“Rejoice!” says Polly Vernon in The Times. After weeks of speculation, singer Jennifer Lopez is officially back together with her former fiancé, actor Ben Affleck. It’s been a grisly 17 months, but this marks the return of “pure, glittering, A-list celebrity gossip”. In their 2003 heyday, “Bennifer” were the ultimate celebrity couple. They were so famous, they hired “three decoy brides” for their (eventually cancelled) wedding. Now they’re posting Instagram pictures of their snogs on superyachts. One can only watch on with glee. “Doesn’t it feel good? Doesn’t it feel fun?”
Better still, Bennifer 2021 is “making middle age aspirational”. It helps that they are still incredibly beautiful, but somehow watching them kiss so publicly is strangely cringe-free and sexy. “He may be nearly 49 and she 52 – but they look hotter and more convincing together than anything the present series of Love Island has to offer.”
But is it all a hoax, asks writer Caissie St Onge on Instagram. The last time Jen and Ben kissed on a yacht was in the video for her 2002 song Jenny from the Block. Now they’re at it again, in exactly the same position. What’s more, in May Affleck was spotted wearing the watch he wore in the original video. My theory is that they’re giving us a “shot-for-shot remake” of the video in honour of the song’s upcoming 20th anniversary. Which, if true, would satisfy J.Lo fans across the world. If not, perhaps they’re re-enacting every scene from the music video without realising – because the original relationship was such a pivotal time in their lives. “Which would be deeply romantic. BUT ALSO DEEPLY DISAPPOINTING.”
The gangsters’ molls going under the knife
The drug cartels in the Mexican state of Sinaloa are so powerful that they are driving a generation of young women to alter their appearance, says the BBC’s Linda Pressly. Plastic surgeon Rafaela Martinez Terrazas describes the “narco-aesthetic” as “a smaller, defined waist, wider hips with bigger buttocks… and [the breasts], they’re generally large”. The look is known as “la buchona” and accessorised with flashy clothes and designer handbags. One narco has sent about 30 women to Martinez for surgery, telling her: “Doctor, you know what I like.” They pay in cash, with liposuction alone costing almost £5,000. Martinez justifies taking the work by saying that drug money is unavoidable in the state’s economy.
Pedro, a local drug trafficker who has paid for two women to have plastic surgery, says narcos typically have a wife and children at home. Their girlfriends “are more like trophies”. It’s often a business transaction: “A woman might say, ‘OK, my body’s yours for six months if you pay for the operation.’” But it’s a dangerous life. In Sinaloa, twice as many women are killed by firearms as in other Mexican states. When one narco’s girlfriend was murdered, her breasts and hips were riddled with bullets – “the parts of her body the narco had invested in”. In the meantime, the girlfriends have to make the most of their precarious lives. As one says of her gangster boyfriend: “For now he treats me like a goddess.”
Devilish Dom is a real sex bomb
😈 I think I fancy Dominic Cummings, says Alexandra Shulman in The Mail on Sunday. Yes, he’s a “megalomaniac, deluded disrupter, vengeful colleague, jilted comrade”. But he’s also “weirdly attractive”. Maybe it’s his slightly unbuttoned white shirt, or his nothing-left-to-lose attitude. Either way, after his crazed interview with Laura Kuenssberg, I mentioned to someone that I found him strangely compelling. They replied that only recently I would have thought he was the devil incarnate for leading us to Brexit. “I still do. But then aren’t devils often the most alluring ones?”