Mic Wright begins this irregular series that takes columnists to task:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1992062,00.html

Zoe Williams sometimes acts like a drunken stand up, who, finding that her audience no longer laughs at her jokes, resorts to self-aggrandisement and petty abuse. In this rant, for which she is no doubt handsomely rewarded, she lays into all those women who feel the need to diet. “Why“, she wonders “would otherwise intelligent women, educated to a high standard, interested in global politics, etc, etc, worry about something so meaningless as their weight?”

It appears that Zoe, dressed in a fetching chiffon scarf in her byline picture and often seen desperately clasping a glass of wine in the pages of G2, has reached a state of Zen where her physical appearance no longer concerns her. Or perhaps it is because she, unlike the “vain and stupid” women who fixate on their weight, simply has the world’s fastest metabolism or a partner who couldn’t care less what she looks like because of her enormous and incredible intellect. Either of these assertions may be true. However, her attack on those women who do feel the need to worry about their weight is illogical and insensitive, based on shock tactics and flimsy assertions.

She opens her subsidised rant with a sarcastic attack on Times columnist India Knight and film producer Neris Thomas, who recently published a new diet book: “It must be an intelligent book, since they are both manifestly intelligent, as attested by their high professional status (Knight is a writer and Thomas a film producer). And yet it is also, undeniably about dieting. Riddle-me-ree.” Williams’ contention is that “women, who fixate on their weight, unless we’re dealing with eating disorders, are not intelligent”. In her heavy handed assessment, worrying about your weight immediately precludes you being an intelligent person. This is a bizarre statement which fails to define what she considers “fixated”. Weight is not a meaningless issue. In a society that is increasingly overweight it is a health issue and Williams’ example of India Knight is particularly strange.

Knight’s book details a diet in which she shrank from a size 22 to a size 14 – this is hardly the realm of size zero models and anorexia. Neither is it a question of ridiculous fussing from a woman who is a bit worried about her love handles, it was an issue of self esteem and well being. Size 22 is unhealthily large and Knight slimmed down for her health and to take control of her self-image. It was not a question of the “industrial narcissism” which Williams purports to attack. By deploying the sacred f-word, “feminism”, Williams attempt to bolster her argument as an attack on women’s complicity with society’s objectification of them but her targeting systems have gone askew. Rather than looking at the excessive focus on shape and weight that litters the tabloid press and the celebrity magazines, she puts Knight and ordinary women in her sights, declaring that an understandable desire to be fit, healthy and not overweight is a sign of stupidity. Her approach is ill thought out and scattershot and when she ponders “maybe this sounds needlessly aggressive” the only possible answer is: yes, it really does.