This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Fatphobia and Fat Positivity.
“Fat” isn’t just a loaded term when referring to actresses, but also a relative one. The late Joan Rivers infamously called Kate Winslet “fat” at red carpet appearances during the awards season for Titanic, even though Winslet seemed about the same size as she was in the movie, then the most financially successful of all time. Rivers’ pronouncement had enough power that Winslet was one of the few young women who came to the Academy Awards that year in long sleeves: to hide her “fat” arms. At the time Winslet was probably still well below the average size of women in the US (and the UK).
I grew up in the ’70s and although TV and movies then had more than its share of super-skinny actresses (especially noticeable in that era before most actresses had breast implants or muscles from working out), their bodies were much more in line with that of the general Canadian, US and UK population, since the average body size of those populations was smaller than the average body size (of both men and women) today. And the actresses on American TV, especially those who weren’t young (some of the most popular characters on the highest rated shows like Bea Arthur on Maude, Isabel Sanford on The Jeffersons and Jean Stapleton on All In The Family were in their 50s) weren’t expected to have the bodies (or faces or hair) of young teenagers–unless they were young teenagers.
As the general populace in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia have developed larger bodies than they had in past decades, most of the actresses from those places have shrunk. Although I was pleased to see Melissa McCarthy as the star of a film that makes good use of her talents (and is blessedly free of fat-shaming or slurs) in a preview screening of Spy (which I will review in full in June, when it’s in theaters), I couldn’t help noticing how sylphlike her equally hilarious Australian co-star, Rose Byrne, is. “Model-thin” has become the default body type for most actresses who wish to have a career in the English-speaking market and beyond: and of course fashion models now are also skinnier than they were in the ’70s and ’80s.
The standard ultra-thin body for an actress is common enough that when I saw the young actress Pauline Etienne topless in the French film Eden (a film I don’t recommend) I was surprised to note that not only did she have naturally large breasts (which are, after all, comprised mainly of fat) but her stomach, while flat was, unlike those of most contemporary actresses, not concave, let alone showing visible abdominal muscles. The default body size also extends to actresses who are not supposed to be “decorative.” In writer-director Andrea Arnold’s powerful, excellent Red Road, from the UK, star Kate Dickie has a nude scene which is neither meant to be nor is erotic, but her body has as little fat as that of a professional marathon runner. When women see these bodies as “the norm” in films and TV even those of us fortunate enough not to hate our bodies, even those of us who are not habitually called slurs because of our size, have to fight the tendency to ask, “What exactly did my body do wrong to be so unlike that of nearly every woman I see onscreen?”
The casual inclusion of a fat woman as one of four main characters on the soapy Australian TV series Winners and Losers feels like a triumph–especially because the body and weight of Jenny Gross (played by Melissa Bergland) are never the center of her storyline, any more than they are of the other leads: model-thin Bec (Zoe Tuckwell-Smith) and Sophie (Melanie Vallejo) and Frances (Virginia Gay) whose body is closer to average size. Jenny is, hands down, the most consistently well-dressed woman on the show, wearing vintage and faux-vintage fashions that look great on her and work well with her cherry-red hair and cat-eye glasses (which the actress wore to the audition and the producers decided to make part of her character). In a perhaps unwitting bit of verisimilitude the matching bridesmaid dress she was called on to wear with two of the other characters at the wedding of a third was equally unflattering to each actress (and body-type).
Although we in the audience are briefly reminded of the abuse fat women can receive, these moments never overtake the show, not even for one “very special episode”. At one point a “player” who is using Jenny refers to her as a “cash cow” (the four women were “losers” in high school but after their reunion became “winners” when they jointly bought a lottery ticket with a large payout) with a laugh on the “cow,” and as with the other three main women characters, we know Jenny was bullied in high school (with remarks centering around her size). In another episode Jenny confronts her older sister, when she briefly visits home, that she too needled Jenny about her weight (Jenny’s parents and other siblings do not and are very close to and supportive of her) but otherwise Jenny has similar problems to the other three main women. She dates the wrong guys (one of her early boyfriends came out as gay, which was my original reason to start watching the series). She was the center of a love triangle for some episodes, spent a period drinking and partying too much, saw her mother through a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment and found out, in the most recent season, that she carries the gene that marks her as likely to develop breast cancer too.
She’s also not always the fat girl who wants everyone to like her: she can be quite cutting (and Bergland has a great touch with these lines) as when she informs a boyfriend with whom she is on the outs that he can’t hope to recover the pants he misplaced during a drunken night out because, “You lost them along with your wallet, your phone, your keys and your dignity.” When Rhys, the boyfriend from several seasons ago confessed to her that he was gay, he said about Sophie finding out (after he tried to kiss a mutual gay friend, Jonathan), “I thought she was going to beat the shit out of me.”
To which Jenny replied, “I kind of wish she had.”
Although Jenny is something of a late bloomer who lost her virginity at 27 (to Rhys) and at that time still lived at home in her childhood bedroom, filled with stuffed animals, the show is free from “Woe is me, I can’t get a boyfriend because I’m fat,” speeches. The show also avoids the cliché in which the fat woman is the f*g hag with no sex life of her own: although Jenny remains friendly with Rhys after he comes out, Frances is the one who is best friends with a gay man, Jonathan (Damien Bodie)–and Frances has had boyfriends of her own too. In the seasons since Rhys (who eventually settled down with Jonathan), Jenny has had a number of love interests, equally, if not more, handsome than the boyfriends and husbands of the other main characters on the show.
So the question remains: why, when I know several such women in real life, do I have to look halfway around the world to find a main woman character on TV who is beautiful and fat, who wears the cutest outfits, has love interests and all sorts of concerns (each episode of this series never has just one crisis when it could fit five) that have nothing to do with her body size? Perhaps US show creators will one day have an answer for me.
Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender