Body Wars

Much like fellow Gen-Xer Lori Gottlieb, who got a bestseller out of “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” while backpedaling that “people are missing the irony in the title,” Dolgoff insists that the “formerly hot” appellation is “obviously self-mocking,” adding, “I was no supermodel to begin with.” Hey, I think I’ll write a book called, “Just Kill Yourself, You Old Bag. I’m Kidding. But You Should.”

“Formerly Hot,” inspired by Dolgoff’s epiphany that “I was no longer who I’d always been — a pretty girl who navigated the world partially aided by the advantage of her looks,” will surely strike a chord with anyone who’s ever realized she’s never getting comped for drinks again. And aging is not in itself a frivolous topic to tackle; being able to attract, after all, is what keeps the species going. Youth has a powerful allure, and its diminishment is a tough nut to swallow. As no less an expert than Cher once said, “I’ve been forty and I’ve been fifty. Forty is better.”

Believe it — there’s plenty about getting older that falls far short of awesome. Watching your parents die off, having to get suspicious moles checked out, fending off your friends’ attempts to discuss their fiber regimens – that’s no picnic. Yet despite the thriving industries devoted to beauty, diet and fashion, despite the imperative to “not look old,” we still feel embarrassed admitting our concerns, fearing accusations of shallowness and vanity.

This uncharted turf is certainly worthy of unflinching examination – and I generally find the More magazine school of rah-rah “this is your time, girlfriend!” empowerment pretty vomit-worthy. But it’s ironic that while this is likely the greatest time in human history to be middle-aged (for which I personally thank you for blazing that trail, baby boomers) we’re still torn up about it. A person over 40 is no longer immediately set out to die on an ice floe, but that leaves the question, What’s left? Are we MILFs and cougars, or just haggard old “formerlies”? We flail awkwardly to finesse this new stage of life, maybe because being older ain’t what it used to be. There was a time we’d just consign ourselves to looking like a Dorothea Lange photograph by the time we had the second kid, but those migrant farmworkers weren’t of the generation that got Viagra and Nirvana. Can we still rock out? Wear funny T-shirts?

That I know full well I’m no kid anymore is evident by the lack of whimsical spelling in my status updates, the “age-defying” label on my concealer, and the fact that none of my Facebook pictures depict me making a duckface while clutching a plastic cup overflowing with Coors Light.  But accepting what one is not is different than being assured of who one is. On his cringe-worthily perfect series “Louie,” Louis C.K. delivers the grim news to the Lloyd Dobler generation: “There’s never going to be another year of my life that was better than the year before it. That’s never going to happen again. I’ve seen my best years.” And unlike those lucky enough to be able to make the wracked-with-baggage boast of being formerly hot, he says, “I’ve never gained from my looks at all. It’s not like, oh, they’re going, what am I going to do now?”

There’s probably truth to the theory that aging hits women, who theoretically rely on their physical magnetism more than their comic timing, differently than it does men. So it’s fair to address the issue of relative “hotness,” and OK for writers like Dolgoff to speak to that urge to hang on to whatever portion one’s been allotted in life. If your body is your home, you don’t want to be the person with a toilet in the front yard that doubles as a planter. What’s annoying is that Dolgoff’s assertion that “while you’re ‘formerly’ some things, you’re ‘finally’ many others,” comes wrapped up in a grabby package of going, going, gone desperation.

If I’ve got potentially 40 more years of living ahead, I won’t spend it as the kind of woman Bowling for Soup writes songs about. In truth, like many people my age, I hated high school and my 20s sucked as much as they rocked. So while we may take the baby barrettes out of our graying hair and no longer fit the description of grrrl, my generation has been pretty busy spending the last few decades living its life, starting its zines, cranking out some great music and generally not giving much of a crap about its hotness to begin with. I’ll gladly answer to “slacker,” but even if it’s with a wink and a self-deprecating laugh over pleather miniskirts gone by, don’t call me “formerly” anything. Because I’m not ready to assume my best years are behind me. And I don’t ever want to define myself by what I’ve been. 

