Last night was the LA premiere of The Mother. Jennifer Lopez attended with her children and also Ben Affleck, who joined her on the red carpet. The Daily Mail has published a couple of shots of the two of them and the Photo Assumption is that there’s some tension between them. It’s kind of a repeat of what happened at the Grammys which was a nothingburger. Still a nothingburger? 

 

If you’re only seeing the pictures in that Daily Mail article, it makes sense to wonder whether or not Bennifer was having a bad night. But there are so many other photos of the two doing their PDA thing, and there’s video of them hornily breathing into each other’s faces which we’re showing on ETALK today but I can’t find an embeddable link to it; this, though, is a video that I do have access to right now, which tells a different story from the one the Daily Mail is trying to tell. 

 

Given that we have more Photo Assumption on the side of “they’re fine”, I don’t know that we have to spend too much time on this. That said, the reason this is getting more attention from some corners this week is because there’s another video that people are circulating of Bennifer a few days ago: 

 

The paps were all over them that day, as usual. And on that day they’d stopped by school with one of their kids. So they’d been followed and it looks like Ben was more exasperated than usual which resulted in him slamming the door with extra force. If I were JLo I wouldn’t have appreciated that, and there would have been a Conversation about it in the car for sure. But the bigger issue, on top of the paparazzi presence, is how these moments are characterised. Not just by that Twitter user above but so many others who are all like… this is a man who is tired of that bitch being such a bitch. It’s gross and it’s misogyny and I know this because I used to participate in it, right here during the early years of this website. Which I will forever be ashamed of. But in these times, we’re supposed to be trying to do and think better. Twenty years ago the culture actively went in the opposite direction and a lot of that was rooted in anti-Latina racism and sexism. Somehow they found their way back – and it's been great for gossip! So I’m rooting for them. Let Bennifer be OK.