beauty

Skinny girls are liars.

 

The only way a woman past puberty can be thin
is via anorexia or bulimia or drugs. But do they admit this? They do
not. Instead, they lie. They say, “I don’t have an eating disorder”. Oh
puh-lease! They say, “I eat all the time!” Pah! They say “my mother is
skinny too, it’s genetics.” Give me a break! They say, “I try to put on
weight but I can’t.” Yeah, right!

And do we believe them? Hell no. We sneer and we snark and we roll our
eyes because they are liars, aren’t they? Aren’t they? Well, maybe they
aren’t. Maybe, just maybe, some women are naturally thin, in the same
way that some women, no matter how much they diet and exercise, are
naturally bigger.

So why do so many women feel so suspicious and hostile towards our
skinny sisters? Jealousy, perhaps. We envy their will power, their
ability to eat cake without fear or consequence, their fast metabolism
and their teeny tiny bottoms. Is that it?

I have a girlfriend who is very thin. She also has three kids. This rare combination means she’s constantly on the receiving end of veiled accusations disguised as faux concern. “I’m constantly being asked ‘do you ever eat?’ she sighs “even by people I’ve just met and the guy who makes my coffee. One of my friends is obese and can barely lift up her kids. I would never comment on her weight or say I was worried about her health and yet she feels perfectly comfortable introducing me to people as ‘my hungry friend’. She thinks it’s funny.”
My skinny friend (who is not in fact hungry) also has to deal with constantly being told, “you don’t look like you have three kids!” To this, she replies “No-one sent me the memo that you have to be a certain size to be a mother.”

There are very few people we’re allowed to be horrible about any more. This is a good thing. We’ve learnt (well, most of us have learnt) that it’s unacceptable to insult people based on their race, gender, height, age or size – not if they’re overweight, anyway.

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But somehow, skinny women fell through the cracks. Maybe because they’re so skinny, get it! Ha ha. See, there you go, that’s a perfect example of an insidious trend: Skinny Bashing. Can you imagine me making a joke about fat people? I never would. But skinny people get no such protection, no such social courtesy because…they’re skinny. It seems to be as simple as that.

I used to be a skinny basher. My intentions were good but I was still guilty. A decade ago, in an attempt to redress the appalling imbalance of female body shapes in magazines, I began to feature larger girls in fashion stories and run empowering features declaring that men preferred “real women with real curves” instead of “a bag of bones”. This was not very empowering to thin women, however. It was insulting. Demonising one body shape in favour of another or labelling one type of woman ‘real’ and another ‘fake’ doesn’t advance the cause of body acceptance, it just shifts the target of discrimination.

After being told this loudly by dozens of thin women who wrote me abusive letters, I quickly adjusted my message and my thinking.

Still, I continue to skim stories about skinny celebrities and their alleged eating disorders and drug use. And yes, sometimes, it’s true. Hello Amy Winehouse. G’day Kate Moss.

But is every skinny celebrity really smoking crack, snorting cocaine or bending over a toilet bowl to stay that way? We certainly make them work overtime to prove they’re not.

Overweight celebrities are never asked to justify their size or even questioned directly about it (until they lose weight) but skinny celebs are fair game. Skinny Bashing is sport.

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Challenged repeatedly about her skinniness, Ellen Pompeo revealed to Who magazine in 2006 that she’d increased her kilojoule intake and started weight training to gain kilos. If she could bulk up, she swore, “I would be the happiest girl in Hollywood”.

Sarah Jessica Parker has faced similar interrogation for years. The 43-year-old actress recently insisted to a journalist “I eat everything. I’m just an eater. If it’s free, I honestly eat everything.” She was then forced to detail what she’d had for dinner the previous evening. It was an impressive list. “Last night I had steak and some lamb shank. And I also had some roasted chicken and some cassoulet and some profiteroles and some ice-cream and some cheesecake.”

My first thought when I read this was “bulimia”. My second thought was “that’s not fair and how sad she has to try so hard to prove she’s naturally thin.”

When Kate Bosworth was asked about the Hollywood pressure to look good, she said “I feel like I have more pressure to be bigger – I get shit on all the time for being too small.”
After her four-year relationship with Orlando Bloom ended in 2006 and a family member died, she lost almost 6kg.

She spoke to US Vogue earlier this year about the ensuing accusations of an eating disorder and that she was a terrible role model for her fans. “I would have said, ‘don’t look at this as the standard of some kind of beauty and health.’” She insisted she was never trying to be a role model, she was just going through a stressful time and she lost weight.

I’d love to say I’m cured of my Skinny Bashing but sometimes, when I see a photo of Victoria Beckham I still accidentally growl, “Lord, she’s starving”. And maybe she is. But if so, surely that should inspire pity more than abuse. I’m working on it.