That's what she said...

This is another thing I found when I was cleaning out computer files. I wrote this a few months ago. Check it.

I recently read an article that stated that if men weren’t trying to impress women they’d stop working so hard at their jobs, stop working out, and stop being healthy at all. Now, this struck me as sort of obvious. I’ve often wondered if I wasn’t pursuing a career as an actress if I would care as much about gaining weight, because my motivation to lose weight is almost always that every single successful actress working is either two dress sizes below me, or two above. You see (and not to make this about me, but the point needs to be made), I am a normal sized human. I am reluctant to use the word woman because that makes it sound like I’m trying to make a point about femininity and the way that women’s bodies are viewed by society, and I’m not (entirely). I’m simply trying to point out that there are no normal sized women (okay fine, women) making a decent living as actresses, unless they have been famous for so long that it no longer matters what size they are (see: Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton–not to say that these women are anything other than stunning, but they no longer have to starve themselves to fit societies standards of acceptability–they’re accepted)

Back to my previous point, however, the sole reason for trying to look “the best that I possibly can” from my point of view is to be competitive with the other actors out there. It is obvious that if I go in for a role and so does another girl with long, dark, wavy hair and big brown eyes and we both do a really solid reading but she happens to have really defined cheekbones and on camera she looks sleek and evokes movie star she’s going to get the part. Because on camera I look like I am the supporting lead in a local sofa commercial.

Now, I do want to digress here again for a moment and point out for a moment that there is an increasing market for people who look like they belong in local sofa or mattress store commercials, and that is the faux-reality show. Shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation LOVE normal looking people. But I’m probably not going to get cast on one of those shows, or in anything else as a “normal looking person” and this is precisely why…I am too pretty. I know, “kill yourself” you’re saying, but seriously it is a curse. I’m a normal sized, very pretty person. In the real world this is a huge asset, in fact it’s never been a problem for me, until now. I’m not going to get the “hot girl” roles, because I have man shoulders, and I’m not going to get the “Pam” secretary role because my features are just too gosh darn striking. Maybe I should go into radio, or stop eating.

Okay, so back to my original point about the purpose we have for being attractive. As someone who has grown up in the film business I can tell you, although I wouldn’t be breaking the news to anyone, that movies are full of attractive people. We, as a culture, are obsessed with looking at attractive people on the big screen, little screen, in magazines, et cetera. It is a fact that a movie full of attractive people will do better at the box office than a movie full of average looking people. We want to spend two hours staring at someone that we’d like to have sex with, not at the lady who’s in front of us in line at the convenience store. This is just the way that it is, we are a culture obsessed with celebrity, vanity, and sex. This isn’t some revelation, this is the way that the world operates right now. This isn’t to say that at some point in the future this won’t change, although I’d be willing to put money on the guess that it stays this way for a very, very, very, very long time.