Size Matters

So, this isn’t really about minorities, but it is about a group of “my people.” It’s about women. Women slightly outnumber the men in the US and due to a desire to get through the rest of this blog and the clunkiness of Google in this particular search, I’m not going to throw up a specific number.

So women aren’t a minority, but they are treated as the lower class when it comes to men/women issues.

I’ll blow past the wage issue because I’m not well versed enough in it to know more than the basic “women earn less than men” bullet point. So feel free to fill in whatever reason floats your boat. I think there’s a lot to be said about women’s naturally less aggressive nature, the tendency of people at the top (men) to be more comfortable putting people like themselves at the top with them, and the fact that women take more time off than men to raise kids.

Interesting, though, that women outnumber the men on your average college campus.

But moving on to something I know more about and which will lead nicely into my rantings.

The roles for women in television and film are historically frustrating to annoying. A quick survey of the roles for which actresses were awarded the Academy Award show that we like our women oppressed and sexual. Female driven movies are few and far between. And television shows with strong and complex roles for women have only started to become part of the norm in the last couple of seasons.

It’s not news that the media holds women to an impossible standard. And at once claims to tout women looking like “real women” with curves and breasts and everything, while photoshopping the crap out of America Ferrera so she looks camera ready for her Glamour magazine close-up.

I remember being appalled back in 1998 or so. When NBC became the prime time leader with Friends and Will and Grace and watching the girls on those shows wither down to sticks as they became more popular. It’s like there was a direct and inverse correlation between the shows’ ratings and Jennifer Aniston’s body fat.

Even on the lowest key of levels, I was so sad to see how much weight one my favorite comediennes has lost since becoming a regular player on Saturday Night Live.

Men, again this isn’t news, aren’t held to the same standard. According to the powers that be, it’s totally reasonable for Jim Belushi to have an impossibly skinny, gorgeous wife. Same with Kevin James (who I totally love!). Lead actors in movies are allowed to be comedically cute enough. Floppy and mussy. Unkempt and untraditional. Not someone you’d ask into bed, but if they were there, you might not kick them out. While their lady friends have to be actually and terribly gorgeous.

So…I was not surprised, but I was upset when I watched the weigh-in of The Biggest Loser. My husband has really taken to this show and I like reality TV more than I (or my career as a scripted television writer) would like to let on, so I watched the two hour extravaganza with him.

The first hour is all very inspiring and makes me want to quit my day job so I can work out with logs and run through sand and lift my workout partner over my head and such.

The second hour is the weigh in. the contestants come in. The girls in a sports bra and spandex. The guys in loose fitting shorts and t-shirts.

SIGH.

So…on a show that’s ostensibly about getting healthy and feeling better about yourself, they put the girls in outfits that reveal just exactly how unhealthy they are. And let the guys hide their bulk from the cameras.

Now, before you tell me that the guys have to take off their shirts for the weigh in and what’s under their shirts can be pretty shocking, let me get there…

The girls are not only in belly revealing outfits, they’re in tight outfits. Outfits that cling to every indent and roll. Outfits that clearly let you see pretty much exactly what these ladies would look like without clothes at all. While the men enjoy moments of detailed physically anonymity—hiding in their baggy clothes that are much more forgiving.

The women have to stand for all intents and purposes in their underwear for the entire hour of the ceremony. While the men only have to take off their shirts for the couple of minutes of the weigh in. Then when the men step off the scale, they get to put their shirts back on and we forget exactly what they looked like under their clothes. While we’re told every second what’s going on with the women’s bodies.

The message that it sends is strange. The men can essentially look okay at their size—they’re hidden under dark, baggy clothes. They have the general shape of a guy, so they look okay. But the women are put on much more display and consequently made to feel much more shame for their shape. Especially in an age where women’s sexuality on TV is the only thing that will keep them there.

What would be the harm in putting the women in something more modest? Why do the guys get to hide their bellies, but the women’s are there to flop over their tight biker shorts for the whole hour? Their arms are exposed. Their bellies. Their thighs. All areas that as a woman, I can tell you I worry about constantly. The men get to hide. They get to be modest. The women are on display.

Like I said, when some of the guys take off their shirts, the effects of their lifestyle are startling and I’m not saying I want to stare at that for an hour either. I feel super self conscious with my body, I can only imagine what it must be like for the nearly 400 lb Rez. It’s not like guys are totally immune from the arrows of our society’s ridiculous beauty standards.

So why not treat both sexes with respect on the show? You can buy loose fitting, light weight workout wear. Something that would be modest, but not affect the weigh in weight. Or simply weigh the clothes before the weigh in and adjust the weight accordingly.

Putting the women in clothing that flatters—whatever size they are—is a more effective way to build those women’s self images and put them on a path toward healing and restoration. Rather than shaming them on national TV.

