Guess What 99.5 Out Of 100 "Beautiful People" Have In Common?
I’ve been carrying around People Magazine‘s 100 Most Beautiful issue all week, having bought it because I thought it would be interesting to talk about, but it wasn’t until the weekend that I had time to crack it open and check it out. And oh my god, it was worse than I thought! I used to read this issue every year when I was a teenager and I thought I remembered them paying at least a little lip service to inner beauty or unorthodox beauty or something along those lines. But no—“beauty” in this issue is the Western ideal of sterotypical beauty. I guess that’s the whole point—to fill a magazine with pretty people.
Don’t get me wrong, I certainly enjoy looking at pictures of, say, George Clooney and Iman. And it’s not as if there are a million Nikki Blonskys and Beth Dittos out there in the world. And yet… somehow I expected it to be less blatant. Because I’m super naive, I guess! Anyway, here are the pages I dog eared. Pretend we’re sitting together outside a coffee shop, sipping iced coffees, bitching about how annoying this magazine is.
Page 16: A photo of Jonah Hill jogging (before the “beautiful” section of the magazine starts, of course). Enjoy the sight of a fat person, because it’s basically the only one in this entire magazine.
Page 19-21: A three-page “bikini challenge” ad for anti-cellulite cream that is “the difference between worrying about cellulite and not having to” (because you used the cream and got rid of it). Let me save you five bucks, or however much this cream costs you: those aren’t your only two choices.
Page 69: Article about the issue’s cover girl, Kate Hudson. Definitely beautiful, no arguments there, but also blonde, blue-eyed, and slender. Also in this issue: Kristen Bell, Taylor Swift, Elizabeth Banks, Heidi and Lauren from The Hills, Carrie Underwood, Christina Applegate, Nicole Kidman, Jessica Simpson, Blake and Taylor from Gossip Girl, Sandra Lee, and Heather Locklear (among others). Hmm. Are you trying to tell us something, People?
Page 101: Queen Latifah! Oh wait, it’s a Jenny Craig ad. The premise of the ad is that your size isn’t important, you should just be a “size healthier” than you are now. Brilliant marketing, there, Jenny Craig. HEY WOMEN OF AMERICA! You are all exactly one size too big! Sorry!
Page 108: Sarah Silverman, talking about how Jimmy Kimmel grabs her “inner thigh fat” and says how much he likes it, even though she hates it. So there is one point in favor of this magazine, because that’s cute.
Page 110: An eye-catching ad for Curvation featuring a full-figured woman in lingerie and Christian Louboutins with some sexy ad copy. It is genuinely awesome and positive, and if we hadn’t seen Curvation founder Queen Latifah advertising Jenny Craig a few pages ago, this would be even better.
Page 154: Queen Latifah again, in the magazine this time, in a section about celebrities who have charitable causes. This is the only plus-sized person on the list of 100 beautiful people, and keep in mind, she was in a diet ad in the same magazine! I also feel compelled to note that she is wearing sequins.
Page 175: A chart showing “beauty at every age,” with 10 people each listed for the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. So that’s 40 people in this little sample size. They are all women. Jennifer Hudson is the only one even remotely plus-sized.
So what have we learned? That only women of color are plus-sized? That being blonde, blue-eyed and thin is the best way to be beautiful? That People is every bit as vapid as you thought it was? That you’re a size too big and have cellulite? That, if you’re overweight, you have a 99% chance of not being considered “beautiful”?
How about all of the above?
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Beth Ditto, Celebrities, Fat Positive, Fatism, Feminism, Gossip, Jessica Simpson, Magazines, Media, Nikki Blonsky, Queen Latifah, Weight Loss
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Mo Said: “That only women of color are plus-sized? That being blonde, blue-eyed and thin is the best way to be beautiful?”
Don’t you know there is no such thing as a “thin” black woman? I am a black woman and this image (“the over-weight black woman) is very dominate in the media and society as a whole. It is frustrating to see, even though both Queen and Jennifer H. are both beautiful (inside and out). It is interesting, because the image portrayed in society of white women is “thin” and the image of black women is “thick”.
It is that image that many blogs and boards that I frequent discuss. Also, being “force-fed” the image of blonde hair and blue-eyes being the idea of beauty are also another peeve of mine (and fellow-blog commentators)…but whatever. If I focused too much on it, I would want to just kick a@@ 24/7. It is true that if you are overweight, you aren’t considered beautiful (unless you are Queen Latifah and being overweight is expected because of your race). I wish the beauty standard was all encompassing, but I don’t think it ever will be.
That’s so sad!! Of course, “beauty” is subjective, but unfortunately, a majority of that mag’s readers forget about that and don’t challenge what they read. Good of you to call them on it!!!
