There are several actors these days who are overweight and go as far as to joke about their penchant for eating, lack of exercise etc in their films. Rebel Wilson is the one that comes to mind.
Should these overweight actresses be praised for shaking up the rigid, typical image of a Hollywood actor and being more representative of ‘normal’ people or is it irresponsible to be praising an unhealthy lifestyle?
I think people should stop considering them (not overweight people, just celebs in general) to be role models.
I understand the whole body positive thing and learning not to be ashamed of how you look.
I think, at least in part, the issue is that people tend to slam them for promoting an unhealthy lifestyle. I’m sure some do promote that, but I see plenty of people not advocating to anyone to accumulate mass, but rather to be proud of how you look. When I see people point at Ashley Graham, for example, and telling her she shouldn’t act the way she does (WRT teaching not to be ashamed) because it’s so unhealthy, I feel like that’s a strawman.
Short answer, I don’t think anyone should be promoting an unhealthy lifestyle. I also don’t think anyone should be shunned for not being ashamed of how they look. Maybe we should shun the people that are going out of their way to make others feel bad about themselves. It’s a great recipe for an eating disorder.
It’s not a simple binary and is more nuanced than that.
Telling society not to shame people for being fat is one thing. But obesity-glorification is another thing entirely.
Some related links:
I think the health-aspect is pretty much a complete red herring. Celebrities have been venerated for years for their hard-partying ways, for example, and even if they were subsequently shamed for the same thing, it wasn’t because that sort of lifestyle doesn’t exactly promote healthy habits. So I think the whole health-thing is really more of a convenient fig leaf than the real issue when it comes to body image.
And often the ones who are celebrated for their beauty are photoshopped to death where they’re not the result of surgery. How is that healthy? And how are the constant messages that you must look any way except the way you do look, which magazines and ads pound us all with time and again, healthy at all? And why would it be OK for a male comedian to be obese but not for a female one?
“Eat up all the time” is an unhealthy message, but it’s not any message Wilson is sending. Meanwhile, lots of other celebs and the magazines which celebrate them tell us that we are all built wrong. That’s not healthy!
god forbid fat people be happy
Weight is a continuum, not a series of boxes. Being slim, slender, or skinny may be approved of, even fashionable, but being - or seeming - anorexic is emphatically not. Being chubby, plump, or heavy is the normal progression for most people, especially for mothers of several children. (“Matronly” became a euphemism for the heaviness associated with not losing weight after childbirth.) But morbid obesity is a medical problem that should be recognized as such.
There’s plenty of evidence that girls, from preteen years into their twenties, feel pressure, either internal or peer pressure, to look like the images of beauty that are projected almost everywhere in western culture. For the past century, almost all of these images of female beauty were of thin women. Dieting, purging, anorexia, and bulimia are ubiquitous and pernicious. Breaking that feedback system has to be a good thing. Girls and boys can and should be taught that they are fine with their bodies, no matter that they don’t look like supermodels or UFC fighters.
Even so, the extremes on both sides are medical issues and not mere aesthetic choices.
The woman in one of Velocity’s links says:
Sure, and people also say this about drug use. “I can smoke/drink/drug if I want to: it’s my body.” We as a society have finally learned not to accept that as anything but self-destructive behavior. Not dealing with the pitfalls of obesity is equally self-destructive. Shouting “I’m self-destructing, bitch” at the world as a positive is another form of denial.
You don’t recover from lifelong eating disorders any more than you recover from lifelong addictive behavior. I’ve struggled with weight all my life. You merely keep the temptations at arm’s length one day or one meal at a time. Alcoholics who give up alcohol do feel healthier. People who lose massive amounts of weight do feel healthier. That doesn’t solve all their other problems or turn them into different people, but it takes one huge issue off the table.
If all that doesn’t work for you, try this. Go into a nursing home for the elderly. Nobody there will be morbidly obese. Because they all died relatively young. Then try telling yourself that health is subjective. Health isn’t listening.
I don’t really care about fat actors one way or the other.
