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263 31 The Roseanne Benedict Arnolds How Fat Women Are Betrayed by Their Celebrity Icons Beth Bernstein and Matilda St. John According to the latest federal guidelines, more than half the people in the United States are fat, but you would never know it by monitoring television and movie screens. Fat people—more specifically, fat women—are a majority group with few celebrities representing us in mainstream media. Housewives on Wisteria Lane may be desperate but they’re not over a size 4. When given airtime, portrayals of fat women are rarely positive, often recycling hurtful and degrading stereotypes. For the fat viewer already feeling demonized for their size, it can be demoralizing never seeing anyone who resembles them portrayed as normal. To add insult to injury, many female celebrities who once picked up the torch for fat girl pride are putting it down. The Hollywood epidemic of gastric bypass surgeries is helping to fuel a string of celebrity defections from “fat and proud” to “thin and repentant.” The spectacle of Celebrity Wasting Syndrome—identified by Sondra Solovay and Marilyn Wann in Wann’s 1998 book FAT!SO? (Wann, 1998, p. 56) as the infectious trend of celebrities losing weight as they achieve success— has gotten a hefty amount of press in recent years thanks to formerly skinny but now anorexic-looking ingénues such as Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan. Hysterical headlines fret, “Is Mary-Kate wasting away?” Yet the fat folks who fall victim to this syndrome don’t receive the same anxious handwringing about the effects on their health, the assumption being that for them any downward shift in weight, regardless of how it was achieved, must be beneficial to their wellness. We’re living in a celebrity-obsessed culture that demands much of people who are, after all, just entertainers. For the modern celebrity, the line between personal life and professional life is blurry at best. Part of the trick of maintaining celebrity is remaining true to popular qualities while changing enough to hold the public’s interest. With that in mind, we don’t presume to intimate that change in itself constitutes betrayal, but rather the alignment with a marginalized group of people followed by a renouncement of that group as unhealthy and sick. The four celebrities discussed in this chapter specifically exploited their size to appeal to a perpetually underrepresented audience—fat women. Their subsequent frantic efforts to 264 Beth Bernstein and Matilda St. John reduce their size, coupled with their pathologizing comments about weight, both negated their initial positive impact and left their fat fans feeling used, duped, and rejected. Ricki Lake: Turncoat Turnblad Given the scarcity of fat women in romantic leads, it was a great moment hearing, “Finally all of Baltimore knows: I’m big, blonde, and beautiful!” Fat girls everywhere thrilled to Tracy Turnblad, Ricki Lake’s unforgettable character in John Waters’s 1988 movie Hairspray: a round, rebellious teen who remained outrageously self-accepting in the face of fatphobes. Magazine interviews with Lake continued this theme. When Hairspray was first released, she declared, “My plan is to redefine the fat-girl-as-heroine. I’m going to make fat fashionable again” (Svetky, 1988, p. 130). She scoffed that she wasn’t “out to . . . lose 50 lbs. and be anorexic” (Allis, 1988, p. 81). Lake’s upbeat presence was incredibly important; she didn’t apologize for being fat and was willing to proclaim that if she got thin, it would be a sign of ill health. Fast-forward to 1992: Lake had not had a hit in a couple of years. Suddenly, she reemerged in the press. Headlines proclaimed that she was “cutting herself down to size” (Rosen, 1992). Reporters swooned over Lake’s smaller figure, and she effectively rewrote her story; from self-accepting rebel she became a miserable, unhealthy girl who had been unable to live a normal life. She whined that at her former weight she “could barely fit into a restaurant booth . . . it was hard to move. I’d walk up the stairs and be breathing heavy” (Rosen, 1992, p. 115). Even worse, Lake began giving out troubling details of how she lost weight: “I went through times when I would faint from not eating enough and working out too much” (Bandler & Ebron, 1994, p. 44). The media’s response was largely positive and unquestioning, without noting that it might also be difficult to slide into a restaurant booth if one is unconscious. Lake continued to betray...

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