Demi Moore Named World's Most Beautiful Woman & It Says A Lot About What's Valued About Women In 2025
It's a perfect window into the ways mores are rapidly changing — and not for the better.
Design: YourTango | Photos: Tinseltown, Featureflash Photo Agency from Shutterstock Demi Moore is a Hollywood legend who has long been adulated for her star quality and otherworldly beauty, but rarely for her acting talent. Until she starred in "The Substance," that is, the camp horror film about beauty and youth obsession that nearly (and should have) won her an Oscar.
Now, Moore is being honored as the "World's Most Beautiful Woman" by People Magazine, and given the themes of "The Substance," and especially the resurgent cultural mores around women currently taking hold in our extreme rightward political drift… Well, doesn't this all feel a bit off?
What does Demi Moore being named 'World's Most Beautiful' woman say about what we value about women in 2025?
As any historian will tell you, politics and fashion are intricately intertwined, and the fact that women's beauty standards have swung seemingly overnight from "body positivity" and Brazilian butt lifts to the "clean girl aesthetic" of "tradwife" "milk-maid dresses" and Ozempic-fueled thinness, all at the exact same time that virulently retrograde gender politics have reared their head in politics and media, is absolutely not an accident.
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The fact that people were so shocked to find that their favorite tradwife and mommy influencers are open supporters of the new administration in Washington is telling about how subtle this programming has been. All over the internet since November, you've seen woman after woman realize that she has been digesting right-wing propaganda without even realizing it.
Which is part of what makes Demi Moore's People feature feel so off-kilter to those of us who have been paying close, and deeply uncomfortable, attention to these trends (often while being called alarmist loons until recently). Here is a woman who is in her 60s but looks 40 (at most), being lauded and sold as THE supposed standard of beauty — a standard that is utterly unattainable without intervention and extraordinary monetary resources.
Women in 2025 seem to only be valued if they can remain youthful by any means necessary.
"The Substance" was conceived in 2022, when the notion of a national pendulum swing toward a politics that openly views women as subservient, duty-bound to reproduction above all else seemed like bombastic overreach. Red state after red state started voting in favor of reproductive freedom in 2022, after all.
It is a testament to how rapidly that all unraveled that a movie that just came out in September 2024 is apparently now so out of date that its whippet-thin, surgically enhanced star is now being held up as THE beauty standard to achieve, without a trace of irony.
None of which — before you jump down my throat — is a knock on Moore herself or anyone who looks like her (or endeavors to). Had Moore eschewed the work she's had she'd probably be getting raked over the coals right now for daring to look her age (just ask Madonna, who has spent the last 30 years being mocked for getting old and then mocked for surgically erasing it), and she probably never would have been cast in "The Substance" in the first place.
Aging as a woman in Hollywood or otherwise is becoming impossible.
Women, and especially women in Hollywood, are damned if they do and damned if they don't, and they're also entitled to do whatever they want to their bodies. To suggest otherwise is to consent and agree with the virulently misogynistic fascism in which we are now boiling to death, and which has women all over this country nervously looking over their shoulders. Bodily autonomy is not a spectrum. It is a binary, black-and-white issue.
So I repeat, emphatically: Moore is not the problem, and probably more than most in Hollywood, has truly worked for everything she has, including her looks. She grew up dirt poor in an abusive home, for starters, and as she detailed for People, had a lazy eye until her young adulthood that required surgery. She has spoken openly about her struggles with body image and what might today be classified as anorexia athletica.
And for all this, she has been rewarded with never being given her due as an actor until 50 years into her career, mainly because of sexist blowback towards her looks and her choices in how to use them in her work, which is a long-winded way of saying Hollywood never forgave her for getting breast implants to play a stripper in "Striptease."
And it apparently still hasn't. It gave the Best Actress Oscar that was said for months to be Moore's to Mikey Madison instead, an actor nearly 40 years her junior. Which, for those who haven't seen it, is literally the plot of "The Substance," not to mention the classics from which it derives, like "All About Eve." See above: Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Although it feels disconcerting that women who look their age are societal pariahs, Demi Moore's 'Most Beautiful' title does offer a glimmer of hope.
Still, if you're old enough to remember the bad old days of diet culture and unattainable beauty standards from which we until recently had a blessed if shockingly brief reprieve, it's hard not to feel a certain discomfiting familiarity when looking at the gleaming photos of the "most beautiful woman in the world's" wind-swept tresses and cheekbones that could still cut glass.
But then that hair itself is an act of rebellion. As Moore put it to People, she has chosen her hairstyle in part because she was told it's "not appropriate to have long hair" as an older woman. "I… saw women of a certain age cutting their hair, almost neutralizing themselves," she told the magazine. "It didn’t make sense for me."
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So no, Moore is not the problem. You could argue, in fact, that she's a counterpoint to the current retrograde sexism, because even as conservatism demands women be flawless and ageless, a woman who dares to be not only confident but sexy well into what is supposed to be her "grandma years" is nonetheless the antithesis of the current conservative zeitgeist, and there are probably a dozen conservative pundits penning screeds about how Moore is everything wrong with feminism as we speak. Again: Women cannot win.
Still, a culture that would have you unironically embrace her as the indisputable beauty standard not only mere months after her turn as an actress whose adherence to those standards still wasn't enough to keep her from being scrapped, but also THE VERY SAME WEEK it was reported (in the same magazine, no less!) that the current administration is looking to Hitler and Stalin for inspiration on how to convince American women to commit to these standards by having as many babies as possible for the glory of the empire?
Well, much like Moore losing the Oscar to a 26-year-old, the jokes kind of write themselves. Problem is, they're not really all that funny.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
