The television series "Fat Actress" is like a yo-yo diet. Kirstie Alley looks blissful in the credits, boogieing with an abandon that covers entire ZIP Codes -- but what about those Jenny Craig ads that reassure us about how much weight she's losing? A fat actress isn't really happy, it seems, unless she's headed for thin.
Everywhere we look, we see the contradictions of a culture obsessed with women and weight: Big is beautiful, as long as it's not too big; you can't be too rich or too thin, but please, honey, don't be anorexic. Emphatically skinny is still in, but fat has achieved a certain political correctness; it's been redefined as a healthy rejection of the undernourished look. Kirstie Alley boogieing on the one hand, and Mary-Kate Olsen, a scrawny waif whose thrift store chic is now being hailed as the new hip style, on the other. Talk about the great divide.
When it comes to our daughters, the extremes beget a lot of hysterical hand-wringing -- you'd think that teen girls, as a group, were always eating too much or too little. And yet the truth is that only about 3% of teen girls have diagnosable eating disorders, although 15% have a "disordered" attitude about food. Statistics say between 15% and 30% of adolescent girls are overweight, depending on the study -- but that's part of a national trend from womb to tomb, not something that distinguishes our daughters from the rest of the population.
In fact, girls' biggest physical problem may be whiplash from the polarized messages they get about how, exactly, they are supposed to look. While we've been feeding them a diet of big mommas and Stepford girls, a growing segment of the target audience has decided it's fed up.
"Don't make all the girls blond and skinny because some of us don't picture that type of person as the ideal," one 10-year-old said in a recent panel discussion about girls in movies. They're just as irate about "makeover" stories, not just the literal nip-and-tuck shows, but the endless number of ugly duckling transformation plots that hinge on a girl having to achieve Hollywood-style beauty to be happy. "Give us ... less of the absolutely gorgeous-looking people," a 13-year-old said.
And girls aren't just starting to complain, they're starting to organize. In 2000, the editorial board (ages 8 to 14) of a girls' publication, New Moon, decided to counter People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People" issue. That turned into a campaign called Turn Beauty Inside Out, which this week comes to L.A. in the form of a girls' leadership conference aimed at the entertainment industry.
