A refreshing role model for our times, or a lazy slob?

(This article may be triggering for ED sufferers)

The Daily Mail, always guaranteed to raise a feminist’s hackles, ran this article today. Entitled “A role model for ordinary women? No, Miss England finalist is fat, lazy and a poster girl for ill health” Monica Grenfell lambasts Chloe Marshall, the first size 16 Miss England finalist as

“an ambassador not for the beautiful larger lady as she’d have us believe but a poster girl for diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, cancers and all the other devastating and potentially fatal health problems that are caused or exacerbated by obesity”

As Sizenet points out, these health problems are only for the physically inactive. Chloe has said in earlier interviews (for the Daily Mail no less) that she exercises regularly and eats healthily. I’m not going to dispute the accuracy of Grenfell’s writing, Sizenet have already done that for me. What I am going to do is reveal what she represents and how poisonous she, and the beauty myth she represents, can be to women.

Grenfell’s book list on Amazon reads like an awful lot of women’s bookshelves. First on the list is her ‘Crash Diet : Lose 7 lbs in 7 days“. It’s rather interesting, then, that Grenfell recommends a ‘crash diet‘ when she seems to feel that Chloe’s insistences that size zero models (only a UK size four! Grenfell shrieks – that’s a practically gargantuan 30 inch bust, 23 inch waist and 32 inch hips!) starve themselves equates to her “telling the rest of us that being fat is great and that the only way to be a healthy weight is by starving yourself.” Evidently starving yourself so that you too can have super-fast weightloss that’ll all come back on as soon as you stop eating like an anorexic is fine if done under a nutritionamalist’s guidance, especially if you’ve bought their book and financed their country home. But wait! Once you’ve starved those 7lbs off you can’t stop there! What about your Bust Arms and Back? You’d better firm those up. But you can’t stop there! What about your bottom? Your stomach? You can never, must never stop perfecting and toning and starving your body until you too can look like a Miss England finalist. After all, as a former judge of this competition that teaches women to value themselves by the most ridiculously arbitrary standards, Grenfell obviously sees these women as the pinnacle of what we all should be. Oh look, she does!

“When I was a Miss England judge I was struck by how elegant, charming and yes, fit, the girls were. None of them was underweight.”

Evidently anyone who is over a BMI of 17 cannot be elegant, fit or charming, these are personality attributes you can only have if you have the body fat percentage of a clothes hanger. On the subject of BMI, Grenfell seems to think that it “indicat[es] her levels of fat”. Wow, for one of them scienterrific nutritionamalists she sure doesn’t know her job. BMI is your Body Mass Index. It does not, indeed cannot, measure your levels of fat. It compares your weight to your height and puts you in various categories. For the record I run 5 times a week, am a healthy vegan, have recently run a half marathon (I’m not fit though, as Grenfell helpfully points out above) and I fit neatly into the ‘overweight’ category of BMI (as do many other healthy, normal people) Muscle weighs more than fat so if you are even remotely active in an organised way it will skew your BMI. There are lots of issues with BMI, not least the way it is used to bash women over the head by body fascists such as Grenfell.

But back to Grenfell, the charming insiduous snake that she is. Possbily her two most interesting titles are “The Revenge Diet – Make Him Sorry He Dumped You! Lose 15lbs In A Month!” and “The Beat Your Body Chaos Diet“. The first book’s title presumes that your boyfriend dumped you because you were fat. It had nothing to do with whether the relationship worked or any other normal reason that people split up with each other, no, it was your fat disgusting body and frankly it was a miracle he even looked at you in the first place. So get revenge! Lose weight on yet another crash diet! (leading to yo-yo body weight, a binge/purge mentality, low self esteem, illness, malnutrition, and eating disorder-like behaviour around food) learn to hate yourself and punish your all-too-deserving body by withholding food and scrutinising every inch of your physique! ‘Beat’ your body! Not with a stick (that’s Grenfell’s job and besides, it’d leave unsightly marks) but with your inner self hatred! Beat your body into submission! Even if you’re 6′4 and naturally curvy and muscled with enough beating you will shrink to a UK size four!

