Joe's View

Have you seen the new January GQ?
There on the cover is everybody’s favorite girl-next-door — Jennifer Aniston — stripped almost-naked, carrying on like she has always dreamed of being Barbi Benton, circa-1968.
I realize that we are in the “post-feminist” era, but who knew that Hugh Hefner was still such a style setter for magazine editors and show biz folk eager to be on their covers?
Actresses facing 40 — or “30 plus 10” as Aniston told an interviewer for Vogue last month — have always been an endangered species, but it is distressing to see the charming star of “Friends” and more than a few good movies carrying on like “The House Bunny.”
Perhaps I am being sexist in thinking that a mature woman might come up with a better photo lay-out concept to sell her latest movie (in Aniston’s case “Marley & Me,” opening nationwide tomorrow). Of course, Aniston has every right to be proud of the state of her body and face as she faces her fifth decade of life on Earth — she will turn 40 on Feb. 11 — but it is hard to imagine one of her male peers stripping down in a similar manner (Brad Pitt in a Speedo? George Clooney wearing only a tie?)
The article accompanying the photos by Michael Thompson is a sniggery affair — “Lordy, Lordy, This Woman is 40” — where writer Mark Kirby carries on about being “hugged” by the star.
“Aniston has been famous — REALLY famous, 25-million-viewers-a-week famous — for my entire postpubescent life. So going into our meeting, I’d been fairly convinced that she’d be too familiar to seem sexy in person — that after years of quirky Rachel Green-esque roles, it’d be impossible to see her as anything but merely cute, or that if she DID seem sexy, it’d be a Mrs. Robinson thing. Not so. Jen looks at least as young, if not younger, than she did during her ‘Friends’ days, this despite her looming fortieth birthday . She looks BETTER, too — fit and sun-kissed as always, but somehow in greater possession of herself and seemingly at ease with her age.”
Yikes!
Would a sob-sister hack journalist, writing for a fan magazine in 1958, have dared to carry on like this in print?