Neither John Travolta nor Jason Segel need to be “re-touched.” Unless I’m doing the touching and re-touching. They’re my #1 and #3 men, respectively.

On one hand, I think it’s about time that famous men started feeling the pressure to be perfect and the sting of the media and fans monitoring everything they put in their mouths and every pound of flesh they gain. Because, for a long time, they got away with their imperfectness while famous women were carefully inspected and trashed for possessing even the tiniest flaw. That rash of “Heavy guy with a skinny, hot wife” sitcoms was just maddening. (Kudos to Days of our Lives for, several years ago, being the only TV show to portray a believable, happy couple in the reverse – hot, in-shape husband, heavy wife. And I haven’t watched it in years so they might have returned for all I know.)

On the other hand, I don’t think men deserve that kind of judgment any more than women do. Who decides what is attractive? I, personally, like men with some meat on their bones, which explains why I find guys like Travolta and Segel so appealing. (Besides the fact that they both seem like genuinely good guys.) And, despite what the media would have us believe, there are actually men in this world who find heavier women quite sexy. So, why do we constantly have to read stories that focus on making fun of celebs who aren’t total hardbodies? It’s like we’re all here saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and they’re yelling, “NO, YOU’RE WRONG! There is a standard of beauty and you all must accept and live up to it!”

By the way, love that blue dress.

For all I know, Self is a great magazine. But I will never know because their cover photos and the spin put on the cover headlines is way too “thin at all costs” focused for me.

Great post, Sweet Machine. I agree with Stacia about my favorite part. The “all about health” argument was particularly ludicrous in this case. Is it just me or are these people getting kinda shrill and desperate?

It’s attitudes like that which are strongly part of why I decided early on in my film studies that I did NOT want to be part of the film community. It has become so taken for granted, just so unspokenly natural, that all women in films are thin and beautiful, that stupid self-entitled men like this author are really PANICKED about male actors gaining weight. Thin women are just an afterthought to male viewers and critics, exactly like you said. I remember in my college film classes, though, at the height of my bulimia, watching Goddard and barely being able to stomach it, wondering, “How is it essential to the plot that she is SO THIN?” Where men take this as undisputed fact of film and don’t even notice it, that was all I could focus on, because I was so preoccupied with wanting to look a certain way and feeling totally inferior because of my non-cookie-cutter body. (I hate Goddard anyway from a purely academic viewpoint, and not just for that reason.)

Male gaze and this cruel blindness to any variation in female body shapes is so ingrained in all art forms that even most female viewers are forced to think the same way- and some aren’t even aware they’re feeding into it. I remember when a female writer/director came to speak to one of my classes and show us some of our shorts, all of which featured anorectically thin women. And she actually said to us that she’d been criticized for using such extreme thinness, and her response was, “Well, I just really like the way thin women look on camera.” UGH!!!!!

I’m thoroughly disgusted but not entirely surprised that the NYT would publish something like this. While it’s certainly an idiotic article, it’s not the first time the paper has indulged totally oblivious self-entitled men waxing philosophical on why the world is not exactly to their specifications, in the form of unattractive women, other peoples’ children, and minorities.

Disgusted with the NYT, disgusted with movies- pretty soon I will really be some kind of J.T. Salinger-like recluse.

I just wish you had some way of tagging or whatever its called (like buzz or stumble or something?) so this can get more expoure.

Also, yeah, I love the whole “but ASKED the publicist..they would never lie to me!” about the photo retouching. If journalism were asking a paid flack for a comment then unquestioningly publishing it, J-school would be a lot easier.

Ditto. And I’m so sick of everyone talking about it…if you saw him on the Daily Show, I just wanted to punch when he said someone behind the scenes said, it must be so much easier to climb up stairs now? And Rogan thought out loud, how huge was I????

Except I’m not sure naive is the word for it – she’s grandmotherly, but she also has a black belt and works undercover for the CIA. So less Miss Marple than Julia Child/James Bond.

*ahem*

Brilliant article, sweet machine. I found this sentence telling from Cieply’s original:
“But a new willingness to cast heavier men “may have happened organically,” Ms. Fasano said, as Hollywood over the last few years has been plagued by what has widely been seen as a shortage of reliably appealing stars.”

So:
People still go see fat actors they love. They still pay money and enjoy their work – you know, the actual performance, the “acting” if you will. Yet they’re not all perfect at us!

I think something the good critic neglects to consider is that physicality brings something to the roles being played beyond audience’s sexual attraction. Being larger in itself doesn’t make someone a better/worse actor, but being comfortable in your skin, or “in your body” sure could. And that’s not even taking into account the way diets can destroy your concentration and focus, make you tired and grumpy and off. Would Russell Crowe be such an everyman in that photo if he were skinnier, shirtless, greased up, shaved? Like we know journalists are in real life, right?

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