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Jennifer Love Hewitt has spoken out about the sexualized comments she received when she was 16 years old in Hollywood.
Speaking with Mayim Bialik on her eponymous mental health podcast, the 45-year-old Heartbreakers star said she endured a lot of inappropriate comments about her body after the release of the 1997 horror film, I Know What You Did Last Summer.
“Everybody said, ‘Oh, I know what your breasts did last summer,’ and that was like the joke,” Hewitt told Bialik. “And, again, everybody would laugh, so I would laugh. It was supposed to be funny, I guess, right? Like it didn’t register with me that this is a grown man talking to me about my breasts on national television.
“It was a culture that was fully accepted. They were allowed to believe that that was appropriate, and I answered the questions, laughed right along with them,” she continued.
“But in hindsight, it was really strange, I think, to become a sex symbol sort of like before I even knew what that was. Like I didn’t know what being sexy meant.”
Hewitt went on to acknowledge how society has changed in terms of what’s socially acceptable.
“There were grown men talking to me at 16 about my breasts openly on a talk show, and people were laughing about it,” she said. “It was a culture that was fully accepted, but when you sit, and you look at where we are now versus then, it is really mind-blowing.”
In 1999, Hewitt starred on the cover of Maxim magazine, posing in a black sports bra and matching leggings. At the time, she was completely unsure of how to interpret the response to her debut, feeling a myriad of emotions.
The Ghost Whisperer actor said people would approach her to say: “I took your magazine with me on a trip last week.”
“But I didn’t know what that meant, you know. It’s kind of gross,” she noted. “So, I think later it sort of hit me more, the kind of things that I probably went through somewhere. But, at the time, it felt very innocent and exciting and fun.”
Two years ago, Hewitt spoke to Michael Rosenbaum on his Inside of You podcast, explaining how she’d never felt fully comfortable “in her body” as a young star.
“I didn’t feel self-confident. I felt watched. I felt like I had to be everything for everybody all the time,” she said. “I was called sexy before I ever knew what being sexy was. I was 17 years old on the cover of Maxim, and I had no idea why I was on the cover of Maxim. I was honored. I loved it. But why?”
