Ooops, someone ate a piece of Demi’s thigh

Demi Moore’s left hip on the December cover of W mysteriously receded to the point that appears narrower than her thigh. So…what happened? No one’s really saying. This is what a spokesperson for W just told us: Photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott “did not do anything unusual or out of the ordinary on Demi Moore for the photo on the cover of W. Demi is an extraordinary beautiful woman and we feel our cover reflects that.”

Well, okay. As long as anatomically impossible renderings are usual and ordinary.

….the meatier issue is how her age now affects her career. Asked how she likes the indie circuit after spending so many years as a star in big-­budget studio movies, she analyzes the question with surprising self-awareness. “The frustrating part is that the type of roles I’d be interested in are not really coming to me,” says Moore, who fidgets and balls herself into various contortions like a kid but speaks in her signature hoarse whisper. “I hate to say it’s a function of my age—but yes, I think in some ways it is. The majority of [female] roles are geared between 25 and 35.”

[you can read the entire interview here]

Now. About those pictures. Is it us or are they a little disturbing? She looks like she’s starving. It’s not just the alarmingly skinny arms, tiny waist, and child-sized legs, it’s the wide-eyed look. She LITERALLY looks like she’s starving.

You know, we don’t deny that there is sexism in the entertainment industry and rarely does the industry have any place for women over 40. But we look at these pictures and think “You know, you might be up for more roles if you didn’t look like, oh, say… a CRAZY STARVING PERSON?” ….There’s a certain class of Hollywood women who have dieted and surgically altered themselves to the point where they really don’t look like people. Not healthy people, anyway.

We just want to grab people like this, shake them, and say, “Despite what your insular little industry has told you, it’s okay to look like a human being.” Seriously. We look at her and all we can do, despite her fame and fortune, is feel a little sorry for her. Imagine what she sees when she looks in the mirror. Imagine the kind of stress and self-image that causes you to go to the extremes required to look like that.

There’s a reason that the leading actresses in the over-45 category are women like Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren. Because they smartly realized a long time ago that the ingenue parts were gone forever and there was no use going after something they were never going to get again.

We realize there’s no small amount of photoshopping involved here, so who knows what her real body looks like, but we’re talking less about her waist size and more about her face, which looks pinched and sharp and undernourished.

No, there aren’t a lot of roles for actresses over forty. That’s true and that’s not cool. But there are even less roles for actresses trying desperately to look 20 years younger than their age. “Desperation” is a terrible quality for a movie star to project.