Crossposted from Tumblr with minor edits

[obstinatecondolement]

Content warning for body image talk and discussion of how media representations influence self image for people who are underrepresented in that media or who are unlikely to see people who look like them depicted positively or at all.


It’s so weird that the images we’re shown, over and over, most often are of people who represent a very tiny minority of the population in terms of the bodies they have (let’s say approximately 99th percentile for height, 1st percentile for body fat percentage, almost exclusively white people, people of color are disproportionately light skinned, almost exclusively people without visible disabilities, disproportionate representation of people who do not wear glasses, disproportionate representation of people who do not have male pattern baldness... and even then it is their Literal Job to maintain a diet and exercise regime that no one who was not being paid to do it and who didn’t have a team helping them could maintain and then on top of that have frequent botox and other cosmetic procedures of a quality that is not going to ever be available to the vast majority of people so that they Age Gracefully) and then, quite naturally, people who grow up surrounded by those images end up thinking that their own bodies are not normal, because they never see anyone who looks like them represented as beautiful or desireable, if at all.

Like… I was just thinking the other day that I don’t think I have ever seen an image of a person with an outie belly button except in a few celebrity maternity photoshoots. Otherwise, I have only ever seen them in real life. And (based on a cursory Google) around 10% of people have navels that stick out instead of in. That is more than five times the number of natural redheads that exist worldwide, but Hollywood is too fucking craven and cowardly to show me a slightly different kind of body to the one that it considers ideal.

Literally every kind of body is a normal body and every kind of body is weird (and wonderful), but you wouldn’t know that from the movies, where wearing glasses is a character design choice and not something 64% of the adult population of the world does and if a scene includes two people whose heights are very different that that’s supposed to be the point somehow and usually it’s supposed to be a joke about how one, or more, of these characters’ bodies are not normal.

And like… let’s expand that a little. How much worse is this alienation when you are not white? When you have a visible disability? When you are visibly trans or intersex or otherwise have secondary sexual traits that are not considered the norm for people of your gender? When you are elderly? When you are fat? When you have scars?

I’m obviously not breaking any new ground here, but sometimes it strikes me just how deeply ironic it is to hear people talk about how movies are obsessed with gritty realism these days, when every mainstream Hollywood movie seemingly takes place in world where 99% of human variation doesn’t exist.

Comments

[flamingsword]

WORD.

[sixbeforelunch]

It's definitely a problem. The media has given us a deeply skewed idea of what the average person looks like, and it really messes people up.

[rigormorphis]

Ooh, this is a good post. I've been thinking about the issue of what kinds of people are considered "regular looking" a lot for the last while, literally just from my own perspective living in my city (the tl;dr is that I'm fat, visibly trans and visibly disabled, and it's interesting to note how different parts of me become hypervisible in different contexts) and your point about Hollywood's supposed gritty realism is such a good one.

My brain is also trying to offer up some thought about how Hollywood including any body type that doesn't fit into that (very narrow, statistically rare, barely attainable) standard is treated as a political statement in and of itself, but I can't quite make a coherent point out of it. Instead I'll just say: making the very presence of some bodies inherently political also sucks!

[brokenmnemonic]

I've learned to treat my memory as vague and unreliable territory, but IIRC I read an interview years ago when Buffy was airing, where SMG was asked about her diet and fitness regime (because obviously, every female actor has to be asked about their weight and diet habits) and she commented that it toook a lot of effort to stay in shape for the show, both from her and from her chef, dietician and exercise coach.

One of the reasons I like Vera and like Dalziel and Pascoe as tv shows were because they actually had overweight people in the roles of effective, successful detectives. As far as Hollywood's concerned, for my entire life people who look anything like as far as me have either been comic relief at best or degenerate villains at worst.