Rashida Jones: I Was A Chubby Nerd As Teenager, No One Trying To Have Sex With Me

Rashida Jones is regarded as one of the most beautiful and successful women on television, but it wasn’t always that way.

The Parks and Recreation star turned television producer said that her teenage years were very awkward, far from the lifestyle she leads today.

Jones told the UK’s Guardian that in high school she was “a chubby nerd. Nobody was trying to have sex with me, so I had to find other things, like reading and being good at school.”

Rashida Jones has an interesting path to acting. The daughter of musician Quincy Jones and actress Peggy Lipton, she graduated from Harvard University with a degree in religion and philosophy and originally dreamed of becoming a judge or the president.

Jones said she never seemed cut out to belong to the children-of-Hollywood-royalty clique.

“It was never a reaction, really. I’m obsessed with the nature/nurture argument, and the older I get, I think nature is paramount to everything. I am who I am, and I wanted to go to Harvard when I was four years old, and I still wanted to go when I was 18, and so I went. I was never going to be like, ‘You know what my last name is, right?’ ”

In the past, Rashida Jones has been unafraid to share her opinions about beauty — even when they are controversial. In an essay published in Glamour magazine late last year, the former Parks and Recreation star wrote a scathing essay about today’s pop stars, namely Nicki Minaj, Miley Cyrus, and Rihanna.

“If 1994 was the Year of O.J.’s White Bronco, 2013 was the Year of the Very Visible Vagina. With the addition of Rihanna writhing on a pole in her ‘Pour it Up’ video and Lady Gaga’s butt-crack cover art or the song that goes ‘Do what you want with my body,’ I was just done. I’d had enough,” Jones wrote.

Rashida Jones also mocked “the Miley Cyrus cross-continental twerk-athon and Nick Minaj’s Halloween pasties.”

“I am not a prude. I love sex; I am comfortable with my sexuality. [But] every star interprets ‘sexy’ the same way: lots of skin, lots of licking of teeth, lots of bending over. I find this oddly… boring. Can’t I just like a song without having to take an ultrasound of some pop star’s privates?” she wrote.

It wasn’t just personal preferences that Rashida was expressing. Jones said she was worried what kind of message the pop stars could be sending to young girls.

“What else ties these pop stars together besides, perhaps, their entangled G-strings? Their millions of teen-girl fans. Even if adult [Miley Cyrus] and [Nicki Minaj] have ownership of their bodies, do the girls imitating them have the same agency?” she wrote.

Rashida Jones added that there is more than one way to be sexy, like “you’re a really great dancer, or you’re really f***ing smart.”