There is something I need to tell you. I mean, you’re going to find out anyway, but I thought I’d tell you first: I’m really Tyra Banks in a fat suit.
Yes, I know that all this time you thought I was just a chubby white girl. I’m sure it sheds light on a lot of things, such as my inexplicable personal happiness. Well, now you know I’m happy because, hello! I’m Tyra Banks! I have my own production company! And here you thought I was just happy because I ate all the pies!
No doubt it all makes sense now. You’ve probably wondered how I managed to ever accomplish anything, what with all the obese-person stuff I have to do every day, like shuffling sadly down the street, getting my big fat feelings hurt by store clerks, and being rejected by dull little metrosexual men. I’m glad I’m Tyra Banks and don’t have to do those things all the time. Well, except for eating KFC. I’d do THAT all the time! Ha ha!
(You know, it’s only okay to laugh because I’m Tyra Banks and I have a syndicated talk show (check your local listings!). If I was a real fat person the laughter would HURT. You know that time I made the girls on ANTM wear stiletto heels two sizes too small? Like that, but in the soul.)
I know it comes as a shock to learn that I’m Tyra Banks wearing a fat suit, but I hope it makes America aware that really, everyone afflicted by obesity has a beautiful person wearing him or her, too, and that deep down, they all feel real supermodel feelings. Who knows who you might find inside an obese person? Maybe Naomi Campbell, who’s actually quite pretty though hardly the household name I’ve become, is trapped inside an obese person’s body. Or maybe she really is obese now. I would like to state for the record, as an honorary obese person, that either way would be fine with me.
That’s all for now. Don’t miss Drag Queen Makeovers on Tuesday! Love, Tyra.
Posted by Wendy | Mon 11.07.05 12:43 AM | Comments (23) | TrackBack | send link
So we saw that penguin movie. I know how all this sounds, after not updating for two weeks: it sounds like I completely just slacked off this whole time and then went and saw the penguin movie, me and that whoever-it-is-I’m-totally-slacking-off-with-person, who, since I’m such a slacker, hasn’t even been introduced by his official privacy-protecting online nickname (which would be “Chris”), when the reality is that I had four articles to write, and I spent much of the past couple of weeks imagining my head was like a heroin’s addict’s arm, like something I had to repeatedly smack smack smack just to get a vein of coherent thought to come up.
And then came the nod, so to speak. And then it was time to see the penguin movie.
I'd heard lots of things about the penguin movie: I know people who loved the penguin movie and people who didn't. I have a friend who emailed me to say "fuck off, Penguin Movie!" because he found it too depressing. But as it happened, we liked the penguin movie. Penguin Movie good! Penguin Movie deeply affecting!
To testify as to just how affecting: you know how some of the penguin parents accidentally let their eggs/chicks freeze/die while the other penguin parent was at sea? (And is that a plot spoiler? Is it okay that I just gave away the part where Antarctica gets really cold?) And Morgan Freeman tells us that it's going to be really sad when the other penguin comes back? But we never actually see those scenes? I was convinced that the only reason we never saw those really sad reunion scenes is because it was just too PERSONAL for the penguins and that to show such scenes would be too exploitative, too Penguin Real World. I thought the filmmakers were classy to not show that. It didn't occur to me until after the movie that it was more likely just impossible for them to tell the various penguin interactions apart--which squawks and trills conveyed things like Brr! Is cold at outer edge of huddle, yes? and which said, Um, while you were gone? I dropped the baby in the snow. Then again, it was wrenching enough to see that one penguin couple fumble their egg and watch it roll away and freeze.
Then again, I know two people (who I shall not name) who now think it's kind of funny to pass pieces of gum, remote controls, cans of beer, etc. to each other, only to accidentally-on-purpose drop them on the ground and then sadly tap the items with their toes making mournful penguin noises. And they did this today on Instant Messenger:
cms36: Here comes the egg! Get it! Hurry!
wendym: Fuck! It rolled too far!
cms36: Eerrrrhhhh? ...Errrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeerhhhhhh!
wendym: Hrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrh! (Click click!)
This, despite the fact that they really did like the penguin movie very much.
