TimothySexton.com
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Britney Spears and the Mixed Messages of Celebrity Journalism
Which is it you want, celebrity media: Normal looking or the smiling skeleton of Joni Mitchell?
I have to admit to being totally confused. Before I ever saw Britney Spears’ MTV Award performance I had read that she was out of shape and even had a bulging belly. Did these writers even watch the show? Okay, I haven’t seen the entire performance but I saw enough to know that Britney Spears hardly looks like Roseanne. And that’s not even to mention the fact that this is a woman who had two children in two years. I make these observations to point up that only the intellectually-challenged celebrity media would criticize the current edition of Spears as “fat.” Part of it has to do with the feeding frenzy taking place over Spears’ consequential lack of judgment in the past year. Part has to do with the fact that the people taking her to task have no real meaning to their lives. I write about celebrities on a regular basis, but these people write about celebrities all day, every day. They don’t write about anything else! The only other job in journalism I can imagine being half as boring is a sportswriter who no longer even has to listen to the answers given to his questions because he already knows what they will be.
The really distressing equation in this story is that many of the same magazines and TV shows that jumped on the Britney-is-fat bandwagon have in probably the last month also run a story about how it is getting harder and harder to find a female celebrity who weighs over 110 pounds. From Lindsay Lohan to Angelina Jolie to the troll twins from Full House, if you want to track down a woman who looks anything even remotely close to normal you really have to do your research. The top of those lists of sexiest actresses are routinely dominated by women who could play scarecrows easier than anything else; most of them are probably anywhere from 10 to 30 pounds lighter than the average actresses of the 30’s through 60s. It is hard to imagine any of them having the lasting grip on the imagination that such bombshells as Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth or even Josephine Baker who, though hardly curvy, would probably be told to lose weight today by some brain-dead studio exec. (The difference being that Baker would tell anyone who suggested to go to hell and pack her bags for France.)
It is time for the media to stop sending mixed messages that are intended only to give the impression that they care. The media doesn’t care about underweight actresses; they care about looking responsible. But for every magazine article about the dangers of eating disorders, there are fifty advertisements for unproven and unscientific weight loss pills and programs. For every four minutes that the 24 hour cable news networks devote to the issue of anorexia among celebrities they run an hour’s worth of commercials for weight loss gimmicks or John Basedow’s increasingly annoying advertisements.
Britney Spears may be on a downward spiral that can’t be stopped, she may be the worst celebrity mother in Hollywood (I doubt that), and her lip-synching skills may in need of a tune-up, but she was most definitely not fat in that MTV Video Awards performance. The only thing even remotely fat connected to this story are the heads of people at Eonline.com and other places that can’t stay focused on what a healthy body actually looks like. Maybe they should be required to take a break from hanging around celebrities, celebrity hangers-on and other people who write about celebrities and spend a month each year writing about normal people.
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