Never have the two blogs met until now. This morning, I was reading a review of a dance movie called "A Beautiful Tragedy" on the blog, Dance Advantage. The movie is about an anorexic dancer in Russia named Oksana. The reviewer wrote about the documentary's unflinching look at ballet in Russia, where dance is taken very seriously. The dance world is notoriously stringent about weight and size yet it's accepted as a given while anorexia in the modeling world is condemned.
Which brings me to this sad article from CNN.com about the death of model Isabella Caro. She was on an anti-anorexia billboard in France and even wrote a memoir called, "The Little Girl Who Did Not Want to Get Fat" about her battle with the disease from a young age.Then, back in my writer world, I got a Google alert about an ALL ABOUT VEE mention. Here it's part of an article titled, "YA Fatphobia" in the upcoming issue of The Horn Book, which is a literary resource for teachers and librarians across the country. My novel is very positively mentioned and included among a handful of YA novels that portray plus-size characters in a positive and healthy way (thank you, writer and reviewer Kathryn Nolfi!).
And one more article from CNN.com, an interview with actress Ginnifer Goodwin ("Big Love"). She's beautiful, isn't she? She has gorgeous skin and a great career and yet, she seems to have an unhealthy attitude toward food and dieting. I know this interview is supposed to show how healthy she is but honestly, she's in the same world as my character, Veronica May. Except where my gal accepts her weight and lives beautifully, Ms. Goodwin seems to see weight as a constant battle in her life, not so very different from Ms. Caro or the Russian ballerina, Oksana. And yet, she's being portrayed as someone with a balanced life. Sorry, Ms. Goodwin, but you're just as anxious and obsessed about weight as every other actress in Hollywood.
All of these articles in one morning! And this was on top of reading the sobering statistic that 2 out of every 3 Americans is overweight or obese. No wonder! We have the worst attitudes toward food and disease and we label people and food "good" or "bad." None of these people need to make weight-loss resolutions: they need to make acceptance resolutions.
2 comments:
It is odd how things of a similar subject seem to crop up all at once. I hated the coverage about Natalie Portman losing weight for her role in Black Swan. Reporters praised her for her dedication to accuracy and self-discipline . . . yet it's just as bad for your body to do it to act as it is to dance.
I try to ignore what other people say about food and do my own thing. I hate when people comment on how little I eat. I eat as much as I can and I get self-concious when people bring attention to it.
Right there with you, Liviania! When people comment on the small amount of food someone eats or when they remark upon how "skinny" one is, it's just as insulting as noting how "big" someone is or how large their appetite is. You'd never do the latter, would you, tell someone they're too fat in public and to their face? But people think it's perfectly fine to tell someone they're too skinny.
The better news from that Black Swan set was that Mila Kunis told everyone how happy she was to bounce back to her normal weight. She seemed more balanced to me than Portman did.
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