Posted by Wendy | Wed 08.17.05 10:01 PM | Comments (22) | TrackBack | send link
Oh, wow, the comments still keep trickling in about the Sun-Times editorial. I don’t have much more to say about the Dove ads right now, but I thought I’d bring back a couple of body-image-related entries from my old online journal. They both date back to 2001 and they haven’t been available online for almost two years but they’re in the new (and slowly growing) archives. Since these are four years old now I have to resist a terrible impulse to heavily revise them; I did edit them a little.
Imaginary Fat People is from July 2001. Part of it is about fat suits—that summer the previews for Shallow Hal were running in the theatres, America’s Sweethearts had come out, and Fat Monica was a big fat stereotype-on-a-stick, and it seemed a good time to say something. And Screw Shari is from May 2001. It’s a rant on this dumb survey I read about in Marie Claire, and it’s nowhere near as high-minded.
I liked book touring but I really, really like not touring, too. I know I’m still slightly recovering because there are some days when my routine existence suddenly feels like a big bouquet of retardedly simple pleasures. I get to go places using my own car! When I am done with work I get to come home! After dinner I can take a walk! And in the park by my home there are dogs, and flowers, and the Righteously Outrageous Twirling Corps practicing their routines, and everything. So I’m going to enjoy all that for awhile, if that’s okay with you.
Posted by Wendy | Thu 08.04.05 09:53 AM | Comments (18) | TrackBack | send link
Okay, so that Chicago Author’s Roundtable is this coming Monday night—not, as I’d totally foggily reported last week, this past Monday. (I guess that’s obvious, since time moves forward and not backward.) I hope you’ll come to the lovely air-conditioned comfort of the Sulzer Regional Library to hear Zulkey and Erin and Kevin Guilfoile and me, along with Kevin Smokler, who is touring this summer as the editor of a very cool book, and who is a great person to commiserate with about the bugfucking crazy business of having to push your own book as much as possible within about six weeks and on about four hours of sleep per night. We’ll be talking about stuff like what it means to have both online audiences and books to promote, whether having an internet presence can help a writing career, and, most importantly, discuss the mystifying differences between a blog and a chatroom (kidding).
So please come. It’ll be fun. I have no idea whether the table will actually be round. That could be awkward.
I feel I ought to provide some updates regarding the dicksmackery observed in Wednesday night’s post.
It seems Bill Zwecker was pretty much spanked by his co-anchors on the Channel 2 morning news the day after his blog post (video here), and they read some viewer/reader email, including one my friend Brenda wrote. Richard Roeper continues to totally leave his karmic toilet seat up by posting a brief response at the end of his Thursday column, in which he's under the impression that we ladies a.) need him to tell us that the Dove women are indeed "normal-sized," b.) are persecuting him for his "preference for fantasy-thin women in their underwear" and c.) have no sense of humor whatsoever.
To which I'll respond:
a.) Look: if you think the Dove women are chunky, you think they're chunky. God knows how your eyes work, but we trust our own, and we also trust our knowledge of Standard English enough to understand that "chunky" isn't what you say when you mean to convey "normal-sized" with humorous intent. It's just what you say when you're a dickclown.
b.) We never asked for you to apologize for your preference for fantasy-thin women in their underwear. You don't have to apologize for your preference for fantasy-thin women in their underwear any more than you should apologize for preferences for fantasy-fat women wrapped in Cling Wrap, say, or fantasy-freakshow women with six to eight impossibly perky double-D-cup dirtypillows, or whatever the hell happens to rock your little Richard, Roeper. We never asked you what your fantasies were to begin with, and in fact we wouldn't give a shit about your fantasies if you hadn't published a petulant half-assed half-column about how icky the Dove women are for not fulfilling them.
c.) Um, we're so funny we have the motherfucking power to make your columns funnier retroactively. Did you like how your July 19th column got funnier after July 19th? Notice how all those lines that weren't jokes on July 19th are totally jokes now? Isn't it cool how you're funny, but only when you write crazy nutty time-release jokes that we don't get? Ha ha!
