Two special Ks from the Beeb’s Pirates Of The Caribbean 2 première gallery:
I used to work with a bright, attractive, independent woman. She even maintained her own classic car. (She’s the only female I’ve ever met who owned her own grease gun.)
One day she horrified her live-in boyfriend by reaching her “target weight”. He begged her to start eating again before he stopped fancying her forever.
That is terrible, just terrible. I am not sure what is more tragic – Knightley doing that to herself, when she has so much going for her, or the terrifying knowledge that many young girls will aspire to be like her.
The pressures women are placed under to conform to a dangerously unhealthy ideal are manifold, and the ad industry bears an awful lot of the blame.
Kind of apt that the movie is subtitled “Dead Man’s Chest”, isn’t it?
I really hate those bag-of-bones women, who on earth find them appealing ?
They look like freaks.
To be fair to Knightly, she has mentioned before that she’s just one of those skinny people who couldn’t put on weight if she tried (which has undoubtedly given her a genetic head-start in her chosen profession), and she regularly takes the piss out of her own lack of chest. The problem isn’t skinny women; the problem is women who refuse to accept that different people are different sizes and who insist on trying to look like Knightly when they’re clearly not supposed to.
I used to know a girl whose metabolism was so fast that she had to keep stuffing her face in order to avoid being admitted to hospital. She tended to get angry with women who said to her “You’re so lucky to be so thin.”
The answer is chocolate eclairs. Pretty much irrespective of the question.
Oh yes.
Great post, and so true.
I always thought Cindy Crawford so much hotter than Linda Evangelista (showing my age here…).
And I think most men are like me. We want those curves, and oh how badly do we want them. They should be smooth and firm to be sure, but they should be nicely convex.
But there’s another factor at work here. Why is it that women aspire to the Keira Knightly physique? Is it because they have been taught by the celeb culture that that is the glamorous way to look? Of course. But what about the possibility that MEN have also been taught that that is the glamorous way for a woman to look, so that, in spite of our private biological lusts, we, too, want the women on our arms to be skinny, even if it’s less of an actual physical turn-on?
“Gentlemen prefer blondes”, as the saying goes, “but they marry brunettes.” Perhaps gentlemen (and other men) prefer nice healthy sexy babes with a few curves (I’m a Nigella-luster too, Geek) but they want to be seen out with (and married to) skin-and-bones.
> Why is it that women aspire to the Keira Knightly physique? Is it because they have been taught by the celeb culture that that is the glamorous way to look? Of course.
I have been informed in the past by anthropologists that cultures in which, as Terry Pratchett put it, what a man really looks for in a woman is quantity have just as much anorexia as we do. So there may well be evidence that making society’s ideal shape bigger doesn’t actually make much of a difference: idolise large, round women and women will still aspire to skinniness.
Or, alternatively, there’s evidence that anthropologists enjoy bullshitting me.
Or perhaps cream doughnuts?
I can’t find the exact quote now, but I vaguely remember somebody famous saying something like:
I think it’s unfair to criticise KK off the bat, even though I do recognise the awful media pressure etc it can influence. For a long while I’ve fancied a girl I know who has a physique like Keira’s. And I know she doesn’t starve herself or anything at all. I’m the same, to be honest. I consume like a bastard, but I’m still a skinny runt. So obviously the problem here isn’t the natural body shapes of individual women or men, but the external pressure that’s exerted to be one or the other. I find both KB and KK immensely attractive, and the same goes for people I meet in day to day life. The horror is to come across someone who is desperate to change themselves one way or the other. Shitrags like Nuts and that don’t do anyone any favours here. Most guys I have had a discussion about this with don’t really care one way or the other; if you’re attracted, you’re attracted, you don’t have a checklist, really.
Don’t really understand the title. Seems like a feminist issue to me.
