It's been a properly busy week behind the scenes at Celebrity Intelligence. Between building out the Royals video slate (have a look here and here and here if you haven't already) and the usual fires that come with running an independent newsroom, I haven't had as much time to actually sit down and write.
Which, this week, worked out rather well. I asked India Oxenberg to cover the story I most wanted to dig into myself: the backlash over Sydney Sweeney's Novig deal. I could sit here and theorize about why one woman's brand deal gets called empowering and another's gets called a betrayal of feminism... but I'm a fifty-something gay man who has spent thirty years writing about celebrities.
Few people have thought harder about this, or more publicly, than India. She spent years inside NXIVM, and has spent the years since unpacking the difference between agency and manipulation in front of cameras far less flattering than Sydney's. That makes her exactly the right person to take this one on, a story that keeps circling back to one uncomfortable question: when a woman chooses to use her body, who does that choice actually belong to? Here’s India talking about it.
