According to the Smoking Gun, Catherine Zeta Jones is suing the Atkins diet cabal for associating her with their practices.
Now this is interesting, as I’ve been reading a slew of unusually aggressive celebrity back-and-forth over demands placed on female celebrities over their body types and weight. It seems like, unless parts of your skeleton are showing, you’re just not thin enough for Hollywood — and yet women should be “happy with who they are,” a brave refrain from everyone from Courtney Love to Amy Winehouse, who, even as they trill these anthems, become alarmingly emaciated. Or, like Tyra Banks, try to capitalize on the way the media has exploited Everywoman’s doubts and fears about body image by “becoming” one of us, and then stripping it down to a Hollywood-approved weight the minute it looked like it might hurt some endorsement deal or when it annoyed a diet advertisier or somesuch (I don’t actually know this, I just suspect based on common behaviors and patterns).
Zeta-Jones is taking an admirable stand, even though, as always, money is at the bottom of this altruism.
Says the Smoking Gun:
By incorrectly reporting that Zeta-Jones “uses and/or endorses the Atkins diet,” the letter states, publications are “falsely representing to the average reader, including many young women who look up to my client and admire her beautiful appearance, that Ms. Zeta-Jones would recommend this diet to any person looking to lose weight.” Claiming that an association with Atkins could hurt Zeta-Jones’s ability to land endorsement deals for “health-related products, attorney John H. Lavely noted, “In essence, my client is being made to look as if she’s more concerned about her outward appearance than she is with serious health concerns.”
Well, yes, that is what the diet industry would rather we do. Even doctors these days are more concerned that women look healthy than that women actually be healthy. Do I think Zeta Jones is punching a fist in the air for women of all sizes everywhere? Hell no. She’s protecting her image as her most powerful asset. But y’know, she’s worked with Queen Latifah, so she knows from experience that we plussies have some serious power when we decide to own ourselves instead of letting the world convince us we’re owned.