And well, that’s what comes of living in a society that promotes images of unhealthily underweight women as normal and attractive. Wow, what a newsflash. Most women I know have no idea how heavy it’s possible to be and still be healthy (they’re startled by how heavy I am, despite the fact I’m tall and have a BMI within the healthy range, for instance), and god knows I’ve encountered women who thought that liquid-only, sub-1000-kcal diets were healthy and okay. Unrealistic images portrayed as aspirational for women aren’t exactly new.
Incidentally, I’m really not convinced that “hey, men don’t fancy it” is a useful argument against unrealistic body images. Wasn’t particularly useful when my eating disorder was out of control – my shrink told me he didn’t think I needed to lose weight, and I thought “and your opinion is worth anything because…?”
Women who are actually starving themselves in an attempt to look like emaciated celebrities are probably being judged enough for their figures. How about making them feel worthwhile for something else?
Well, it’s certainly mostly a female issue, but it’s not primarily about the power relations between the sexes so I wouldn’t call it a feminist issue. The gulf between what (most) men want women to look like and what (most) women want to look like is simply too large for this to be the case. It’s not about men keeping women down; it’s about men and women making money out of other women (and men). And it’s about women competing with other women—and not about their competing with each other for men.
Yet again, I’d say prevailing unhealthy attitudes about body image aren’t linked to sex; they’re linked to class. If I presented you with a collection of silhouettes of the bodies of British females and only told you the ages of their owners I suspect that, overall, you’d make a pretty good guess at their social class. Anorexic girls are far more likely to attend expensive private schools than inner-city comprehensives. Exclusive women’s clothes shops are far less likely to stock over-size garments.
Slimness signals self-control, the ability to defer gratification, an awareness of fashion—and it’s a signal to other women, not to men. It’s striking that higher status female professionals are far less likely to be fat than higher status males. Why should it be that the richer, more powerful, and more independent a woman is the more likely she is to be starving? It’s not as though she has less access to food or that men have more control over her consumption of it than her lower status peers.
It might not be, but it is a useful argument against blaming men (as a whole) for the promotion of unrealistic body images—or, rather, this particular class of unrealistic body images. Pamela Anderson and Jordan are a different matter.
Have you ever tried to reassure an intelligent, educated, successful but weight-conscious woman that there are more important measures of her worth than her dress size? You might as well try to persuade a man that size doesn’t matter.
You know, on reflection, the problem those pictures really illustrates is bad tailoring. As mentioned aboce, Keira is rather attractive usually. What the hell is a woman with no chest, who knows she has no chest, who even jokes about having no chest, doing in a dress designed to show off acres of cleavage?
Now Damian, you know me – I can eat like a starved hyena and still don’t gain weight (and yes I get annoyed at people who tell me I’m “lucky” that I can lose 1 stone in a week by not even trying/wanting to).
And in my “expert” opinion Kiera has lost too much weight. I bet you she’s been going to the gym and working out loads. She wasn’t that much of a skelton for pirates 1!!!!
Is this not a boobs and bum question, rather than a purely weight issue? I’d have to be the size of Jabba before I got melons approaching Kelly’s!
Natural tendency, even.
It also undermines the credibility of feminist analysis of real discrimination against women.
Precisely how? And perhaps I believe that women giving themselves physical and mental health problems is a major issue…
There are many sound arguments why women (and men) should eat properly and not obsess about their body shapes. However, the position advanced on this page—that curves are good because men like them—is not one of the better ones. It may not have occurred to many of you men out there, but women’s bodies do not exist merely to be looked at, judged and lusted after (or not) by men. And women’s aspirations for their bodies should not simply be dictated by what men may think of them. Women’s bodies should be healthy, I am absolutely agreed with you on that, but they should be so in their own right and for their very own good.
P.S. I should point out that the male gaze isn’t exactly the most tolerant either: you want curves, fair enough, but you also want slim waists, lean ankles, and attractive faces…
I certainly didn’t advance that view.
