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Eye on Soaps' October 16, 2006 Anorexia Versus Genetics; Media Pressure Versus Body Type We have been hearing about it for ages and all have likely formed some pretty strong opinions about the subject: the thinness of Hollywood.
Hudson did not take the allegations that she was "dangerously thin" lying down and promptly filed suit. The tabloid alleged that the 27-year-old actress was “recklessly and foolishly endangered her health” by failing to eat. In short, you can say they are sleeping around, you can say they are taking drugs, are pregnant, broke up with their significant other or had cosmetic surgery, but don't call them skinny! I remember the exact moment that skinny became it. When I was growing up, skinny kids were just as subject to being a teasing target as were fat kids. Then somewhere around the late 60's, one word changed all of that.
Now, more than three decades later, the same paradigm persists. We've all see the emails that circulate talking about how if Barbie was a real person, she'd have to walk on all fours and that the fashion models of the 1980's weighed about 8% less than the average woman and today, they weigh 23% less. To fit the emaciated ideal of feminine beauty, starlets had their lower ribs removed to give their upper abdomen a more hollowed look. Back teeth were removed to allow the cheeks to sink in further and make the faces look more gaunt. Basically, the goal is to look as corpselike as possible. My son, Joe, has a theory on this that I find interesting, which is that as the population of America and Europe began not only to grow, but to dangerously overflow, we no longer as a species needed to be driven to propagate, so we began to idealize women who seem least likely to bear offspring; those who appeared to be unhealthy and weak. As women, lord knows we are not above suffering for beauty. Witness the horrible creations of corsets, girdles, underwire bras, high heeled shoes, permanent make up, recovery from plastic surgery, hair perms and bleaches that burn our heads, piercings, leather clothes, tight jeans, eyebrow plucking, bikini waxing, face peels, colored contact lenses, not to mention enduring hours of different types of exercises to tone this or sculpt that. Through history, women have done plenty of weird shit to their bodies to look more appealing. We can and do frown upon the foot binding done in China where little girls aged 5-6 had their feet tightly bound so they would not grow and would remain tiny to please the Chinese men, who saw this as their own version of beautiful. Their feet would small and dysfunctional, prone to infection, paralysis, and muscular atrophy, but bind away they would with the most desired foot size being about 3 inches in length. Is that really so different than having our American feet completely misshapen after less than a year of regularly wearing pumps? I don't believe most American women even know what their feet look like in their natural state any more, having worn high heels for so long.
The public worries, because we are a worrying lot. We fuss if they are too thin. We fuss if they are too fat. We worry and fuss and fuss and worry.
So who is on the "Anorexic Terror Alert" red scale these days?
There are more. Laws yes, there are more, but bandwidth and your load time are already breaking. Where, though, would we be without a few "manorexics?"
To be sure, there are far more women than men in the fearful place, but they are there. There has always been (of course) an average size in people and over time, that average size has gotten bigger. When I was born as a baby of exactly 6 pounds, I was a normal sized, average baby. When my older boys were born and were in the 7's, they were normal. When my last three children were born, the average sized baby born in America weighed 8 pounds, 4 ounces. As a race, we are getting bigger. When you have an "average" size, there will, of course, always be people who are above or below that average. Today, the average woman weighs 144 lbs and wears between a 12-14. I'd love to be that size again. I'd just love it. So if we are getting bigger, why are our ideal people getting so much skinnier? If there have always been skinny people, is that just the case here? If someone is skinny by nature, does it necessarily mean they have tapeworms or anorexia or are a drug addict? Of course it doesn't. Average tells us everything and anything away from that average is, to our highly trained American eyes, automatically suspect. The interesting part about averages in terms of dress size is that if a woman is above that average size, they are seen as a second class citizen and expected to hide themselves away until they can do whatever it takes to bring themselves into that average range and "conform," regardless of what else they bring to the table (other than food, that is). If they are below that average, we sign them onto a Hollywood career, worry about them a lot in the tabloids and pay them millions of dollars to pose for us. Life is odd, isn't it?
"I'm jealous of Ethiopian kids. I'd love to be
skinny like them,
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Kate Hudson,
daughter of actress Goldie Hawn and musician Bill Hudson (a lot of
you will not remember the Saturday morning variety show called "The
Hudson Brothers' Razzle Dazzle Show," circa 1974 or so starring Bill
and his brothers, Brett and Mark) recently accepted a financial
settlement and a written apology from the UK version of the
"National Enquirer" magazine in response to a libel suit regarding
an October 2005 article in which they said that Hudson was
"dangerously thin" and her mother had urged her to "eat something."
The one word
was: "Twiggy." Twiggy was Twiggy Lawson, the first woman to become
an international supermodel. Twiggy was our first waif, but it
didn't take long for others to show up. Tiny Mia Farrow took
Hollywood and Frank Sinatra by storm. Audrey Hepburn slinked
(slank?
slunk?) into our world with her skinny little ass and her skinny
little black pants. From then on, Marilyn Monroe wasn't the
only death to mourn. Never again would her size 14, curvy body
be considered the epitome of beauty by mainstream America (or
Europe, for that matter). Gone was the soft curve of a hip,
the rounding swell of a healthy breast or the flush of a full cheek.
If you were not built like a teenage boy, you were not beautiful.
Thin was IN. Nothing tasted as good as being thin felt! From
the late 60's through the 70's, the Mary Tyler Moores and Ali
McGraws and the Chers and Jane Fondas and yes, the Goldie Hawns of
the world dictated to us that you could never too rich or too thin.
The honeymoon with food was over and it became the enemy as diet
after diet took the country by storm. How much grapefruit can
you eat? How many eggs can you consume? How much cabbage
can you digest and not have the property values of your neighbors
drop? 
To my
memory, and I could be wrong here, model Kate Moss was the first
living person who made us really worry about her in regard to her
size. It was odd to see the tabloids blasting concerned
headlines about how thin she was. It didn't take much time for
Calista Flockhart to be targeted during her Ally McBeal days.
Both actresses vehemently deny having any kind of eating disorder or
taking extreme measures to control their weight. Flockhart
adamantly denied drug used while Moss found herself amid a wicked
cocaine scandal in 2005. Skinny by genetics or "dying to be
thin?" Only they will really ever know and then only if they
are able to be honest with themselves. Maybe they are just
thin naturally. Is it really any of our business? The
ethics of that question have been posed forever with only very
subjective results. The litmus is this: Would we be more
surprised if Harrison Ford married someone who was as far over the
size of the average woman as Calista is UNDER the size of the
average woman? I think we'd probably be pretty blown away.
When was the last time we said, "Wow, look at the little butterball
that handsome star married!"
Is it with
good reason? We probably would have been somewhat OK with the
thinness and likely gone on praising it as the height of beauty had
Karen Carpenter not dropped dead, to our perspective, out of the
blue. Photos of her taken just prior to her death scared the
living shit out of us and made us say, "ano... what?" Anorexia
and bulimia were so far out of the mental grasp of the average
American when she died in 1983 that it took us a while to realize
that there were people who could become so obsessed with control and
weight loss that they would eat a perfectly good meal and then force
themselves to throw it up afterwards. A person starving
themselves to look like the emaciated people we wept over in the
"Save the Children" commercials was a little more than most of us
could wrap our brains around. Suddenly, it went from, "My
goodness, she's skinny! I want to be her!" to "Oh my God, is
she going to effin die??"
