This fear around a woman’s weight is absurd

Beautiful: Gemma Arterton was badly treated by the film studio

It seems like the perfect example of the insanity of Hollywood. On The Guilty Feminist podcast, actress Gemma Arterton spoke about the time a studio declared a state of emergency over her weight while she was filming a movie in Morocco and immediately sent out a personal trainer to attend her 24 hours a day. Video footage to prove she was working out in the gym was demanded and provided.

Of course, Hollywood IS mad. But only in the sense that it takes everyday concerns and desires to extremes, in the desperate hope of pleasing its public.

Arterton’s story illustrates not just the industry’s amusing tendency to excess but the less amusing tendency on the part of the western world to fear female fatness. That a size 10, preternaturally beautiful, talented (and, I know from interviewing her in the past, clever, funny, unpretentious) actress can be treated this way is absurd.

But what it says about the preoccupations of ordinary life is frightening.