Romola Garai, in the course of commenting on some of the regularly-discussed indignities of being larger than a size six in Hollywood, makes two very important points about what our skewed perceptions of beauty do to us:

“Everyone’s aware of it. It’s partly because fashion, film and television have become so interdependent. Increasingly, it’s actresses doing the big fashion advertising campaigns and now there’s no distinction between actresses and models. “There’s no way I could ring up a company that was lending me a red carpet dress and say, ‘Do you have it in a 10?’ Because all the press samples are an eight – I would say a small eight. If you want the profile, you have to lose the weight.”…

The actress conceded that men in the industry also feel pressure to lose weight, referring to a report that Jason Segel, the Hollywood actor, was told to lose 30 lbs for his role in a romantic comedy. She said: “Executives said it just wasn’t credible that anyone would want to have sex with him the way he was. “I think that is such a profound misreading of what people want out of sex and relationships. And I want no part of that. I wouldn’t want to sit in a room and have someone say to my face, ‘No-one is going to want to have sex with you’. No job is worth that.”

That conflation of actresses’ and models’ role is important because it provides a homogenous beauty standard. When there was a clear distinction between how models wore clothes on the runway, and how actresses wore clothes in their version of the real world, that created a continuum between models, actresses, and those of us whose bodies and faces are not our living. Forcing models and actresses to meet the same standards, even though a diversity of body types would make both industries more interesting (a point that’s illustrated to a certain extent by this slideshow of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show), creates a polarized dynamic rather than a range, a right body type and a wrong one rather than the sense that there are a lot of kinds of women who need to wear clothes and can look incredible them.

But even more important is her point about sex. The idea that having good sex is a matter of how you look rather than how comfortable you are in your body, how well you know your needs and desires, is one of the worst, most persistent misconceptions in our mass culture. Good sex is about sensation, about communication, about all kinds of things that are totally disconnected from how well you’re posed while you’re having sex, or how you look in clothes you take off prior to having sex. Denying that means we have worse sex than we deserve in our popular culture, and perhaps as a result, fewer ways to articulate what we want and what would make us feel good. It’s no mistake that Garai is a wonderfully engaged actress in her sex scenes in The Hour, which is back in a couple of weeks, and is terrific, and in The Crimson Petal And The White. Our pop culture would be better off if we had more actresses who thought–not to mention looked–like her, and more people who wanted to write and direct with these ideas in mind.

Of all the new shows I’ve been monitoring this fall, the one that confounds me the most thus far is The Mindy Project. I had what were almost certainly unfairly high expectations for the program, about a young ob/gyn based in part on Mindy Kaling’s mother, given Kaling’s work on The Office, her status as a fully-developed cross-platform comedic voice, and my enthusiasm for the subject material, including women’s health and medical billing. But I can’t decide if I like the show, in part because I can’t decide if I like its main character.

Low-level female difficulty on television tends to be most interesting if it’s to an end. Liz Lemon’s crazy is the result of a poor work-life balance and in response to the insane expectations of women in Hollywood. Hannah Horvath’s wild vacillations are the result of a girl being told she’s talented but never being expected or forced to turn that talent in any applied direction. So far, Mindy’s damage, seems more like a symptom of bratty entitlement than part of a larger constellation. I appreciated that her character carried out a competent delivery in the first episode, but not so much that it erased my real sense of anger at her for missing another patient’s delivery because she was being a mess and then acting irritated when another doctor got credit for and business out of doing her job. Similarly, the idea that she’d hire a nurse because of a shared affinity for romantic comedies turned me off. Mindy seems more like a child than the grown person with character and nuance the show seems to want me to believe she is, more the supporting character with her love of romantic comedies as a single, defined quirk that provides fuel for recurring jokes, rather than the multi-faceted main character The Mindy Project needs her to be. Some of these elements feel like natural transitions from Kaling’s stint writing and playing Kelly Kapoor on The Office, and perhaps an illustration of some difficulties Kaling is have extricating herself from a character who is drawn closely from her own experiences and viewing Mindy independently as the woman who is ushering her character into the world and into prime time.

But it remains a problem for the show that Mindy is someone who, if I met her in real life, I don’t think I’d want to spend much time with. The bar is lower for people I don’t have to meet in the real world and admits much stranger fictional creations than I’d accept real ones. But they aren’t completely divorced from each other. A character who falls in the dangerous zone of irritating, rather than being either genuinely compelling or a fascinating, illustrative train wreck is a difficult one to attach to.

