When you're at the very top of the list - the only way to move would be down.

Kate Beckinsale’s problem with being the sexiest woman alive

By Lizbeth Scordo | A-Line: Celebrity Style – Mon, Jul 16, 2012 9:00 PM PDT

 

 

Kate Beckinsale on the cover of Allure. (Norman Jean Roy/Allure)

 If you had to choose a new challenge to deal with in life, the ramifications of being named the sexiest woman alive sounds like a good one … and happens to be the exact problem actress Kate Beckinsale has faced since the title was bestowed upon her by Esquire magazine in 2009.

"I think the risk of being the sexiest woman alive is that you don't want to ever have sex again," she tells Allure. "You don't want to wear a bikini again. You want to wear some nice overalls and a trucker's hat."

Whether or not she's over those hang-ups remains to be seen, but there's another issue the British beauty is dealing with these days: the public's perception of a 38-year-old mom of a teenager … a real-life role Beckinsale just happens to have. 

"It's more of the thing of being embarrassing to somebody. I haven't been embarrassing before. I can't dance at a party where there are teenagers without clearing the dance floor," she confesses in the magazine's August issue. "Those are the things that make me go, F***, I'm old … you're a parent, everyone leaves."

(Norman Jean Roy/Allure) 
Norman Jean Roy/Allure



It may be hard to believe, but Beckinsale is indeed the parent of a teenager, 13-year-old Lily, the daughter she had with fellow actor Michael Sheen. The couple's relationship ended in 2003 after eight years together.

Since 2004, Beckinsale has been married to director and producer Len Wiseman, whom she met on the set of the 2003 thriller "Underworld" and credits with helping her finally feel beautiful. "Feeling attractive didn't come until I was 29 and with Len … At the time it was partly perceived as if I'd gone all Hollywood, but it wasn't like that at all," she explains. "It was just OK for me to walk around and feel feminine and attractive. I like feeling liberated like this."

 

Norman Jean Roy/Allure

 

And at the ripe old age of 38, Beckinsale indeed feels like she's doing a decent job of keeping it together. "I haven't experienced a full facial collapse, I haven't suddenly gained 20 pounds that won't go away, or a beard," she jokes in the interview. "That probably will happen, but it hasn't yet."

With the clock ticking until that beard and extra 20 pounds show up, she's been on the fast-track to returning to a blockbuster action-movie career, appearing earlier this year in "Contraband" alongside Mark Wahlberg, the sequel to "Underworld: Awakening" (which her husband produced), and will star in the upcoming "Total Recall" remake (which Wiseman is directing), playing the protagonist's murderous wife. It's a role that might have its benefits when teenage boys start calling on her daughter Lily.

"I remember Len talking to Bruce Willis when Len did 'Live Free or Die Hard,' and I think Bruce did some terrifying things when his daughter started having a boyfriend. Len and I asked him, 'When Lily starts having boyfriends, will you come over, too? We'll all stand on the doorstep, scare the s*** out of them,'" she recalls. "But maybe now I don't need Bruce. Now that I'm a villain, I can go solo." 

 http://omg.yahoo.com/blogs/aline/kate-beckinsale-problem-being-sexiest-woman-alive-040037195.html

What?! How dare a celebrity not take the weight offf immediately...and act like a normal woman!? CRAZY!!

Kendra Wilkinson defends Jessica Simpson’s post-baby body: ‘People just need to mind their own business’

By Kathleen Perricone | Goddess: Celebrity Moms and Dads – Fri, Jul 6, 2012 10:30 AM PDT

Wilkinson. (STARPICZ / Splash News) 

Simpson. (Splash News) 

No one knows the public scrutiny of trying to lose the extra baby weight that Jessica Simpson is currently facing more than Kendra Wilkinson. After the Playmate-turned-reality star welcomed son Hank IV in December 2009, she struggled to shed the 60 pounds she put on during pregnancy and regain the sexy shape (and those abs!) that made her famous as one of Hugh Hefner's three girlfriends on E!'s "Girls Next Door." "I looked in the mirror and I said, 'I'm fat,'" Wilkinson told ABC News last year when discussing her battle with not only trying to drop the baby weight but postpartum depression as well. So she is especially sensitive to the microscope Simpson is under as she tries to lose the more than 70 pounds she reportedly gained while pregnant with daughter Maxwell Drew.

"That just breaks my heart," Wilkinson, 27, tells omg! from Yahoo!. "I feel for her. I was in the same boat. People just need to mind their own business. That's a woman who just gave birth. Her first priority right now is her child. Her first priority is not losing the weight. You should be proud of her for that. A lot of people just dump their kids off at nannies and lose the weight overnight. We should all be proud of her for being real and taking control and making priorities."

 
Hank, Little Hanks, and Kendra. (Eric Charbonneau/WireImage)

 In fact, it's her struggle with postpartum issues that has been one of the reasons Wilkinson is debating if she even wants a second child, even though her husband, former NFL player Hank Baskett, is really pushing for another. The star of the WeTV show "Kendra on Top" was photographed leaving a store in early June with a pregnancy test visible through her plastic bag, but when it came out negative, she admits she felt relief. "I did think I was pregnant because I was feeling a little crazy," she says. "When I found out I wasn't, it gave me another boost. In another way, I was a little bit bummed. I kind of wanted a positive." Until that time comes, she's busy with a new business endeavor. "I do have my Love Candy [lingerie and toy] line coming out. [After that launches], that's when we'll start planning baby number two. We're going to start trying in a couple months."

