The PEN15 Club

Deranged sometime actress Ashley Judd is doing her damnedest to promote her tiny new indie, Come Early Morning. In a Q&A session with New York Magazine that dubs her “Mouth of the South” (a nickname I’ll bet she hasn’t heard since her days as a University of Kentucky coed), Judd manages to equate the film’s theme of a woman finding herself with her own struggles to set “boundaries.”

I’m able to maintain healthy boundaries, to hold space with exploited people with more integrity. I don’t have to try to take it on myself, to make it my suffering as well as theirs. For example, the first time I went to a brothel in southern India, I was puking and shitting for days.

Wow, Ashley. Vivid. And later:

I don’t fucking care what people think. You know, usually when celebrities are asked, “Why do you give back?” their answers are quite general: “We can all do our part, I’ve been given so much.” Well, I do it because I have feelings: I feel pain about poverty. Did you know there are 1.6 million deaths from simple diarrheal disease every year? I’m taking care of my own goddamned feelings. When I go to a brothel, I feel complete and sometimes homicidal rage. And I am frankly going to die if I am not a part of the solution. I will take in all of those feelings, and they will eat me alive.

This statement begs the question: What is Ashley Judd doing spending so much time in third-world brothels? But at least it’s a refreshing approach to celebrity philanthropy. Rather than acting as though helping the poor has made her a more centered person, a la Angelina, Ashley is using third-world suffering to assuage her own maniacal self-loathing.

Not to mention the fact that all of this excessive shitting - her own and the poor people’s - is making her really angry.

Mouth of the south [New York Magazine]