‘They were allowed to believe that that was appropriate’: Jennifer Love Hewitt speaks out about disturbing sexualization she was subjected to as a teen

Jennifer Love Hewitt shot to fame as a teenager in the late ’90s, and she was instantly subjected to crude comments about her body from total strangers. And that kind of sexualization was so common back then that she didn’t even realize how disgusting it all was.

Hewitt got to talking about that time while appearing on Mayim Bialik’s podcast, Breakdown. “In my 30s, I sort of 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.”

Hewitt ended up posing for the covers of “sexy” magazines before she even had a chance to explore what sexuality meant to her. “I was on the cover of Maxim magazines, and people would openly walk up and be like, “I took your magazine with me on a trip last week’,” she said on the podcast. “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.”

The ’90s and early ’00s were, to put it bluntly, a horrible time to be a young woman in the public eye. The media sexualized girls when they were still at a young age and demonized them if they refused to play ball.

During that time, Hewitt took to wearing a t-shirt that read “Silicon Free” because people were speculating she’d had breast enhancement surgery. “After [I Know What You Did Last Summer] came out, everybody said ‘Oh, I know what your breasts did last summer’ and that was the joke,” she said. “Everybody would laugh, and so I would laugh, ’cause it was supposed to be funny, I guess. It didn’t register with me that this was a grown man, talking about my breasts on national television.”

It took Hewitt a while to understand exactly what had happened to her as a teen. Watching a documentary about another teen star was what did it. “When I watched the Britney Spears documentary, that was really honestly the light bulb for me. When I watched it… my husband was like, ‘Why do you look so disturbed?’ and I was like, ‘I know what that feels like,” she said.

Britney Spears was resoundingly mocked by the public when she shaved her head in 2007, but she did so in an attempt to take back her own sexuality. “You want me to be pretty for you? F**k you. You want me to be good for you? F**k you. You want me to be your dream girl? F**k you,” is what she wrote about the incident in her 2023 memoir, The Woman In Me. She was clearly angry, and no-one should blame her.

Hewitt isn’t angry. She said on the podcast that she didn’t blame the people who made comments about her body, because, “it was a culture that was fully accepted. They were allowed to believe that that was appropriate.” She went on, “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.” We still have a long way to go before teens are safe in the entertainment industry, but at least we’ve made some progress.