The Mindy Project also feels to me, so far, like an illustration of why, while it’s really important to have shows that star women of color and women whose bodies don’t fit an exceedingly narrow Hollywood ideal, the presence of both of those conditions is not actually sufficient to make a show good or interesting. It’s nice to see that Kaling didn’t shrink in between her transition from a supporting player to a star. But it’s exhausting to see Danny (Chris Messina), the doctor who is her obvious love interest, tell her, with what seemed like apparent intent to hurt her, that she could stand to lose fifteen pounds. And I thought last week’s episode, in which Kaling repeatedly re-orders frozen yogurt while on a date with Seth Meyers, ended up making her look like a child (something that was also the case during her first-episode date with Ed Helms) rather than saying something sensual and interesting about her appetites or her relationship with food. Maybe Danny will come around about Mindy’s body, maybe the show’s thoughts about Mindy and food, which has popped up as a theme twice, will cohere. But right now, the show is in an odd interim place where more mean about Mindy’s weight than it is either treating her like a normal sitcom star no matter what she looks like or actually examining Mindy’s relationship to her body. I’m not sure it’s progress to put someone of Kaling’s size (which honestly, seems fairly close to mine, and thus not even truly that daring) on television if the joke and character beats feel old and slightly cruel.

Thus far, the show’s perspective on race feels like it’s coming from a bunch of different directions, and I’m more interested in the ways in which they’ll cohere into a complete picture. The scene in the first episode where Mindy, drunk and riding a stolen child’s bike down a dark suburban street, hollers “Racist!” at a driver who honks at her, is a very smart, subtle one-word joke both about the possibilities both that people’s actions are influenced by racism and that charges of racism can be not just spurious but frivolous. The show hasn’t commented directly on what it means for a South Asian woman to covet romantic comedy dreams, though Mindy’s boyfriend, who she meets cute in ideal romantic comedy circumstances, does leave her for a younger, Eastern European woman—the dream is only available to everywomen who meet certain racial and age criteria. Then, there’s her attitudes towards lower-income patients, which is inflected by both class and race. Mindy may act like she has a candy heart with a little boy who translates for his veiled, uinsured mother, telling him to lie to her about their family’s insurance status so she can accept her as a patient, but she complains bitterly about poor patients to her coworkers. That constellation of factors is sharper and more interesting than anything The Mindy Project‘s done with body image or Mindy’s relationship with food, and I think the show might be sharper if her relationship with romantic comedies was filtered through a lens of race and class rather than foregrounded. I understand that romantic comedies are the show’s hook. But I can’t help but wonder if the show would be more interesting if Kaling’s specific perspective on them was a bit more foregrounded so the show would feel like a conversation with a close, smart friend rather than a recapitulation of archetypal story beats.

And really, I suppose, that’s what I’m finding difficult about The Mindy Project, which should be everything I like on television. I need Mindy to give me a reason to keep her around. Because unlike her best friend Gwen, we’re not bound by chains of friendship stretching back to colleges that require me to do hangover maintenance on her and debrief over lunch. We’re still getting to know each other. And so far, though Fox has given the show a full season, I’m not sure whether I want to stay for another drink or another episode.

For more on The Mindy Project, Pitch Perfect, and other pop culture ephemera, check out the latest episode of A Movie and An Argument With Alyssa and Swin:

As Maureen O’Connor explained at The Cut yesterday, something very strange is going on with a Billboard profile of Christina Aguilera. Us Weekly reported, and lots of outlets repeated, that the profile contained the following passage:

I got tired of being a skinny white girl. I am Ecuadorian but people felt so safe passing me off as a skinny, blue-eyed white girl … [In 2002,] I had gained about 15 pounds during promotion and during my Stripped tour. They called this serious emergency meeting about how there was a lot of backlash about my weight. Basically, they told me I would effect [sic] a lot of people if I gained weight — the production, musical directors. They claimed people I toured with would also miss out if I gained weight because I would sell no records or tickets for my shows. I was young, so I lost the weight quickly and was toothpick thin during [2006's] Back to Basics promos and touring.

I told them during this Lotus recording, ‘You are working with a fat girl. Know it now and get over it.’ They need a reminder sometimes that I don’t belong to them. It’s my body. My body can’t put anyone in jeopardy of not making money anymore — my body is just not on the table that way anymore.

Except it doesn’t exist, and no one’s sure where they come from. And while the fakery is deeper, the whole incident reminds me a great deal of something that happened in January. After the birth of Jay-Z and Beyonce’s daughter, a blogger named Renee Gardener wrote a poem about the use of the word “bitch” in Jay-Z’s music that made it sound like he was swearing off that particular epithet in his music: “Before I got in the game, made a change, and got rich/ I didn’t think hard about using the word b*tch/ I rapped, I flipped it, I sold it, I lived it/ Now with my daughter in this world I curse those that give it.” The poem was widely attributed to him and occasioned an out-pouring of praise. The idea of one of hip-hop’s biggest icons taking a conscious stand against misogyny and repudiating his past casual use of it was clearly powerful to a lot of people, except it wasn’t true.

