RhondaWeasley.com

It’s been a long time since I’ve written here and this will be a long one…

So most of my fellow Harry Potter fans have read Jo’s rant on Hollywood’s super thin obession. I myself was given pause by it. For the past 6 weeks (I’m in week 7) I have been quite obsessed with designing my own person weight loss plan. I applied for “The Biggest Loser” in fact, but alas, they didn’t want me. So decided “screw the TV show, I want to lose weight”. I didn’t need a reality show, I just had to get up and get moving. So I got up and I got moving and I had to do it without a personal trainer, a gym, home gym equipment, or even a physican to consult. I can’t afford any of these things afterall. But I couldn’t let that stop me.

In truth, I’ve never been thin enough in my own mind, except when I was four and for some odd reason I lost a lot of weight (only to gain it all back). But at four, I didn’t care. Being Dawn was enough. But now, I have to admit, VANITY is a big issue in me desiring to lose weight. I want to be more attractive to the opposite sex (actually, in my case, the same sex too). Was I working to achieve some wrong and twisted Hollywood standard?

Then today I read the completely rediculouse article from the Daily Mail saying that Jo’s remarks in her rant contridict her descriptions of “attractive” (thin) children in the book and “evil” FAT children.

Thier First mistake – “the slim and attractive boy is Harry Potter”. They’ve read things completly wrong. Harry Potter is undernourished and small for his age!! She in no way implies this makes him fall into the standard definition of attractive. In fact, it takes a growth spurt at age 16 to even make him close to a “slim and attractive” boy. What Jo did with the two young cousins early in the novel is give a distinction between one boy who was given far too much (in everything including food) and a boy who wasn’t given anything beyond the bear essentials to keep him breathing. Not to mention Harry wears glasses. At best his initial description is that of a puny NERD, not the “slim and attractive boy”! She makes neither the underfed or the OVERFED boy attractive for obvious reasons, neither of these situations is attractive. Harry is appealing because his neglect isn’t his fault, Dudley choses to be a bully and to overindulge himself. It’s partly his parents fault, but come on. She in no way makes Harry out to be attractive as a result of his aunt and uncles neglect.

Their Second Mistake – “Hermione is ravishing and trim” (when she’s Emma Watson that is). Jo didn’t cast Emma Watson, she had absolutly nothing to do with it. I certain don’t think she demanded the Hermione candidates step on a scale before being cast. Acting was a bit more important. She has certainly never ever said what size Hermione is and if she wanted to paste a picture of ideal attractiveness in Hermione then she WOULDN’T have given her an over-bite. I’ve always imagined Hermione as a bit thicker in the waist then Emma is. Not Dudley size of course, but certainly not the “hottie of the next teen drama” material. Even Yule Ball Hermione wasn’t described as thin. The most noticable “improvement” was her straightened hair. Nothing indicates she was revealed to have a waist the size of Paris Hilton.

Thier Third Mistake – They cite a quote of Ginny’s ballerina impression in Half-Blood Prince. This was not an attempt to be attractive nor was it a scene where Harry fell for her, she was MAKING FUN of Fleur for goodness sake. Harry found it amusing, not attractive. And as she’s an athlete in the later novels (and not a Beater) so it makes sense she has an athletic trim build. Most female athletes, just because of constant exercise, are fit and trim simply because their lifestlye makes them that way. To say a person ate alot – never exercised (Dudley) and never gained a pound would be a lie. And in fact, once he joined in on sports (boxing) he did turn the fat to muscle (OotP). It didn’t make him a better person. So rather he was fat or fit, Dudley was a spoiled brat of the worse type.

Fourth Mistake – They talk about attractive Fleur. They neglect to mention that Fleur (while not evil) is highly unlikeable most of the time. Most readers didn’t embrace her until the end of HBP when she proved she had the abilty to LOVE SOMEONE ELSE DESPITE WHAT THEY LOOKED LIKE. Fleur was never attractive to boys because Pretty=Nice, she was attractive because she was from a race of elite creatures.