Have a good weekend. I'm going to see Gravy Train!!!! tonight, because they are my fantasy women. (And that includes the two guys.)
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Posted by Wendy | Fri 07.22.05 02:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | send link
So Salon is running a feature article on the teen plus-size store Torrid today. While it’s more balanced than most stories I’ve seen, pretty much all the press coverage of Torrid has touched on the pros and cons and cultural implications of a store that lets America’s surly young fat girls have miniskirts. And every time I read some handwringing comment about how size 20 halter tops can only encourage rampant epidemic statistical-life-expectancy-altering morbid obesity, I can’t help but think the concern is a little misplaced: that it’s not so much about the size of the damn halter top but who it’s for.
Maybe Torrid is revolutionary and all that, but it needs to be said that it's one of the first stores of its kind for girls—nobody ever seems to consider that equivalent stores for guys don't really exist, because guys have had far less trouble finding larger sizes in mainstream stores. I grew up understanding that in a typical department store I'd have to tear apart the racks to find an Esprit shirt in a tight size 16 but that the thrasher skateboard t-shirts across the aisle in the young men's department were as big as tents, even on me. Seriously, I remember being fourteen and watching Just One of The Guys on cable and thinking that should I ever be passed over for an important high school journalism prize and thus be forced to switch schools and pass myself off as a guy in order for my talents to be taken seriously, it wouldn't be so fucking hard to buy clothes anymore.
I'm not glad there's a rise in obesity statistics, but I would have liked a store like Torrid twenty years ago. I guess it's no wonder that out of all the different kinds of plus size markets out there, the store that most consistently sets off Fat Apocalyptic alarms is the store for young white girls, because really, hot young white chicks are among our most precious national resources, and without them America's reality shows and porn would suffer. When I read an an article like this where, in the first paragraph, the writer conveys the genteel moral dismay he felt when he passed by a Torrid store and noticed "there were a lot of--how should I put it--well, fat teenage girls inside," the cynic in me can't help but wonder why in the hell Lawrence Goodman, Esteemed Newsweek International Commentator, was paying so much--how should I put it--attention to a girly teen mall store in the first place. Maybe he just wanted to see if the shrug was catching on? And I kind of doubt he could have mistaken the place for a Radio Shack. I know I'm being a little extreme here, but I'm pretty sure that the problem people have with the Torrid girls is not that they're "unhealthy" or "might have their life expectancy diminished by as much as two years." Nope, it's something else, and don't think that the girls don't know what it is. Don't think that wearing a plus-sized hot pink bustier is just about helping themselves feel better, because for every bit of restored self-esteem they might experience when they wear it, there's likely a little bit of fuck you, world mixed in, too.
Which is exactly how it should be when you're sixteen, so there.
Posted by Wendy | Wed 04.06.05 07:40 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack | send link
I don’t usually talk about my job, but someone else has written about reading manuscripts for a children’s book publisher so I don’t have to. And she’s just scratched the surface as far as the kind of stuff we get. Though am I crazy for wanting to read that POPGIRL story? Getting that query in the mail would make my day, I think.
If you’re wondering while I haven’t had a thing to say here about Kirstie Alley and Fat Actress it’s because I wrote about it for an upcoming BUST column. So while you’ll have to wait until late May to see it, please know that I did get paid to watch her flail around and scream hoarsely out her car window at the drive-thru about how she didn’t get her order of fries, which, if you know anything about the mysterious and reportedly hilarious ways of fat people, is NOT something an actual fat person would ever do, since they do everything they can to avoid public displays of blatant fattery. But Kirstie Alley has some weird ideas about fat, because judging from the way she dresses herself now, she thinks being fat comes with a special talent for reading Tarot cards.
I wish I could think of something to say about Celebrity Fit Club on VH1, which was not nearly as wrongheaded as Fat Actress (though—again, what was with all the weird medieval details? The set design? Maybe Hollywood stylists never see fat people outside of Renaissance Fairs and think that we all dress like serving wenches and/or sit in ornate carved chairs?). So, nothing else to add for now, except that in my boot camp class I do push-ups just like Wendy The Snapple Lady and when she did a set of standard pushups that one time I felt sort of personally betrayed somehow.
