The Sun-Herald

Fat's only funny if you're a bloke

What do Kyle Sandilands and a room full of brides-to-be have in common?

Nothing, except the tragic story of a girl who longed to be thin for her wedding.

As Sandilands outraged the nation with his cretinous fat jokes directed at Magda Szubanski, I was at a wedding planner party filled with hundreds of young women determined to look perfect for their nuptials.

On my mind was another bride-to-be, Samantha Clowe, from Leeds in the UK. Samantha is no longer looking forward to her wedding. She died of a heart attack last year, quite possibly due to existing on 530 calories of soup, snack bars and shakes a day on a crash diet she was following because she didn't want to be a 'fat bride.'

The 34-year-old had already lost 20 kilos by living for 11 weeks on almost a quarter of the recommended daily calorie intake for women.

Samantha had hoped a slimmer silhouette would also bring her more respect at work, which is perhaps the saddest part of all, considering she was a metallurgist, a demanding role requiring statistical skills and a sharp, analytical mind. At the time of her death she was working for a major steel company so we can assume she was no slouch at her job. But, like so many smart women in these supposedly enlightened times, Samantha felt compelled to seek approval by being thin.

Despite all our hard-won gains, I wonder whether women will ever be free from the tyranny of aesthetics. Disturbingly, the emphasis on female appearance over achievement is on the rise again, as UK commentator Janice Turner recently pointed out in her searing article When Feminism Went Nuts.

Australian statistics tell an equally dispiriting story. In 2003 the Victorian State Government, concerned by rising numbers of eating disorder sufferers, launched a parliamentary inquiry into body image and young people, consulting children and teenagers state-wide.
When the inquiry's results were tabled in February 2006, they painted a stark picture of a self-doubt. Troubling accounts, such as that of a girl who developed an eating disorder in grade one because someone said her packed lunch would make her fat, abounded. The report found that one in almost every 200 adolescent girls develops anorexia nervosa, which is the Australia's third most common chronic illness for teenage girls. Up to three in 100 develop bulimia.

We hear that men are now sharing the pressure to look perfect - and I'll concede there are certainly more images of six-packs and pecs in the media - but when I watched the crowds of holidaymakers around the pool on vacation recently, I saw no coyness among the men parading their hefty paunches or skinny ribcages while their wives and girlfriends anxiously swathed their bodies - whatever their shape - in sarongs.

The gender imbalance runs so deeply through society and permeates popular culture so comprehensively that it's hard to believe it will ever change. But I believe the way to begin is with the mundane, not the media; the everyday attitudes and the commonplace cruelties that can slowly erode even the most resilient woman's confidence. The media's exaggerated images of perfection have become so extreme that it's actually easier to dismiss them and to see the joins between airbrush and reality, scalpel and skeleton. But it's much harder to ignore the casual cruelty of friends and colleagues.

After her death, Samantha Clowe's brother ruefully admitted he used to tease her about her weight. "I was the typical younger brother, being cheeky and telling her she was fat. I didn't realise how much it affected her," he said. But he was brought up in a world where men routinely make fat jokes about women. Many of them make a decent living from it. Kyle Sandilands had been doing it for years before he finally crossed the line.

Interestingly, it's often fat men making the fat jokes. They'll defend their misogynist routines by telling you that you're welcome to take the piss out of their weight in return. But fat jokes don't hurt men the way they hurt women, because men are not required to measure the sum of their achievements in centimetres of flesh. Fat men can have beautiful mistresses, dazzling careers, public recognition. Fat men can win respect. It's not kind or right to make fun of anyone's appearance, but for women the jibes can be so much more devastating.

When weight is a matter of life or death, as it was for Samantha Clowe and still is for so many other women, then the jokes aren't funny. They're lethal.