The Fat Girl's Guide to Life - Essay Example

Weight Wars: The Impact of Media upon Men’s Views of Plus Sized Women It is everywhere. Media impacts the lives of millions of people everyday, from what is on television, to magazines, to the sides of buses! One of the greatest impacts on American society is on body image. Women learn to be thin, and to never forget their make-up, while men learn that women are only pretty if they have tiny waists, long thin legs, beautiful faces, and huge breasts. One woman notes “I open a magazine and a supermodel stares back at me, her waist the size of a lifesaver. An article accompanying the picture constantly mentions how beautiful she is. I immediately drop the magazine and start doing sit-ups. Can you blame me?” (Maine 90) This woman is not alone. These images do more damage then many people understand. Women who wear large sizes are judged based on their body, not on other attributes. It does not matter how smart, or how funny they are, what kind of person they are, or even how beautiful their face is. What counts is their size, and they will constantly be judged by that. Often the most painful judgment comes from men; they scorn, they catcall, and they chose to ignore women who do not meet the beauty standard. It is through the media, men learn that women must meet the ideal, or they are not valuable. By looking critically at two media forums, television, and magazines, it is clear that the impact media has on men’s understanding of female beauty and value is directly linked to the false image media has imposed upon society. On of the best loved shows on television has had one of the strongest impacts on men’s understanding of beauty. For ten seasons Friends was adored by fans, and still today is on television everyday. Yet time and again comments were made about weight, and even at nine months pregnant Rachel was not allowed to look over a size eight! One of the most shocking moments comes when they do a clip back in history, and the viewer is taken to watch a scene between Ross, Monica and Chandler. When Chandler first meets Monica, Ross introduces her as “his little sister.” Chandler, noticing her weight comments, “yeah, okay.” Later, at a different meeting, when Monica has lost weight, he then finds her incredibly attractive. Although she is the same person, what matters is her outside, not her inside. Another show, discontinued in 1997, was Married…with Children. About families, the main character, Al Bundy, works as a shoe salesman, and has particularly negative views of large women. There are constant, negative quotes from the show, including such tales as “A fat woman came into the shoe store today. Wanted a pair of shoes for a Christmas party. I told her to stand on her hands, put a star in her butt and go as the world’s largest, ugliest tree!” and "A fat woman clip-clops into the shoe store today and says "I want something I can feel comfortable in." so I said "Try Wyoming!" Both are particularly offensive to women, especially large women, and when placed out there by a man, create an image that it is okay to make cruel comments about women, and that they are funny, as long as women are fat. It is not only television that mocks women who are large. Comments are made regularly on movies, including suggestions that women can get a man, but only if they lose weight. One of the more recent movies that focused on the concept of weight and success was Bridget Jone’s Diary. Bridget is a successful journalist, who is desperate to find herself a husband. She sets for herself goals: to find a husband, to stop smoking, and to lose weight. She struggles with issues of body image, how to dress, and how not to make an idiot of herself. The women around her are skinny, successful, and never seem to get themselves into trouble. On days she feels and looks thin, she is attractive, on days she looks chubby, and she is ignored. Her stress is seen as funny, her trials with weight a joke. In all three of these examples, fat women are not only unsuccessful, they are lonely, and their plight is used as the butt of jokes. Men learn that women who are chubby can be laughed at without repercussion, and that they are not meant to be viewed even as women, but as sexless objects, useless for anything but amusement. Magazines also work to create an unlivable image that only tiny women are sexy women. Sharlene Hess-Biber, author of Am I Thin enough Yet, comments “The slim and flawless cover girl is an icon created by capitalism for the same of profit” (Maine 95). They refuse to print pictures of women who are overweight, believing that women do not want reality, they want to see an ideal, and image they can dream about (Fraser 1). These images teach men that skinny, waif-like women are what is sexy, and that they are what people want to see, and therefore what should be desired. At one point, journalists printed a quote that said “Journalists printed a story that said 82 percent of men would rather sleep with a goat than Fergie” (Shanker 10). Eighty-two percent of men actually believe that large women are so unattractive that they would rather sleep with an animal! Yet, science has proven time and again that men are hard-wired to prefer women who are larger, since they are more likely to be able to bear children. If men are physically more attracted to large women, then what would cause them to claim that skinny women are more attractive, and that is what they desire? There is only one answer. That media has blinded them, and recreated the script that Americans, at least, must follow. Dating large women is used as a joke in movies such as American Pie, and any movie that involves relationships between men and women. What all these images create is the idea that fat women are somehow less human, and need less love, or respect, or care. Men learn that women are objects, and can be mistreated, or mocked. If the media does it, and that is the primary source for writing scripts for how to live life, then men are only learning from what they have available. These scripts are dangerous, and painful, not only to women, but to men. In Body Wars, Maine quotes author Kim Chernin as saying The model they are preparing is twelve years old. What emerges is a preadolescent girl, with slender arms and shoulders, underdeveloped breasts and hips and thighs, whose body has been covered in sexy clothes, whose face has been painted with a false allure and whose eyes imitate a sexuality she has, by her own confession, never experienced. And this, says fashion, is what a mature woman should attempt to look like” (111). This is what men are being taught to love. To love and want women who are not yet women, and do not exist. Men will look for something they will not find in a relationship, and women who would like to do anything to achieve that goal. Nobody can be truly happy. It is clear that media images can only hurt people. They hurt men, by creating for them a false image of what they should find attractive, and by teaching that ridicule and mocking are acceptable when a person does not meet the media’s standard of ideal beauty, a standard that by definition can not be met by 90% of the population. The media hurts women, because they can not live up to the image that is created for them, and have to deal with the ridicule that is placed upon them, and the myths of fatness, including laziness and uncleanliness that American society believes. Neither group can be happy, since both are trying to find a place for the false image in the script of their lives. What is worst is that media is everywhere. It is there everyday, in everything. Turn on a television, open a magazine, look out a window at a bus; the images of women as thin and sexy are everywhere. Equally clear is the image that fat women are laughable, lazy, unnatural, and unfeeling. Media creates for men a false understanding of women, and that is what hurts everyone. Works Cited Fraser, Laura. “Fear of Fat.” Fair and Accuracy in Reporting. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1388. 1997. Maguire, Sharon. Bridget Jones’s Diary. 2001. Mains, Gregory S. “The one with all the Thanksgivings.” Friends. 1998 Maine, Margo, ed. Body Wars Making Peace with Womens Bodies. Carlsbad: Gurze Books, 2000. Married With Children. Fat Woman Quotes. http://www.al-bundy.co.uk/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=10. 2004. Shanker, Wendy. The Fat Girls Guide to Life. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. 10. Read More