‘Wicked: For Good’ revives an uncomfortable debate about bodies and images | CNN:
As “Wicked: For Good” has filled theaters and its publicity tour has circled the world, though, some fans have focused on a different matter of appearances: the women starring in the movie are really, really, really skinny — enough to draw attention and enthusiasm in the circles of the internet where users celebrate and promote eating disorders.
The amount of angst this issue causes the leftwing is truly something to behold. Unable to determine right from wrong, commentary on actresses starving themselves devolves into a free speech debate:
Contemporary culture holds that it’s inappropriate to discuss the bodies, and especially the weight of the bodies, of public figures. Yet images of famous bodies are still globally marketed commodities, alongside all the shared social media photos of everyone else, and people have never stopped absorbing and responding to what they see.
Oh, it’s a conundrum.
Hollywood has always had a love affair with thinness, but by the 2010s, society seemed to be changing. People embraced the ideas of “body positivity” and “body neutrality” — entertainers come in all shapes in sizes, ad campaigns and media prioritize diverse body types, and resisting the urge to comment on a person’s weight has become commonplace.
None of that seemed to stop the pendulum from swinging. Coinciding with the rise of GLP-1 medications, skinny is now in. On fashion runways, fewer than 1 percent of looks presented in the recent season were on models considered plus-size. The weight-loss hashtag #SkinnyTok has gone viral; celebrities are mysteriously shrinking before our eyes.
…All of this has left people constantly, fervently talking about bodies without even being able to agree about how to talk about bodies.
This is amazingly obtuse, which is the standard on the leftwing: We can’t possibly talk about something because the talk itself is supposedly harmful.
Let me help: Wicked actresses are starvation-level thin. They are unhealthy. For those of us who remember Karen Carpenter, we have grave concerns about the actresses’ mental health. Hollywood should not be promoting this level of emaciation without a very good reason for it (which is to say, it’s done for a specific role that requires it—Wicked’s fantasy world does not—and under medical supervision). Even then, how about using CGI instead?
Conversely, the “body positivity” movement of the 2010s was a disaster, as evidenced by the death of a number of “fat acceptance” influencers if nothing else. But of course there is plenty else: Obesity is the cause of Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, osteoarthritis, fatty liver disease, and obstructive sleep apnea. It’s correlated with stroke, coronary artery disease, and certain cancers.
It may be, and I know this sounds crazy, that there is a wide range of acceptable weights and that being neither too thin nor too fat is all a person needs to be. Finally, the idea what we can’t comment on public figures, especially actors or actresses, who go to extremes, is ridiculous.
See? That isn’t so hard.