Kirstie Alley’s Weight Gains Are Our Losses

By Akela Talamasca on April 29th, 2009

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This article is not really about Kirstie Alley. Although news of her recent weight gain — or re-gain — was enough to make me gasp with horror at her increased size, the better part of me also gasped in horror at my own reaction. Only in America do we vilify the other person for gaining weight when we ourselves are doing the same.

There are a couple of issues at work here that we, as parents, should watch for. It’s never too early to teach our kids about the ways that the media guides our perceptions of what’s attractive. If you take a look around at the advertising you see on the street — from billboards, the sides of buses, from every magazine cover — you’ll find the same homogeneity of shape. Men are muscular, sporting “washboard abs” and wardrobes that cost far too much; women are slightly too thin for health, and in sexualized poses.

Kids are already exposed to far too much of this kind of content, and it’s affecting their ideas of what it means to be male and female. Music videos do nothing to help this, offering up women as objects of desire without even the leavening effect of intelligent dialogue to prove their individuality. This continues on downward, into the toys our kids play with — in particular the Bratz line of dolls.

Already poisoned to accept nothing less than the media-saturated ideal, this mindset is further reinforced when TV talkshows dare to criticize formerly-thin celebrities for gaining weight, as though it were the most awful thing in the world to no longer pander to the prurient desires of the mass-consumptive audience. Yet at the same time, a casual glance at the body shapes of the average man and woman walking around these days clearly shows that the gazelle-like forms we see in print and video are the true anomaly, and a close examination of the food we consume is enough to prove that the food industry cares not at all about keeping us healthy.

We need to make sure that our kids know both that obesity can lead to dangerous health issues and should therefore be properly managed, and yet that what they see in the media is a false ideal, and that their self-worth shouldn’t stem from the way people perceive their outward appearance. It’s a tricky line to walk, and to do it properly, we have to be examples ourselves by eating properly, exercising regularly, and restricting television to content that ideally all family members can watch together. And when commercials come on, rather than simply turning the channel, we should be educating our kids on what they’re seeing, and how to identify when they’re being sold, rather than when they’re just being entertained. Kids are bombarded daily with all manner of ideas; let’s make sure we teach them how to recognize the good from the bad.