Yesterday my roommate and I were feeling silly and we watched the movie “Sleepover” together on TV (remember Sleepover? That movie with Alexa Vega from 2004?)
So in the movie, there are four best friends who want to go to a high school dance, and Alexa Vega has a crush on this cute boy and blah blah blah… (On the scale of good movies, it falls far behind the quality of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen movies, and wayyyy behind “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days.” Anyway…
So one of the four best friends is, well, sort of chubby. Actually, very chubby and poorly dressed and awkward, too. And it is heavily discussed (no pun intended) in the movie, including how the girl feels that she’ll never get a guy. Their conversation went something like this:
Chubby girl: “I’ll never get a guy!”
Her skinny friend: “Yes, you will. Wait, what would you rather eat? Celery or brownies?”
CG: “Is that a question? Brownies!”
HSF: “Then, you just need to find a boy who prefers brownies, too!”
So, at the end of the movie when the girls go to the dance, the chubby girl ends up dancing with a chubby boy. While they’re dancing, she asks him, “Do you like brownies?” He responds, “Of course! They’re like, their own food group!”
Despite that this is a relatively harmless movie, this annoys me because I feel like this perpetuates really negative stereotypes
towards bigger girls.
So, we need to set a few things straight:
1. Bigger girls can get boyfriends. In fact, they usually end up with better boyfriends than their skinnier friends, because the boys the bigger girls end up with are sophisticated enough to possess many ideas on what an attractive or sexy body looks like.
2. Chubby girls can be quite beautiful, well-dressed, and poised, despite the damage that makeup artists and costume designers do to chubby girls in TV and the movies.
3. Um, doesn’t virtually everyone prefer brownies to celery?
Unfortunately, the company that put out this movie shows that they want to marginalize the bigger girl in this movie even further: despite that she has just as a big and important of a role in the movie as the other girls, she wasn’t put on the movie poster or the DVD cover! In an age where the presence of plus-sized models in teen media is flagging, do we really need the overweight characters from movies left out of promotion? I don’t think anyone would avoid this movie because there was an overweight girl on the cover…
4 responses so far ↓
1 Jamia // Apr 30, 2007 at 12:44 am
Ew. I am boycotting this film. I am so angry that they excluded one of the key actors from the cover. It is like how they used to put white models on the covers of records that black artists made in the 40’s and early 50’s to improve marketing to the racist public.
2 Maddie Lear // Apr 30, 2007 at 1:32 am
I love that movie! Yet, I am sorry to say that I never realized that she wasn’t on the cover, etc. I truly think that that exclusion is horrible. The world is so unbelievably hateful. Think about it, we all say that we are progressive towards racism, sexism, etc. and in some ways we are, but it seems that once we the women’s movement happens, and the civil rights movement, the world just needs something to help spread hate. There is an episode of 90’s tv drama ‘My So-Called Life’ starring Clare Danes, and I remember that there was a mother-daughter fashion show, and at the end, her character, Angela, is looking around the room at all of the women of different sizes, ages, colors, and she just says “They’re beautiful.” And it’s true, we are all beautiful.
3 Jamia // Apr 30, 2007 at 10:33 am
I love that episode of MYSCL. I have the box set. I was 15 the year that show started and Angela spoke to me. I think that it was almost like America’s version of Canada’s Degrassi Junior High. As close to real as we can get on TV.
We are all beautiful the way we are, in all our shapes, sizes, colors, and textures. It took me years to feel absolutely beautiful in my own skin and its an ongoing battle, but I advocate it for all of us. Loving yourself in spite of the competing messages from society and the media is a revolution in itself.
When I stopped straightening my hair in high school it was so liberating. I stopped “colonizing” my hair. I loved me and myself and realized that I am gorgeous the way I am and having natural african hair even if it was different than the white people around me, was just as special and beautiful as straight silky hair. I have never been happier with myself and my aesthetic than I am now… eating what makes me happy and wearing my hair natural… Because i’m me. Life is too short to fit into boxes created by others.
4 Liz Funk // Apr 30, 2007 at 12:18 pm
You gals ARE beautiful. Haha…
In “Sleepover’s” defense, however, it was a GREAT movie. There was this one part where the popular girl is dancing with this nerdy guy, and all the sudden, he’s like, “Hey, do you want to see a picture of me in a coma?” and he whips out this photo from his wallet of him unconscious in a hospital bed. And the girl was like, “Sweet!” It was TOO funny.
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