Just a quick blurb about a post I found on “Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience” about a girl in England who will be competing in the upcoming Miss England contest. She is a plus sized model at a whooping size 12 U.S. standards. God that just pisses me off. Plus -sized? Anyway, at 5’10” she is also a 38DD, which I can’t imagine and am so blessed not to be. The link includes a link with pictures, so if you are visiting from Uncle Keith or Nurse Myra – enjoy.
weight loss
I wrote a piece over the weekend about weight and women. The idea came to me after I had watched a very old flick in which a quite young Angelina Jolie had a role. I was struck by how plump the camera made her seem in comparison to the tabloid photos you see of her these days at the grocery, and it occurred to me that the same contrast could be seen in many actresses as they advance into the thirties and especially their forties. Several comments on that blog entry took me to task because they misread the piece as an attack on Ms. Jolie even though I made it clear the piece was not about her as much as it was about society and its unhealthy physical expectations of women and how that effects us as we age. I am not going to claim to be a fan of the woman however. I mean she is just an actress and, her humanitarian work aside, I think she’s weird. Frankly, celebrities make poor role models overall because many of them, in my opinion, live frivolous, high consuming lifestyles that are more the result of their genetic windfalls than of anything approaching true artistic talent or hard work. Still the original blog entry was about women as a whole, and I don’t think I am off base when I say that most of us have body image issues to some extent and much of this is a result of the constant emphasis on our exteriors from the time we are quite small. One has but to thumb through the dozens of fashion, women’s and celebrity magazines at the checkout of any grocery to see that how a woman looks is not an insignificant part of how the world judges us. We are pummeled with all sorts of messages that cannot help but reinforce the fact that we can never be too thin, too coifed or too perfectly coutured.
As a result of that entry I had close to 400 views in a twenty-four period and it is still the most read piece of the last week. I haven’t had this many hits since the days when I was still posting at the YWBB, and my blog was linked in my sig line, so any time I posted a comment or started a thread people would check out my blog and photos. It was a creepy experience then, and it is just as creepy now because I know that the majority of the people who took a peek were hoping to find photos of a fat Angelina. How sad is that? People trolling the Internet in search of fat actress photos. Voyeurism at its worst? Probably not, but still quite icky when you think that many of the searchers really wanted to see a hefty Angie because it is that kind of thing that make others feel better about themselves in comparison.
Which brings me back to the original point of my first entry, body image. I spied copies of the new Valerie Bertinelli book at Chapters when I was out with my husband Sunday. Her book was all about losing weight. She had gained quite a bit of it. I remember seeing her meaty self on Touched by an Angel a few years back and not being that surprised really. She is, I believe, a bit older than I am and it is normal to put on weight as one ages though she may have been a bit too heavy for someone so short. On the cover of her new book, she looked very much like I remember her from her TV woman in peril movies of the 1980’s. Normal sized and healthy. It was a relief really to see a female peer who didn’t have that extremely bony appearance that seems de rigueur for famous women these days. I didn’t pick the book up. I am not interested in these types of books, but I wondered why, with everything she has gone through, the most important thing she could think of to share with the world was her diet and exercise plan?
It’s all about looks isn’t it? I flipped through Glamour and then More magazines while I was at the library today waiting for my yoga class to begin. The ads were all for make-up and clothes and hair products. The articles were about hair, and clothes and getting in shape and staying in shape and how all of these things will help you feel good enough about yourself to find a man or keep the one you have satisfied enough with you to stay.
In the film, Garden State, Natalie Portman’s character keeps a well-stocked pet cemetery in her backyard. It is mostly full of hamsters who were too dumb to get off the exercise wheel and died running. I was reminded of this when my husband asked me how many of my “sisters” I hoped to save from the hamster wheel by writing some of the pieces I write, like this one for example. I told him “none”. Salvation comes from within.
Rob and I decided to snuggle up with the computer Thursday night and watch a dvd in bed, as is our wont. We have four selections from the bookmobile currently in queue. Nothing upbeat however, which earlier events of the evening screamed out the need for, so we chose the least evil – Playing God with David Duchovney, Timothy Hutton and Angelina Jolie.
To say this was a B movie would be a great injustice to B movies. Bad acting abounded. Hutton’s channeling of Jack Nicholson couldn’t even save it, and I personally found it oddly distracting to hear Jack and see Tim.
I love Hutton. Have since I first saw him in Taps when I was junior in high school. Being a Catholic school kid, I naturally loved movies where kids outthink and and outclever preening, officious adults, and Taps is the ultimate private school kid’s fantasy of takeover and take no prisoners while doing so. My soft spot for Duchovney stems from The X-Files. I loved Fox Mulder. Misfit. Misunderstood. Fighting a nebulous authoritarian entity bent on maintaining a population numbing status quo for the benefit of the elite and the powerful. It appealed to the peon public school teacher that I was at the time. That and I just love tv and movies with well-written, snappy and intelligent dialogue. Give me character depth over mindless action any day. Nuff said.
