A hempless Leighton Meester: Comfortable?

I was perusing the September issue of Teen Vogue and came across an article about hair, featuring Leighton Meester, one of the stars of Gossip Girl. The piece seemed inoffensive…until the second sentence:

“But ask [Meester] about her own high school days, and she readily admits she wasn’t exactly an upper-East side sophisticate. ‘I had glasses, unplucked eyebrows, and I wore hemp necklaces!’ she confesses. ‘It’s only recently that I’ve gotten comfortable in my own skin.’”

Does this make anyone else a little bit mad?

What was the most aggravating to me was that the author implied strongly that Meester dressed like that BECAUSE she had no self-confidence. She wore glasses, hemp necklaces, and didn’t pluck her eyebrows because she wasn’t confident. Apparently, everyone who wears glasses hasn’t “gotten comfortable in [their] own skin” yet… such as totally amazing women like Tina Fey or Lisa Loeb? Also conversely to her statement, people who are particularly confident might wear hemp necklaces because it’s an unpopular style, as opposed to less self-assured people being afraid to take a fashion risk. And the eyebrows… it’s a person’s choice, to pluck or not to pluck. There are people out there blessed with natural, no-pluck-needed eyebrows. Maybe Meester is one of the lucky few.

You can be as unconfident as anything and wear the hottest, most popular clothes, contacts, pluck (or even wax!) your eyebrows, and wear, uh, un-hemp necklaces and you STILL won’t be comfortable in your own skin. Or, you can wear all of those things and feel great about yourself!

I rarely look through Teen Vogue, but I know girls who revere it as a Bible of sorts. Will they stop wearing their glasses because Leighton Meester thinks that it makes them seem unconfident? I really hope not.

January Jones / Betty Draper - not allowed to work out?

A few weeks ago various entertainment blogs and news sites were running a series of stories about Mad Men‘s Producer Matthew Weiner. Feminist bloggers and health writers soon joined the conversation. Now Mad Men is no bastion of feminist drama and critical theory, but these bloggers were veritably showering praise on Weiner. Why? Because, reportedly, he doesn’t allow his actresses to exercise and encourages them to eat plenty in order to look “soft and voluptuous” like “healthy women.”

F-A-I-L.

I’m going to make this as coherent a criticism as possible, but Weiner’s comments and the subsequent feedback from bloggers anger me as symptoms of much broader problematic conversations. So I’ll break the issues down systematically:

The idea of fattening up or slimming down for a role is nothing new in the acting world. But to imply that gaining weight to ensure continued acting success is somehow amenable to healthy living as well is ludicrous. These actresses have been asked to gain weight because doing so will allow them to better embody the aesthetic that predominated in the mid-20th century, one which favored hourglass shapes (the word “ample” comes to mind) over androgynous or boyish figures. Keep in mind that this was a body ideal of that era, not a standard everyone met by any means.

Furthermore, it is unclear to me what Weiner and these actresses mean by “healthy women.” Are we to understand that women whose figures do not fill out a 1960s girdle are ill? That women with curvy bodies cannot have eating disorders or exercise fixations? That women who rest up and do not engage in any activity–because of their obviously delicate constitutions–are somehow better off? This has all the tinges of old school sexism, 1960s style, appropriately enough. I say call a spade a spade, and say the actresses in Mad Men are being told to gain weight in order to appear like June Cleavers (albeit sexier ones), not that they are models for natural health.

Which brings me to my next point: the strong show of support for Weiner among women’s and feminist blogs. I can understand why–don’t get me wrong. I don’t have to rehash how the thin aesthetic endangers womens’ health. Sometimes, anyone who breaks away from such rhetoric seems a godsend. But why should it be the case that the feminist reponse to media filled with women who are unnaturally thin due to compromised physical and mental well-being should be a call for women to embrace being overweight to the extent that they are at increased risk of chronic disease? What happened to moderation?

Yes, moderation. Where we eat healthy, plant-based diets. Where we make ourselves tired (but not crazy or dead) through regular exercise. Where we enjoy peaceful time to ourselves and joyous time with those around us as a balance to busy lives.

I don’t mean to imply that everyone should start policing every lifestyle decision they make. I don’t think we should start analyzing each morsel, each epushup, each unchiseled ab. Instead, I simply feel that we should be careful not to conflate dialog on body image with medical advice. Greta Christina, on her atheist/feminist/sex blog, discussed this subject back in March. She wrote about some of the internalized backlash she felt as a feminist trying to lose weight, and the particular difficulties in negotiating this position without feeling she had to defend herself against fat-positive advocates. She offers steps for those looking to pursue weight loss in an image-obsessed society from an anti-establishment perspective. Similar guidelines would apply to weight gain or any other type of body transformation:

(a) Doing an honest, non-denialist, reality-based assessment of the costs and benefits of weight loss (including, and especially, the health costs and benefits);
and (b) Pursuing weight loss in a reality-based way if you think it would be right for you.

Simple but not simplistic, and worthwhile considerations, I think.

I have often found it uncomfortable and difficult to bring up this critique of feminist-grounded “fat acceptance” movements. Mine is not an easy view to articulate without fear of being misrepresented. Yet, I think this very questioning within the feminist arena, moving beyond the hackneyed “love your body” to a “love your body and seek ways to honor it, feel more vibrant, and pursue healthy longevity” is well worth our while. After all, do not fit and thriving bodies in themselves make it possible for us to be better feminists and activists?

Janani also writes for Who’s On Third Wave where this article was originally posted.

dieting = healthy?

I’ve had a theory brewing in my head recently: if all the women in the United States were a size 2 yet as a society we still struggled with heart disease, diabetes and certain cancers then the “health” argument would be very different. After watching the recent Nightline segment “Is it Okay to be fat” my theory was confirmed. The title should’ve read, “Is it okay for women to be fat?”; and then at least it would have been more honest.

It’s hard to debate health when what you’re really debating aesthetics. A serious debate on health would’ve seen men on the panel, since this issue is a societal problem and not something women should have to shoulder alone (though we often do).

I struggle with body image. I’m in my mid twenties and I haven’t yet found that balance of looking in the mirror and liking what I see. I think others would consider me  “healthy”: my body functions properly and I have what the CDC would consider a “correct” BMI number however I got that way eating highly processed “health” foods and the battle of body image rages inside of me all the time. I look in the mirror and dream of my pre-pubescent body when my boobs were higher and my thighs were leaner, when I more closely resembled the 16 year old fashion models that grace every women’s magazine.

I really do want to be truly healthy, so recently I’ve made a serious effort to integrate it into my life(rather than before where being healthy was admittedly, a by-product of wanting to be skinny.) Now I eat with a consciousness of being part of a food chain: eating locally grown whole foods that were raised and farmed sustainably. I cook more and enjoy my food with my husband rather than eating a separate highly processed dinner than him because it only had 400 calories.

As a consequence, I now have a different relationship with food: a relationship dictated by how healthy and happy I feel from eating it-not how skinny it makes me.

For women “healthy” has become interchangeable with “beauty” and a lot of products are marketed and sold to women this way. The blurring of those lines lends itself to misdirected debates like this Nightline one, where we find ourselves dissecting two separate issues the same way. I’m all for a healthy society that has a positive relationship to food… just not at the expense of women’s self esteem.