Why the silence? My master's report has forced me into seclusion. But today I turned in my first (more like final-but-not-quite) draft. I am breaking the monastic atmosphere, though only briefly and half-heartedly, with a new column that will be included in my project.
“Write yourself: your body must make itself heard.” – Helene Cixous
The thin body is made for consumption. Reduced to its essence, potent and pure, distilled on sleek magazine covers, it is swallowed like a smooth pill. We hungrily stare at tabloids in the supermarket checkout line, and rows of artistically angular women stare coldly back. The thin body itself does not consume. It transcends want and need. Even Nicole Richie, a girl that is clearly needy, that so desperately wants to be wanted, and has redesigned her body to attend those needs, rises above with her skeletal frame.
In November 2005, the reality TV star graced the cover of Jane, a cheeky magazine for hip women. On The Simple Life, which debuted in 2003, Richie was the court jester to Paris Hilton’s princess routine. She had the foul mouth and dirty mind to pull it off, but she also looked the part. Hilton’s svelte body and carefully coifed appearance made Richie look round, ratty, and ridiculous. So when she appeared in Jane, resplendent amongst a hazy field of summer flowers, she was barely recognizable. The rough-hewn recovering heroin addict suddenly possessed classic Audrey Hepburn grace. Richie had new clothes, new hair, new makeup, a new dog, but the most dramatic difference was her new body. The teaser on the cover read, “Nicole Richie on her drastic weight loss and that Paris catfight.” Richie dropped the pounds to shed her old image.
This is the slim down dream: Leave your excess baggage behind, become light as a bird, and the sky is the limit. It is no surprise that her continuing weight loss was applauded as part of a stunning makeover. In Style dedicated their summer 2006 “Beauty Transformation” to Richie, displaying an initially unflattering timeline of pictures starting in November 2001 that show her triumphant rebirth as “a modern Twiggy.”
On Nov.13, 2006, Richie was once again a cover girl. This time she was the lead story for celebrity magazines OK! and In Touch, and was prominently featured on the front of People, Life & Style, and Us Weekly. She even got The National Enquirer. The headlines declared “Scary-Thin Nicole Seek Treatment” and “85 lb. Nicole’s Fight for Her Life.”
When her body continued to shrink, going from stunning to scary, Richie defined a new breed of skinny star. The tabloids anointed them the “pin-thins.” Teen idols like Lindsey Lohan, Mischa Barton and Richie passed their nights in the same clubs with the same men wearing the same fashionable clothes. A common link in their narratives was self-destruction in all forms, especially those that supported their poignantly waifish appearance, such as drug abuse and starvation. Eating disorders are conventionally interpreted as a way to take control, reestablish personal power by seizing your own body. But with the pin-thins, control gained a different connotation. These young women were referred to as “out of control.” Their alleged eating disorders looked more like rebellion and internalized anger than traditionally passive submission. Each pound lost symbolized another screw falling from their unhinged lives. Ultimately, celebrities overindulge, especially freefalling party girls, even when it comes to restrictive nature of extreme weight loss.
In a perverse inversion that confirms every little girl’s body image nightmares, the dangerously tiny stars become increasingly popular. Life & Style featured Richie in a September cover story called “Body Obsession: Extreme diets! Plastic surgery! Why gorgeous young stars are risking their lives for the perfect body.” The perfect body. When extreme thinness is the desired aesthetic, women are physically and mentally weakened. Losing significant amounts weight requires a caloric deficit through restriction or purging that leaves the body constantly lacking fuel. The body must eat itself in an attempt to survive, burning both fat and muscle tissue, including organs such as the heart. Maintaining an unnatural weight requires the same struggle. As the body attempts to reset its metabolism, everything slows to a sluggish pace, the brain fuzzy and the body weak, still consuming itself in an attempt to find enough energy for daily functions.
Richie adamantly denies her weight loss is due to an eating disorder, but the semantics no longer matter. Her starvation is so apparent that she has been reduced a purely physical being, a body screams much louder than her verbal protests. By measuring her worth on the scale she turned herself into an object, a commodity, something to buy and ingest. Even the tabloids made photographic timelines of her weight loss. In Touch estimated Richie is 5’2” and lost 35 pounds in 3 years, or 28 percent of bodyweight. Life & Style guessed 40 pounds. They showed three pictures of Richie labeled with their assessment. “First she was plump” at 125 pounds in 2003. After dropping to 108, “she was just right” at the end of 2004. “But then she went too far” when she hit 85 pounds. Her thinness, initially praised, now suspicious, remains her only dialogue.
She does not need words. We only need to look at those tabloids to get her true message. In the startling pictures, beneath the layers of designer clothes and huge sunglasses, her bones are razor sharp, her joints glinting in the fluorescent lights. We see an empty body, we see an empty soul. An empty soul is a blank canvas. And a blank canvas is endless with possibilities. A lost girl, searching for love, found it the dead space that now surrounds her. We watch, stealthy as vultures, wanting, ravenous for more.
