If The Original Bridget Jones Was Released Today, People Would ...

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 Even according to BMI, a completely unhelpful and outdated method, 9.5 stone for an adult woman is a ‘healthy weight’.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.

Courtesy Everett Collection

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 That saying something like this would be blasphemous and outdated in today’s society.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.