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Populär Culture Review
Jemima confesses that she buys glossy fashion magazines and then she
says: “I sit and I study each glossy photograph for minutes at a time, drinking in
the models’ long, lithe limbs, their tiny waists, their glowing golden skin. I have
a routine: I Start with their faces, eyeing each sculpted cheekbone, heart-shaped
chin, and I move slowly down their bodies, careful not to miss a muscle” (Green
1). When Jemima finally loses weight (for a man), the stylish Geraldine takes
responsibility for giving her a makeover, and urges Jemima to use her credit
card to buy designer clothes and get a great hairdo. After the makeover, Jemima
and Geraldine walk down the town’s high Street as “two slim (slim!) blondes,
laden down with fabulous goodies” (Green 174). In Western culture, fat people
are visual embodiments of conspicuous consumption, fall guys of the
ambivalence created by a society which actively encourages overconsumption,
but punishes brutally when there are bodily signs of that overconsumption.
While she is fat, Jemima does not spend any money on herseif (except for
buying a lot of food), but as soon as she becomes thin, she overspends on
designer clothes, expensive haircuts, and gym memberships. Geraldine urges her
to treat herseif now that she is beautiful by subscribing to the consumerist
thought process that all beautiful women should indulge themselves for having
attained the golden bar of “beauty”.2 The underlying message seems to be that
fat women should be punished for overconsumption, while thin women should
be rewarded; visible signs of overconsumption in the latter case—Louis Vuitton
and Prada bags—are approved of and not vilified. Jean Baudrillard comments on
the implications of consumerism in Contemporary culture in The Consumer
Society, and argues that womanly women are encouraged
to gratify themselves in Order to better be able to enter as
objects into the masculine competition (enjoy themselves in
order to be more enjoyable). They never enter into direct
competition (except with other women over men). If a woman
is beautiful—that is to say, woman is a woman—she will be
chosen. If a man is a man, he will choose his wife among other
objects/signs (his car, his wife, his eau de toilette)
(Baudrillard 97)
These beauty treatments make women feel more confident about their place
in the rat race to get the best man and the best job since the base criterion for
success in any field is their beauty—physical appearance is the new BFOQ,3 a
phenomenon which naturalises BDD in women.
As mentioned earlier, one key feature of postfeminism is the constant
self-surveillance women subject themselves to in order to fit the perfect,
supermodel thin myth of Woman perpetuated by the mainstream media and
patriarchal society in general and leads to women in general being victims of
BDD. The idea of the self-as-product leads to a connected problem in chick lit:
the rivalry among women. When women become seen as objects in a