Posted by Wendy | Thu 03.17.05 04:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | send link
Did you see how Margaret Atwood went and invented this thing that signs books from a remote location? No, really: Margaret Atwood totally invented a robot arm that signs books. That’s just surreal. Wouldn’t it be great if writers just did that stuff all the time? Like if David Foster Wallace just came up with some crazy precision laser beam that can render legible footnotes in microscopic -15pt type, or Tom Wolfe devised an electromagnetic wand to detect irony in sex scenes? Personally I would improve on the
book-signing invention by solving the women-writers-can’t-get-male-groupies problem at the same time. That’s right—I would build a Book-Touring Femmebot, with Realdoll parts and NPR personality. Among its many features it would adminster a stun-gun-like shock to anyone who says something like, “So your book, it’s really just chick lit, right?” or “Why aren’t you on Oprah?”
Posted by Wendy | Fri 01.14.05 10:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | send link
I pay more attention to Christmas lyrics than any normal person ought to. I think this is because one afternoon, when I was six years old, my grandpa read A Visit from St. Nicholas (aka “Twas The Night Before Christmas”) aloud to me, and though I’d probably heard the poem dozens of times by then, I hadn’t realized that the narrator—maybe Clement C. Moore himself—vomits right in the middle of the story. It happens not too long after that part with the sugar plums dancing in the heads and so on, right after out on the lawn there arose such a clatter.
” ‘I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter!’ ” my grandfather read. I loved his voice. ” ‘Away to the window I flew like a flash,’ ” he continued. ” ‘Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.’ “
He stopped for a second. “Uh-oh,” he said. “He threw up.”
“Really?” I said. I could definitely understand why someone might throw up on Christmas Eve. Sometimes I worried that I would.
“Poor fella,” my grandpa said. It was good to know that a little puke didn’t necessarily ruin a Christmas, but all the same, I don’t think I ever asked anyone to read me the story again.
Anyway, that might explain why I am the way I am now. Here is a list of holiday song lyrics that bother me:
Lyric: “It doesn’t show signs of stopping,/ And I brought some corn for popping.” Reason: It’s POPCORN. Who calls it “corn for popping,” the Pennsylvania Dutch? And who brings pantry items on a date? What else does she have in her purse—Cocoa for Heating? Cake of Fruiting? The protagonist of this song is a crazy food-hoarder with convoluted syntax, and I hate having to think of Ella Fitzgerald that way when she sings this.
Lyric: “And so I’m offering this simple phrase/ To kids from one to ninety-two.” Reason: Excuse me, Nat King Cole, but I think “Merry Christmas to You” has long been in the public domain, so to offer it, especially with some arbitrary bullshit age limit, seems awfully cheap. Actually, I hate this song in general, since it’s called “The Christmas Song” in a very knowing, meta way, and has no story or point other than to be a purely fetishistic inventory of Christmas imagery, with that crass “offer” of commodified goodwill in the last verse. This song is all about Jack Frost nipping at your SOUL, for God’s sake. Pass the crack pipe, Natalie.
Lyric: “You will get a sentimental/ feeling when you hear /Voices singing let’s be jolly,/deck the halls with boughs of holly.” Reason: “You will get a sentimental feeling” sounds unsettlingly like a hypnotic suggestion. Also, “let’s be jolly” is not anywhere in “Deck the Halls,” duh, so the only time you’ll ever hear voices sing, specifically, “let’s be jolly, deck the halls with boughs of holly,” is in this song, which means this song is referring to ITSELF and the sentimental feeling you’ll supposedly get next time you hear it, and the next time after that, and on and on into infinity this song will tell you how to feel.
Lyric: “Here comes Santa Claus! Here comes Santa Claus! Riding down Santa Claus Lane!” Reason: Gene Autry had to have pulled these lines out of his butt. Sorry, but he did.