There’s a clear hunger for celebrities who speak the truth about their industries, who shake off trends like fat-shaming, or the denigration of women, a hunger so intense that people will fabricate things, or buy into relatively implausible misattributions in order to satisfy those cravings. You’d think that incidents like these would show the power of authenticity and honesty as a product, demonstrate the demand for artists who don’t look like they starve themselves and singers whose views on women evolve, for a celebrity culture that’s more human and less homogenized, less shackled to its past.

Well, this is discouraging. Lady Gaga’s label has apparently decided that, rather than ordering costumes for the singer’s tour that suit her body, or letting her decide what she looks good and comfortable in, the pop singer needs to lose weight:

Executives at Universal Music Group saw recent pictures of the singer bulging out of her too-tight clothes and were forced to order a better-fitting wardrobe for the remainder her of her world tour, according to a RadarOnline report. “The tight, skimpy outfits weren’t doing anything for Gaga’s new fuller figure, so Universal ordered more flattering and better fitting costumes for the rest of the tour,” a source told the gossip site.

They allegedly told the “Born This Way” singer to lay off her favorite high-calorie foods, pizza and pasta. “Gaga has an incredible appetite for Italian food, which stems largely from her roots. It’s very easy on tour to get hooked on a diet of pizza and pasta because they are comfort foods—and when you are away from home you always long for something that reminds you of where you came from,” the source said. “She loves to eat, but because of her tiny frame it shows if she doesn’t work out as much as normal. Executives told her to quit gorging on her favorite foods.”

Did they like her better when Gaga was talking about being on the so-called Drunk Diet promoted by her then-boyfriend Luc Carl? Are some of the stranger things she’s worn during her time in the public eye actually less attractive than the sight of her with curves? There’s something pretty depressing about an environment where it’s easier for a woman to get away with wearing a dress made of raw meat than a body mass index that’s outside what the corporate definition of acceptable.

The last year’s seen a lot of efforts to interrogate the way superheroines’ bodies are posed and presented, whether it’s artists drawing male superheroes in the same skin-revealing costumes and poses as Wonder Woman or Jim C. Hines’ series of pictures where he posed like heroines on the cover of urban fantasy novels. Now, Ultraculture, as an illustration of its Captain America: The First Avenger review, has taken to Photoshop to show us what it would look like if a superhero’s comic physique could actually be expressed by a live human being. The results are…unsettling:

If depictions of superheroines reduce them to their breasts, buttocks and vaginas, this kind of illustration turns a human being into a vast, undifferentiated cut of meat. The effects are different, of course. Our positive association with musculature means we can still praise the person who acquired it, which is how we ended up with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a major cultural and political figure, rather than reducing him to parts of his wildly-enhanced body, while a tight focus on accentuated female body parts tends to minimize the humanity of the woman they belong to. But this kind of distortion is still unsettling, whether the person it’s done to is male or female. An overemphasis on traits society have decided are positive and admirable can be limiting and overwhelming, too.

Watching the American women win the all-around team gold in gymnastics in London last week, and watching Gabby Douglas win the individual all-around gold after that, I was struck by the fact that all the women on the team were born just before or after the publication of Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, Joan Ryan’s book about gymnastics and figure skating that made it almost impossible for me to feel decent about watching those sports precisely at the moment that American participation in them peaked during my childhood. I wrote about this a bit for Slate:

Ryan chronicled the accident at the 1988 World Sports Fair in Tokyo in which Julissa Gomez was left a quadraplegic after attempting a Yurchenko vault. Gomez, who eventually died from complications of her injuries and treatment, was not proficient enough to perform the vault, but her coaches insisted on it as a way to boost her potential point total. Ryan devoted another chapter to the death from anorexia in 1994 of gymnast Christy Henrich, who shared a coach with Gomez. If they (and a young Romanian gymnast murdered by her coach in 1993) were the extreme outliers, the larger numbers who developed obsessive compulsive disorder or cutting were no more encouraging. For a nascent young feminist who also thrilled to Olympic skating and gymnastics, Little Girls In Pretty Boxes was to those sports what the debate over chronic traumatic encephalopathy is to football today, a challenge to the idea that they were redeemable.

And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think there’s something to that comparison. It’s not an exact one, of course. Anorexia nervosa was not a competitive event in gymnastics in the same way hitting other people and making them fall down is part of football. The problems in gymnastics that were literally killing young women in performance and in the prime of their competitive years were more easily separated from the performance of gymnastics than hits are from football.

But there are similarities. There was a prevailing belief in gymnastics that lighter bodies resulted in higher heights during some elements, and more delicate performances, much in the same way that the NFL has developed a preference for significantly larger players, making hits harder and more dramatic. Safer helmets may not be a cure-all for hits that cause concussions, and may encourage players to hit harder in the belief they’re more protected, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to make football safer, or that doing so will kill the game. Gymnastics has adopted more stable vaulting tables and different points systems, and the sight of young girls doing astonishing things with bodies that now seem more oriented towards strength than fragility is no less thrilling for it.

