Post by Jennifer Lynn Jones, Indiana University

Every year I look forward to ESPN Magazine’s “Body Issue,” an interesting if somewhat uneven antidote to Sports Illustrated’s “Swimsuit Issue.” Out now, the issue ostensibly serves as a reframing of the body according to the demands of a specific sport, celebrating bodies “for what they can do, rather than how closely they adhere to prevailing beauty standards.” It typically features female and male athletes posing naked in the midst of activity, discussing their relationship to their body and their sport. Past editions have included sections contrasting the average size and shape of athletes in different sports, charting not only the range but also the value of bodily variation in athletes.

This year’s edition appeared just a few weeks ago, and this is the image that got me excited to see it.

Amanda Bingson is a record-holding hammer thrower from Nevada. She competed at the 2012 Olympics and is a professional athlete with USA Track and Field. And just look at her here! Big! Strong! Tough! Some might say thick but Bingson also calls her body “dense.” The skin rolls on the cover photo don’t seem inhibit her abilities, nor does the cellulite on her hip in the interior spread.

But this is the only cover I found on the newsstand.

Natalie Coughlin is one of the most successful swimmers in the world, has medaled in every major competition in her field, and even holds the record for the most medals received at one Olympics in her 2008 appearance. There’s no question of her abilities; the question here is who ESPN Magazine chooses to feature how and where. For special issues with multiple covers, my experience is that newsstand availability reveals what image the magazine believes will sell best, with those predicted to be less popular going out to subscription holders. Newsstand issues therefore wind up being the most normative image, and the logic holds here: a slim, white, blonde female athlete barely engaged in the actual activity of her sport. In contrast to Bingson, Coughlin doesn’t even have to appear “in action” to prove her worthiness for a cover; her looks are enough. The problematic influence of this particular image of Coughlin was enough for a Swimmer’s World contributor to address.

Coming to the fore here is the conflict between appearance and achievement in sport. Athletic achievement is valued more than appearance: what you do is supposed to matter more than what you look like. This equation best suits predominantly male spheres, although phrases like “fat guy touchdown” reveal how appearance still factors there. Sport is often seen to be beneficial for women because the emphasis on achievement is expected to overcome the focus on appearance, but more often than not, women face a double bind: damned if you conform to conventional female appearance, damned if you don’t. The pressure from this conflict affects all female athletes, but considering that sport goes beyond its fields of play into other arenas–from sponsorships and product endorsements to fashion spreads–appearance often wins out and disproportionately affects those with non-normative bodies: not small, not white, not cisgender, those read “in excess” of expectations.

The release of the 2015 “Body Issue” coincided with debates around the bodies of two other high-achieving female athletes, Serena Williams and Caitlyn Jenner. Williams, the top-selling cover from the first “Body Issue” in 2009 (at top), was near to earning her sixth Wimbledon title when a New York Times article sparked controversy for its discussion of her body. Explicitly about size and gender but implicitly about race, the Times story is just one in a series of attacks on Williams’ body, ruminating on her larger, more muscular body primarily from the perspective of other female tennis players with smaller, white bodies. As Zeba Blay notes, the problem with the Times piece “isn’t about the fact that Williams isn’t tall, slim and a size two. It’s about the fact that she isn’t white.” Race is certainly central here, but size still matters: readings of Williams’ size and race compound and co-construct each other. Relatedly, when Corinne Gaston argues that this “type of body-shaming … comes gift-wrapped in a triad from hell: misogyny, racism and transphobia,” I would add sizeism to the list as well. Furthermore, drawing on Julia Robins’ critique, we shouldn’t allow discourse about Williams’ appearance to obscure her achievements, but neither can we easily separate her achievements from her body. The labors of her body–the acts of shaping and using it so successfully–are also part of her achievements, ones that have clearly given her a competitive advantage over the more conventionally sized/raced/gendered competitors quoted in the Times piece. This disruption of tennis’ identity hierarchies is a further victory, but one that shouldn’t continue to come at Williams’ expense.

Just four days after Williams’ Wimbledon win, Caitlyn Jenner made her first public appearance to receive the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at ESPN’s ESPY ceremony, and comparable controversies followed. As Jon Stewart noted when photos of her Vanity Fair debut first appeared, as a man we could discuss Jenner’s “athleticism, business acumen,” but now that “you’re a woman… your looks are really the only thing we care about.” Achieving femininity involves attaining an approved appearance, legitimated through cover stories like the Vanity Fair spread, but attaining that appearance often obscures other achievements. Many questioned how Jenner could merit the award simply by “putting on a dress,” showing ambivalence in the reception of her presentation: being taken seriously as a woman requires “getting work done,” arranging and engaging in the labor to approximate conventional femininity, but the challenge of that work–physical, emotional–isn’t seen as equal to Jenner’s past athletic achievements as a man. Jenner and Williams were also pitted against each other: comedian D.L. Hughley echoed others’ comments by contrasting Williams’ feminine beauty to Jenner’s and questioning why Williams would be critiqued for appearing “too masculine” while Jenner is celebrated for becoming more feminine. While this double standard should be examined, such assertions also overlook how these oppressions stem from the same problematic system. Recognizing the intersection of these oppressions strengthens their challenge to that system, and hopefully improves the opportunities for more participation and representations of non-normative women within it.

