Julie Burchill: FIRST PERSON
In the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, Louis B Mayer, head of MGM (More Stars Than There Are in the Heavens), kept a very strange chart on his wall. The chart kept a record of the menstrual cycles of the studio’s leading ladies: Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Grace Kelly.
By consulting it, directors and camera crews knew when their precious cargo might be feeling a mite tearful and would ruin her make-up if spoken to sharply, or when her skin might not be in the best condition for a big close- up. It seems rather pervy to us, but to judge from the way women looked in the films of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties, it certainly worked.
In my most paranoid moments, I imagine that the editor of theBritish tabloid Daily Mail has on his office wall a huge chart, exhaustively detailing the weight gains and losses of every woman in the public eye, from Jennifer Aniston to Catherine Zeta Jones.
A wanton kilogram gained over a two- week holiday and the fearless tabloid camera crew will be there, aiming their zoom lenses at Baby Spice’s thighs and coming away crowing that, yes, at 23 she may be worth her age in millions, but she’s got cellulite! That’s that uppity little bitch sorted, then! Mission accomplished, the men can sleep soundly, until it’s time once more to drag themselves from their pit and look into the shaving mirror at a face surely only a blind mother could love.
What does it do for a girl, if she has the world at her feet and her head in The Face, but the bespectacled little bald man who does the night shift doesn’t fancy her? Starving herself might seem the safest bet.
But wait! Here’s Calista “Ally McBeal” Flockhart, in a sleeveless dress at the Emmy awards ceremony, looking like something the cat dragged in after gnawing the flesh off it. Flockhart is now so thin that her face has that heartbreaking imploding look usually associated with cancer and concentration camps – and anorexia. And far from approving, the Daily Mail, with a straight face, mutters of “fears … an eating disorder … like a wraith … intense speculation … bulimia … anorexia … excessively thin”. Excessively thin. This from the newspaper that only a year ago was pillorying Emma Bunton aka Baby Spice about her alleged bulk. And Kim Wilde. And me. And as for poor Geri Halliwell, forget it. This most luscious, lovely young women has spent her career attracting insults.
Poor Flockhart, too. In a grotesque example of life imitating art, her desire for approval led her to believe that the less space she took up, the more she looked like daddy’s little girl, the more public admiration would mount. Unfortunately she seems to have taken it a kilo too far and will now be as deafened by the chorus of disapproval as if she’d put on so much weight that her thighs went to bed 10 minutes before she did.
The media, particularly the frigid, joyless, gynophobic mid-market tabloids, feel very uncomfortable when a famous woman becomes too thin. She is their monster, after all, the logical conclusion of believing that you are only of value if you can still get into your school uniform – junior school, at that.
Anorexic women blow the whistle on the idea that to be thin is automatically to be attractive – as if we needed more proof. The Daily Mail seems obsessed with the weight of the incomparable Kate Winslet – just voted sexiest film star in the world by the red-blooded, mostly male young readers of the film magazine, Empire.
“To let oneself go” means to neglect one’s looks and to enjoy oneself big time; very appropriate. It is easy to come to the conclusion that an abiding fear of women’s capacity for pleasure is at the bottom of the obsession of what can only be called the Fat Police.
The fear that women are becoming “out of control” is an old one and many lifestyle choices have been demonised because of it: smoking, drinking, contraception, single parenthood.
Female promiscuity is the mother of them all, but no one really wants to criticise women for having sex before marriage any more; 4% of brides are virgins. Besides, men don’t want to have to go back to paying for it all the time – a certain amount of female promiscuity suits them fine.
But the need to control women, to make it clear to them that they are simply not allowed to do as they wish with their own bodies without facing a barrage of name-calling and public ridicule, has come out in the media’s attitude to the female body.
It is no coincidence that a skinny woman became the ideal for the first time in the 1960s, at a time when women started complaining about their lot in unprecedented numbers, and that what is considered the ideal drops a dress size each decade as women take up more space in public life.
OK, you can have your fancy management job, society seems to be saying, but make sure you take up as little room as possible. The more successful the woman, the thinner we expect her to be.
Working hard at staying thin is the way the female public figure says: look at me, I may be rich and famous, but underneath we’re all lovable, just like the bra advert, and we all need your (male) approval to feel good about ourselves. Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful, because I’ve really, really suffered to get this way.
But it is the paradox of the paper dolls that in seeking approval, their sex appeal dwindles away with their flesh, while the big girls are currently the cream of the crop.
Many things can be sexy, many shapes and many sizes, but neediness – whether for a square meal or the approval of the popular press – never has been and never will be.