That’s not to say that making football watchable will be easy, particularly since I’m not sure we’re at a critical mass of viewers who feel deeply uncomfortable continuing to consume a sport that destroys men’s brains and lives. And changing it is unlikely to happen quickly, particularly given that football players are conditioned to and rewarded when they hit extremely hard long before they reach the National Football League, with its hit-oriented highlight rules and bounty scandals. But if a generation of gymnasts could grow up and compete healthier in a world that Joan Ryan helped change, maybe a generation of young men can come up playing a different kind of football, shaped by the world of devastating reporting on chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Unsurprisingly, given their constant classlessness, the Daily Caller reacted to the news that American women’s beach volleyball champions Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings planned to stick to the bikini swimsuits the wear to compete by declaring “They’re going to be the cheekiest gals in London this summer. Olympian Misty May-Treanor and her fellow competitors on the US women’s beach volleyball team vowed yesterday to keep wearing their sexy bikinis at the upcoming Games — despite a new rule that lets female players compete in dowdy shorts and T-shirts.”

Then, they decided to wear long-sleeved t-shirts with bikini bottoms in weekend matches because, shockingly, it is not precisely balmy in the British Isles and sometimes when you are an athlete, you might want to stay warm so you can stay loose, and play your best and avoid injury. Quasi-famous dudebros like David Spade are apparently irked that they didn’t get to see enough skin, and the Daily Mail has gleefully validated their deep and pained concern. It’s a hilarious and depressing illustration of sexual entitlement and the second-class treatment of female athletes. By what possible standard would you think that an athlete you’ve never contracted with, much less met, was required to fulfill your personal quota for ogling? Or that when someone is competing on an international stage, they’re obliged to avoid so-called dowdiness.

Because even if they had initially planned to wear only their swimsuits, even if they enjoy wearing them as a display of attractiveness and strength (which, given that May-TreanorJennings has kids, is super-awesome) May-Treanor and Jennings are under no obligation to wear bikinis for any given match. The only rules they’re bound by are Olympic regulations on uniforms, the only guidance they should feel compelled to accept is that of their coaches and their own senses of what their bodies need, and the only reasonable emotional demands on them are their own internal standards for excellence and the pride that excellence can give their nation. And though it can be easy to forget amidst all the coverage of tears, and uniforms, and so-called divas, being the World’s Greatest is just as sexy a look on a woman as a regulation bikini.

As someone who writes about popular culture, I have to shake my head and laugh rather than vigorously bashing it into my desk. Such is the case with Thomas Delatte’s “100 Hottest Olympians” post for Bleacher Report, a piece so sexist, so insulting, so foolishly written, and that reflects so poorly on the writer that it’s astonishing that someone thought it passed muster. The concept is simple: help heterosexual dudes spot attractive women at the Olympic games (God forbid women admire the bodies of any competitors), and remind them that the important thing isn’t that these women have trained their entire lives to prove that they’re preeminent in their fields, but they’re available to be ogled by viewers at home. Along the way, Delatte reveals that he doesn’t know much about a lot of Olympic sports, but that he’s a gold medal contender in the field of condescending grossness. What follows are the fifteen (out of one hundred profiles) most astonishingly awful things Delatte has to say about female Olympians from around the world, in no particular order:

1. “Maja Wloszczowska won a silver in the women’s cross-country back in 2008 and is back for gold. As long as she wears those sexy bike tights, I don’t mind her returning every four years.”: Because she’s there for you, not for her, or for her country or anything like that.

2. “It is an Olympic year and that means we get to meet all kinds of new hotties like Stacey.”: Wait, you mean this isn’t an international effort to promote peace and unity? It’s a Maxim fan convention? Thanks for clarifying it!

3. “If the soccer thing doesn’t work out—and we already know it will, but if it doesn’t—she can just become a WAG. She is dating Jrue Holiday.”: Here that, fellow working women? Marriage is the exact equivalent of obtaining your own professional goals!

4. “Rowing is a sport that gets no love. That might be because, unless you have grown up around the sport, it is boring. You are watching a team of women row a boat faster than the other women. Uh, yawn. But there is a six-foot, 157-pound reason to enjoy it this year. Her name is Gevvie Stone.”: Apparently mastering the nuances of, say, football or basketball, leaves no room for understanding the strategy of any other sport except OMG HOT GIRLS.

5. “If she doesn’t win anything in London, at least she can go home as part of the hottest Czech Republic duo in beach volleyball.”: Someone needs a lesson in false equivalencIes.
Read more