I do believe, however, that the bodyshapes that most men find attractive are healthier than the ones most women envy.
Well, it’s certainly mostly a female issue, but it’s not primarily about the power relations between the sexes so I wouldn’t call it a feminist issue. The gulf between what (most) men want women to look like and what (most) women want to look like is simply too large for this to be the case. It’s not about men keeping women down; it’s about men and women making money out of other women (and men). And it’s about women competing with other women—and not about their competing with each other for men.
Hmm. I think that what individual men might want, and what a generally patriarchal culture pushes at women, are different things, and that the latter still justifies calling it a feminist issue. Particularly when women are under so much more pressure to conform to a beauty stereotype than men – if it’s not to do with what individual straight men want (which I’m prepared to accept), it’s still gendered, and there’s probably a reason for that even if it’s not obvious. Gendered pressure is, I think, a feminist issue.
I also suspect (admittedly on no more evidence than general cynicism about gender gaps in employment) that most of the people making money out of it aren’t women.
The competitive thing is interesting, yes. I’ve been in workplaces where the women did compete to lose weight, and it didn’t seem to have anything to do with attracting men. But again, I think that falls into the difference between individuals’ relationships and a general ideal of female beauty that is predicated on “you’ll never get a man with that cellulite”, whatever individual or even majority male desire actually is. (Which, as Second Sex points out below, isn’t as uncomplicatedly rosy as you seem to be implying. I can’t see much of Kelly in that photo, but I suspect she’s still unusually thin – it’s just that she’s not thin relative to Keira.)
So, regardless of the generally acknowledged behaviour of men, the generally sexist nature of society is probably behind it all? I don’t think this holds up. It also undermines the credibility of feminist analysis of real discrimination against women.
If one group of exclusively black people machete another group of exclusively black people to death in a world in which white people have the vast majority of the power and money should we blame the racism of the whites for the slaughter—“even if it’s not obvious”?
So, regardless of the generally acknowledged behaviour of men, the generally sexist nature of society is probably behind it all?
Like I said, it is obviously gendered. And unless you’re going to argue that women just have this naturally tendency to starve themselves for no apparent reason, then yeah, it’s probably linked to ongoing unequal expectations and aspirations of men and women.
If one group of exclusively black people machete another group of exclusively black people to death in a world in which white people have the vast majority of the power and money should we blame the racism of the whites for the slaughter—“even if it’s not obvious”?
Or, we could ignore analogies which might or might not be relevant, and mostly seem to distract attention from the actual issue.
So do I, but I believe it’s important to separate women’s issues from feminist issues, just as it’s important to separate black issues from race issues. For example, HIV is a public health issue; the treatment of gay housebuyers by life insurance companies is a gay rights issue. You can’t blame prevailing attitudes towards gays for the existence of HIV, but you can blame them for discrimination against the “pink pound”.
There’s almost certainly an inverse correlation on this planet between how “patriarchal” a society is and the levels of eating disorders among the women living in them. This is the exact opposite of what your explanation would predict. How do you account for this?
By all accounts, Kelly Brook has no brain at all, and has been forced to shack-up with some bald guy ten years her senior. Who’d want to be in her shoes, enormous breasts notwithstanding? 😉
> unless you’re going to argue that women just have this naturally tendency to starve themselves for no apparent reason
Why not? Young men have a tendency to top themselves for no apparent reason, and no-one blames women for that.
> By all accounts, Kelly Brook has no brain at all
By all accounts, all good-looking women are stupid and bitchy. I have ignored such accounts for a long time now.
> some bald guy ten years her senior
Some bald, successful, famously attractive guy with oodles of money.
Now, you know me, Damian. I am not really one for banning things. But if I never heard the term ‘real women’ ever again, it would be too soon. (It is usually used by men and women alike to describe a woman who has been favoured by nature with boobs, a bum, and a proportionate waist.) The idea that in order to be a ‘real woman,’ one must have a higher concentration of fat on certain bits of one’s body is just…Not worth entertaining, really. Yet open any women’s magazine and it’s been bought hook, line, and sinker – except when it comes to dressing the models, who have to be slim in order to wear the designer samples.