“Do not read beauty magazines: they will only make you feel ugly”
It may be a quote from a strange spoken-work mix/song from the early nineties, but it’s really stuck with me!
On a more shallow note: My vote for most beautiful gene pool is Family Gyllenhall, because of Jake G and Maggie G’s cheeky smiles and insanely blue eyes. (I just watched Stranger than Fiction and Day After Tomorrow)
I bet they are mostly white and thin.
The most frustrating thing to me about magazines is people still buy them. And then they buy into them, heart and soul.
Boycott the glossies.
Ha! Mo, thanks for saving me the trouble and also illuminating how self-serving and ad-revenue-driven this whole thing is (I mean, not like I didn’t know, but it helps to be reminded). I’m stupidly drawn to this issue every year, but I might actually be able to resist now. At least I’ve broken myself of buying the “Half Their Size!” ones.
I saw the title and my answer to the question was……THEY ALL HAVE STYLISTS?? Cause, dude, I’d be giving ’em all a run for their money if someone would just do my hair, pick my clothes, do my makeup every day, even at a size 14. Know what makes me happy? Pictures of celebrities without their stylists where you’re all…holy crap….Julia Roberts is all teeth (and not that hot.)
That’s what I think.
Great post.
1) E, all of the above. And I’m not even going to go into how odious each of them is (are?).
2)
Now, as you know, usually I am not the PC Party Pooper. Many epithets are flung at my head, but not that one, generally.
But are you sure about that?
Re: Sarah Silverman: what inner thigh fat?
Anyway, wow, yeah, restrictive standards of beauty much?
(Came over via the fatosphere.)
Ugh to all of the above!
I used to LOVE Queen Latifah, and when I saw her on that commercial, I almost cried because I felt betrayed. I’ve talked about it with some people recently, and we decided that maybe it was good to produce getting healthier versus losing a ton of weight, but still, it’s Jenny Craig.
As far as the whole plus size only beautiful when you’re a woman of color thing goes, I think that that is something I’ve thought a lot about. Being white, I feel like there’s a different ideal for the way I should look. This is not to say that woman of color don’t have similar outlandish standards to meet, but I will never be blond, blue-eyed, and slim. There’s no way in hell. Women of color, it seems, are expected to have curves, at least, whereas mine are completely shunned.
Anyway, I wish we could just grab the American public, the media, and everyone involved and say “HEY, WAKE UP!”
But that’s not going to happen.
Thanks for the rundown of the magazine. Now I know not to even bother buying it…
Dee, thanks for your comment. I definitely thought about that as well; the woman in the Curvation ad was black also. So the only full-figured women in the magazine are indeed African-American women.
On the other hand, also on the beautiful list are slim black women: Gabrielle Union, Zoe Saldana, Alicia Keys, Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, Vanessa Williams, Rhianna, Halle Berry, and of course, Iman. I don’t know if this gives you any more food for thought, but I figured I’d throw that out there for conversation’s sake.
Littlem, there was a discussion about the Sarah Silverman quote over at Elastic Waist recently that might interest you. I guess I agreed with the point of view that all women, no matter how we might look at them and say they’re thin, have a right to be insecure about their bodies. Certainly when celebrities are photographed in bikinis and torn apart in the tabloids (see: Mischa Barton and J. Love Hewitt) I have sympathy for the pressure they’re under to have the mythical “perfect” body that I don’t really think any of them eally has. But yeah, several commenters on EW had issues with the post, and made good points also, I thought.
Dee, I give you the endless Halle, Beyonce, Gabrielle, Garcelle, Alicia, Kelly, photoshopping of America, ridicule of Sara Ramirez, and some dweeb shouting “black women are fat” in the back of Robyn McGee’s conference.
I could have sworn we already went around once about this, but it used to be that “all” women of color were required to be thick.
Economic changes have also changed what a “status”y woman is “supposed” to look like, and these days,according to the mainstream press, it’s “bad” that Hispanic kids eat at grandma’s once a week, and upwardly mobile men of color are shouting, among their other demands *rolleyes* “Women, don’t be overweight.” And it seems like they tend to define “not overweight” as “the figure of an upper middle class white woman”. So IMO they do not get a pass.
Congratulations, Alyson. You win the internets.
Slightly off topic, but am I the only one who ever wonders what happened to Jimmy Kimmel’s wife and kids after he hooked up with Sarah Silverman? Gina was such a nice average sort of person, not the typical Hollywood girlfriend/spouse at all — and then she and the Kimmel spawn just sort of vanished once Kimmel started making the Big Buck$.
Way back before Kimmel did The Man Show, he and Gina appeared on an episode of HGTV’s “Designers Challenge.” They needed a kitchen make-over.