How far to take retouching isn’t just an issue for glossy magazines anymore. As Glamour points out, there are over “70 iPhone apps to help you alter your photos before you press upload” – and even more possibilities once the images hit your computer. Perhaps that’s why Glamour readers are so comfortable with a little cleaning up here and there. The magazine reports that “Nearly 60 percent [of readers] feel it’s OK for a woman to tweak her personal pictures.” Moreover, a whopping “23 percent of women ages 25 to 29 do it; that number climbs to 41 percent among those ages 18 to 24.” The younger you are, it seems, the less inhibited you’ll be about retouching your image.

But readers are considerably less lenient when someone else is wielding the tools. “Only 43 percent of women said it was OK for magazines to retouch, and just 39 percent were comfortable with ads doing so.” Why so schizo? Perhaps the results reflect a level of previously unacknowledged vanity and hypocrisy – some rampant trend of falsifying our personal images. Glamour certainly takes a dim view of it, getting Susie Orbach, author of “Bodies” and “Fat Is a Feminist Issue,” to note, “It makes us think there must really be something wrong with us if we can’t even look as good as the average woman on Facebook.”

But there’s more to it. For one thing, unless you’re blatantly faking your looks for a dating profile (PS don’t), chances are whatever altering you do of your photos isn’t in the service of selling somebody an unattainable bill of goods. It’s one thing to be cool with zapping out a zit on a regular person’s avatar, but it’s another ball of wax entirely when a company is trying to sell a product based on an image that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world. Just this week, the British Advertising Standards Authority yet again yanked a major cosmetics campaign, noting that a recent L’Oreal ad featuring Rachel Weisz “misrepresented the results that the product could achieve.” And when magazines are peddling the fantasy that actresses are slinking into bikinis six weeks after delivering their twins, or, for that matter, that Faith Hill doesn’t have a collarbone and Kelly Clarkson doesn’t have a butt, well, perhaps readers are justified in feeling a little gun-shy. And, for another thing, the way that individuals use retouching isn’t always merely in service of looking as hot as possible. It’s often just about making the picture itself interesting – griming it up for a vintage effect, going crazy with the exposure. It’s a different kind of retouching, one that doesn’t begin and end with creating a fake set of abs on the cover of Ab Monthly.

Regardless, Glamour is clearly ready to heed the words of its readers. It’s not just altruism at play here: too many public embarrassments when the unaltered versions of overly enthusiastic photo spreads appear and your credibility is shot to hell. Yet it’s also an acknowledgment that, as Glamour puts it, “retouching has its limits — or should — and Glamour plans to take a stronger role in setting ours.” What’s at stake isn’t the softening of expression lines or removal of sleep-deprivation dark circles – those things will go on. But a too perfect image loses not just its humanity; it loses what sites like Flickr have based their whole appeal on: interestingness. “You told us you don’t want little things like freckles and scars removed,” Cindi Leive wrote, adding, “And while our policy has always been not to alter a woman’s body shape, we’ll also be asking photographers we hire not to manipulate body size in the photos we commission, even if a celebrity or model requests a digital diet.” Beautiful girls in beautiful photos still sell magazines – and by extension, lipstick and jeans and all the aspirational dreams associated with them. But a pledge to go a little easier on the alterations suggests the possible beginning of fashion’s unlikeliest trend ever. A dash of authenticity.

Lagerfeld’s remarks came within a piece in which he also declared, “If I was a woman in Russia I would be a lesbian, as the men are very ugly,” and that “Nobody wants Greece to disappear, but they have really disgusting habits – Italy as well.” He also claimed that Michelle Obama once said, “Why you don’t like my big black ass?” (the First Lady never said any such thing), and asserted that “People in magazines are 50 percent bimbo and 50 percent pregnant women.” So Adele gets off pretty lightly in the whole thing. Okay, his math might not be that far off on the magazine content thing, but it’s safe to say that while the man can rock a double-breasted silhouette like nobody’s business, he might just be a total moron.