Fifth Mistake – Neville Longbottom is a HUGE hero in the book in my eyes and he is (by the Hollywood standards anyway) fat. Matthew Lewis, who plays him in the films, may have slimmed down but Neville has never been anything but a plump, yet likeable boy. He is the difference between a “healthy sized boy” and a boy who needs help (Dudley) because he’s on the fast track to early health problems. And there are FAR MORE “EVIL” skinny characters then there are Evil fat ones. Dudley’s own mother is a toothpick and certainly NOT someone Harry wants to hang out with. And Tom Riddle was quite a handsome “slim and attractive” child (perhaps more handsome then Harry was at that age) and still the most EVIL child yet to be portrayed in the novels.

There are more, but I will not go through them all. This article essentially ignores everything in the book that disproves there point and twist certain scenes to prove it. And I suddenly realized I too missed the point of Jo’s rant initially. I also think the Scottsman article “missed the point”. They tried to make Jo out to be arrogant for taking aim at the innocent comment “you’ve lost weight”. Jo was not the least bit arrogant about it. She was simply pointing out in her rant that it’s amazing people hold the “you’ve lost weight” compliment in such high reguard, especially when you weren’t ever very overweight (for which I think Jo qualifies) and when you’re not trying to lose weight. Maybe it’s a great compliment to hear if you were, in fact, over weight to the point it was a health risk and detriment to your life. I mean if a person lost the ability to walk it would be a great compliment to say “You’re walking now”, but it’s not something we praise for the everyday person – with thinness we do. Jo simply used this “compliment” as one talking point in her argument about how we value people based on their weight within our culture. And how we expect them to all fit some ideal (unheathly for most) “thin” size. Point being, it’s not always good to have “loss weight”. We need to emphasize the problem of being “too thin” as much as we do the problem of being “too fat”.

The big problem with the media is that to support their “thin” standard they twist things to make it seem like anyone against “size 2″ as an average size supporting “XXL”. And that’s simply not true. The truth is I know I will never be a size two. And I don’t want to be. I don’t find girls who look like toothpicks anymore attractive then I would a 350 pound woman. What I want for myself is a heathly curvy shape, not the flab I have now. I want to get on a bike without feeling winded pedling uphill. I want to fit on a rollercoaster again and enjoy a themepark with the kids fully. I wanted to put on a bathing suit and swim without worrying about what I look like in the bathing suit (like I did when I was a kid). And for a long time I got so depressed about not being able to do those things, all I did was sit around and not do ANYTHING. Even inside I wasn’t the kind of person I wanted to be. When I decided to get up and DO SOMETHING I was doing more than working toward my Vanity goal (and it does exsist, I won’t deny it), I was finding the “happy Dawn” again. A Dawn that had gotten lost in her own helplessness against the weight problem. And the important thing is that DOING SOMETHING to change it is making me more proud of myself. And being happy with yourself does make you more attractive to others in some weird way.

The Daily Mail needs to look back at Dudley as an example of unheathy excess. Dudley was not only fat, he was unheathy and obese because his parents lacked the ability to say no to him. If not for the interference of a third party (the school) he may have lacked the ability to move properly by his late teens. Instead, because of a forced diet and joining in on sports (Boxing) he eventually turned fat to muscle. But being more physically fit (a portion of the Order of the Phoenix novel the Daily Mail’s writer seemed to skip) didn’t make him “good”, it just made him better at being a bully. Fat or “fit”, Dudley was a horrible person. And that’s Jo’s essential point in her rant.

I realized suddenly that’s Jo’s point. The measure of a person is not what they look like. Jo is saying is not against the change I’m trying to make in my life, it’s against the people who imply that every woman should be skin and bones. She’s saying live to be happy (and I assume healthy). Not to fit someone else’s standard.

Everything about the diversity of the Harry Potter characters (including attractive Evil characters) supports exactly what she said in her rant. And the largest (no pun intended) examples of her appreciation of inner beauty over outer beauty are Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood. Neville is, in fact, plump and one of the most nobel characters in the series. Luna Lovegood is herself no matter what people think of it. With all the things people hold against her, I doubt she’d spend all of one second obsessing over waist size.
What Jo is saying in the end is in fact emphasized by the diverse cast of characters she has designed. She saying the things that last and are important are not based on waist size (or teeth size or what exture of hair you have or your fashion sense), but beneath the skin. And that’s a reminder I need to take to heart when I become too fixated on what’s on the scale.

So ends my really long blah blah blah about all this rubbish.