Being A Young Starlet Does Not Sound Fun

Being a young woman in Hollywood does not sound fun. Sure, it has its perks — money, mostly, since fame sounds like an iffy bet at best — but it's also got its horrific downsides. Even the daily life sounds pretty unenviable. Just take the word of Evan Rachel Wood, who recently recalled the bad experience she had at a Vanity Fair shoot when she was 15, wherein she "felt like meat."

The Vanity Fair shoot in question was for the July 2003 Teen Royalty issue, which I remember looking at with no small amount of longing when I was 12, imagining myself up there with the likes of Wood, Amanda Bynes, Raven, Alexis Bledel, Mandy Moore, Hilary Duff, Lindsay Lohan, and the Olsen twins. This was the year of Wood's Thirteen and just after Gilmore Girls' third season. A simpler time for all, at least on the surface.

That cover may be a source of nostalgia for many who grew up enraptured by early-2000s pop culture, but for the people actually on it it seems to have been an entirely different experience. This is hardly rare for Hollywood — to assume just because someone's smiling on a magazine cover means everything that led to that cover was hunky-dory would be a blatant ignoring of the facts. Especially when you actually listen to them. Woods took the chance to speak up about her truth after a twitter user posted the pic as nostalgia:

I for one would like more of these stories — not for the destruction of nostalgia, but so that we can all really know the things we shouldn't forget.