Long-time lurker, but I thought I’d throw in some thoughts. I was born with blonde hair and blue eyes. I was the quintessential girl-next-door because of this. I had this thick beach-wavy blonde hair that I was told looked gold in the sunlight, and eyes that were blue with just a touch of green in them, with long dark lashes to frame what my aunt called “bedroom eyes”.
And I absolutely hated it.
Were I that “perfect” size six, I could have been from Sweet Valley, but I was always the chubby girl and later, the fat girl. Still a very pretty, but fat, girl. And even from that obvious difference, I still looked like a lot of the girls in school. And I couldn’t stand it. I hated that nothing distinguished me from them other than my weight. I didn’t feel comfortable being this prototype when I obviously wasn’t. Not to mention the brain damage I had received as a child in an accident which makes it hard to focus and remember things at times; “Oh my god! You are such a blonde!”
So long story short, I chopped off my hair, dyed it dark red, and bought make-up to bring out as much green in my eyes as I possibly could. I’m still going to be the elephant in the room, but now I’m a much more interesting elephant.
I think it’s so sad to look at my yearbook and see how many girls look almost exactly the same with blonde hair and matching fake-tans. It’s the same on magazine covers; lithe blonde white women with a “healthy” pre-cancerous glow. “But not too dark! We don’t want her to look ethnic!” I hate that this type of artificiallity is the standard by what we define beauty as. Especially since it’s seems to be aimed at women younger and younger every year.
By the way, this isn’t to bash you blondes out there, just using it as an example of conforming to some standards of imposed beauty. Rock your hair girls no matter what it looks like, and that’s straight from a stylist’s mouth.
That you can’t be beautiful over 60?
How many of those ladies are naturally blond? Or blue-eyed? Or tanned?
Maybe just “you can’t be beautiful, buy more stuff?”
To me, Kimmel grabbing Silverman’s thigh fat because he loves it even though she hates it is kind of creepy. I don’t think of grabbing as a friendly sort of touch.
What do they have in common? Ooh, ooh, I know. Their sparkling personalities! Their witty senses of humor! Their abilities to hold erudite conversations!
No? Damn, I suck at pop quizzes.
And it seems like they tend to define “not overweight” as “the figure of an upper middle class white woman”.
littlem, I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it like that before. Very interesting.
The People Magazine beautiful people editions are more of the same. Success means looking young, sexually attractive and white.
The whole issue of the so-called thickness of non-white bodies is actually a great revelation of just how loaded “thin” is. Beyonce, Giselle Beauvaise and Janet Jackson are all thin. They’re just shaped different than the frail, heavy bused form being promoted as the ultimate ideal of “health.”
I’m also anti-Silverman-comment; I have no idea what the actual relationship is like, so I can’t say yay or nay Jimmy. But the quote, to me, seems to suggest – oh, she’s so lucky, she found a guy who can love her “ugly” parts, like thigh fat (and of course ugly=fat here). It makes me uncomfortable.
But, I agree – part of a right to our bodies means a right NOT to like parts of them. So that leaves me just with frustrated unarticulated grumpiness. :)
Mo said: “On the other hand, also on the beautiful list are slim black women: Gabrielle Union, Zoe Saldana, Alicia Keys, Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, Vanessa Williams, Rhianna, Halle Berry, and of course, Iman. I don’t know if this gives you any more food for thought, but I figured I’d throw that out there for conversation’s sake.”
That is true, and these women are seen as the “idea” of what black women should strive for. I don’t know how many times I have heard from people (men and women of varying races) say things like “Black women just let themselves go” or “Why is it that Black women aren’t active.” I’m not saying that there isn’t societal pressure for black women to be “thin”, living in the US we are constantly bombarded with the images of “thin” as the ideal. It is believed that “all” black women are “thick” either by letting ourselves go or what have you, unless you are in Hollywood. Iman, Halle, Beyonce etc., are seen as examples in Hollywood to strive for, but you can’t lose too much a@@ and breast in the process.
Oh well, instead of trying to focus too much on the crap we are bombarded with daily, I just make do in being me.
That woman in the ad is the most beautiful woman in the magazine. And I think the women in the “without makeup” section look a whole lot better than they do when they’ve been styled and airbrushed.
That said, I have to ask, WHY in 2008, are we promoting the skinny blue-eyed blond as the ideal of beauty? In this global age? WTF?
I don’t think that as a WOC, I “get a pass” just because I happen to be fat, too. Quite the opposite. It’s because we’re *already* out of the mainstream standard of beauty that we’re not considered attractive or desirable, that in that line of thought, of *course* we’re going to be fat too. (IMHO, it goes back to the historical mammy/vixen stereotypes from slavery.) The fetishization of the derrierre in black (and sometimes Latino) culture and myth is only further objectification, not exemption from the “fat = bad” standard.
Even the thinner actresses/singers can’t get beyond the favor shown lighter skin , long (straight!) hair, and caucasian features.
