YOU MAY or may not have heard of Jessica Simpson. She's a minorly successful American singer, who has appeared in a couple of films and is primarily famous for thinking tuna is a breed of chicken.
She is largely inoffensive, blonde and pretty, but over the past ten days has been the target of such a firestorm of criticism and name-calling you'd have thought the poor girl was singlehandedly responsible for the invasion of Iraq.
Simpson's cri
me is to have gained some weight. Now, we are not talking a lot of weight here. We are not talking about whale bellies of blubber, or ten sugar bags with 5lb weights attached, or even enough of a spare tyre to fill a size-14 dress. We're talking a few pounds, a stone at the most. Given that a rigorous diet-and-exercise routine had previously reduced her body to the size of a stick insect's – she was working out for two hours a day and subsisting on a few organic romaine leaves, a regime that made her, by her own admission, unhealthy, miserable and depressed – she needed a bit of meat on her bones.
Not that any of this has made the slightest bit of difference to the snarling publicity that has surrounded her weight gain, which exploded last week when pictures of her looking curvier while performing at a concert emerged. "JUMBO JESS!" screamed one US tabloid headline, in a story that went on to insinuate that her new look meant it unlikely her boyfriend, an American football player, would be "popping the question any time soon".
Most magazines and newspapers in this country also picked up the story, with one quoting a fashion insider saying that she would need "heavy airbrushing" before any glossy mag would consider featuring her, another suggesting she had been "squeezed" into her clothes and had a visible spare tyre (simply not true), and another describing her weight gain as a "global talking point".
Simpson, as you might expect of a 28-year-old whose weight gain has become the biggest story to emerge from the US since Obama's inauguration, was devastated. A few days later she became visibly upset on stage, bursting into tears and muttering into her microphone: "Dear God, help me get through this tonight."
Pushing aside the obvious observation that there are many other far more important global talking points to be concerned about than one young woman's weight gain, I find it profoundly disturbing that society judges female weight gain so harshly. That we expect young women to be stick thin to the point of emaciation and then lash out in abject horror when they start looking healthy, curvy and normal is an incredibly worrying example to be setting to them.
Simpson will probably end up on another restrictive I-want-to-be-a-size-zero-bring-on-the-osteporosis diet, and it will yet again make her thin and miserable. And while I feel sympathy for her, ultimately my fears are for the many other young girls around the world who struggle with their weight, who will take one look at the coverage of Simpson and reach for the diet pills – or worse.
WAGs doing their own nails? Get a job!FORGET the job losses, ignore the companies going into receivership, pay no attention to those doom-and-gloom figures from the Treasury. The only way you'll really know the country is in recession is when Alex Curran starts doing her own nails. Yes, even the nation's WAGs are feeling the bite of the credit crunch, sparking Curran, wife of Liverpool midfielder Steven Gerrard, to confide that her designer belt is having to be significantly tightened. She is now doing her own manicures, buying the occasional item from Topshop and getting her hair done just twice a week. "I think people – especially WAGs – are becoming more conscious of spending money now," she remarked.
Especially WAGs? Get a grip, love. This is a battalion of women, hardly any of whom seem to have their own independent source of income, who leech off their footballing boyfriends and husbands for their designer goodies and trinkets, and in the process have become an embarrassment to modern womanhood. If they really want to become conscious of spending money, they could try something really revolutionary, and get a job.
• SIR FRED Goodwin still doesn't get it, does he? In front of the Treasury Select Committee yesterday, along with several other bankers responsible for the financial mess we are now in, he insisted that the bonus system was still necessary in banking because, otherwise, staff who were not being rewarded would "simply move on". Move on to where, exactly?
Look around you, Sir Fred: the banking industry (along with many others) is on its knees and thousands are losing employment every week. Most people these days are grateful just to have a job, never mind one handing out bonuses.
Thanks, Sir Fred, for providing us with another example of how out of touch those who were at the top of Royal Bank of Scotland have become.
The full article contains 866 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
