Public Figures
Britney’s Body Is Everybody’s
WHEN PEOPLE ASK ME HOW much I weigh, they are often looking for a measure of distance more than a measure of weight. They want to know my weight in pounds, of course, but at the heart of so many inquiries about the weight of a small woman is a desire to know the difference between their bodies and mine. They want to know the distance between these two countries we occupy and the difference in area. As I write this, I weigh 110 pounds. It is a number that I am not uncomfortable with, but I prefer to be from one pound to four pounds lighter, between 106 and 109. The circles on the six and the nine are deceptive roundness, seeing as the body they represent is mostly defined by straight lines at this weight. The zeros in the middle of the number serve as numerical thigh gaps: a space to house the coveted nothing that I hunger in the direction of. But my eating disorder is a pathology that gives significance to arbitrary figures, both embodied shapes and numerical ones.
Men often register low weights as normal. Their standard calibrations for the weight of petite women is between 100 and 115 pounds, average ones 115 to 125, and tall ones 125 to 135. These men are completely wrong, of course. But women, too, have a hard time adjusting for height and width to understand how another woman can appear slight but bear a substantial weight or how others can appear so ample but register on the scales at smaller numbers. Further exacerbating the disorientation we experience when faced with other people’s statistics that do not match our internal calibrations of them is the preponderance of celebrity programming featuring hypothesized weights and sizes for famous bodies. Exact weights litter fitness and celebrity magazines that seem off somehow but always carry the weight of our judgments, and an internal subtraction problem, to determine our proximity to their shapes. Weighing fewer than 100 pounds indicates too much weight lost, weighing more than 150 pounds indicates a calamitous embarrassment, and weighing over 200 pounds is nothing short of a mortal sin.
I went from small to smaller in the year 2013, after having spent the two years prior hopping between average and the bigger side of little. I have a clear memory of reading Shape magazine’s Britney Spears cover story that summer in a nail salon and realizing that for the first time since I became aware of Britney existing, I weighed substantially less than her. The subheadline claimed that Britney was “fitter and more fabulous than ever” before detailing her workout routine.1 That same year, RadarOnline published a slideshow of female celebrities and their weights, some estimated by fitness experts and several culled from a website called Whattheyreallyweigh.com, presumably owned and operated by a deeply happy human being.
But the most frequent place these numbers appear is on the covers of magazines during the annual shame parade that tabloids put famous women through during the summer. The headlines are always some variation of “The Best and Worst Bikini Bodies of the Summer!” The graininess of the collection of candid photos of celebrities at the beach betrays that these images were taken from afar and likely without the knowledge or consent of the celebrity therein. The result is that the featured celebrities are often in the middle of play or halfway through speaking a sentence in these images. Their mouths appear agape and their chins doubled up. And these lists are always incomplete, of course. Not every celebrity goes to the beach during the summer, and certainly not all of them are captured by photographers when they do. But the high volume of celebrities living by the coast in Los Angeles makes the list reasonably robust. And though these images are not taken with their consent, there is always an element of intent written into the copy that surrounds them. Unlike the Victoria’s Secret catalog, these images were not posed, and they presumably went largely untouched by the wands of Photoshop, but intentionality is breathed into each picture. Thin and shapely women are always said to be “flaunting” or “showing off” their bikini bodies by simply appearing in public. Those who don’t fit within the narrow definition of perfection in a given year are “letting it all hang out.” A private citizen might be able to take legal action against the offending photographers and the publications that hire them for the privacy violation, but being an entertainer generally means the forfeiture of such an option. Theirs are public figures in every sense of the word.
I rarely purchase these magazines. It is not because I am ashamed of my predilection for gawking at famous flesh but because I feel it would draw attention to my own body. I fear that looking at other bodies would magnify the existence of mine, making me somehow more material than I had been before. But when they were available in the piles of reading materials at nail salons, I would pick them up and feign defeat at the selection, as if I were positively beleaguered by some duty to read it. At drugstores with self-service kiosks where the magazines are situated directly next to the machines, I would pick up a copy and swipe the bar code across the scanner in one motion. Once I had the tasteless contraband in my hands, I skipped directly to the section of the magazine where the selections for the “best” bikini bodies were printed. I marveled at how symmetry of muscle and bone in the legs could be as striking as symmetry in the face. I wondered how abdomens could be exercised to so precise a point that they were completely flat but showed no visible muscle definition that might masculinize the effect even slightly.