I’m late to seeing everything these days. Sometimes I like it: I’m not jumping on the bandwagon so much as catching up to it in my own time. I don’t have the pressure to keep up with all the conversations. I get to savor the pleasure after everyone else has moved on.

Several friends had watched Damages on Netflix, but I was unsure because of the FX brand. Louie‘s one of my favorite shows, but I was skeptical of how such a male-oriented network would treat a story focused on two female leads. I ultimately started Damages on the recommendation of a friend: she and her family unintentionally stayed up all night one Christmas Eve marathoning it, so enthralled they danced around and pumped their arms whenever the theme music played. It was hard to ignore such a ringing endorsement, and to her credit, I was hooked from start to finish of the first season.

Damages focuses on the law firm of Hewes and Associates, headed by litigator Patty Hewes (Glenn Close). Hewes specializes in class action lawsuits, with the first season centered on a case against Art Frobisher (Ted Danson), a corporate playboy who destroyed his company and workers’ life savings by an alleged illegal stock sale. Frobisher’s former employees hire Hewes and Associates to try the exec in criminal court after a government trial finds him not guilty. New associate Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) enters the firm at pre-trial. Talented but naive, Parsons unknowingly has a special connection to the case that makes her indispensable to Hewes. Drawn too deeply into the case, caught in the machinations between Frobisher and Hewes, Parsons pays in unexpected ways that unfold over the course of the first season, starting right with the first episode.

The structure is the best part of the season. The pilot begins with a grainy, frenetic flashforward to what results from Parsons’ role in the Frobisher case. These flashforwards pop up regularly but not consistently so even their appearance keeps you guessing. They reveal a bit more each time, sometimes moving forward but sometimes showing a different perspective of a previous scene. A few flashforward moments are repeated but get more chilling with each view, especially the pilot opener: the repeated sight of just an empty building lobby and closed elevator doors, reminiscent of The Shining‘s corridor scenes, started giving me chills as I understood more about the case and more about what might be happening in those spaces.

The cat-and-mouse game between Hewes and Frobisher also propels the narrative compellingly, not only in the moves they use against each other but also in the questions they create about who’s good and who’s bad. Arguably they’re both, but who’s really the worst? Frobisher is a sociopath, a charmer who will stop at nothing not only to get what he wants, but also to try being liked in spite of it. Hewes is a prototypical antiheroine, hard to like in any obvious way: frosty and spiteful, she uses everyone around her for what she believes to be a bigger, better result to her case. She might be on the right side of the law, but do all her cruel, destructive means justify her desired ends? That question is left open as the season one finale sets up a longer series investigation.

Relatedly, many have written about the gender politics of the show. There’s a lot to mine there, and I’ll catch up with more of those readings as I continue to watch. Of course, there’s not only the male-female battle between Frobisher and Hewes, but also the female-female conflicts between Hewes and Parsons, one of the most commonly discussed parts of the show. The complications in the female relationships can’t be ignored, nor can the similarities between Hewes and Close’s other infamous ballbuster roles, especially Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction. The connections are intriguing and compel further consideration. I will say that in the battle between Frobisher and Hewes, she eventually comes off as more sympathetic to me: some emotional outpourings and glimpses of a backstory reveal she might have some regrets, although the source of those regrets is left unresolved like other threads in the season one finale.

There are some other pros and a few cons to mention. I liked the pop soundtrack. It was eclectic and evocative, appearing rarely but all the more effectively for that. Donal Logue makes a particularly delightful but brief appearance as a red-pantsed Wall Street blowhard. Finally, it pays to rewatch, which is a big plus in my book. The initial meeting between Frobisher and employee “double-agent” Larry is especially chilling in retrospect.

In terms of cons, Zeljko Ivanek’s accent is atrocious. I’m from the South, and I had no idea what accent he was affecting here. My sense is that it’s meant to reflect on a later character revelation, but it’s not worth inflicting it on the entire series. Lastly, and this is admittedly minor, but there are a few character and actor changes from the pilot to the rest of the season, mostly in rather extraneous family relationships. The main reason I even noticed this (aside from the rewatch) is because Miriam Shor played Parsons’ sister in the pilot, and I’ve always like her so wanted to see more.

