“Why is humiliating people funny? I get it, I do it too. We all do it. … But I think when it comes to the media, the media needs to take responsibility for the effect that it has on our younger generation, on these girls that are watching these television shows and picking up how to talk and how to be cool. … So then all of a sudden being funny is making fun of the girl that’s wearing an ugly dress.
And the word fat! I just think it should be illegal to call somebody fat on TV. I mean, if we’re regulating cigarettes and sex and cuss words because of the effect it has on our younger generation, why aren’t we regulating things like calling people fat?”
As she showed in the Barbara Walters interview quoted above, Jennifer Lawrence is the opposite of a celeb you love to hate — if anything, she’s the star everybody loves to love. Yet another reason to love her is her regular insistence that Hollywood be held accountable for the kinds of messages it conveys about size, beauty, and femininity. She famously refused to lose weight for The Hunger Games, instead focusing on working out and getting strong — and she caught flack for it from critics (yes, female as well as male). The New York Times wrote that Lawrence’s “womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission.” What does J-Law have to say to that? She told Elle, “I’m never going to starve myself for a part … I don’t want little girls to be like, ‘Oh, I want to look like Katniss, so I’m going to skip dinner.'” For a star who’s beloved for her ability to laugh at herself, she takes her position as a potential role model seriously — all the more reason to love her.
“I love food and hate exercise. I don’t have time to work out… I don’t want to be on the cover of Playboy or Vogue. I want to be on the cover of Rolling Stone or Q. I’m not a trendsetter, I’m a singer. I’d rather weigh a ton and make an amazing album… my aim in life is never to be skinny.”
Adele doesn’t pull punches when it comes to taking down exes in her music, and she doesn’t have time for body critics either. As it turns out, her success has landed her the covers of Rolling Stone and British music mag Q… as well as Vogue, Elle, and Cosmopolitan. Adele’s uncompromising attitude and belief in her talents has definitely worked out for her.
“Hollywood is a very hard place to be in. It really is. Being the person that I am, you know, being the size that I am, being a woman, being a black woman, there’s not a lot of roles for us. … I was being offered the girl who sits in the corner and, you know, eats all day, the girl who wanted to commit suicide ’cause she was fat. It was never anything that I felt had a good ending. I never wanted to play a character that hated herself. I wanted people to know that those aren’t the only kind of roles for women like me, normal girls. Going to the auditions, and hearing the casting director say ‘you need to lose a little weight,’ I didn’t understand why people couldn’t accept me for who I was. … I’m not gonna conform and hurt myself and do something crazy to be a size 2.”
She’s known for playing the uber-confident Mercedes on Glee, but before landing that role Amber Riley had given up on Hollywood and decided, with the support of her parents, to go back to being a regular high school student. Luckily for us, she eventually decided to try again and found a role that let her shine without having to compromise.
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