Jennifer Garner’s Good-Girl Image Has Become Her Business

Jennifer Garner hasn’t been a major movie star in years. So why are gossip magazines so invested in her?

.. good girls praise their husbands and their children on social media. They don’t cuss publicly. They have two glasses of wine, max. Good girls might have a job, but nothing in a power position. Good girls have domestic hobbies. Good girls don’t wear earrings that are too big or skirts that are too short or heels that are too high. Good girls use Match.com or eHarmony but never Tinder. Good girls might not be regular churchgoers, but they definitely believe in God. Good girls got him to put a ring on it. Good girls go to bars only in packs of other good girls. Good girls don’t want to talk about that one time they ended up in bed with someone they didn’t know. Good girls aren’t necessarily liberal or conservative, but they don’t think it’s very nice to talk about politics on Facebook. Good girls are legion. They’d never dream of making another woman feel bad about herself. And yet they so often do.

.. Fox argued that the idea of the “good girl” was one of three ways of controlling women’s submissive place in society.

  1. The most extreme and obvious way is through seclusion, in which women are not allowed entrance into the male spheres of society.
  2. The second is protection, in which women are allowed access, but only with a male chaperone or guide.
  3. The third, Fox argued, is normative restriction, in which women are ostensibly free, but still highly controlled — only the control comes from within, through the internalization of how a proper, acceptable, happy woman should act, look, and speak.
  4. And the primary way women have historically and contemporarily restricted themselves is through adherence to the idea of the “good girl.”

.. Girls are also surrounded by suggestions that they self-objectify — but only for show, and never for their own pleasure. Like Garner’s character in Alias, a good girl might put on lingerie to play a character, but only so long as she knows, and everyone else knows, that she remains a good girl beneath.

.. In order to maintain her brand’s viability — and bankability — Garner must continually prove her goodness. When her husband cheats on her with the nanny, she decides to fight for the family. When he continues to date the nanny, the family continues to go on vacations together — because it’s better for the kids. Goodness, at least in its American puritanical form, is all about suffering: The amount you endure, with a smile on your face and a “bless his heart” when asked about your husband’s back tattoo, is a testimony to just how truly good you are.

 .. When she finally filed for divorce after nearly two years of separation, “sources” emphasizedthat she wasn’t ready for dating because Affleck was the love of her life. All of Garner’s decisions — including the one to have Affleck live in their pool house, and then nearby — were purportedly in service to “the important important thing: their children.” See: the invitation for Affleck to accompany Garner when she goes to speak in the Bahamas, because, as one source told Us Weekly, “Jen feels it most beneficial for the kids to have their father present.” When the news broke that Affleck’s affair predated the dissolution of the marriage, she stayed in “mama-bear mode … putting the kids’ happiness first”
.. “She will always appear to be taking the high road,” Lainey Gossip explains. “Pleasant, keeping to herself, working on fitness with a friend.”
.. White female celebrities are a tough sell right now, but Garner — who has managed to market herself as both conservative and liberal, a good girl but not a good girl tainted by relation to Trump — fills a specific need.
.. The company employs a complex algorithm, tested across its titles and others, to determine which celebrities sell magazines at a given moment. They wouldn’t have put Garner on the cover if the data didn’t suggest that she sold. (The cover’s sales were up 18% over the week before).
.. The cover photo was not from Garner and Affleck’s recent trip to the Bahamas, but from a previous trip, two years ago, after they first publicly announced their divorce. Affleck may have accompanied Garner to the Bahamas with their children, but the magazine needed a photographic suggestion of their uncoupled happiness — so they just photoshopped a different color shirt on him and let the headline do the suggestive work.
Garner regularly provides evidence of her good-girl-ness, but when she doesn’t, the magazines and paparazzi and headline writers and “sources” do the work for her.
.. Garner might not be trying to tell other women how to live their lives, or shaming them for their inability to perform a certain type of femininity. But the salience of her image quietly does that work, regardless.