Now that politics is dead, I suppose it is no good saying that fat is still a feminist issue. But at this time of year particularly, when our resolutions waver but the flab remains, it seems to be the only issue.
The hot news last week was that Kate Winslet, appointed representative and self-styled champion of the resolutely unskinny, has renounced embonpoint: “I’d like to get a bit of the weight off,” she was reported as saying, “or I won’t work.” But, she said, with an ambivalence many of us might recognise: “I despise myself for it and feel I’m letting a lot of people down.”
And a lot of people, notably those who usually fill the tabloid press with cruel remarks about every star’s candidly captured quivering extra inch, have been keen to say how let down they do feel. How will droves of teenage girls, with their role model now deserting them, not lurch into a life of eating disorders? How terrible! How irresponsible! Surely she had a duty to be normal for us.
The fact that she probably rightly feels she won’t get good acting roles unless she loses weight might have something to do with the fact that much as we say we admire those who refuse to be thin, we have a remarkable intolerance for those who dare to be fat.
But Winslet isn’t fat she just isn’t ridiculously thin. Forget all that rubbish about the camera putting on pounds it’s our perceptions that distort. Despite the fact that the average woman in the United Kingdom is a size 16, any female in the public arena who is over a size 12, sometimes who is only a size 12, is either ludicrously applauded or pulled apart for every inch that takes her over a size eight.
You might remember some years back, at the advent of Kate Moss and the superwaif look, how suddenly Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Linda Evangelista et al were held up as symbols of real womanhood, models who had figures and proper shape. Well, I suppose in all things there are degrees, but didn’t people realise how thin those girls were? I think we can safely say that something is wrong when a woman of 1,8m who weighs about 51kg is considered normal. I know that when I’m (for me) thin, I’m described as voluptuous and when I’m actually voluptuous, well, there’s no polite term for it.
Even if we don’t like to think of fat as a feminist issue any more, which to some extent it has to be, we certainly consider it a moral issue, which it decidedly should not be. When a woman hates her weight, she feels she is somehow morally failing; when she decides to do something about it, likewise.
Winslet’s ambivalence is shared by many women. Rationally, one abhors the skinny dictatorship with its concomitant tortures; emotionally, one yearns to be, in this regard, a member of the power elite. The urge to ally yourself with the forces of oppression is sickeningly seductive. That, to the outsider, the torture seems self-inflicted helps no one. No intelligent woman seriously thinks she will be better if she’s thinner; few, however, can honestly deny they feel worse if they’re not.
The pitiful truth is that most of us do feel better for losing weight. The sad thing is this is equally true of those who don’t need to lose any in the first place. Body dysmorphobia has become the significant feature of being female. And here the feminist perspective is a vexed one, for this is so pointedly a tyranny of the sisterhood. It’s not men that women diet for, but the unforgiving gaze of other women.
We like to think these days that women are more in tune with their bodies and their selves, but in fact men appear to have a much less squeamish attitude to flesh than do we. I am not allying myself to those who feel that there is any merit in being overweight. If self-destructive dieting is a bad thing, it does not mean that self-sabotage through overeating is good. But there is a relationship between the two. What we find so hard to be is normal; we have lost much sense of what that might actually mean.
All cultures have their aesthetic ideals and what is considered most desirable has, in some sense, to rest in what’s most rare and hardest to attain. So it makes sense that, in a time of affluence, when food is plentiful, we should prize thinness rather than congratulate those for their all-too-easily achievable flesh.
But if it were no more than that, it would be fine. It’s the self-hatred that goes with it, insofar as women (and increasingly men, too) are concerned, that is so pernicious. To hear women talk about their bodies and if you’re a woman, you hear that a lot is a painful thing. It doesn’t surprise me that Winslet should hate herself for being overweight, or feeling herself to be, or that she hates herself, too, for wanting not to be. There seems to be no way of running away from this particular masochistic circus.
But if I said that we do feel better for being thinner, perhaps I should also say that at least if there is a possibility of finding temporary happiness, or at least relief, through losing weight, then there is some gain. The truth is that if women fear other women’s disapproval, they we also shrink from their envy.
There is no point in poor Winslet’s holding on to her extra pounds in the hope that we will like her for it. And if the only thing that holds her back is the fear that we’ll think she’s let us down, well, let time- honoured customs prevail ditch the self-hatred, but diet and be damned.