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for his personal fetish for fat women. Brad has been in a relationship with his
secretary, Jenny for a long time, but since Jenny’s fatness disqualifies her from
being in the limelight as the girlfriend of a “successfiil man,” he needs Jemima
to fit the part of trophy girlfriend. Jenny has always treated her badly, and
Jemima finally Widerstands it is jealousy, not only for her looks as she had first
believed but because Brad needs to hide Jenny’s position in his life with
Jemima. Jemima does not find love with her new looks but gets used for them.
She has been in love with Ben, a dashing, handsome co-worker through the
whole novel but he had never noticed the fat Jemima as anything beyond
someone he worked with. At the end of Jemima J, her slim good looks finally
get Ben to fall in love with her and marry her, and the epilogue teils the reader
that Jemima becomes a “voluptuous, feminine, curvy size 10 who is completely
happy with how she looks” (Green 373). However, the reader needs to
remember that she is able to be this comfortable with her size and what she eats
only after her previously model-thin body hooked the man who had heretofore
completely ignored her sexual possibilities. Thus, the concept that thin is
beautiful imprisons both men and women and leaves both sexes searching for
genuineness. Jemima might feel good about herseif after losing the extra weight,
but she has the knowledge, and thus the insecurity, that her boyffiend loves her
because of her appearance, and not irrespective of it. In “What’s Really Eating
the Women in ‘Chick-Lit,” Alison Umminger writes that chick lit often
represents men as “far too superficial and shallow ever to love a woman for her
imperfect seif. In these fictional worlds no man is strong or deep enough to love
an overweight woman, not publicly at any rate. Thus all the characters remain
trapped (or willingly ensnared) by a culture that values surface first, substance
second” (Umminger 249).
However, Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed is a noticeable contrast to
chick lit novels like Jemima J that seem to feature slim and pretty heroines. The
female protagonist, Cannie Shapiro, is given more self-esteem and a more
secure career than Jemima Jones, and her elevation from joumalist to
screenwriter occurs when she is fat and not when she becomes thin.
Nevertheless, Cannie knows that she will be judged according to her weight by
the people she encounters. When she is asked by her personal weight-loss trainer
if her weight affects her performance at her job, she says:
Not really. I mean, sometimes, some of the people I interview
... you know, they’re thin, I’m not, I get a little jealous,
maybe, or wonder if they think I’m lazy or whatever, and then
I have to be careful when I write the articles, not to let the way
I’m feeling affect what I say about them. But I’m good at my
job. People respect me (Weiner 41)
Although Cannie tries to charily navigate through the way her size
would influence the way people behave towards her, she cannot protect herseif