I’m absolutely sick and tired of reading attacks over the size and shape of certain celebrities. I don’t care whether a person has put on weight, lost weight or is unhealthily thin.
You may argue that a celebrity is a rolemodel and therefore their body shape is our right to deconstruct, criticise and comment on. I disagree. Our children deserve better.
They need to see us desist from judging people based on looks. These judgements do enormous damage, as it teaches them that body image is the defining characteristic of a person. It tells them that a person can be legitimately criticised for looking a certain way. It tells them that unless they look that same way, they aren’t good enough.
Hilary Mantel has broken this very rule by unleashing her vile and poisonous attack on Kate Middleton. By mercilessly pillaging Kate’s body size and public persona she has helped perpetuate the habit of judging people by externalities alone:
She is a double Booker Prize winner, the darling of the literary establishment.
And Hilary Mantel has used her position among the novel-writing elite to launch an astonishing and venomous attack on the Duchess of Cambridge.
Mantel, whose latest books are set in the Tudor court, dismissed Kate as a ‘machine-made’ princess, ‘designed by committee’.
Mantel, 60, also scorned her as a personality-free ‘shop window mannequin’ with a ‘plastic smile’.
She compared Kate unfavourably to both Anne Boleyn – one of her historical heroines – and to Princess Diana, insisting both had more personality.
She said Kate had gone from being a ‘jointed doll on which certain rags are hung’ to a woman whose ‘only point and purpose’ was to give birth.
Mantel said Kate ‘appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished’.
She said the Duchess was quite unlike Anne Boleyn, who was ‘a power player, a clever and determined woman.’
Mantel contrasted her appearance to Prince William’s mother, Diana, ‘whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture’.
Mantel said that when she first saw Kate Middleton, she struck her as ‘a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore.’
Ms Mantel’s comments on the Duchess of Cambridge’s appearance comes shortly after she spoke about having body issues of her own.
Ms Mantel went from a size ten to a size 20 in nine months after she was diagnosed with severe endometrosis at the age of 27.
The treatment, which included surgery removing her womb leaving her infertile, caused her to gain four stone.
The 60-year-old author said she sometimes dream of being thin again.
Prince William’s wife-to-be was as ‘painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character’.
She added: ‘Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners.
‘She looks like a nicely brought up young lady, with “please” and “thank you” part of her vocabulary.’
Mantel spoke of Kate’s appearance in her first official portrait since marrying William, painted by Paul Emsley, which was unveiled last month.
She said: ‘Her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off.’
Mantel went on to say that female Royals were ‘at the most basic… breeding stock, collections of organs.’
St James’s Palace last week criticised a magazine for printing pictures of Kate’s baby bump taken during a break on the Caribbean island of Mustique.
And they were furious last year when pictures of her topless on holiday were printed in Italy – saying ‘a red line had been crossed.’
But Mantel suggested Kate could have few complaints about private pictures of her being taken on holiday – observing: ‘The royal body exists to be looked at.’
‘Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.’
Click on the link to read School Official’s Solution to Harassed Teen: Get a Breast Reduction
Click on the link to read Self-Esteem Crisis Even More Serious than the Obesity Crisis
Click on the link to read Our Young Children Shouldn’t Even Know What a Diet Is?
Click on the link to read Charity Pays for Teen’s Plastic Surgery to Help Stop Bullying
Click on the link to read Most People Think This Woman is Fat
Click on the link to read It’s Time to Change the Culture of the Classroom
Click on the link to read Sparing Young Children the Affliction of Body Image
Topical Teaching 