Ginag that is exactly what I was talking about…I don’t get a pass for being an overweight black woman, but ignored altogether. However, there is the belief that black women are fat or unattractive or that fat=unattractive (with exceptions) because we are “out of the mainstream standard and beauty.” I wasn’t going to get into the whole color-complex thing, with the light skin + straight hair=beautiful/better because that is a whole discussion on its own.
I stopped reading People Magazine because like all other magazines, they give mixed messages.
One day, they praise women for their “curves” and run a front page story about being too thin in Hollywood. Then next week, the front page story is “How I lost half my size!,” and list their “most beautiful” every year, 99% of the women they choose are the same ones they chide for being too thin! (I won’t even mention the guys because in Hollywood, it’s the women that are always harped on about their figures, whether it’s too thin or too fat).
With that constant backpedaling every week, you just can’t take them seriously.
Like a commenter above, I learned if I had a stylist I would SO rock that list.
I stopped reading People Magazine because like all other magazines, they give mixed messages.
Yup. It’s “Forget the diet — curvy stars take to the beach!”, then next week “Who’s let themselves go? 5 stars you won’t believe”, then the week after “EXTREME SKINNY CELEBRITIES — health may be at risk, doctors say”, then the next issue people are off being curvy again.
How are you meant to take that kind of revolving door seriously?
1. Kristen Bell’s eye makes me want to gouge out my own
2. Taylor Swift is waaay to old to be playing a teen in her “Teardrops On My Guitar” video and the songs kinda cheesy, too. But she IS gorgeous, maybe she should just stick to porn. Yeah, I know, that was wrong..
3. Elizabeth Banks? Oh, God, ok, she’s pretty, until she starts talking..can’t stand watching her, she almost ruined “Scrubs” 4 me.
4. Heidi and Lauren = ugly on the inside and nothing too special outwards, either..
LMAO @ Queen Latifah!
And, Yes, all the blonde/light eyes look the same!!!
‘Scuse me while I run right the Hell out and buy a bottle of peroxide (for da hair!)
I was thinking about this issue of People. I think what would’ve made it perfect would’ve been an interview with Lynx and Lamb, the Olsen twins of the white power movement. Seriously, hearing all this blonde hair blue-eyed worship makes me queasy.
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Reason number 427 why I really want to start my own magazine.
Oh wow, YES. This is definitely a good post.
This is also the reason why I only read “National Geographic” if I ever have to pick up a magazine.
I haven’t seen this year’s list, but last year there were actually quite a few non-blonde people on the list, such as Jennifer Lopez and Halle Berry. I don’t think there is such a bias on blondness as everyone thinks, although I do think there is one on thinness. Blondness is more unusual (in its natural form) and perhaps for this reason more coveted, but there are plenty of dark-haired beauties gracing the beautiful people lists.
There was a whole section this year on redheads, also. Amy Adams and Isla Fisher were in there, among others. (I love them both.) Anyway, I agree (well, obviously, given the title of this post) that thinness is the real key factor here.
Hey not only blue eyes and blond are beautiful there are also other races who are much beautiful, what about asian people, maybe for you having blond a blue eyes are beautiful but for me I don’t care if they have it. For me they are all artificial someday all of the beauty they posess will fade away .
Um – how about that most of them have had (non-reconstructive, aesthetic) cosmetic surgery, and all are handled by Ye Olde Photoshoppe? Don’t get me wrong – I think there is a lot of beauty on this planet. I just prefer mine with the original parts and all of the crazy things living wreaks, not processed. I’ve always hated these lists because I think they encourage people to strive for things that are not found in nature, and what’s found in nature is pretty breathtaking, so. Even the fabulous words these subjects utter are redacted, emailed by publicists – what are we really wasting our time with here? It’s like fodder for anthropologists – how a culture idealizes and describes itself.
Wow, who ate a heap of cynical for breakfast today?
ginag & Dee: Co-sign! Another WOC here….and….here’s another log on the “fire”…..I’m over 40! *gasp*
Body hatred is how billions get transferred from the middle class to the corporations are real “fat cats.” You don’t think they would ever let go of such a goldmine in a recession year do you?
Have you heard about the new fashion honey? All you need are looks and a whole lots of money…..
That’s why I don’t pay attention to those ‘Most Beautiful’ or ‘Sexiest’ or whatever lists/countdowns. Whether in print OR on TV. All they EVER do is repeat the belief that the only ‘pretty’ people are tall, thin, white, with light eyes and [mostly] light hair.
IF non-white people ARE so ‘graciously’ mentioned (because you know, non-white people are brainwashed into believing we should be glad white people even CONSIDER us somewhat remotely attractive physically) they still ALWAYS are the ones who meet the ‘white/Eurocentric’ standards of beauty.
It’s all BS.
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