Weight and Female Celebrities

Alessandra Stanley has a fascinating article in the Times this weekend about the intersection of celebrity and weight in America -- and I don't necessarily mean that in a good way. There are right now a bunch of non-thin women on the celebrity B-list, from Lady Gaga ("gaining weight, it turns out, is the most outrageous stunt Lady Gaga has pulled to date") to Christina Hendricks (above). Several female comedians have made acceptance of their weight part of their routines. All good.

And yet this seems to be just another excuse to talk obsessively about weight, our own and other people's. I just searched for the Christina Hendricks picture above, and the links that came up seemed to be mostly about her weight, hardly anything about whether she is good actress or a even good person (or anything trivial like that). You're either thin or you're not, and how you achieve this and feel about it seems to be the most important thing about you.

Should you be in between, i.e., normal, you can have issues about that, too. Actress Mindy Kaling:

Since I am not model-skinny, but also not superfat and fabulously owning my hugeness, I fall into that nebulous ‘Normal American Woman Size’ that legions of fashion stylists detest. For the record, I’m a Size 8 (this week, anyway). Many stylists hate that size because, I think, to them, I lack the self-discipline to be an aesthetic, or the sassy confidence to be a total fatty hedonist. They’re like ‘Pick a lane.’

I think that in 500 years our obsession with weight will seem as weird to people as, say, Byzantine riots over different interpretations of the Trinity seem to us.