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women’s advancement” (Wolf 10). Women who, as a payoff of the second wave
feminism, could now develop powerfiil careers and identities of their own, were
neglecting these impressive advances in women’s positions by pursuing thin
bodies and everlasting youthfulness. Wolf records that thirty-three thousand
American women said to researchers that they would prefer to lose up to fifteen
pounds rather than strive for a different goal (Wolf 10).
A central feature of what Diane Negra calls “the self-surveiling
postfeminist subject” in What a Girl Wants? is the Obsession with attempting to
kowtow to the societal beauty ideal of the Barbie—the over-exercised, underfed
female body—working on the (false) presumption that such beauty would be
concurrent with the achieved seif (Negra 119). In pursuit of this elusive ideal,
Bridget Jones begins every joumal entry with a careful catalogue of her weight
and the number of calories from food and alcohol that she has consumed that
day. She dry scrubs her body to reduce cellulite and constantly suffers from guilt
for breaking every diet she attempts. In a similar vein, JemimaJ begins with the
sentence, “God, I wish I were thin” and Jemima then speaks of her secret hobby
of studying the bodies of famous supermodels in glossy magazines and yeaming
to look like them (Green 1). Weiner’s heroine, Cannie Shapiro, like Jemima and
Bridget, obsesses over her weight and wants to make herseif invisible. This
Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is a patriarchal creation that most women are
victims of and strive to overcome by stringent unhealthy diets, over-exercising,
and even self-starvation.
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At the beginning of Bridget Jones ’s Diary, Bridget announces that she
weighs 129 pounds and lists the different food she ate that day before she gives
the reader any detail of her life. Bridget Jones sets the tone for later chick lit
protagonists by being overly critical of herseif for her weight and in a constant
state of guilt because. of the diets she thinks she should be following but keeps
failing to maintain. Bridget is relatable to the target women readers of chick lit
because she embodies most of the obsessions which modern single working
women are plagued with. Although she is a healthy woman, she is obsessed with
her (completely healthy) appetite, trying to conform to the impossible
dimensions of “beautiful women” as propagated by the mainstream media.
When she finally does reach the target weight she has yeamed for all her life,
people teil her she looks tired and wan. This leaves Bridget nonplussed as the
years of sacrifice and always being on a diet to achieve this perfect weight is
dashed to nothing when nobody appreciates what should have been the new,
improved, thin Bridget. Helen Fielding also ironically comments on the
extensive processes of date preparation which women have to undergo to make
themselves desirable. Bridget laments:
Completely exhausted by an entire day of date preparation.
Being a woman is worse than being a farmer-there is so much
harvesting and crop spraying to be done: legs to be waxed,