How Jennifer Aniston’s fertility became everyone’s obsession | Zoe Williams

The Friends star has spoken out about not getting pregnant in an era when her body was deemed a perfect match for social expectations of femininity

Jennifer Aniston has spoken for the first time about trying to get pregnant, which is significant for the kind of people who speculate about celebrities and their fertility - which in the late 90s and through the 00s was roughly everybody - because the exact cause of Aniston's child-free life has been puzzling them for years. It was really hard," she told Allure magazine. I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it. I would've given anything if someone had said to me, Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favour.' You just don't think it. So here I am today. The ship has sailed."

The undisputed main star of Friends and, circa 2003, the highest-paid female TV actor in the world, has always been a template for the feminine ideal. I remember an American columnist in the very early years of Friends explaining her appeal thus: She knows, and everyone knows she knows, she has great hair." It was such a peculiar formulation that it lodged in my mind, which was fortunate, because it was the mid-90s, so it's not on Google. The hair, not too long (attention-seeking), nor too short (feminist/independent), not too blond (conventional) or too dark (vampy), not too shiny (airhead) nor in any way dull (frigid), was the perfect, man-pleasing hair for the late 20th-century woman; but the fact that she was self-aware, hair-wise, was important too, because it was cool in those days to be a little bit feminist.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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