By ROSIE WATERLAND
Apparently Lena Dunham is fat.
Lena Dunham, the lead actress in hit US TV series Girls, seems to have become some sort of poster-girl for fatties because of her shocking decision to be on television and not look like a model at the same time.
She has a normal body (as in, one you’d see walking down the street, not down the runway), and in TV, anything less than model-thin is considered obese.
Therefore, according to many critics, fans and those who just feel the need to comment, she has become ‘a hero to fat people’.
But she’s not my hero. She’s not my poster-girl. There is no universe in which Lena Dunham should be considered a ‘hero’ for fat people. Because Lena Dunham is not fucking fat. Not even close.
She is my hero in so many other ways. She’s smart, hilarious and talented. She’s achieved the career of my dreams and at 26, she’s less than a month older than me. Girl’s got skill.
But every time I hear her referred to as some sort of ‘champion for big girls’, my heart sinks a little. Because if she’s considered fat – the absolute exception to the rule when it comes to someone being allowed on a TV show that doesn’t have obesity as the running ‘we’re acknowledging the literal elephant in the room’ gag (Mike and Molly, Drop Dead Diva, Fat Actress…) – then we have a pretty messed up perspective of what being ‘fat’ actually means.
Does she look like what 99% of other actresses in the entertainment industry look like? No. She has a healthy body that hasn’t been dieted and toned like her life depends on it. She has flesh that doesn’t display her ribs like they’re some kind of trophy. I completely appreciate how out of place that makes her on television and I think that means we need many more like her.
But fat? No way.
If you want to know what fat actually looks like, it’s me. I’m fat. I am 75kgs overweight. That probably makes me (at least) double the size of the woman I’m supposed to be admiring as someone who has become successful in television ‘in spite of her size’. And let me tell you: that is really depressing.
I’ve written about how I got to this size and how it affects my life so I won’t go into that here. I am an obese 26-year-old woman; that is my reality at this moment in time.
And as a person who is dealing with the shame, discrimination and feelings of absolute worthlessness that come from actually being obese in a beauty-obsessed society, when I hear people call Lena Dunham fat (even the actress herself jokes about it), I want to scream.
Because being bigger than a supermodel is not the same thing as being fat. Your thighs not being the same width all the way up is not the same thing as being fat. Having love handles is not the same thing as being fat.
To use the word ‘fat’ like it means the same thing as the words ‘not skinny’ is an incredibly dangerous game to play. BECAUSE NOT BEING SKINNY IS NOT THE SAME THING AS BEING FAT.
Not that long ago, when I was a much smaller size, I would have never understood that concept. I was one of the people who thought you were either fat or you were slim. I remember when I first started gaining weight and I hit 80 kilos, I was devastated. I thought I was disgusting. I wouldn’t wear sleeveless tops. I wouldn’t go to the beach. I wouldn’t even let my boyfriend look at my naked body.
That sounds so ridiculous to me now, because actually being fat gives you a realistic perspective. At my current 135kgs, I get so furious at myself for having wasted so much of my time being paranoid about my weight when I was a perfectly normal size.
At this stage, I’d be happy just to be back in double digits; and if I ever got back to 80kgs – a weight where I was once desperately unhappy – I’d be jumping for freakin’ joy.
Because it takes actually getting fat to realise that there are countless beautiful body shapes in between fat and skinny.
Not being one doesn’t automatically make you the other. But the way people talk about Lena Dunham, it can seem like being one or the other is the only option. She’s not skinny; therefore she’s fat. And it’s that kind of attitude that made Howard Stern refer to seeing Dunham’s naked body as so offensive, he felt like he was being raped. It’s that kind of attitude that makes girls and women with perfectly normal, healthy bodies consider themselves totally unacceptable and worse, unlovable.