Lyric: “In the meadow we can build a snowman, /And pretend that he’s a circus clown. We’ll have lots of fun with Mister Snowman,/ Until the other kiddies knock him down.” Reason: Okay—building a snowman in order to pretend it’s a circus clown is just fucking demented. It’s like building a robot and pretending it’s Dracula. Or putting a sock on your hand and pretending it’s the Incredible Hulk. It makes no imaginative sense whatsoever. Anyway, the people in this song already built a clergyman snowman and pretended to discuss their marriage plans with it, which is admittedly bizarre, but you can at least sort of see the point, and then presumably these are consenting adults here, since they are talking about love and marriage and facing their future and they use the word “conspire” in the fourth verse and everything—so why do they suddenly regress in the very next verse and build a retarded snow-clown and blather about “the other kiddies?” Wonderland or not, we need continuity here, guys. On the other hand, I did come across a really interesting alternate version of this verse that involves ALLIGATORS—no really, read it: they talk about having fun with Mister Snowman until the alligators knock him down—and, well, that changes everything and makes the whole premise completely surreal in a way that I fully support.
Posted by Wendy | Mon 12.20.04 01:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | send link
Mode magazine is calling it quits, which is kind of a shame. For those of you who live outside the U.S., or are men, or shut-ins, or whatever, Mode was the first mainstream fashion magazine to feature fuller-figured “plus-sized” models—though sometimes it seemed the only thing “plus” about the size numbers was that they were “integers greater than zero.” In general, though, Mode was created to promote an alternative to the kinds of beauty standards put forth by more traditional fashion magazines, and it was great.
Or it was sort of great. Or it was a great idea. I’m afraid to say I always had mixed feelings about Mode. I know I was supposed to be thrilled it even existed, and in a way I was, but I didn’t really like it. As much as I hate to say it, Mode was a little… well, lame.
Or it wasn’t Mode itself that was lame; it was the ads. Or it was the fashion industry. Somehow the whole gestalt of Mode didn’t quite work: on one page you’d see Kate Dillon in couture showing her milky cleavage; on the next there’d be an ad for some crappy knee-length tunic from Fashion Bug Plus. One of the inadvertently interesting things about Mode is that the clash between its pictorial content and its ads revealed the shitty realities of the clothing business—all the assumptions about age and class and aesthetics that make clothes in women’s sizes so depressingly ugly. Which is not to say the magazine didn’t try like hell to change those assumptions; if any progress has been made (and I think there has), Mode probably had something to do with it.
The weird thing about Mode was that it managed to become such an important magazine without having much to offer in the way of magazine. I know a lot of people were willing to overlook the magazine’s skimpy content because the models looked so much more “real,” but I guess I never quite agreed. Intellectually, I can understand the disgust that lots of people feel towards the “unrealistic images” of very thin women in Cosmoor Vogue. Personally, though, I never felt it. Maybe it’s a result of having never been thin in my life, but I never thought those models were supposed to represent me. I never felt I should “aspire” to look like Amber Valletta, and the idea that I ever would seems pretty fucking insulting.
On the other hand, when I read crap like Mademoiselle, I know I’m being encouraged to see myself in the articles—all the quizzes and the slumber-party chatter and the inane advice about relationships and careers and sex and “ways to drive your man wild.” Maybe Mode could have used some of that crap. When you skim all those dippy feature articles in other women’s magazines, you get a sense of the kind of persona they’re trying to sell you. When you read Mademoiselle, you’re the slighty naughty twentysomething party girl trying to make it in the big corporate world. With Marie Claire or the old incarnation of Glamour, you can be kind of shallow, but at least you vote and have most of your shit together. With Cosmopolitan, you can pretend to be a scheming uber-vixen in spike heels. With all these magazines, the persona never quite fits, but that’s kind of the point: you try it on for awhile for kicks.
I could never really do that with Mode, though. Most of their content seemed to consist of technical beauty tips and the sort of generic little feature articles usually found in airline magazines. At best, they’d have a feature story on some fuller-figured celebrity, which was nice and all that, but then again the point was always the same—Look! She’s beautiful! That woman is plus-sized and beautiful!
