Hollywood has an interesting take on the curvy woman.
The curvy woman is always the funny one. Or the dramatic one. Or some other extreme character trope. She is never, or at least not often, a serious character with a serious purpose in the movie’s plot.
It seems that Hollywood gets caught up in the image of the woman’s body and cannot see beyond it. And women with bigger or curvier bodies are seen as eccentricities, thus their characters are eccentric.
Hollywood allows a curvy body to define the character.
These funny, dramatic, sensational women are always kept at a distance. They are never allowed to be desirable.
They are never given any sex appeal, and they are never shown actively participating in finding love.
When thinking of this issue, two examples come to mind.
Melissa McCarthy and Rebel Wilson are both wildly popular with audiences. Their movies regularly and consistently fill movie house seats.
Both of these women have enough talent to fill an ocean — or maybe two — and they are both curvaceous and beautiful.
McCarthy and Wilson have both starred in gut-busting comedic roles. They appeal to all age ranges.
But though these roles have made them famous and popular, they have done nothing to portray their bodies in a positive manner.
They are cast and costumed as women who are undesirable, rather than the beautiful women they are.
The beauty ideals that have been set in place by society emphasize glamour and the wretched thigh gap.
The vision of beauty is so narrow that there is no room to accommodate a beauty that comes in a different kind of package.
These bigger women are shut off from Hollywood because their bodies are not aligned with the beauty ideals that have been set for them by the remainder of the world.
They are forced to find another way to make it in the Hollywood industry. Big women have to cultivate new talents in order to find their way in ?Hollywood.
These women cannot rely upon their looks and their bodies to help get them where they want to go.
They have to work harder than everyone else at mastering skills that make them an asset to the film industry, rather than making them a liability.
Big women are forced to find alternatives to the sexy seductress roles and settle for roles in which their bodies are shamed and presented as ?undesirable.
They are forced to be more in order to achieve even a fraction of the success that women who fall easily within society’s image of beauty achieve.
It’s high time we reevaluate what it means to be beautiful within our popular culture and within our own lives.
Less is not more. More is more.
johnstra@indiana.edu