To Grenfell the only thing that matters about a woman is her weight. This is all she is judged on (and Grenfell has deigned herself a worthy judge, after all she’s judged Miss England, and with the ability to coldy value somebody on their looks alone why is this woman not sitting in on rape cases?) and if she improves it enough she will be worthy. Worthy of men, worthy of ‘charm and grace’ and worthy to walk the streets as a role model to the young women of today proving that if you just lose weight you’ll finally be good enough.

Grenfell voices what images tell us every day. You are just not good enough unless you are in a constant battle with your body to lose weight, tone up and slim down. To Grenfell we should all be gutless. Preferably with empty, concave bellies being ‘charming’ and ‘graceful’, living on 1000 calories a day, caught in an eating disorder and dying inside. God forbid we should let a woman like Marshall into the public eye to show that beautiful doesn’t have to mean anorexic, to show young women that healthy is beautiful, whatever your size.

Maybe you should contact her and tell her what you think.

Gutless

So I’m reading Shapely Prose and other body positive blogs the other day and listening to Hole on Winamp. Just as I was digesting ‘The Fantasy Of Being Thin‘ and the FWord’s ‘French women don’t get fat‘ the song ‘Gutless’ came on, and the combination of what I had read and ponderings upon the adjective ‘gutless’ all segued together.

gut·less /ˈgʌtlɪs/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[guht-lis]

–adjective Informal.

lacking courage, fortitude or determination

[Origin: 1600–10 for literal sense; gut + -less]

So if gutless, literally minus a gut, means you lack ‘courage, fortitude and determination’, what does the gut signify? Courage, strength, moxie, (and, for lack of a gender neutral term) “balls”. In the sense of the adjective ‘gutless’ possessing guts, and something to put them in – a belly, is positive, admirable, desired. But of course, and rather conveniently, this does not extend into how women are ’supposed’ to look. Size zero celebrities, diet books, celebrity fad diets*…all tell us that what we should strive for, the image of perfection, is a flat, toned stomach. (*Note that this Daily Mail link to Beyonce’s ‘maple syrup diet’ describes her pre-crash diet size as ‘heavier’, simultaneously telling us that while the diet is risky and dangerous ultimately it is worth this risk as we all want to be lighter, slimmer, trimmer…better.)

Perfection is gutlessness. Women should work to ‘lose that gut’ – diet, exercise, detox, have dangerous elective surgery…the perfect woman is gutless. Furthermore if a woman dares to dress in anything other than a black sack when she is not perfectly gutless, she is publicly decried as fat and awful.

Women are encouraged to starve themselves on fad diets, to deprive themselves of food, to be hungry all the time. On top of this they chase an ever-shrinking image of perfection, desperately trying to reduce themselves, to become the incredible shrinking woman. And when they achieve this goal? They are starving, unwell, frail and tired. They are gutless, literally and metaphorically.

And this is just how patriarchy, and the fashion/cosmetic/diet industry, wants them. If women hate themselves they spend more money, they believe the ridiculous claims of cosmetics companies, they buy diet books and dieting foods, they constantly chase a model of ‘perfection’ defined by the very industries that profit from their self-hatred. They become obsessed over food, not equal pay; a flat stomach not the glass ceiling; pores, not politics; losing weight not raising rape convictions…They become gutless, disinterested in politics and equal rights and the very model of a quiet, well-behaved female citizen that does not challenge the status quo and is too hungry, weak and obssessive about whether her bum looks big to be any sort of a threat to patriarchy. Gutless is good, if you think where we are now is enough.

But it’s not. Women are still served up shit every day and told that it’s ice cream. We are not equal, and we never will be if the majority of the female population cares more about being slim than being equal. Screw gutless. Eat. Eat food that nourishes and strengthens you, love your body for what it is and for what it enables you to do. Stop dieting. Love your belly. Get a gut. Get ‘courage, fortitude and determination’. Get equal.

Go to Amazon/your local library/a feminist friend’s well-stocked library and read ‘Fat Is A Feminist Issue‘. Then read ‘The Beauty Myth‘. Love yourself, love your guts whether they hang out or don’t and focus on the important stuff, not your size.