I never buy People. I never even leaf through it at the doctor’s office; I’d rather read a four-month-old issue of Parenting. Even an unapologetic pop-cultivore like me has to draw the line somewhere, and I like a trashy celebrity exposÈ as much as the next girl, but People‘s so-called exposÈs never really expose anything, except, of course, for the peppy unctuousness and terminal lack of writing flair of the staff. I won’t even mention the fact that I auditioned for a job there and got turned down. In the end, my dummy article probably deserved to get rejected – I made the mistake of using complete sentences, sentences which contained words longer than two syllables, and the finished product lacked that crucial mundane vapidity that defines People. Still, I went to the trouble of writing up a piece on Traci Lords, and it nearly killed me, and I could have done without the executive editor greeting it with the approximate enthusiasm of a man who has just had an umbrella unfurled in his ass. Anyhow. People is like Kathie Lee Gifford, only in print form – obnoxiously perky, phony, and star-struck – and I can’t justify spending three bucks on a publication with zero critical discernment.

But I did plop down my three clams for the “How Thin Is Too Thin?” issue that appeared on newsstands last week. I’d noticed a startling drop in the average weight of the average starlet without People pointing it out, but I found it surprising that, of all the magazines on the newsstand, the one that usually hurls itself slavishly at the feet of the famous chose to blow the whistle on the eating disorders running rampant in Hollywood. It took them a few years to get around to running the story, and I don’t know that it’ll have much effect (Calista Flockhart’s desperately bony arms have survived nearly two years of water-cooler gossip and sniping by the Mesdames Rivers, after all). But at least a national entertainment magazine said something.

In defense of the women spotlighted by the article, I will say that People obviously manipulated the appearances of the stars they chose. The graphics editors no doubt selected the photographs that would provide the most severe contrast between The Old Normal-Weight Look (read: fat and happy) and The New Super-Thin Look (read: drawn and ill) of each actress or singer. Also, some of the stars have changed their hair, or their style of dress, or some other aspect of their appearance that makes them look thinner (for instance, Jennifer Aniston’s stick-straight hair probably emphasizes the thinness of her face more than her shag cut of several years ago would). I will also say that the camera really does add ten pounds. I appeared on Ricki Lake a few years ago at a normal fighting weight, but on the tape, I look like a building. A squat, low-slung, thick-walled building. With a sagging roof. And if I’d known I’d wind up looking like that, I’d have gone on a crash diet a few days beforehand and taken off a few pounds, so I can see why a lot of these women keep their weight so fanatically low. In other words, I don’t endorse low self-esteem or bad body-image or female vanity – but god knows I can empathize with it.

But a few of these women genuinely look ill. They look wan, frail, exhausted; they can’t hold themselves up straight. Individual bones in their wrists and shoulders show. The fact that every other element of their looks – their makeup, their hair, their clothing – looks just as strained and overconditioned and frail as their bodies do hardly gives the overall impression of a normal healthy body. Lara Flynn Boyle looks okay. She looks thin, but she’s always looked thin; I don’t see a marked difference between the way she used to look and the way she looks now. (The cover photo of Boyle is evidence of the manipulation I mentioned earlier. She looks dead awful, no question, but that hairstyle doesn’t do her a single favor of any kind. Plus, she’s shot from the side, and from the side, I look like a size eight.) Ditto Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice). I’ll admit to finding it a bit odd that a woman who had a baby relatively recently doesn’t have more flesh on her, but Posh never struck me as particularly voluptuous to start with. If Ginger Spice had remade her body into that sort of spare, androgynous figure, I’d look twice, but I don’t think Posh looks bad, and again, you can’t really compare the photo of her supposedly fat ën’ happy self with her supposedly drawn ën’ ill self; the layout uses two wildly different poses. Heather Locklear also looks fine to me. A little on the spindly side, maybe, but she’s a tiny woman anyway, and in the picture used to illustrate her alleged eating disorder, 1) Locklear has long hair and a better tan, both of which make her face seem thinner, and 2) she has a black outfit on, which makes her body seem thinner. Evidently, she posed for the second photo the same year as she did for the first one, and she does look more muscular in the second one, but in the first one, she has on one of THE UGLIEST dresses I have EVER seen IN MY LIFE, and I grew up in the Gunne Sax capital of the world (a.k.a. “New Jersey”). I mean, I see where People wanted to go with that, but they only proved one thing with the Locklear shots: nobody but NOBODY can get away with shirred aqua satin, not even Heather Locklear. Courtney Thorne-Smith looks more or less the same as she did on Melrose Place. Helen Hunt looks flatter-chested and has started dressing too young for her age, but she looks okay. Yeah, they could all stand to gain five or ten pounds, but they don’t look awful.

