless phrase, associated with no movement, school of thought, or even mode of engagement. It’s not as if preventing HIV transmission, particularly among young people in third-world countries—one of Judd’s priorities as an activist—is something that’s a fringe, costal belief, or as if only folks who live in the 90210 zip code are anti-genocide. As far as “Hollywood” goes, Judd actually lives in Tennessee, which is a residency problem, but of a different variety. Culturally, she has opinions about solidly middle-American things like University of Kentucky basketball and hockey, as well as car racing. Judd may have a way to go to remake herself in the public eye as a policy wonk the way now-Sen. Al Franken has—though she has a public policy degree from Harvard. But as candidates for that transformation go, Judd’s a pretty good one. And if her candidacy emerges and helps put paid to the idiocy of that phrase, that alone would be a useful contribution to our national political discourse.

Inspired by the experience of a recent and nasty spike in conversation about whether or not she’s had plastic surgery, and if she has, whether she’s lost her looks, and if she is, whether she ought to get on it lest she lose her husband, Ashley Judd’s published a column in the Daily Beast about the conversational cycle that produces these kinds of judgements:

I ask especially how we can leverage strong female-to-female alliances to confront and change that there is no winning here as women. It doesn’t actually matter if we are aging naturally, or resorting to surgical assistance. We experience brutal criticism. The dialogue is constructed so that our bodies are a source of speculation, ridicule, and invalidation, as if they belong to others—and in my case, to the actual public. (I am also aware that inevitably some will comment that because I am a creative person, I have abdicated my right to a distinction between my public and private selves, an additional, albeit related, track of highly distorted thinking that will have to be addressed at another time).

There’s something fitting about the fact that Judd’s piece came out at the same time that Lifetime has released significantly altered images of Jennifer Love Hewitt to promote her new show, The Client List, in which she plays an employee of a massage parlor, and shortly after Lindsay Lohan’s Saturday Night Live hosting appearance prompted a new round of speculation about and judgements of the results of her plastic surgery. They’re all striking illustrations of the ownership both studios and the public feel we have over the bodies of women who entertain us for a living.

The photoshopping of Hewitt’s body reverses the usual process. She’s made less voluptuous, and her bra is photoshopped to cover more of her body so it functions as a very skimpy tank top rather than as lingerie. The show’s walking a very fine line with its concept in any case. Hewitt’s rub-and-tug provider is meant to be an subject of identification for women viewers rather than an object of lust for male ones. She’s presented as attractive, but she can’t be too attractive lest viewers find her looks as well as her profession threatening. It’s not only men who actresses’s looks are tailored to satisfy and comfort.

And the speculation over Lohan’s reputed plastic surgery illustrates the ugly side of our pickiness. A viral YouTube video’s circulated tracing the evolution of her face:

The horrified reaction to her looks has been impressive even by the standards of collective internet bodysnarking. But for all the head-shaking sorrow about what people believe, erroneously or no, about what Lohan’s done to her face, it’s hard to imagine the same level of outrage and disgust about the rumors that circulated six years ago that she had gotten breast implants. There is no world in which women in Hollywood could possibly be making decisions about their bodies for their own pleasure or satisfaction. If they don’t submit to our collective whims, the general public seems to have given itself permission to destroy them.