Is “Fat” A Dirty Word?:
89
her dimensions would have been 40-18-32 (Brooks 93). JemimaJ portrays how
the accessibility to certain coveted jobs is directly related to how one looks.
Also, chick lit shows fat women as undeserving not only of romantic love but
also of familial love, as some books, Jemima J and Good in Bed for example,
demonstrate the abandonment of fat daughters by their attractive fathers. This is
testimony that men are as much a victim of the culturally prevalent idea of
thin=beautiful, and breeds a basic distrust of men in general and their capability
to look beyond looks. Only Jennifer Weiner’s books are comparatively different
ffom the general type of fat-duckling-to-thin-swan novels because she allows
her heroines monetary success even when they shop in the upper dress sizes.
Western society has a knack for seeking the unattainable, particularly when it
comes to outward appearance. Many ads are digitally altered to further signify
this desire for an “unflawed” physique. Due to these skewed perceptions,
women resort to extreme diets in attempts of obtaining the inaccessible. It is
imperative that we be conscious of the severe affects that media produces on our
lives and its capacity to subliminally alter our perceptions.
Michigan State University
Srijani Ghosh
Notes
1 In Interrogating Postfeminism, Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra note the
contradictions present in the current understanding of “postfeminism,” and
observe that it is “characterized by a double discourse that works to construct
feminism as a phenomenon of the past, traces of which can be found (and
sometimes even valued) in the present; postfeminism suggests that it is the very
success of feminism that produces its irrelevance to Contemporary culture”
(Tasker and Negra, 8).
2 Tasker and Negra add insight to this phenomenon of consumption to
“improve” oneself physically insofar as it pertains to the postfeminist woman
when they say, “Postfeminism also perpetuates woman as pinup, the enduring
linchpin of commercial beauty culture. In fact, it has offered new rationales for
guilt-free consumerism, substantially reenergizing beauty culture ... and
presiding over an aggressive mainstreaming of elaborate and expensive beauty
treatments to the middle dass” (Tasker and Negra 3).
3 Wolf argues that beauty is now being catalogued “as a Version of what United
States sex discrimination law calls a BFOQ (a bona fide occupational
qualification) and Britain calls GOQ (a genuine occupational qualification), such
as femaleness for a wet nurse or maleness for a sperm donor” (Wolf 27).
WORKS CITED
Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. California:
Sage, 1998.
Brooks, Karen. Consuming Innocence: Populär Culture and Our Children. St
Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2008.