Maybe the whole problem with Mode was also the same thing that made it so different and radical: whenever you picked Mode, you were trying on the notion of being beautiful. You read Mode; you were beautiful. Every month, the Letters to the Editor were almost always the same—letters from women who were so very grateful to be beautiful at last. Or else letters from men who were practically wanking off at their keyboards because the women they saw in Mode were so beautiful, and they just wanted to let us know that the women in the world who look like the women in Mode are beautiful, too. And then sometimes Mode itself would take it on themselves to remind us that men think we are beautiful, because, actually, we are very beautiful.
I could go on with pointing out the limits of this kind of thinking, and make jabs at their “Ask Emme The Full-Figured Supermodel” advice column (which they ditched a couple of years ago anyway) but instead I’ll just make an analogy: Mode was like that one person who comes up to you at a party when you first get there and you’re all shy and you don’t know if you’ll fit in yet. And that person says, “Oh my God, that skirt is so cute—you look so good in it,” and you say, “Wow, thanks!” and the person says, “Really, it looks so good on you,” and you’re like, “yeah,” and you smile, and the person smiles back, and you sip your drink and smile at the person again, who nods, and then you don’t know what to say because you realize this person has nothing else to say to you. And then you look around, and you think, well, what now?
Don’t think there isn’t a part of me that wonders if I expect too much. I guess I should be glad that Carre Otis thinks being a Mode cover girl is better than being slapped around by Mickey Rourke.
And don’t think I don’t realize how powerful Mode really was. Whenever I hear people praise the magazine (which is often), they’ll always say something about how amazing it was just to see the kind of body types in Mode’s pictorials—and how it made them see the models in the other magazines differently. “You don’t realize how skinny those chicks in Elle are until you look at the women in Mode,” they say. Mode made the most difference when it functioned like a test pattern—images designed to help us adjust our eyes, that showed us what normal looks like.
Well, now we know what it looks like; now we know it’s beautiful. And now it’s time for something else to happen.
Posted by Wendy | Sun 09.30.01 08:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | send link
I went to see America’s Sweethearts last week. I’d heard the movie kind of stunk, and I could have seen John Cusack’s big, adorable head spout much better dialogue in other movies, but I went anyway. I went to see Julia Roberts in the fat suit. I needed to see what the film industry’s idea of a 180-pound woman looked like.
It turns out that Julia Roberts really does look like a 180-pound woman in the fat suit. I was pretty impressed, actually. She had some fakey-looking chubbiness around her face, but the general idea was right. She had a full face; she had a belly and a more ample chest, and what impressed me the most when I first saw her—when she walked into the hotel room in that flashback scene—was that she was just the Julia Roberts character with a fuller face and a belly. She acted the same way and she dressed pretty much the same way (Though when you’re the size she’s at in that scene, you don’t tuck your top in. You just don’t.).
But for the most part, the illusion worked. Almost. Because then the next time Julia Roberts made an appearance in the fat suit, she was stuffing her face. She was on a movie set and lingering by the craft services table with her cheeks full of food, with one hand feeding herself and another hand reaching for more food. The moment that scene came onscreen, everything changed about Julia Roberts’ performance in a fat suit. She’d become an imaginary fat person.
Imaginary fat people have food in their hands most of the time. Or their pockets. Often imaginary fat people speak with their mouths full. Imaginary fat people are socially awkward. Imaginary fat people are thin inside, but it’s hard sometimes to tell where the inside leaves off. The fat of imaginary fat people exists either in a fat suit or nowhere at all.
I’m talking about more than just onscreen stereotypes of fat people. Imaginary fat people aren’t quite the same thing. Their actions are stereotypical, certainly, but they come off quite differently than those of an overweight actor who performs fat-person cliches. Chris Farley played plenty of scenes in which he ate like a pig and smashed chairs by falling on them, but these things were about his physical comedy, the way he use his size, not the fact of his size in itself.
Imaginary fat people can be fat without the distractions of “character.” Fat is the character and imaginary fat people breathe themselves into life. They have nobody to blame but themselves.
During Julia Roberts’s first fat suit scene, the audience in the movie theatre didn’t know how to respond. When the hotel room door opened to reveal her standing there with her fat, there were a few tentative snickers; possibly a few were inadvertent, from surprise. Later, during the food scenes, the audience burst out laughing abruptly but wholeheartedly, relieved, as if they understood something at last. Or as if someone who had made them uncomfortable had suddenly left the room.
