The Ass and the Ingenue

Okay, so, I have a big ass.

It is so large as to make the purchasing of jeans nigh-impossible. My waist-to-ass ratio is more than a little (and more than a little inconvenient). On a BMI scale, I am overweight. And you know what? I'm cool with this.

There was a little while there when I was not so cool with it. I would beat myself up about my weight, cry for long periods, stare into the mirror, and chastise myself for eating. Pretty nominal stuff, all told... most girls get preoccupied with these things. Guys too.

One night, I remember crying and thinking that I was useless because I was not skinny. As a female in the world, there was no place for me because I was not slender. Mind you, I don't hold anyone else to this line of thinking - for my more ample-bodied and beautiful friends, I hold nothing but the highest regard. I feel untold love for more "curvy" girls, for their daily strength and bravery. I believe, most of all, that people are genetically predisposed to different weights - and that a healthy weight for one person is not the same as a healthy weight for another.

But in that moment, I felt sick, and wrong, all because I could not find a cultural mirror to hold my body type to and find myself beautiful.

It need not be reiterated that, here in the modern world, we are obsessed with skinniness; worse, we are obsessed with finding a "cure" for certain body types. Look on the faces of magazines. How many topics are about finding some new way to tone up, to lose weight? For many people, the bodies we have are the ones we're stuck with, and no amount of booty-shaking and carb-avoiding will ever change that.

As I have been dangling my toes in the waters of body acceptance and living the philosophy of being healthy at one's natural weight, so too have I been seeing glimpses of the sordid underbelly and workings behind our culture's perpetuation of "skinny=good". It is no coincidence that these things coincide.

The more I see about body image in the industry, the more I am sickened by it.

Let me preface the following by saying that I love the agents I work with. They are intelligent, progressive, and kind. I am so lucky to be "apprenticed" to them, as it were.

That being said, in the past few months, I have heard more totally average-bodied girls referred to as "fat" and "dumpy" than I would really like. I have heard Catherine Zeta-Jones referred to as "overweight". But today's conversation with my boss really took the cake.

We had recently found out that a client of ours had been turned down from a role for being too "curvy". To my naive mind, she is very beautiful and slender. So, outraged, I made my opinion known. I told the agents that I felt our client was by no means "curvy" out in the real world, but that didn't seem to matter.

"She has a big bum," my boss said. I tried not to look crestfallen.

It was then explained to me that girls with big asses could never be romantic leads. That no audience member would ever believe that a large-assed girl could be "the one" in some man's life. What my boss explained to me was matter-of-fact, wisdom garnered after so much experience in this business.

That didn't stop it from being awful.

She also mentioned that someone with that figure would be better suited for comedic roles. Whether or not it was meant this way, I understood it to mean that our culture at large does not take the ample-bodied seriously. And it's true. We see overweight men and women in primarily comedic roles, with notable exceptions (Christina Hendricks is not fat by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a hard time picturing many agents taking a chance with other girls of her body type; likewise, James Gandolfini struck it big with such an interesting and dramatic role as Tony Soprano). We equate the larger body with a larger personality - bold, brassy, but ultimately silly and certainly not romantic.

In the world of showbusiness, the cycle perpetuates itself, and seemingly no one makes the rules - and no one stops the buck. Agents will rarely chance working with an actor who doesn't fit a certain mold; they do this because they know casting directors won't hire someone outside "type"; casting directors won't cast against type because they believe audiences won't buy it; audiences are then taught that only thin girls get songs sung about them, and only thin girls fall in love.

And we curvy girls - myself, and those larger than me - learn that we are not "the one," and that no one with a big ass can be an ingenue.

This is a gigantic crock. But it is also a business. Actors are in the business of selling themselves, just as a jeweler would sell a bracelet or a writer would sell a story. To the public at large, and especially in the business, being thin is equated with caring for oneself and being polished. (This opens up other doors pertaining to weight and class, but that is for another time.) But what the public also tends to forget is that, since actors are selling themselves as products, they are not like real people.

In fact, actors are not even the approximation of real people. Stoppard said it best... "actors are the opposite of people". They are chosen not as slices of life, but as "paragons". They are fantasies. But no matter how many times we say it out loud and rationalize that sentiment, it's so hard to shake the cultural mirror that pervades our society.

The media does not, in many ways, reflect life. It reflects what a set group of people believe life should be like. How many times do we need to repeat that before it starts to sink in? How many working actors, and working people, do we have to put through the wringer before normal bodies can be normal again?