Lastly, it seems especially apropos to catch up on Damages during the summer of Mad Men’s finale, as the two premiered within the same mid-July week in 2007, launching what we now talk about as a revolution in basic cable programming. In fact, Mad Men beat Damages for the Best Dramatic Series Emmy for their first seasons. Anyone remember that? I love Mad Men–it’s one of the only shows I refused to time-shift–but having watched both series’ first seasons within the past year, I can honestly say I question that choice.

Dieting is as American as apple pie. As Jerry Mosher notes in “Setting Free the Bears: Refiguring Fat Men on Television” from Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, “Dieting is such an American institution… most American sitcoms sooner or later do a ‘dieting show'” (188). This has been true since at least the fifties, when The Honeymooners and The Goldbergs both featured fat lead characters and episodes on dieting. However, The Goldbergs has the rare distinction of featuring at least two dieting episodes, airing only two years apart with drastically different resolutions. These two episodes from the early family sitcom demonstrate how ambivalent approaches to corpulence have long coexisted in American culture.

Series creator and writer Gertrude Berg had a self-deprecating but strategic awareness of her size. Embodying the role of Molly Goldberg for three decades, Berg capitalized on the meanings of her character through a number of paratextual products, including a cookbook and line of plus-sized house-dresses. Three factors may have insulated Berg from conventional pressures to reduce throughout her career: her establishment in radio; her matriarchal main role; and her Jewish background, since “off-white” ethnicities have often been associated with larger sizes in American culture. However, moving from the aural medium of radio to the visual medium of television may have increased those pressures. Mid-fifties competition may also have played a part, especially with the bevy of thinner, younger wives from the WASP-populated middle-class suburban family sitcoms that followed in The Goldbergs‘ wake.

Molly Goldberg’s size takes center stage in at least two episodes, number 25 from the DuMont run in 1954 and number 66 (“Milk Farm”) from the Guild Films syndication run in 1956. The episodes are remarkable for their similarities and differences. Chief among the similarities is their incorporation of the tropes of weight-loss narratives. These include forms of confession and surveillance, through the use of counseling, scales, and before-and-after photographs.

Both also feature work-out scenes that emphasize evolutions in televisual style through differing takes on similar routines. The 1954 episode, aired live, involves a long take through deep space. The camera captures a long shot of women working out simultaneously on different machines, then moves into and through the space, getting closer shots until finding Molly in a steam cabinet. The 1956 episode, edited for syndicated broadcast, functions as a conventional montage: single takes of women at different machines combine to represent discrete moments over time.

However, the biggest difference between the two episodes resides in their treatment of Molly’s efforts and results. In both, Molly cheats on her diet and fails to lose weight. In the first, the family supports her endeavor but finds the process amusing. When Molly reveals she’s ultimately lost no weight, they surround her with affection and console her with a bowl of ice cream.

In the second, the family supports Molly’s husband Jake in forcing her to go to a milk farm. Booted for cheating, Molly returns home to find a letter to the family detailing her crimes. At dinner Jake then shames her, calling Molly a “compulsive eater” who can’t control herself. She explodes:

“I am not! I am a human being like you and like you and like you! You think going away to drink milk is the answer? It is not!… How should I learn self control with skimmed milk? I don’t want to be forbidden forbidden fruits! I want to be surrounded by them! I want to be the one to say no!”

Molly then appears to prove Jake right, storming into the kitchen and devouring spaghetti behind closed doors. She returns to the living room with only bread on her plate, chomps a carrot, and indignantly exclaims “I don’t need a policeman!” before the episode ends.

One reason for the differing treatments here may be the change in the series setting. By the second episode, the Goldbergs have moved from the Bronx to suburban Haverville, changing their sociocultural meanings as much as their geographical location. Such aspirational migrations often compel corporeal alterations. Likewise, assimilation to their new environment (and new producers) may have involved attempts at not only trimming the Goldbergs’ Jewishness but also their size. The episode’s battle over Molly’s body reflects the angst from all these adjustments, as well as Gertrude Berg’s own dissatisfactions with the demands of Guild Films and the direction of her show.

Ultimately, the contradictory aspects of these two episodes are invaluable in framing ambivalent experiences of corpulence operative both then and now. Together, they highlight the negotiations over the body between self and others–the networks that help to shape the body and our perceptions of it–as well as the conflicts within. Gertrude Berg’s inspirations and intentions with both episodes may not be fully known, but her writing and performing in both provide a glimpse into the complexities of size in American culture at that moment that still resonate today.