They also laughed when Julia Roberts gotupset and went down to the restaurant of the hotel by herself—a different hotel this time; now she was thin—and she ordered three big plates of food at once and ate from them voraciously. Of course they were laughing at the fat person who wasn’t there anymore. I mean, I laughed, too.
But then I realized I would never do that—eat like the way she was eating, alone, in public. Everyone I know who is fat has a problem with eating in front of strangers. You worry what people will think about you, what they’ll imagine.
An imaginary fat person doesn’t need a fat suit, but it helps. Think about all the Fat Monica jokes that have been told over the years on Friends. For a while it was enough to make verbal references to Monica’s past life as a fat person, sort of an inside joke. Skinny Monica would respond with little more than an exasperated look—oh, you guys! —whenever Ross and Rachel and Chandler made jabs at her phantom fat. The jokes were on nobody. But at some point it seemed everyone wanted to see the nobody, so the show’s writers put Monica in the fat suit, they wrote flashback sequences and alternate-reality episodes in which she would appear.They made the joke bigger and brought us all inside of it.
It sounds like that movie Shallow Hal will have the same kind of mind tricks as well—the movie where Gwyneth Paltrow plays a fat woman in some scenes and a thin woman in others. Supposedly the gimmick is that whenever Jack Black looks at her in the fat suit he sees her as a thin woman for some reason, and through this illusion he falls in love with her—therefore he really falls in love with a fat woman. But of course the fat woman isn’t real; only Gwyneth Paltrow is.
When you think about it, imaginary fat seems to be the only kind of fat the popular media can deal withat all. For months I’ve been reading stories in Us and People which insist that actresses are looking “healthy” again, natural again—using as their proof photos showing actresses first in their “too skinny” mode and then at their heavier, “more comfortable” size. I could pick out a few differences here and there—Portia de la Rossi’s arms, maybe, which are no longer as bony—but for the most part I couldn’t discern any kind of significant change in size. It’s a bizarre visual exercise: object lessons in looking at fat, in recognizing it only after carefully studying its absence.
We’re being told to look at ordinary arm flesh, or the occasional spill of skin out the side of a tight strapless dress, or the tissue that covers the hip bones—we’re told to take particular note of this stuff, and call it fat. The only fat we’re allowed to consider is the fat on someone like Charlize Theron. The only acceptable fat is practically invisible.
In the middle of Us magazine’s cover story “Hollywood’s Obsession With Weight” was a sidebar with a positive story about Carnie Wilson’s weight loss surgery. Having the sidebar there didn’t really seem to make sense, because the rest of the story was about actresses who were losing too much weight. But then, when you start to think in terms of imaginary fat, it makes perfect sense to include Carnie Wilson. Do you think anyone would have really given a shit if Carnie Wilson had lost all her weight by dieting and exercising? She would have gotten some press and some praise, probably, but the real attraction is that she lost the weight so quickly. Read any story about her and notice how often she’s quoted as saying things like, “It was as if I’d blinked and the weight came off.”
If fat can vanish like that, it might not be that real, right? We must love to think so.
Posted by Wendy | Sun 07.29.01 08:57 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack | send link
So the June 2001 issue of Marie Claire has the results of some survey in which readers were asked how much money would induce them to do things like cheat on their partners or have a one-night stand or gain ten pounds permanently. For the ten-pound propostition, women could name a price of $100, $1000, $600,000 or state “no amount is enough,” and for each option the article ran a quote by a woman who explained her choice. The fact that more than half the women surveyed went for the last choice—no amount is enough—strikes me as depressing and yet kind of intriguing, and I’m sure there are all sorts of interesting reasons why so many women wouldn’t go for gaining ten pounds in exchange for, um, financial freedom. But all the magazine could come up with was this quote by “Shari, 34, nurse,” who says:
“I’m comfortable with my body, so adding ten pounds to it would take an unthinkably large amount of money—more than any lottery. The extra weight would bring me up a size and probably show more in my face and hips.”