Models are a different thing, as their whole career is wrapped up in their body and image. I do think it’s harmful to glorify anorexia, and it’s harmful to glorify morbid obesity.
The job of an actress (or actor) is not to represent normal people. It is to create fantasies that will sell tickets.
If they’re happy, good for them. Audiences, particularly ticket sales, determine if a given actress/actor is selling the fantasy successfully. IOW, “I think I’m beautiful at any size” is one thing. “Do you think I am beautiful - if you do, buy a ticket” is not quite the same thing.
Body-shaming is not the same thing as declining approval, IMO. If someone wants to sell me tickets or post articles on the Internet telling me what they think about their own appearance, I reserve the right to my own opinion. That doesn’t mean I stop people on the street and tell them they should lose fifty pounds.
Regards,
Shodan
Good point. I don’t think that glorifying or celebrating an unhealthy lifestyle is a good thing, but is being unapologetic about overeating or not exercising any worse than being apologetic about overdrinking, drug use, dangerous hobbies, or any other unhealthy/risky behavior?
Yup.
Nobody says thin celebrities are ‘promoting an unhealthy lifestyle’ just because they’re thin; or even for going on about how they stay that way. And yet many people have to live in an extremely unhealthy fashion if they’re going to get that thin.
If people really are bragging about how little they move (as opposed to making jokes on the subject; I haven’t seen Wilson’s act and don’t know which one she’s doing), then criticize that, specifically; not their weight.
Are we talking “celebrities” or “comedians/comediennes”? Because in this case, it makes a difference.
There is a long tradition of morbid obesity in comedy, the “Fat Funny Man.” Whether they would openly admit it or not, people generally think fat is funny. Right or wrong, that’s just how it is, and many professional comedians have astutely observed and exploited this quirk of human nature. I won’t go and provide a tedious list of famously fat comic actors, we all know dozens of them, and you’re all probably subconsciously thinking of one right this second.
I think there’s a certain contingent of people out there who have a very black and white idea about being overweight/obese. To them, there’s no concept that someone could be overweight or obese AND beautiful- they’re mutually exclusive in their minds. And so is the idea that you can celebrate a beautiful/confident/successful fat person without also condoning/promoting obesity/obesity-causing habits and lifestyles. They seem to have the attitude that praising anyone who’s overweight or having an obese celebrity NOT being shamed for it is somehow encouraging/condoning obesity. There’s no middle ground- either you’re all in on shaming/being against obesity, or you’re for it.
Most people see it as more of a gray area and also segregate celebrating professional achievements and confidence/comfort in their own skin from the idea that it’s necessarily praising them for being obese. I mean, nobody’s holding Rebel Wilson or Melissa McCarthy up as paragons of physical beauty, but they’re both (IMO) very funny comediennes and regardless of how they look, they deserve recognition for that. And most people would agree that Ashley Graham is beautiful, even if she’s not anywhere close to model-thin.
Nobody? Have you not seen the “eat a sammich” meme that happens whenever a celebrity thinner than a Kardashian posts on their Instagram? I’m exaggerating, but that is pretty common.
No; possibly because I’m not following celebrities on Instagram. Or, for the most part, elsewhere.
I will however withdraw the “nobody”. There are a whole lot of people in the world, saying a whole lot of things; I should have known better than to say “nobody”'s saying anything whatsoever.
Just looked at some pictures.
They’re neither of them conventionally pretty by current standards. But I think they’re both good looking.
I agree that whether their acts are good has nothing to do with what they look like.
I wasn’t trying to say they were ugly or unattractive in any way, only that they are both obese, and their main claims to fame is their talent for comedy and acting, not their looks or obesity.
Ah. Gotcha.
Professional actors are exactly the type of people I would expect to gain or lose significant amounts of weight (which swings probably arent healthy), or otherwise radically alter their appearance, depending on what part they are to play. Either way, not seeing any bearing on ‘normal’ people (not that acting is abnormal, but it’s a special requirement as far as protean appearance goes. Same with breaking into funny accents).