The movie dates itself though with Jolie. It had to have been one of her earliest roles because the girl had meat on her bones. Not fat however. By normal people standards – even accounting for the slightest of imaginative stretches – the woman was still thin. A form fitting red silken pants suit she wears in the final scenes, that would have made any real person look like a raw sausage, and showed clearly that Jolie was in fine shape. Still, it was odd not to see the collarbones, sternum/ribs and emaiciated cheekbones that make her lips even larger and scarier.
The visible ribs and sternum are de rigor for “older” actresses these days. I was noticing it yet again last weekend when Rob and I were watching The Inside Man. Jodie Foster couldn’t have looked more like a female Skeletor if she’d set out to do just that. The Dachau survivor look is partly a female over-reaction to middle-age (and I do know firsthand of what I speak) and in the case of women in the spotlight like Hollywood actresses, it is the only way they can stay ahead of the pretty young things who are allowed to be a bit rounded when they first start out and still considered beautiful. The reason for this abbreation in my opinion seems a bit pedophilic on the part of the old men who run the movie business, but that is just my opinion.
Round and middle-aged just spells f-a-t to most men past twenty-five, and who sets the beauty standards? They do. Brandon over at WWTDD had a piece this past week on male preferred female body types (okay – his preferred but I am thinking that he is not the minority on this issue), and he states that skinny with big breasts is best. (Just as an aside – my body type – is not preferred except by my husband who is not a dirty old man or a silly twenty-something boy).
Sad what the pressure to conform does to most actresses, and ordinary women, eventually. I was thinking about Angelina and writing this piece when I was getting ready for my workout at the gym this morning. Today was weights, abs, stretching and then walking. A full work-out. An abbrievated one, like yesterday, because I had to hustle up to get to my daughter’s school to help with the field trip into the museum in the city, is abs, stretching and shorter walk.
So, as I was tying up my shoelaces and setting the iPod score for the morning activities – because mood is important – I notice two women getting ready, without much enthusiasm, for the exercise class that meets in the gym.
I don’t take those pseudo-aerobic post Jane Fonda classes. Took only one class like that in my life when I was in college. I needed a final P.E. credit for graduation, and it was the only class left with openings. I have never loathed exercise so much as I did those 9 weeks.
One of the women was complaining that despite not eating (it sounded as though they were both doing some sort of fast) and coming to work out, she felt bloated and sick and was sure she had gained weight. The other woman questioned her a bit but could only offer sympathy and as I was leaving I overheard the first woman say she was tempted to just start using a laxative. Now, I didn’t catch all the conversation. They looked over at me quite a bit while they were talking and whispered a bit – afraid I was listening (I was) and waiting for me to leave. I could have interjected and offered some advice based on my own experience, but I didn’t. Both women were very overweight. I would say if not morbidly obese than darn close on the BMI scale. And I remembered when I was very heavy. I didn’t want to hear anything from thinner women about how they did it.
I assumed that all thin women were genetic lottery winners anyway, and I know now that many thinner women lie like rugs about how they got or stay thin. My own sister was the Dexatrim Princess in her teens in her fight against weight, and a lot of women simply don’t eat or use excessively amounts of exercise to maintain their “I’m just naturally thin” appearances.
Celebrities in particular are notorious for questionable weight loss and maintenance methods. The majority of the population is not gifted with thinness that requires nothing to achieve.
I walked upstairs to the weight room thinking about those women. I remembered when I was first starting to jog back in college. I was chunky. The excess flesh on my legs and belly jiggled when I ran though I couldn’t feel that movement as keenly as I do today. I didn’t have the spatial sense of myself then that I have earned through years of running and other activities. It was not easy to put on shorts and go down to the field across from the Student Union and run everyday. The Union was a lunch mecca and my P.E. class was at 12:30 in the afternoon. There were people everywhere. But running was like teaching would later turn out to be for me – in my blood. A combination of running and having to walk everywhere during my college days eventually thinned me, and I continued to tone up and thin as I added a variety of activities to my repetoire as I got older.
Aside from pregnancy, I have really never been overweight since then, but I remember those days and I feel deeply for heavy and overweight women when I see them at the gym or out jogging or walking. Their effort is more than a physical one. While some people cannot fathom the idea that celebrities can be learned from in any way, my Jolie encounter Thursday night reminded me once again that it is all women who are damaged by the inane and arbitrary beauty standards of our society. No one is immune.
anniegirl1138 