Behold the Hollywood Parade of Fatties

Oinkers, oinkers everywhere and not a lump to tweak.

Details Magazine, which seems to be about as insipid as any other magazine out there these days, is trumpeting its approval of the latest Hollywood craze -- fatties! -- by offering up a stupid story and a slideshow of bonafide fat cows.

It's a classy presentation, all right. You've got the pig in high heels as the slideshow's splash page. And then if you pay attention to the URL, you'll notice that the slideshow file is named "072006FATTIES," and the women are affectionately referred to as "plate-scrapers."

And man, those bitches are huge.

The slideshow features the ample frames of a young Liz Taylor and a pre-mammoth Anna Nicole Smith. Then there's Kristin Davis weighing in at a whopping 104 or so -- Jesus, that lady can inhale the steakburgers! -- and Monica Bellucci, who is probably fatter than the fattest Italian whale in the world. God, she's a fattie.

And the story cites even more delectably large and curvy Hollywood women: Gretchen Mol, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Drew Barrymore, Rachel Weisz, Liv Tyler, Maura Tierney, and Kate Winslet, to name a few. Yes, these women's large figures are sure to make waves in the rigidly regulated world of Hollywood beauty. I mean, Kate Winslet's got to be pushing a size, what, 6? 8? God, what a fattie. How brave of filmmakers to put her fat face up on a screen and still expect to turn a profit.

I'm glad Hollywood is coming around to tolerate and even appreciate these gargantuan fleshbots. While they may be sort of tough to look at, their ample folds of flesh are kind of endearing, in a wholly disgusting way, of course.

But there could be a serious drawback to patting these fatties on their fat, goopy backs for daring to be real. This could lead to even bigger actresses getting screen time in roles other than The Wacky Best Friend or The Annoying Woman Who Eats Everything at the Funeral Buffet or The Cross-Dressing Grandmother Played by a Dude.

We could actually start seeing the bulging inhuman mugs of America Ferrera, Camryn Manheim, Queen Latifah*, Mia Tyler, Oprah, Lauren Ambrose, or Margaret Cho in digital magazine spreads about famous Hollywood women with real curves who are dignified and graceful and sexy and all that crap**.

I shudder at the thought.

*Yes, I realize QL has actually been in a movie where she played -- from what I understand, since I didn't see the film -- the romantic lead. But my point still stands. She's the exception that proves the rule.

**Once again, I'm making an argument that sounds too much like "But X type of woman deserves to be objectified too!" I made this argument back when ol' Humbert Humbert Derbyshire argued that woman pass their optimum sexual attractiveness in their early 20s. What I'm getting at in that post and this one is that these beauty ideals about how women should look vs. how women do and can look are total and complete bullshit and do nothing but contribute to the long-term disappointment women have in themselves and, to a strong degree, the long-term disappointment women's partners have in them. It's two-fold: 1) Women who feel like shit about themselves are going to have a tough time being comfortable and content with their bodies and therefore can make less fulfilling partners because of their constant nagging self-doubt. 2) People who want to love women and how they look are still creatures swimming in media saturation and can have an numbed, unfair expectation about what women's bodies should look like.

(HT: Broadsheet)