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I can still remember the shape of Mischa Barton’s stomach. In the role of Marissa Cooper in The OC, the Noughties teen drama set in sunny, sandy California, the actor was often wearing a bikini. I watched that show obsessively when I was a teenager – and Barton’s body consumed me. I worked out that, in order to be beautiful, I needed my stomach to look exactly like hers: washboard-flat, and framed by two razor-sharp hipbones.
Hers was a stomach I’d seen elsewhere, too. Like on Paris Hilton. And Gwen Stefani. And the bodies of all the Victoria’s Secret models I was repeatedly told were definitive bastions of female beauty. Of course, in our apparent era of body positivity, it has since become “acceptable” to have a few curves on our figures. But this doesn’t really apply to the stomach, a part of us that society still insists must be completely smooth – have you seen those videos of celebrities getting lymphatic drainage massages on their bellies, too?
The belly is often the body part we fixate on more than almost anything else, yes in men (see: abs) but especially in women, and most of all at this time of year when many of us are gallivanting around in our swimwear. We judge midriffs on other people (soft versus hard) and we judge them on ourselves (flat versus rolls), often to a very nasty, self-flagellating degree.
Thank goodness, then, for Kate Winslet, who reminded us how absurd this all is in a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar. Speaking about her new film, Lee, in which the 48-year-old plays model-turned-Second-World-War-photographer Lee Miller, she recalled how during filming, a crewmember suggested she shift her position, to change her appearance. “There’s a bit where Lee’s sitting on a bench in a bikini… And one of the crew came up between takes and said, ‘You might want to sit up straighter.’ So you can’t see my belly rolls? Not on your life! It was deliberate, you know?” She added that she doesn’t mind showing her body – and her skin, wrinkles and all – in its natural state on screen. “The opposite. I take pride in it because it is my life on my face, and that matters. It wouldn’t occur to me to cover that up.”
It’s not the first time Winslet has made the case for belly rolls. Speaking to The New York Times in 2021 about a sex scene she filmed for Mare of Easttown, she recalled how the director, Craig Zobel, assured her he would cut “a bulgy bit of belly” out of the sequence, to which she replied: “Don’t you dare!” It’s an important message, one that we seem to have forgotten about in our current Ozempic era, where size-zero bodies have quietly become the desired aesthetic once again.
But why do we place so much importance on stomachs? For me, it’s always been the lens through which I see the rest of my body. I know that if I wake up with a flat tummy, it will set the precedent for how I feel about myself for the rest of the day. In short, I’ll be confident. Not just about the way I look, either, but about everything else, from how things are going in my career to my personal relationships. It will give me a glow that other people will comment on and notice.
If I wake up feeling bloated, though, then it becomes the single most intrusive thought I’ll have all day, one that will slowly infect how I feel about myself in all areas of my life. I will refuse to wear certain items of clothing – anything remotely tight is off the table – and will be conscious of how I’m standing and sitting all day. I will also avoid any cameras that are pointed towards me. God forbid someone tries to touch my stomach, too. There have been moments, when I’m lying on my side, and partners have reached for it and I’ve swiftly batted them away, disgusted at how my own body naturally falls and recoiling at the prospect of anyone coming close to it.
We have internalised a dark message that tells us not to sit a certain way, or pose from a certain angle
This is such deeply embedded messaging that I can only think stems from growing up in the Nineties and Noughties. It was in the shows and films I watched, and in the pages of the magazines I fawned over. Even as a teenager, I can remember standing in front of the mirror next to friends, all of us pinching at our bare stomachs together, wishing parts of our flesh away. In hindsight, it wasn’t unlike that famous scene in White Chicks, when Jennifer Carpenter’s Lisa has an outburst in a changing room, tugging at her (completely flat) stomach and hysterically calling it “Tina the talking tummy”. I should add that all this is despite the fact that I’ve always been slim and consequently have, for all intents and purposes, matched up to society’s beauty standards.
Winslet’s comments were heartening, sure, but they also made me feel desperately sad. Because they reminded me just how loud the noise around women’s bodies still is. That’s true regardless of whether you’re a pre-pubescent teenager or an Academy Award-winning actor. What kind of person feels compelled to tell Winslet she should hide parts of her body? How dare anyone try to oppress a woman’s bodily autonomy like that? Had that comment been directed at a younger, more inexperienced and insecure actor, it could be exactly the kind of thing to spark a decade-long battle with body dysmorphia.
It makes me angry. For Winslet, for my younger self and for the other women I know for whom this way of thinking has become more destructive, leading to a lifetime of disordered eating habits. Thankfully, for whatever reason, I’ve been spared that particular path. But that doesn’t make any of this much better.
We have internalised a dark message that tells us not to sit a certain way, or pose from a certain angle. One that forces us to suck in if we feel our bellies protruding too much, or to avoid certain items of clothing to hide them. It’s tedious and exhausting and I’m fed up with it. Hard or soft, a stomach is a part of us and, as Winslet said, we should take pride in it.
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