The Amazing Ability of the Celebrity Media to Send Mixed Messages About the Appearance of Famous Females

"Her bulging belly was sooooo not hot." Those are words from Eonline.com about Britney Spears body in her recent debacle at the MTV Video Awards. I saw parts of the performance and, frankly, I imagine that most of the women who work at Eonline.com would kill to have Spears' body even as it looks now. More disturbing is the decidedly hypocritical and confusing message that the attacks on Britney Spears' physical appearance sends. It is one thing to complain about her lackluster performance skills, though, again, I would say that even that performance was more exciting than Ricky Martin's "legendary" Grammy Awards appearance. (Even I can dance better than that.) It is another thing entirely to watch a woman who is clearly in better shape than most celebrities be excoriated because she is deemed fat when so much magazine cover and air time is devoted to excoriating all the anorexic women in Hollywood.

Which is it you want, celebrity media: Normal looking or the smiling skeleton of Joni Mitchell?

I have to admit to being totally confused. Before I ever saw Britney Spears' MTV Award performance I had read that she was out of shape and even had a bulging belly. Did these writers even watch the show? Okay, I haven't seen the entire performance but I saw enough to know that Britney Spears hardly looks like Roseanne. And that's not even to mention the fact that this is a woman who had two children in two years. I make these observations to point up that only the intellectually-challenged celebrity media would criticize the current edition of Spears as "fat." Part of it has to do with the feeding frenzy taking place over Spears' consequential lack of judgment in the past year. Part has to do with the fact that the people taking her to task have no real meaning to their lives. I write about celebrities on a regular basis, but these people write about celebrities all day, every day. They don't write about anything else! The only other job in journalism I can imagine being half as boring is a sportswriter who no longer even has to listen to the answers given to his questions because he already knows what they will be.