All right, so I really don’t see any problem with that first part. It sounds like a matter of being at a certain comfort level and not wanting to change things. That kind of makes sense. But then Shari, 34, doesn’t shut up. She blathers on:
“I’ve always been a size 2, and I’m lucky not to have to diet, or go to the gym. Though I don’t flaunt my figure, I think I look good in almost all clothing styles. The ten extra pounds wouldn’t pose a health risk, but it would be noticeable to others—and that would bother me. When you’re thin, people offer flattering compliments like, ‘Oh, you are so lucky to be that skinny.’ If I gained weight, the positive feedback from others might disappear—and that could chip away at my self-esteem.”
This has to be one of the most dumbassed things I’ve ever read. Especially that last sentence. “Chip away at her self-esteem,” as if her sense of self-worth was some kind of Franklin Mint collectible she’d ordered.
She says that if she gained ten pounds permanently the compliments might disappear. If she was a size FOUR. And that this could adversely affect her belief in herself so profoundly that six hundred thousand dollars or more would not be worth the chance that perhaps friends and strangers would no longer fawn over her completely fabulous metabolism, because then if that happened she’d most likely spiral irreversibly downward into an existential wretchedness, and she’d shuffle along with her ponderous size 4 hips, forsaken, with no other choice whatsoever but to frequent trashy bars, drinking grain alcohol and slurring profanities and desperately climbing onto the laps of strange men and crazily dry-humping them and offering them hand jobs or whatever—not for money, of course, because she’d have six hundred grand socked away—but for the attention.
Because even with six hundred grand, a little therapy for this self-esteem problem is apparently not an option. And apparently also trying to gain a sense of self-worth from other things—such as, you know, being a NURSE and helping sick people—is also not an option. Because Nurse Shari probably spends all her time sashaying through the critical care wards wriggling her teeny butt and fishing for compliments from all the paraplegics and burn victims and amputees and chemotherapy patients. “How do I look today? Yeah, uh-huh, I’m totally naturally a size two! People tell me I’m lucky. Do you think I’m lucky? Oh, and it’s time for your dialysis. Anyway, my thighs in these jeans …” It just pisses me off that her inane quote was published in a national magazine where anyone could just pick it up and read it. And that any guy could read it and laugh his baseball cap off because OF COURSE he’d gain ten pounds for a few thousand bucks, no problem; he’d just take the money and buy amateur porn.
And I guess Shari is too stupid to consider that in a few years her body might change and gain ten extra pounds anyway, and when that happens I hope she thinks about how much interest that money could have accrued and how it would have come in handy when her kids needed to be bailed out of jail after getting caught imitating stunts they saw on Jackass, because they’re stupid; stupid by virtue of being raised by Shari, who is stupid. I hate Shari.
(And I hate that those Marie Claire bitches totally set me up to get all pissed off. They probably went through hundreds of surveys before they came across Shari’s and they snickered until they nearly peed on their Jimmy Choo mules and decided to run her quote as if it was something a reasonable person would say. I mean, I hope that’s what happened.)
But I think I would take the $600,000. I think, actually, I would just take the highest amount of money offered, provided it was at least enough to change my standard of living. Although I have to say I’ve been a total whore for compliments lately. Maybe I want to hear this stuff because I’ve actually done something. I’ve been going around for months and months stomping around on the floors of aerobics classes and slinking around Cub Foods looking at all the food labels and trying to memorize the point value for everything like an idiot savant, so I need my props.
I suppose if I gained the ten pounds and got paid six hundred grand, I could go around saying, “Hey! I got paid an assload of money to stop losing weight!” and friends would say “That’s fantastic! And you know, you still look great.” But maybe they’d say that just so I’d pay for their drinks. Also, I couldn’t really take credit for anything except just being lucky enough to have $600,000 offered to me, which would then make me as annoying as Shari.
Taking the money might make me a bitch; would it make me a whore? Sometimes I think it would be nice to have a reason not to care about my weight, and a huge amount of money would be a big reason. Maybe it’s a matter of what’s being sold. I have to think about what that would be.
Posted by Wendy | Sat 05.26.01 12:45 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack | send link
