In the first grade I had a crush on a girl named Patty and
decided to let her know it in true grade school fashion: by pretending not to like
her. I shouted “Hey, Fatty!” at her across the classroom, in what seemed at the
time to be a clever play on her name, even though Patty was not fat.
Shockingly, this failed to win her over, and it was the dawning of my
realization that women don’t respond favorably to criticism of their weight.
The entertainment media seem not to have learned the lesson I did at six years
old.
In a TV interview
with Barbara Walters this week, Jennifer Lawrence, the wildly popular 23-year-old,
Oscar-winning star of The Silver Linings
Playbook, Hunger Games and American Hustle, responded to a question
about her criticism of the media for exacerbating women’s body image issues,
saying,
I think when it comes to the media,
the media needs to take responsibility for the effect that it has on our
younger generation, on these girls that are watching these television shows,
and picking up how to talk and how to be cool…
And the word fat. I just think it
should be illegal to call somebody fat on TV. If we’re regulating cigarettes
and sex and cuss words because of the effect it has on our younger generation,
why aren’t we regulating things like calling people fat?
Well, we shouldn’t be regulating that because saying hurtful
things shouldn’t be illegal. I think, however, that most people understand and
don’t disagree with her point that the media are cruelly obsessed with the
physical appearance of female celebrities, and the celebs themselves do not
bear the impact alone. An entire generation or two or three of female fans also
absorb the media’s lesson that women must meet a faultless standard in order to
be considered beautiful.
Lawrence has often been outspoken on this subject. Last year,
for example, she told Elle magazine:
“In Hollywood, I’m obese. I’m considered a fat actress.” In November during a
live interview, she responded forcefully to an audience question about how
young girls can deal with the pressure to look perfect: “Screw those people,”
she said, meaning the critics:
The world has a certain ideal – we
see this airbrushed perfect model image … you just have to look past it. You
look how you look and be comfortable. What are you gonna do, be hungry every
single day to make other people happy? That’s just dumb.
She has called out shows like E! Fashion Police, in which the horrid Joan Rivers and her catty
cohorts, for whom no woman can be skinny enough, ruthlessly dissect actresses’
red carpet appearance: “There are
shows like The Fashion Police,”
Lawrence said, “that are just showing these generations of
young people to judge people based on all the wrong values and that it's okay
to point at people and call them ugly or fat.” Rivers
shot back impotently on Twitter that Lawrence was arrogant, a charge that
applies to no one in Hollywood less than the unpretentious JLaw.
As if to prove Lawrence’s point, a controversial gif
has been making the rounds of the internet, showing a startling degree of airbrushing
used on the already gorgeous actress for a 2011 cover photo of fashion magazine
Flare. In addition to the usual and unobjectionable
alteration of color tones and lighting, the magazine inexplicably trimmed
Lawrence’s waist, thighs, and arms; elongated her neck; added contour to her
cleavage and cheekbones; and flattened her belly. The effect was to chisel JLaw’s
hotness down, unnecessarily, to a cold, bony, misogynistic ideal. Such image
manipulation is no surprise to anyone; the process has been common in the
fashion biz and media for decades. But if her healthy, natural curves couldn’t
make the grade on a magazine cover, what woman’s can?
I wouldn’t count on that opportunity coming to fruition.
There is no way around the fact that profit for the fashion industry is driven
by the twin engines of insecurity and fantasy. In response to public outcry,
the fashion industry has made a few exploratory efforts to use models who look
like “real women” (I actually don’t like that phrase; models are real women
too) and learned that the public by and large doesn’t respond favorably to
that. Until women themselves stop desiring the fantasy, the media and fashion
world will keep exploiting it.
Maybe Jennifer Lawrence’s influence among legions of young
fans will be the beginning of the end of that desire.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 12/19/13)
