The Friends star has spoken out about not getting pregnant in an era when her body was deemed a perfect match for social expectations of femininity

Jennifer Aniston has spoken for the first time about trying to get pregnant, which is significant for the kind of people who speculate about celebrities and their fertility – which in the late 90s and through the 00s was roughly everybody – because the exact cause of Aniston’s child-free life has been puzzling them for years. “It was really hard,” she told Allure magazine. “I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it.

The undisputed main star of Friends and, circa 2003, the highest-paid female TV actor in the world, has always been a template for the feminine ideal. I remember an American columnist in the very early years of Friends explaining her appeal thus: “She knows, and everyone knows she knows, she has great hair.”