Fat Actresses?

I first started thinking about this topic when I saw a magazine cover with a very cute Jennifer Love Hewitt in a black bikini declaring, "I'm not fat!" A little investigation online revealed these photos of Ms. Hewitt on a beach in Hawaii. Yep, those camera angles are pretty unflattering without airbrushing. But fat? No, she's not fat. She's probably pretty average for a woman her age. I think she looks pretty good in that bikini. Some of that is the advantage of age. I'm old enough now to appreciate just how cute most young women are. It really is a shame that youth is wasted on the young and judgmental.

One blog posted a picture of Hewitt from a Hanes underwear ad and commented on what a difference a few years makes. I'll bet you anything that the difference isn't the years but Photoshop and airbrushing. Even Cindy Crawford gets the full Photoshop treatment to smooth out wrinkles and shave inches off her thighs. There is hardly an image in a magazine or an ad today that isn't thoroughly altered to create an unbelievably perfect image of the subject. I once blogged about a time lapse video of a Dove ad that showed the process in minutes.

What drove me over the edge and finally caused me to post this was a review of 27 Dresses, which contained this line "They’re no Hepburn and Tracy, but Heigl—her quivering double chin a welcome sight in a profession of dangerously low BMI—and Marsden skillfully find the believable traits in their characters and turn them into some semblance of adults." "Quivering double chin"? MEOW! HISS! That's got to be one of the cattiest comments in movie review history. I spent the entire movie wondering how anyone could ever suggest that a very attractive woman with a totally flat stomach, a 12 inch waste, and no fat could possibly have double chins and anything but a low BMI. (Well, maybe she has some fat, but it is all in the right places.)

Okay, maybe these actors and actresses bring some of this on themselves by helping to promote an unrealistic image of themselves. I'll bet they're not complaining when the director strives for just the right camera angles or the advertisers break out the Photoshop to improve their pictures. But the rest of us don't have to contribute to this unrealistic image of what people really look like.

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