Lets ditch the notion of an ideal body
While I've not minded seeing lashings of pictures of her in various publications over the last week, the controversy of which Christina Hendricks is an unwitting star is a cause for dismay.
The equalities minister Lynne Featherstone suggested that the Mad Men actress should be a 'role model' for women, on the grounds that she's not too skinny and is therefore less likely to plunge teenage girls into a quagmire of self-loathing and eating disorders.
Cue exasperated comments from female commentators.
The trouble is, the average woman stands no more chance of looking like Christina Hendricks than I do of transforming myself into Johnny Depp.
That's the bad news.
The good news is, unless you're aiming for Hollywood stardom, that doesn't matter.
Contrary to what certain newspapers and magazines would have you believe, we don't live in a world in which only people of a certain body type can be happy.
To seek to establish any type as an ideal is an insult to the others, and is surely not in the spirit of the 'equality' that Featherstone is supposed to be promoting.
If we worry that idealised images in the media are filling teenage girls with self-loathing, the last thing they need is for an equalities minister to introduce yet another idealised image as an alternative.
I reckon Featherstone's suggestion that digitally altered photographs should carry a health warning is also misguided. Such meddling attempts to tackle this issue the wrong way round. Rather than granting these images the compliment of imposing a health warning on them, our energies would be better spent educating teenage girls to take them less seriously, and to invest their self-esteem in something more substantial than their relative resemblance to an imposed physical ideal.
She said advertisers and magazine editors have a "right to publish what they choose" but added that "women and girls also have the right to be comfortable in their own bodies. At the moment they are being denied that".
Rubbish. If you get upset by idealised images of celebrities, don't look at them.
In these difficult economic times, a minister whose role is to reduce inequality should have plenty to do.
And it could be that Lynne Featherstone is looking for ways to mitigate the scrapping of free swimming lessons, for example, or to ensure the unemployed have free access to the internet to help them apply for jobs. But I suspect her role might be more to do with spouting non-sequiturs about body image that serve no purpose other than to give the papers the perfect excuse to feature lovely pictures of Christina Hendricks.
* Following my column on Raoul Moat and his Facebook following, a couple of readers have pointed out that 3,000 people signed up to his Facebook page, Raoul Moat You Legend, does not mean 3,000 idiots.
Many of the people who were 'friends' of this site will have been signing up simply because they are moved to make a comment on the issues raised by the whole Raoul Moat fiasco and the controversial nature of the police response - and that includes comments attacking his supporters. Not all of us, I am chastened to be reminded, have the luxury of airing our views in a newspaper column.
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Weather for Cleckheaton
Monday 13 February 2012
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