Jennifer Love Hewitt Talks About Being Sexualized as a Teenager: ‘I Didn’t Even Know What Sexy Meant’

Jennifer Love Hewitt has spoken out about becoming a sex symbol as a teenager — recalling that she was frequently asked questions about her breasts.

Hewitt was just 18 when she rose to international fame via the huge 1997 teen horror movie I Know What You Did Last Summer — and even younger when she first started getting attention for her body.

“In my 30s, I sort of went back and looked at that time again and I was like, ‘Oh my God’,” she told fellow teen star Mayim Bialik on her Breakdown podcast. “There were grown men talking to me at 16 about my breasts just openly on a talk show, and people were laughing about it. I don’t even remember that, I really didn’t take that part in, but in hindsight it was really strange I think to become a sex symbol sort of for people before I even knew what that was.”

Now 45, Hewitt said she “didn’t even know what sexy meant” when she first started doing shoots for men’s magazines. “I was on the cover of Maxim magazines, and people would openly walk up and be like, “I took your magazine with me on a trip last week’,” she said. “I didn’t know what that meant, you know what I mean? It’s kind of gross. I think later it sort of hit me more, kind of the things that I probably went through somewhere. But at the time, it felt very innocent and exciting and fun.”

Hewitt even remembers wearing a t-shirt with the slogan ‘Silicon Free’ after speculation that she’d had a boob job when she was, in fact, just a normal growing teenager. “After the movie came out, everybody said ‘Oh, I know what your breasts did last summer’ and that was the joke,” she said. “Everybody would laugh, and so I would laugh, ’cause it was supposed to be funny, I guess. It didn’t register with me that this was a grown man, talking about my breasts on national television.”

Hewitt says she’s now “thankful” that she didn’t think about it too deeply at the time. “Had I taken on some of that earlier, I think it would have messed with me a little bit, but it didn’t for whatever reason,” she said. “When I watched the Britney Spears documentary, that was really honestly the light bulb for me. When I watched it, I finished watching it, and my husband [Brian Hallisay] was like, ‘Why do you look so disturbed?’ and I was like, ‘I know what that feels like.’ I know sitting there and being asked those questions and it never dawned on me that it was inappropriate.”

Hewitt added that she appreciates that all things body image have moved on since she found fame. “By the way, I don’t blame them for asking the questions or making the jokes or doing it,” she said. “It was a culture that was fully accepted. They were allowed to believe that that was appropriate, I answered the questions, laughed right along. I have no problem with them for doing it. But when you sit and you look at where we are now versus then, it’s really mind-blowing.”