I recently watched a series of short films created by Lena Waithe, titled Girls Room, about a group of teenage girls dealing with all of the things that universally make being a teenage girl a pretty awful experience.
It opens with a shot of each of the five characters, including one relatively curvy girl. ‘Ah’, I thought to myself, ‘I know what her “issue” will be’. I’ve been watching films and TV shows about high school since I was about 11 years old, and despite now being in my late twenties, I’m still hooked. I’m something of an expert in the genre.
So when I see a curvy or plus-size body on screen, I know exactly what I’m going to get: a storyline about a young woman’s struggle to love her body, possibly alongside a short narrative arc about an eating disorder, which miraculously goes away when she discovers that ‘it’s what’s on the inside that matters’.
It’s a well-intended sentiment that secretly tells non-thin women that they aren’t beautiful, but that they can still be nice.
Only in this case, I was wrong. The storyline this character had was absolutely unconnected to her body. Boys in this film found her attractive. Her co-stars didn’t comment on her body fat percentage. Her weight, despite being a bit higher than that of her friends, was incidental.
This was no accident. Describing the film, creator Lena Waithe explained, ‘One of the characters is a little curvier, but I didn’t want her story to be about that.’
My jaw nearly hit the floor.
If you’ve got an easy relationship with your body, then none of this will seem extraordinary. But trust me, when you grow up bigger than your friends, and you spend your life obsessing over your BMI, the representation of a person on screen who isn’t thin, and isn’t talking about not being thin, is revolutionary.
I was a size 12/14 as a teenager – not huge by any stretch of the imagination, but technically overweight, and bigger than the size four friends I surrounded myself with. While they wore bikini tops and denim skirts, I cinched in 1950s prom dresses with waist belts and dreamed about the day I would be thin enough to really join in.
The message that my body was my problem was reinforced by every TV show I watched. Plus size characters were (and still are) scant, and when they did exist they were either unhappy with their bodies (Raven in That’s So Raven, Deborah in Drop Dead Diva, Hannah Marin in Pretty Little Liars) or a joke (Fat Monica in Friends, Melissa McCarthy in everything other than Gilmore Girls).
Even the seminal classic Mean Girls reinforced the idea that fatness equals weakness by using weight gain to bring down Regina George.
The rule seemed to be that for a character to have a storyline that wasn’t about weight, she had to be thin. The only time I remember seeing this broken, before Girls Room, was in the truly bonkers teen series Pretty Little Liars.
Actress Sasha Pieterse, who had played villain Allison DiLaurentis when she was in her very early teens, was returned to the central cast in the later seasons. But, since reaching adulthood, and as a result of hormonal issues (according to a statement she released on Instagram) she had gained weight.
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Sasha, and therefore her character, was still stunning. But she wasn’t thin anymore, and therefore the creators of Pretty Little Liars had (admittedly unwittingly) created a situation where the Queen Bee character wasn’t thin.
Even better, her not thin body was never discussed. It wasn’t a conversation piece. It wasn’t even acknowledged. Yes, this might well have been because Pieterse weight gain was outside of the control of the show runners, but in action that didn’t matter. I didn’t care why it was happening, I just felt elated that it was happening – that someone who looked like me was shown as popular and powerful.
When we only show women on screen who are battling with their weight, we send the message that weight is something to worry about, that anyone who is not thin is expected to make that the central focus of their life.
And it’s not. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.
Our body fat percentage is one of the least interesting things about any of us, and that should be reflected on screen.
I have aged out of the demographic for teen TV shows, but despite being a fully fledged adult, I – like a lot of us – am still massively affected by what I see on screen.
I might be a grown-up, but I still need a helping hand when it comes to feeling OK about my body, and every time I see someone who is my size on telly, living their life and not obsessing about their weight, I feel a little more able to do the same.
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