The desperately thin housewives

[Elvira]

The desperately thin housewives
by MARCELLE D'ARGY SMITH

08:17am 23rd February 2006

What on earth is happening to those housewives in Wisteria Lane?
The highest profile female icons on American television, all women in their 40s (except 30-year-old Eva Longoria who plays ex-model Gabrielle), are vanishing before our eyes. Surely none of them weighs more than 7st. And people are starting to notice.

Marcia Cross (Bree), Teri Hatcher (Susan), Felicity Huffman (Lynette) and Longoria are now bone-people with bright, tight designer clothes covering their skeletal bodies.

Pale skin is stretched tightly across gaunt faces, cheekbones are razorsharp, rendering their smiles neither pretty nor convincing. Only Longoria's face is still rounded with youth. But if there's such a thing as dress size zero, she must be heading towards it.

Obsessed

These adult women who are obsessed with being thin/thinner/thinnest have the bodies of undernourished teenagers.

And no, it isn't attractive. It's LA. It's California, Land of Plenty, where there's food in abundance yet women think they're alluring if they starve.

It's two fingers to the developing world where people are hollowed-out thin because they are poor and there isn't enough food. Funny how the world's richest and its poorest have bodies that look the same.

Does no one on the set mention that its stars are in danger of losing their sex appeal? Only Nicollette Sheridan (Edie) seems to have any flesh on her limbs.

Ardent Desperate Housewives fans who drool on about the show on various websites are now fretting about the weight of the stars.

"They're way too skinny. It makes them look awful," wrote one. "Women of that age need meat on their bones," added another. "She's LA's answer to Victoria Beckham," was the view of a third.

Pressure

The most worrying of all is Teri Hatcher. Maybe she felt pressured into 'doing something' when she turned out to be just one of a good ensemble cast and not the star of the show after all.

Tiny Eva Longoria is the one most often described as "hot"; Marcia Cross - who plays the Martha Stewart-on-steroids type - picks up votes as most people's favourite character; Felicity Huffman is an acclaimed actress. But they're all as thin as coat hangers. What do you do in LA when you're insecure and on display? You go on a rigid diet and exercise like mad, that's what.

You probably have your own gym and a trainer who'll bully you daily. You go running carrying weights and bottled water. You eat leaves, air - and maybe the odd raisin.

Hatcher seems to be living on fresh air alone. She appears coyly thrilled not to have the body of a grown-up. She has the "I'll-just-pull-my-sleeves-over-my-hands-'cos-I'm-vulnerable" teenage gestures to go with her teenage-imitation body.

She was described by a British journalist, who met her on the set recently, as looking "shocking - barely there. But the PR company doesn't fly you out to say that".

Bulemic and anorexic

DH stylists have wisely covered Hatcher in layers of clothing to disguise what must now be clinical anorexia. And, no, she's not dating George Clooney.

Yet even Emmy Award-winning Felicity Huffman -one of the most popular and clever actors around - has admitted to being bulimic and anorexic 'in my 20s'.

She describes her weight as "dropping to 98lb [7st]". Judging by recent episodes, she's dropping weight again.

Her co-star Marcia Cross is as thin as any young model on the catwalk. It's not a great look for a woman in her 40s.

But do all these stunning women realise how hard, angular and strained they are beginning to appear? Why do they do this to themselves?

Competitive Dieting, that's why.

It often happens in hit series with a female cast. Once the show rises to the big time, the collective dress size drops.

They vie to be "best-looking woman" each week. But with similar hair and make-up, and the same access to great clothes, the only thing they can do to make themselves different from the others is lose weight.

It happened in Ally McBeal. Calista Flockhart, perhaps in an effort to defend her star billing territory beside the other talented, sexy women in the show, began to get thinner.

She teetered across our screens with her lollipop head and spidery limbs, making us worry that she lacked the strength to open the door to her office.

She, too, did the sleeves over the hands "I'm-a-needy-cute-person" thing. This gesture is very fashionable in Mad Thin World. It drives the rest of us nuts.

And Calista wasn't alone. Her co-star Portia de Rossi, who played ice-cool lawyer Nell, lost so much weight she appeared skeletal, and actress Courtney Thorne-Smith left the series, claiming she'd been pushed to the brink of anorexia.

Competitive Dieting also happened in Friends when Courtney Cox almost lost her looks by turning into a stick insect.

Jennifer Aniston followed suit and began to look too angular when she slimmed down to seven-and-a-half stone.

You'd think the cast of Desperate Housewives, who've been around the LA block a few times, would be old enough to know better. But they haven't learned a thing.

We're witnessing, yet again, women's bizarre masochism and obstinate refusal to "grow up", because staying childishly thin is a way of saying you wish to remain a child. It's to deny a great time in a rounded, sexy woman's life.

No one expects Susan and Co. to look average. Slender and curvy would do fine. But these razor-sharp cut-outs of grown women are making these housewives look so desperate, I may switch my allegiance to watching fat men play darts.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1773

[ourmaninBusan]

These adult women who are obsessed with being thin/thinner/thinnest
have the bodies of undernourished teenagers.

It says a lot when grown women are trying to measure their
figures by comparing themselves with the likes of Mischa Barton.
How "skinny" are the studio execs who put them on the show?

[Lani]

I always thought Marica Cross was way too thin. In that scene in the first season where she strips down to her underwear was just so wrong to me.

[NawdleZouss]

I don't know, I never noticed Marcia Cross as being really thin. Teri Hatcher is terrifying (no pun intended), Eva Longoria is pre-pubescent shaped, and Felicity Huffman and Edie whatsit would look much better with some pounds on them. Overall, I don't know why they're constantly billed as a bunch of sexy harpies or whatever, they're not that...lookable at?

[olivia720]

This is a good article and it articulates what I've been feeling about this show. All these skinny women are getting ridic.

[hello]

Millions of women and men are in agreement! Enjoy life, it's short, but FULL of delicious food!!!! I'm sampling it all!!!

[NawdleZouss]

Word.