The discourse over Bridget Jones being considered fat in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) has been done – more done than me at 3 PM on a Friday afternoon after I’ve fallen into a post-lunch slump.
We, as a society, have rehashed it over and over again: on morning talk shows, via magazine articles like this one (I have, personally, written about the topic), and Twitter memes. Bridget Jones, at 9.5 stone (as per the book and films), was not fat. She wasn’t even chubby. Even according to BMI, a completely unhelpful and outdated method, 9.5 stone for an adult woman is a ‘healthy weight’.
As Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is released, said discourse will no doubt start up again. Love Actually’s Natalie, played by Martine McCutcheon, will be cited too. We will all, moralistically and defiantly, say that these women aren’t fat, that it was everything wrong with early '00s diet culture.
But here’s where I get stumped. Our looking back in horror at how Bridget Jones was considered fat insinuates that we no longer think that way. That saying something like this would be blasphemous and outdated in today’s society. This is, ultimately, a lie we tell ourselves.
Diet culture and body image standards are still incredibly bad – and we've really not made much progress on the Hollywood film front. Honestly, it might even be worse today. They may have shifted ever so slightly, and maybe our language has evolved, but body and beauty standards are still haunting women in every aspect of our lives.
When I look back at growing up in the '00s, and all the juice cleanses and obsessive calorie counting I used to do, I find myself falling into a pattern where I comfort myself about how bad it was, and how I’m in such a better place now. But I am only in a better place because I am an adult, an adult who has done a lot of work on my self-image via feminist education and the work of incredible activists.
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On TikTok, I see teen girls and young women going through the same – if not worse – dieting habits. What is considered fat on social media, and yes, on film and TV too, is no different from two decades ago. A successful actress being 9.5 stone or over is still rare, and would probably become a cultural talking point. For actually fat actors, there is almost no space on screen for them. Many plus-size stars end up losing weight, quickly and drastically, to fit into the industry's restrictive standards.
Women who don’t exactly fit the prescribed beauty ideal have a relentlessly awful time in the media. I have a small public profile, and I have experienced a taste of this; my weight and body have been endlessly picked apart by faceless accounts on social media. Nicola Coughlan has received an extraordinary amount of attention for her body since taking on the role of Penelope in Bridgerton. She has begged people to stop commenting on it, so I won’t go into more detail in order to respect that, but it has been a staggering reminder to watch.
Lena Dunham recently re-entered the public eye with her new series Too Much, and I’ve already seen endless comments online about her body. This is despite her saying in an interview with The New York Times: “I was not willing to have another experience like what I’d experienced around Girls at this point in my life, physically, I was just not up for having my body dissected again.” Yet, here we are.
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Sydney Sweeney, a slim actress, has recently been the victim of misogynistic body shaming. Trolls called her “fat” and a “catfish” after some paparazzi photos were released. What matters is what it highlights: objectively, non-fat women are being called fat, still. So, the chance of actually fat (or even midsized) women being accepted and not shamed is next to zero. Fat is still culturally a synonym for unattractive and unworthy – no matter how much we dance around this grim reality.
I'd even go as far as saying the continued success of Bridget Jones is, in part, due to the fact that Bridget is now thinner. Would today's audience really be accepting of a midsized, middle-aged Bridg? I think not.
It’s a love letter to the OG Bridget Jones’s Diary, complete with penguin pyjamas, blue soup cocktails and a reindeer Christmas jumper that will make you sob
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