Jennifer Lawrence Is Only "Not Thin" In The Sense Of Being "Not Starved"

This is kind of random, but recently I've seen a few things about Jennifer Lawrence, presenting her as being, like, an exemplar of good-body-image or whatever. And I don't exactly disagree, but I'd just like to point something out: Jennifer Lawrence is not fat. She is not chubby. She is not overweight, I don't think, although I don't know her actual height/weight numbers; at the very least she does not appear to be overweight. She's a rather slender young woman. What she is not, however, is someone who looks like she starves herself (which is what a lot of her quotes are about). She does not look gaunt, she does not seem to be just skin and bones, or even just skin, a bit of lean muscle, and bones. She does not, in short, look underweight. But that is not a bad thing. It's right there in the word "underweight," which on its face seems to suggest a sense of being under the ideal or desirable weight. If you are underweight, forgetting for a moment about any particular definition of the term in terms of Body Mass Index or whatever and focusing on the word itself, you weigh too little, and it's a bad thing. Jennifer Lawrence is by no means underweight, but let us all remember that that does not make her fat, or overweight. She looks, to my basically untrained eye, like someone who is at quite a healthy weight, and also one that makes her look very vibrant and, well, hot.

And I kind of feel like the treatment of Jennifer Lawrence as this body-image icon is really emblematic of the original problem here. An awful lot of women who are famous in whole or in part for being considered attractive, like Heidi Klum or Gweneth Paltrow, do have that starved look, and I personally find it really really unappealing. I think that's much of what's behind how I find fairly few of those public hotties to be actually attractive. Some women in that category, though, like Lawrence and like Christina Hendricks, do not have that look, but rather look a bit more like actual people. And these people tend to get discussed as the exceptions, the people who are doing something weird and controversial by not starving themselves in some bizarre attempt to look hot or something. Meanwhile, you don't often hear people actually saying that Heidi Klum or whoever is too thin to be attractive. Until that happens, I think, and until the discourse is more "what's wrong with all these hyper-thin people?" than "oh look, these slightly-less-thin people are so admirable!" the basic premise that women are supposed to be pencil-thin will still be there in the background, unchallenged even when those who rightly defy it are being lauded.