Scarlett Johansson: “I don’t need to be skinny to be sexy.”

In Scarlett Johansson’s new movie, struggling actress Elizabeth Short (aka The Black Dahlia, played by Mia Kirshner) is shown auditioning for role after role. Johansson says she has “a lot of friends who are very talented actors and musicians who struggle...

"Any time that you are involved in a field that's revolving around vanity of some sort with a high rate of failure, it can breed a desperation in people that doesn't always have a happy ending. I think that kind of ambition with no end can really make for a lot of nastiness... Especially being surrounded by a lot of artists who struggle and watching them struggle.. I feel very, very lucky.” [From an about.com interview]

For many women in film [and music, not to mention modeling] the “nastiness” can include pressures to be stick-skinny.

Johansson - and many of us men who appreciate feminine beauty [and she is a wonderful example] - thinks the really skinny look is “unsexy.”

Johansson says, “I try to stay fit and eat healthily, but I’m not anxious to starve myself and become unnaturally thin. I don’t find that look attractive on women and I don’t want to become part of that trend. It’s unhealthy and it puts too much pressure on women in general who are being fed this image of the ideal, which it is not.

“I think America has become obsessed with dieting... I also think that being ultra-thin is not sexy at all. Women shouldn’t be forced to conform to unrealistic and unhealthy body images that the media promote. I don’t need to be skinny to be sexy.” [from CelebSource.org]

Cameron Diaz once said in Vogue magazine that she always wanted to "be a fleshy, voluptuous woman... the kind that bursts out of her clothing, displaying her wealth of femininity."

Model Crystal Renn has commented in tv interviews she is much happier and saner now as a plus size model than when she was starving herself earlier in her career. She is reportedly 5'9, size 12, 38c-30-42 [pics] and works with fashion photographer Steven Meisel, and designers Jean-Paul Gaultier, Dolce & Gabbana and others.

> related Talent Development Resources pages:
eating disorders
body image

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