Calista Flockhart looks awful. In the first photo of her, I could see where she gets her I-just-have-a-fast-metabolism line; she looks very thin, but healthy. But in the second photo, she has no stomach, no breasts, no hips. Her wrists, dangerously thin, have no meat on them, and beside them her hands look enormous and bony. Calista can eat all the M&Ms for the cameras at the baseball games she wants, and snack pointedly while chatting on talk shows; I don’t buy it. The difference between the circumference of her waist and that of her head? Inches. And not many, either.

Paula Devicq looks – well, the way Paula Devicq looks makes me want to cry. I went to an all-girls’ school, and a lot of the girls had eating disorders. Many of us considered having one a status symbol, a mark of exemplary discipline, self-control, luck. (I lacked the necessary willpower for anorexia, preferring instead to channel my control issues into a whopping case of panic disorder.) A few of my schoolmates had to go into the hospital to get their weight back up, and I passed these slumped, sad little skeletons in the halls every day, and I saw them in the bathrooms every day, on their knees, bringing the diet Coke they’d allowed themselves for lunch back up, because one calorie was one too many, and I know the rictus that takes the place of a face, and the bad posture, and the stained and loosened teeth, and the downy arm-hair doing the work that fat should do, and the conspicious absence of tampons from the purse. Look at Paula Devicq in a back-lit scene if you get the chance. Check her forearms and you’ll see that fine hair, that down that means she has no fat. The woman looks like the talking skull from Tales Of The Crypt, and I haven’t thrown that line out for a laugh. She looks like she’s got three months to live. I can’t even joke about it. She had a beautiful face, and now she looks like a corpse.

I’ve fulminated numerous times over the tendency of the media to glorify the thin, boyish figure. I’ll probably keep fulminating over it. It scares me that girls might look up to the boyishly scrawny models and actresses they see everywhere, and that they might starve themselves down to look the same way, and that so many of us – teenagers, grown-ups, middle-aged women – feel as though we have to look young and thin, and yet still have boobs, and that so few of us feel happy with our bodies. I’ve said all this before, so I won’t belabor this particular point any further. But Calista Flockhart and Paula Devicq and Jennifer Aniston appear to have serious eating disorders, and ironically, eating disorders start on the inside. Women (and the occasional men) develop eating disorders as a measure of control over their environments, some to distance themselves from abuse, others to internalize a divorce or other upheaval in the house, still others because they think a “perfectly” thin body will give them the approval they can’t give to themselves. I didn’t write this piece to excoriate these women. I wrote it because watching women starve themselves makes me sad. I wrote it because they need help. I don’t want to blame anyone. I just want it to stop.

I wear a size twelve. I have flab, and plenty of it. I have a bosom that, on occasion, resembles a shelf. I hate myself for that, sometimes, and then I hate myself for hating myself, and if my fairy godmother showed up and told me I could choose between my writing ability and a guaranteed size eight for life, I can’t swear I wouldn’t take the size eight. I have issues with my weight too, and I can see how a woman in an industry that emphasized beauty so heavily would develop a serious perspective problem. I wish I had an answer or a solution, aside from the obvious one. But I don’t. We all have to value ourselves for ourselves. But we won’t. We really do count appearance as the best indicator of worth, and we can’t discard it entirely as a criterion – let’s face it, if I couldn’t make fun of Julia Roberts’s horse face, I’d have to get a real job – but we have to learn to separate it somehow from the things that count, and I would rather look the way I look than look, well, dead.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Life is short. Pass the Funyuns.

In case you want more information about, or help with, anorexia nervosa.
People‘s online presence.

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