The bony look really suits some people, and Kiera is one of them. The dress is horrible, but she does not look anorexic to me – just naturally very thin.
Geek, does that mean that listening to Tchaikovsky is the musical equivalent of sleeping with fat women?
I can’t help but feel that in a society where the generally approved and promoted definition of female beauty, attractiveness and success in a (mainly) male-dominated media incorporates extreme slimness one can avoid looking at this as a feminist issue. Men may like curves (I certainly do) but you only have to open the Guardian Saturday magazine’s fashion pages to see what male (and female) editors and photographers look upon as representing true beauty. Isn’t it the case that in some societies a degree of extra padding is seen as signifying economic success? I’d be interested in seeing what kind of average weights women in those countries are carrying.
To take Damian’s racial metaphor one could note that even in some predominately black societies people still resort to chemical skin-lightening preparations; presumably something to do with the way in which success is portrayed in the global media as something associated with a caucasion complexion.
“one can avoid looking at this as a feminist issue”
Oops, should have been ‘can’t’.
“By all accounts, Kelly Brook has no brain at all, and has been forced to shack-up with some bald guy ten years her senior.”
Forced? How? By whom?
Indeed – she left a longterm relationship with a young actor (Jason Statham) for Billy Zane, a parting which left Statham admittedly devastated. (This knowledge resides in the bit of my brain where the atomic number of Californium should be.)
Lorna – I don’t think this is a feminist issue at all. Keira is a woman who is ’empowered’ to make her own choices about her image. If you believe that she has been influenced to become thin because of any other reason, it implies that she has yielded her power and become a victim. There are still imbalances in society which need to be addressed, but Keira being underweight certainly isn’t one of them. Women in the western world do have power but should learn to use it the right way and not create an image of demented screaming wenches complaining about everything men or society say about women. We should learn to play ball using the same rules.
1) Apologies for the excessively long comment.
2) Various sentences were lacking words like “than” and “as” which, when slotted in correctly, would make everything so much more grammatical.
Apologies for the very slow reply – my internet access is somewhere between sporadic and nonexistent. Also I typed out one long reply and your website ate it. Then I typed it out again, and it ate it again. Then I gave up for a few days.
Squander Two –
Why not? Young men have a tendency to top themselves for no apparent reason, and no-one blames women for that.
I hope you don’t think that I “blame men” for the whole unhealthy-body-image/extreme-dieting/eating-disorders thing. (If I go into how much I think they do or don’t have in common, particularly bearing in mind only one of them’s a mental illness that kills people, this comment will explode. But I see it as more of a continuum three similar but unrelated issues.) That’s why I distinguish between the actions of individual men and a patriarchal society.
Incidentally, I don’t really think that young men’s more successful suicide attempts are “for no apparent reason”. I see it as pretty much inevitable when you’ve got a gender role that doesn’t allow for asking for help with emotional problems, but does allow for both decisive and violent action. AFAIK, women get more depression diagnoses and have more unsuccessful suicide attempts and self-harm, which I reckon supports my pet theory.
PooterGeek –
So do I, but I believe it’s important to separate women’s issues from feminist issues
A women’s issue, to my way of thinking, would be something that affects women because of something not-really-changeable in the majority of women. Like endometriosis. Sure, there’s women who’ve had hysterectomies and there’s transwomen who don’t menstruate and the causes and treatment are kind of fuzzy, but basically, it’s a women’s issue. Now, I can’t see any sensible reason why the unhealthy-body-image/extreme-dieting/eating-disorder continuum should disproportionately affect women just because, whereas it does seem to be linked to gender roles – higher pressure on women to conform to an ideal beauty image (whether an individual man fancies that image or not) with the unspoken assumption that it’s men who ought to be approving of her beauty; generally less power, control and status in society (when the starve-y eating disorders are often about trying to prove some kind of control or power). Therefore, feminist issue.