So I have a suggestion. And this is coming from someone who’s been on both sides: who felt crappy when she was a healthy weight, and then had the very confronting realisation of what really being fat actually feels like (hint: I cry a lot). Here it is:
Forget Lena Dunham. Use me as your fat poster-girl, because I’m an example of someone who is actually fat. I’m an example of someone who isn’t just ‘not skinny’ but is actually, literally, morbidly obese.
Every time you feel crappy about yourself, like maybe you should lose a few, imagine your head on my 135kg frame. Hopefully then you’ll look in the mirror and be happy (or at the very least, happier) with what you’ve got.
Do I want to be the poster-girl for fat women? Not really. But I have a ten-year-old niece who is already telling me that her friends skip lunch to lose weight. And in a world where a female’s worth seems almost exclusively reliant on her beauty, and her beauty seems almost exclusively reliant on her size, no wonder they’re confused.
I just hope that if people can picture me as an accurate example of someone who is fat, maybe they’ll start looking at Lena Dunham as an accurate example of someone who is not.
Let her be the poster-girl for wunderkind comedy writers who don’t give two shits about their thighs in a mini-skirt. Let her be the poster-girl for females who don’t think they have a place in television unless they look like… every other female on television.
But please, PLEASE, for the sake of warped body-perceptions of women everywhere, don’t let her be the poster-girl for being fat. Because Lena Dunham IS. NOT. FAT.
Rant over.
Have a look at our gallery of fantastic Lena Dunham photos below:
Have you watched Girls? What do you think of the public’s perception of Lena Dunham’s body?
Top Comments
She really is fat. And not funny.
Telling people that being fat makes them worthless and that the only way to gain worth is to lose weight and then telling them exactly how to do it despite the fact that people have different body types and genetics and predispositions and etc and then having said person realize how hard it is to lose weight and maintain it (nearly impossible for large sums of weight loss) and become discouraged and have no self esteem to fall back on because that self esteem now relies upon appearance...you can't take care of yourself if you don't love yourself, and you can't love yourself if you've been socialized to place all worth on appearance and your appearance does not match what society advertises as beautiful and "healthy." I don't think most people aspire to be fat, but the reason that is even a concern is because for women in this society, somehow being a role model is all about looks (funny how the media shapes our everyday thoughts). In the future, I hope that fat women, thin women, women in between, women of color, disabled women, women of all religious backgrounds and nationalities, lesbians, trans women, queer women, short, tall, etc, ALL sorts of women can be role models, and they can all be beautiful but they do not have to be, and when that time comes I hope that finally people realize that a woman can be a role model and no one has to want to look like her to want to be like her. I hope in the future girls and women look up to an ugly fat woman because she is confident and intelligent and has a powerful career, or a disabled woman who shares how she loves her life, etc--I don't think people will ever choose to be disabled, but many people can be inspired by the lives of disabled people and truly admire them and look up to them, why can't we do that with fat people? At present, it's because fat people only amount to how they look in society right now...so admiring a fat woman somehow amounts to wanting to be fat yourself (which is not shameful anyway, people can choose to have whatever body pleases them for their own life). Get mad at the food industry for poisoning our food supply or get mad at the media for giving most people a body image complex and disordered eating. People are fat for a variety of reasons, but most people do not choose to be fat, not because it is gross or bad, but because no one would choose to be discriminated against and dehumanized. Funny enough, shaming people doesn't make them thinner, if it did, everyone would be thin; I think it tends to do the opposite. Blame the dieting industry for creating these things which ruin metabolisms and self esteems everywhere, blame magazines for only representing a certain type of woman, blame movies for showing men of all sorts of body types having romantic or sexual relations with women of just one body type. If you are very vehemently against a group of people, whether it be an ethnicity or religious group or a body type, chances are you are speaking through the medium of brainwashing via socialization and not a voice of "reason" or "intelligence" and certainly not a voice of "compassion." I challenge you all to try to be compassionate, it's not so easy, but I think it's even more worthwhile than attempting to "perfect" the body you have.