The Perfect 10?
8 June 2005 @ 10:31
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There was once a book which claimed that fat is a feminist issue… Poor old Kelly Osbourne is back in rehab. OK, so they are spoilt little rich kids to some extent, but Kelly O has been quoted saying she has found the panning of her album and constant jibes about her body and image hard to take. You can see why. Kelly is the average size of a woman in the UK (and we all know we are second to the States when it comes to ‘obesity’), a size 16. She does insist on dressing fashionably and in rather odd garments, which do not make her look her best, but even so, she is a normal looking woman in a world of stick-insects. Osbourne’s body image cannot have been helped by her own mother’s transition from normal to scrapped and skinny via the surgeon’s knife, but in many ways she has taken over the mantel - from the now also scraped and skinny Kate Winslet - of the “normal woman in Hollywood” (if that is not a contradiction in terms!). Quite so. Dieting all the time would make you blooming miserable, wouldn’t it?! Last night I watched a rather light weight programme about feminism presented by the only ‘feminist’ whose name isn’t treated like a swear word these days, Germaine Greer. It struck me that after the pill became available in the 1960s, male society still needed to impose some power on the female society - no longer could they use the fear of instant babies - so they imposed the ‘beauty myth’ (as Naomi Wolf called it). Women can now work like men (for less paid, admittedly), have sex like men, choose when to reproduce, but they have to be thin and well dressed whilst they do it. No wonder we are driven on to pills and under the f**king knife! |