The show purports to be about being healthy, not about looking good. So neither the men nor the women should have to put that much skin on that much display. But I guess when it comes down to it, the show isn’t about the contestants at all, but about ratings and giving the public something to talk about in the morning. Whether that’s the workout or the sideshow factor, I suppose to the suits, it doesn’t much matter.

Traffic

Rewatching this movie. Was really into it…until the 1:37:31 mark.

I guess the scene I’m about to tear into should be mitigated somewhat with the fact that Don Cheadle, Luis Guzman are good guys. Nice characters and great actors.

But at the 1:37:31 mark, we’re introduced up close and personally to the character who will probably resonate as the worst to our American sensibilities. And he’s black. And effing the s out of a white girl so she can score some drugs.

In a movie filled with people who are doing questionable things, you might ask why this guy stands out to me as worse than the others. Or why he is disserved by being black.

Let’s start with the fact that Americans are weird about sex. That’s a pretty subjective way of saying the equally subjective statement that we’re Puritanical hypocrites, but we are. Raunchy sex in movies typically illustrates the worst that someone can do or the lowest that someone can go.

If you take the psychology of serial killers at the prestigious USC film school, you’ll learn that serial killers are often impotent or at least struggle with the sexuality in some horrible way that leads them to kill.

Virgins survive in horror movies. Girls who have sex don’t.

It’s all over the language of the screen. Sex is bad. Even though rates of unplanned pregnancies and STDs continue to be on the rise in the US (among affluent communities at that) we still as a nation pretend that and enjoy art that acts as though sex is reserved for base people and creates base things.

So when we see Michael Douglas’s daughter having sex done to her by this muscular black man, we know that things aren’t just bad. They’re really f*cking bad.

The sex she had with her (white) boyfriend was a) implied and b) though it was in a drug-addled state, it was at least loving.

This black guy just does sex to her with no feeling. No inkling of emotion. Totally using her. The scene is shot from a horrible perspective angle that lets the viewer feel really up close and personal with a guy we’re supposed to dislike and who we’re pretty sure bad things are going to happen to…and we’re led to be okay with that.

Also add to this that all the people at the girl’s AA group were white. No minorities were there trying to better themselves. But she needs drugs. So off she goes to a poor black neighborhood where she gets laid for crack.

And we’re not led to dislike her for her addiction. She’s explained to the camera that she’s angry. We see her messed up nuclear family. So we feel sorry for her. We sympathize with the fact that she needs to medicate to find comfort. But the blacks on the street in at in her in fact in this scene, there’s no sympathy for them. They’re just street thugs who make faces as Douglas drives his Mercedes through Compton. The white girl is going to get out and get rescued. But Douglas, who’s character is in charge of arresting the nation’s drug problem, isn’t worried about anyone else.

And then, to make it clear just how far gone the girl is, when she passes out and is for all intents and purposes a corpse on the bed, the black guy climbs on top and goes at it again.

Also, at the 2:03 mark, we meet another man to whom the girl has ostensibly whored herself out to. He's white. We don't see him mount her. There's no creepy vaguely necrophiliac sex. The guy is apologetic for his actions and he's gone.

No one else in the movie is as base of a character as the black drug dealer. And as the movie purports, drugs are all over. Even in rich, uptight suburbia. So why go and enlist a bunch of black actors to portray the worst of the drug problem?

There’s any number of other things that could have communicated her downfall. She’s scored drugs from her rich white friends through the first hour and a half of the movie. Why she needs to go to a scary black neighborhood now is odd. Especially since the last time we saw her with her boyfriend, they were a sweet couple. Very very high, but sweet nonetheless. And he got her high just fine. Why not go back to him. call him and ask him to come get her? there’s nothing on film that would suggest that she couldn’t call her established boyfriend and she’s been in treatment, so she’s not making decisions out of her freebased haze.

So why a scary black neighborhood? Why not, I guess? No harm right? In reinforcing horrible stereotypes in a movie that seems to say that it’s tearing them down.

Does Don Cheadle make up for that? Does the black lawyer in the courtroom? Benico del Toro’s character trying to do good? The Latino judge? Maybe. And Soderberg does deserve credit for making these choices that can unnecessarily be called “progressive.” These are bold casting choices in an era where we still can’t have a black man and woman be leads in a romantic movie without it being labeled an “urban comedy.”

But the scene with a guy having sex to a nearly dead girl is more visceral. It makes your gut turn. There’s a physical sense tied to that emotion. And it’s the scene where something horrible happens to someone the movie has taught us to care about. So that’s going to be what sticks out to you. What you remember. The funny and charming banter that Cheadle and Guzman have in the car will fade. You won’t remember all the turns of phrase.

But you’ll remember how uncomfortable you felt when you saw nameless, voiceless black man remount a sweet, innocent girl that he’s just finished corrupting.

I got to 1:51:31 before I had to get back to work. will finish up any more chat about this flick when I get to finish the film.