Yet despite his unique version of high praise for Adele, plenty offense at Lagerfeld’s remarks. Fashion publicist Kelly Cutrone shot back on Twitter “Love Adele Boycott Chanel.” Anderson Cooper added Lagerfeld to his weekly “Ridiculist,” calling him, spectacularly, a “fashion designer and Edward Gorey cartoon character and chronic foot-in-mouth disease sufferer.”

For his part, Lagerfeld, perhaps sensing accurately that it’s one thing to put down Russia, Greece and Italy, but you do not want to screw with Adele fans, beat a hasty retreat from his remarks. “I’d like to say to Adele that I am your biggest admirer,” he added in Metro later in the week. “Sometimes when you take a sentence out of the article it changes the meaning of the thought. What I said was in relation to Lana Del Rey and the sentence has since been taken out of context from how it was originally published. I actually prefer Adele, she is my favorite singer and I am a great admirer of her. I lost over 30 kilos over 10 years ago and have kept it off. I know how it feels when the press is mean to you in regards to your appearance. Adele is a beautiful girl. She is the best. And I can’t wait for her next CD.” Thanks for tossing Adele the bone of a “beautiful face,” Karl.

It’s significant that in his original story, Lagerfeld very clearly decreed Adele “a little too fat,” but the paper’s writer Kenya Hunt quoted it Wednesday as “a little bit fat.” Frankly, neither line is cool, but Lagerfeld’s true observation, his deeming Adele “too fat,” shouldn’t be altered or toned down. It’s significant because it implies not merely that she is particular body type, but that said type is unacceptable, that it is “too” much to deal with. Too fat for whom? Not Adele, clearly. Not her throngs of fans.

Somehow, in this day and age, the fact that a young woman of ample proportions is making it is considered revolutionary – unnerving even. That’s not just Lagerfeld-specific idiocy either. This very week, New York Times magazine writer Jacob Brown crowned Lana Del Rey as “the perfect antidote to Rihanna-Gaga overload — dare we say, a skinnier Adele, a more stable Amy Winehouse.” Really? Who knew that the world needed a “skinnier” antidote to Adele, that her size was somehow on par with the late Winehouse’s addictions?

Thank God that Adele herself, who underwent throat surgery in November currently and has the top-selling album in the country, has a different set of priorities — one that doesn’t include giving a toss about what some fan-brandishing fashion designer or Lana Del Rey slobbering Times writer or anybody else thinks about her body. She tells Anderson Cooper on Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” “I don’t want to be some skinny mini with my tits out. I really don’t want to do it and I don’t want people confusing what it is that I am about…. I’ve never seen magazine covers and music videos and been like, I need to look like that to be a success.” She’s right, she doesn’t. She’s up for six Grammys this Sunday and has even managed to adorn the cover of Vogue, despite her crippling handicap of weighing over 100 pounds. She tells Cooper, “I represent the majority of women and I’m very proud of that.” But whatever your size, she represents a whole lot more — dare we say, a breathtaking voice of sanity in a size-obsessed world?

But along the taunt-strewn way, audiences and critics began to take serious notice of a very funny actress. When “Bridesmaids” became a massive hit last spring, its success was fueled in no small part by McCarthy’s fearlessly brash performance. (Once you know that McCarthy based her character on Guy Fieri, the entire thing gets that much more fantastic.) It wasn’t just the ferocious comic energy that McCarthy put into using a sandwich as a sex prop or defecating into a sink that made her so instantly indelible. It was the way she gave Megan such a convincing heart. In a sea of poop jokes, she emerged as the most real character in the whole movie, the one you’d want in your own entourage.

And just as the long, golden popcorn days of “Bridesmaids” began to fade and her ride at the top seemed close to an end, McCarthy bested a posse of multiple-award winners — Laura Linney, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Edie Falco and Martha Plimpton — to win the Emmy for best actress in a comedy. Strutting onstage with the jokey props of a tiara and bouquet, she gushed with the unguarded enthusiasm of a true beauty queen. “I’m from Plainfield, Ill., and I’m standing here and it’s kind of amazing,” she said tearily, before threatening to “carry around” her colleagues later in the evening. By fall, she was hosting “SNL” and gracing the cover of Entertainment Weekly, crowned yet again as the new “Queen of Comedy.”

