Britney and the “f” word

If you visited CNN’s website last week you would have found the headline “Britney’s Fat Fight” nestled between a story about the “Foot and Mouth Threat” in the UK and the “Quake Rattle” in Sumatra. Such is the importance of a little bit of lard hanging off the pop tart’s naval region that it deserved such prominence. Sounds absurd to me.

But after popping out two kids, going through a toxic divorce and having a nervous breakdown that left her without hair on her head or her nether regions, it made me wonder: if Britney is indeed “fat”, what’s that saying about the rest of us?

True, maybe she shouldn’t have pranced on stage in nothing but a sparkly push-up bra and barely-there panties when she supposedly had sniffed an entire bowl of French fries and swigged a couple of margaritas. But in normal circumstances without the lights, stage, back-up dancers and an audience of 7.2 million people, would our reaction have been any different?

The men I’ve posed the question to say that it would. If she were a regular Jane walking on the beach with two kids under five in tow, she’d have been rated a whopping nine out of 10 on the Sheila-scale, with some even labelling her a bona fide yummy mummy.

The women I polled expressed similar sentiments, with one saying she’d give up her right arm for a post-baby bod that looked so darn good – no cottage-cheese thighs in sight.

With the recent talk and criticism of skinny actresses, stick-thin models and a just-given-birth Angelina Jolie with insect-like arms, it seems when it comes to the media’s assault on women, we just can’t win …

On the same day as Britney’s fat debacle, a story on ex-porn star Jenna Jameson ricocheted through cyberspace, with media outlets tut-tutting over her appearance at New York Fashion Week. She appeared in a cleavage-enhancing tartan mini-dress looking an apparent shadow of her former self.

No wonder we’re all so confused.

I admit she does look alarmingly thin, yet having recently read her autobiography, How To Make Love Like A Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale, and then her MySpace blog where she talks of her nasty divorce that’s been weighing heavily on her, her drastic weight loss appears a little more understandable.

“I worked extremely hard for years to secure my success,” she writes, “and I have been forced to fight for everything I busted my ass for. This has definitely affected my weight. It really hurts that my fans and everyone else have taken it upon themselves to be so horrible, screaming eat a burger! Or we want the old Jenna back! I’m sure everyone out there has gone through tough times, and this is when I need support. I wish I could enlighten everyone with what is exactly going on in my divorce and business, but I can’t because of legal proceedings.”

According to Naomi Wolf, the added pressure on modern women can be blamed on the rise of feminism. In her zeitgeist-defining tome The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, published in 1990, Wolf talks of how feminism was meant to bring us more freedom than ever before with more legal and reproductive rights, education and affluence. But instead it backfired.

Women today feel more trapped by societal pressures than ever before with the rise in eating disorders and cosmetic surgery, with a whopping 30,000 women telling American researchers they’d rather lose 10 to 15 pounds than achieve any other goal.

The result? “A secret ‘underlife’ poisoning [women's] freedom,” writes Wolf. “It is a dark vein of self-hated, physical obsessions, terror of ageing, and dread of lost control.”

A decade on, her hypothesis sounds even more relevant.

Yet the findings of a recent poll by More magazine may come as a surprise. The survey found that men “can’t handle beautiful women”. In other words few men would want to get naked with a woman that had the “perfect body”, with a sobering 88 per cent reasoning there’d be way too much pressure on them to bed such a creature.

On the skinny side of things, men weren’t too turned on by Angelina’s new bony look either, with a measly 6 per cent saying that skinny women are desirable.

The majority of blokes preferred a woman with wobbly bits as opposed to 12 per cent of gents who liked a woman dedicated to diet and exercise.

Yet despite most women acknowledging the fact that too skinny is out and body confidence is in, the study found women still continue to think of their body shape every 12 minutes while 80 per cent admitted their lives would improve if they were happier with their body.

While walking down the street in my daggy gym gear feeling somewhat self conscious about my less-than-taut bits, I actually found some solace in the fact that the poll stated men don’t actually mind a little bit of blubber.

But when I overheard a bunch of women laughing at the latest Britney-in-underwear-on-stage pic in a gossip magazine, all the self consciousness came flooding back.

by Samantha Brett

View Source