(I take issue with your HIV/homosexuality thing, by the way – it doesn’t exist because of homophobia, but a lot of failure to treat, prevent or detect it probably comes down to stigmatising what sort of people are likely to contract it. For instance, a few years back, I read a survey on condom use among young heterosexuals and one of the reasons they didn’t use them was seeing HIV as a gay disease. See how easily a biological thing becomes a political thing?)
There’s almost certainly an inverse correlation on this planet between how “patriarchal” a society is and the levels of eating disorders among the women living in them. This is the exact opposite of what your explanation would predict. How do you account for this?
Well, if I knew everything about what caused eating disorders and how to fix them, I’d be making a lot of money selling some poor saps useless remedies. Okay, probably not: I have some sense of shame. But I spend a lot of time thinking about them – yeah, I’m weird like that – and particularly trying to work out how to make sure my own stays dead, and I don’t claim to understand how all the different factors interact or how much weight (no pun intended) to give to each factor in each situation. If patriarchy automatically equalled eating disorders every woman on the planet would have one. Still, it seems to me that it is a significant factor.
Jacqui –
Keira is a woman who is “empowered” to make her own choices about her image.
Possibly. I doubt she’d be anywhere near as successful in her chosen profession. Female leads seem to be generally skinny.
If you believe that she has been influenced to become thin because of any other reason, it implies that she has yielded her power and become a victim.
That is difficult line to try and avoid crossing with a lot of thinking about groups who are in some way disadvantaged, yes. But while I think it’s insulting to say “oh you’re just a victim”, I also think it’s misguided to say everything’s peachy when it doesn’t seem to be.
While I suspect Keira Knightley probably is under pressure to maintain a certain level of conventional beauty, I’m not convinced she’s pressurised into unhealthy eating so much as I’m convinced images of her, displayed something for women to aspire to, is part of the general pressure women face which leads to the whole unhealthy-body-image/extreme-dieting/eating-disorder continuum.
Women in the western world do have power but should learn to use it the right way and not create an image of demented screaming wenches complaining about everything men or society say about women. We should learn to play ball using the same rules.
We might just have a fundamental disagreement here. I’m very much a gloomy feminist. All in favour of celebrating women’s power and autonomy when they’ve got it, but very very reluctant to think there’s – to stay with your metaphor – a level playing field all of a sudden.
[…] Following this news, I’d just like to point out that the photograph of Keira Knightley accompanying this PooterGeek post should have been captioned “Who ate all the pies?” […]
Could I just point out one thing which seems to be overlooked. Kelly Brook is incredibly stupid. She has no brains. Keira is articulate and intelligent. I am a young woman who would aspire to be more like the latter for that reason alone; who cares about her cup size her intelligence is sexy. Any man who would want to bang brain-dead Brook does not deserve to write his opinion on here.
[…] During our Keira-frenzy, I forgot to draw attention to the photoshoppery that accompanied one of her earlier “historical” movie romps. Check out her amazing inflating chest [safe for work]. […]
I was trying to look up the year Susie’s Orbach book was published and somehow your post came up – amazing in itself how 2 pics of celebs can provoke such an interesting, reasoned and substantial discussion.
I tend to agree with Geek on that, 30 or so years forward, it becomes clear that fat is, well, much less of a feminist issue in itself that it seemed to be, though, despite all efforts of our media, governments corporations to the contrary, it’s still more of a female issue than a male one. But it’s much more of a male issue than it used to be.
That suggests that the economic argument has A LOT of merit.
Why is it still more of a female issue? Probably because looks/attractivness as well as eating/feeding are more female issues, and, assuming at least some merit to evolutionary psychology, it’s biologicaly determined (althought not necessirily desirable or culturaly inevitable).