So McCarthy’s latest coronation as a best supporting actress nominee should come as no great surprise. Yet that in no way detracts from the awesomeness of it. It’s a victory in a movie industry – and an awards system in particular – that is still dominated by a very specific physical type. The skinny kind. Though Gabourey Sidibe came close two years ago for “Precious,” you’d have to go all the way back to Kathy Bates in 1990 to find an Oscar-winning best actress who might ever have darkened the door of a Lane Bryant. In McCarthy’s category, there have been a handful of plus-size winners of late, including “Precious” costar Mo’Nique just two years ago. But though Jennifer Hudson was known for her big voice and frame when she collected her Oscar for playing the generously proportioned Effie in “Dreamgirls,” she’s since slimmed down enough to become a Weight Watchers spokeswoman.

It’s not that the award bestowers don’t love a big lady, or what passes for a big lady in Hollywood. It’s that they just don’t pay much mind to the authentic kind. Ten years ago, Renee Zellweger gained 30 pounds – and still looked like a pretty average-looking woman – on her way to an Oscar nomination for “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” A few years later, former model Charlize Theron bulked up and won the little golden man when she played serial killer Aileen Wournos in “Monster.” It’s not just the women, by the way; George Clooney added heft for “Syriana” and walked home a winner.

Looking at this year’s nominees, the disconnect between the larger-size characters they play and their considerably smaller real-life size is hard to ignore. This year’s single husky male nominee, Jonah Hill, has undergone a dramatic weight loss. Viola Davis packed on 25 pounds for her role in “The Help” – and still needed padding. Her costar and fellow nominee Jessica Chastain put on a mere 15 pounds, a feat she later complained was “a form of torture.” McCarthy, in contrast, seems remarkably untormented. Yes, she admits there are times she would “love” for someone to think she looks a tad “emaciated,” but as she declared in 2011, “I think the things that define me… are a lot more than those kinds of petty things.”

A person’s exterior is at once a “petty” thing and a primary one. It affects how the world treats her and how she chooses to respond in kind. And that McCarthy can be an Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated, magazine cover-gracing, full-blown star without shrinking down to Keira Knightley proportions represents a consciousness shift not just in the culture at large, but in a business that associates success with being built like Jennifer Aniston. The nomination of McCarthy suggests that maybe the movies are finally acknowledging that human beings come in different sizes. (The fact that Rebel Wilson gets to be the bride in the forthcoming “Bachelorette” is an encouraging sign.) And though we’ll have to wait until Feb. 26 to learn if Melissa McCarthy will take home an Academy Award, her uncompromising rise to A-list status already makes her not just a winner, but, beautifully, a big one.

Does anyone else think that sounds like an awful lot of powder and pills — not to mention cold, hard cash — for a “natural” process? Especially one that features one low-calorie meal a day “from a set of foods”? Not Emmy-winner Mariska Hargitay, who says that the system “has changed my life.” Not celebrity divorcee Demi Moore, who calls it “the best!” Mmm mmm, what could be better than a “filling” 90-calorie shake composed mostly of rice protein concentrate, rice bran and rice syrup solids?

Plenty, suggests London dietician Catherine Collins, who noted in Sunday’s Daily Mail that Paltrow is “not a nutritional expert. I would not recommend it.” Also, 21 days of that stuff sounds really gross. (Goop does note that the invitation to cleanse is “not intended as medical advice” and is “just a suggestion,” thereby covering Paltrow’s toned, slender butt.)

Though Goop’s “suggestions” are historically wildly out of touch with any 99 percenter’s lifestyle and budget, the idea that someone could be fabulously well-off enough to pay exorbitant sums for the pleasure of not eating strikes may of us as especially hilarious, even for Gwynie. And though Jezebel once called Paltrow a “tone deaf… Marie Antoinette,” at least the doomed queen knew that if you’re spending money, it might as well be on the luxuriant pleasure of cake. Not a powder to promote “intestinal transit time and bowel regularity.”