For now, Wilkinson is focusing on her adorable son, who just recently started preschool — which has been just as hard on his mom as the 2-and-a-half-year-old. Although she says she was okay initially with him being gone all day, after the first week, "I was telling Hank, 'We've got to go get him,'" she jokes. "He says, 'But it's too early.' And I'm like, 'It's ok.' I've been caught up in trying to take Little Hank out of school early, and the school is like, 'Leave him in school!' It's so hard. … He hates it. It's been really hard for him."

Wilkinson says it's normal situations like that, which set her life apart from those of other celebrities — or at least, the ones they project. That's why it's so important to her to show the good, bad, and ugly on "Kendra on Top," which she executive produces. "I still remain true to who I am … because [reality stars] know we're not at the top of the celebrity list," she tells omg!. "But what we can do is give a taste to our fans of what it's like being in Hollywood for a real couple. Some people go out and flaunt the whole 'I'm a celebrity, I'm rich, look at me!' But we represent a real couple that comes from real places, but we just so happen to be in the Hollywood light."

One real issue the couple faces is her husband's struggle to find work post-NFL (Baskett has been an unrestricted free agent since not having his contract picked up in March 2011), which turned Wilkinson into the breadwinner of the family, a role both husband and wife have wrestled with, she reveals. "That issue was there, but we have overcome that. The question was really for me. I would ask myself, 'Am I really ready to call myself the breadwinner? Am I wanting that role?' When reality hits you, it hits you pretty hard. Hank not having a job didn't just change him, it changed me, too. And we had to come back together and come back to reality and really figure things out. And that's when communication really had to get stronger. I love being the breadwinner, but would I want to see Hank being the breadwinner? Yes, because as a guy I think it's better for their ego."

 
Girls Next Door: Kendra, Bridget, Hef, and Holly. (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images )

 Besides her husband and her son, there's another very important man in Wilkinson's life: her former boyfriend, Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner. Although the two split in 2008 after four years together, she notes that the 86-year-old "is one of my closest friends." And that's why it's been rough watching him reconcile with his former fiancée Crystal Harris, who infamously called off their wedding just five days before the big day last June. As for getting back together with Harris and moving her back into the Playboy Mansion, "that's his choice," says Wilkinson sadly. "That talk [with him] is definitely off limits … you know, I don't get it. But I just think it's someone's choice, and you just kind of have to accept it if you're friends with them."

Two people from that phase in her life that she is no longer friends with are Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt, with whom she shared girlfriend duties on "Girls Next Door" for five seasons. Despite their many years together, Wilkinson says she no longer speaks to either woman. "We're kind of like in our own little worlds," she reveals. "We've moved on. We weren't really that close before … we've always had our own friends and our own lives."

So would she return to that life and pose for Playboy again? "No, definitely not," Wilkinson says without hesitation. "It's just time to move on. It's time to look forward to new things."

 http://omg.yahoo.com/blogs/goddess/kendra-wilkinson-defends-jessica-simpson-post-baby-body-173018976.html?_esi=1

Teen's Petition Leads to 'Seventeen' Body Image Pledge

14-year-old asked mag to show more 'real girls' By Emma Bazilian

Two months ago, 14-year-old Julia Bluhm of Waterville, ME decided that she was tired of listening to her ballet classmates complain about their bodies, which weren’t always as rail-thin or clear-skinned as those of the retouched models in their favorite magazines. So Bluhm, a member of SPARK (an organization that aims to end the sexualization of girls in media), started a petition on Change.org to ask Seventeen magazine to print one unaltered photo spread a month. And after collecting nearly 85,000 signatures, staging a demonstration outside of Seventeen’s New York offices, launching a Twitter campaign, and meeting with editor in chief Ann Shoket, the teen magazine finally listened.

In the August issue of Seventeen, Shoket wrote an editor’s letter addressing the concerns of Bluhm and her supporters. “Recently I’ve heard from some girls who were concerned that we’d strayed from our promise to show real girls as they really are…Like all magazines, we retouch images—removing wrinkles in fabric, stray hair, a few zits, random bra straps—but we never alter the way the girls on our pages really look,” wrote Shoket. “While we work hard behind the scenes to make sure we’re being authentic, your notes made me realize that it was time for us to be more public about our commitment.”

So as an extension of its ongoing Body Peace Project, Seventeen is launching the Body Peace Treaty, which includes pledges to “never change girls’ body or face shapes…always feature real girls and models who are healthy,” and “be totally up-front about what goes into our photo shoots.”

Now that they’ve gotten through to Seventeen, members of the SPARK team are petitioning Teen Vogue to make the same commitment to represent real girls. “Seventeen was supposed to be a jumping-off point to reach all print media, so we’re continuing on with that goal,” Emma Stydahar, 17, who helped to launch the Teen Vogue campaign, told Adweek recently. “Once people are looking at themselves not in comparison to these unrealistic standards of beauty, that’s when they start realizing that what they’re seeing in the mirror is beautiful without retouching, whether it be with makeup or Photoshop.”

 http://www.adweek.com/news/press/teens-petition-leads-seventeen-body-image-pledge-141493