You know what they say. Beauty, eye of the beholder, blah, blah, blah. Well, behold!
Her name is
Chloe Marshall, she is a size 16, and she is this year’s Miss Surrey, England. Having won the Miss Surrey crown, Chloe has gone on to reach the finals of the
Miss England competition, which will take place on July 18. From there, Chloe may well advance to the
Miss World pageant.
Hold on a second. We’re talking about the Miss
plus size England contest, right? No. This stunning young lady has accomplished what no one would have dared imagine until she came along. Chloe is not a “plus size” beauty queen. She is simply a beauty queen. No asterisk for Ms. Marshall. She is a genuine contender for the honor of representing her country in the Miss World competition for 2008.
As someone who simply adores so-called “plus size” women, I am thrilled by Chloe’s improbable ascent in a world as deeply conventional as that of international beauty contests. No one that I can recall has so thoroughly shattered the mold out of which an endless procession of animated
"Real Dolls" have emerged and pranced across stages to thunderous ovations, year after year after year. I must, however, be realistic about all of this. Given the powerful forces arrayed against her, it is unlikely that Chloe’s Cinderella moment will continue much longer.
The backlash has already begun. While many are elated at the positive message Chloe’s success sends to women with body-image issues, others have dismissed her as a bad example for a society in which childhood obesity is on the rise. Columnist and former Miss England judge
Monica Grenfell writes:
Who does she think she's kidding?
What she's demonstrating isn't bravery but a shocking lack of self-control.
Instead of flaunting her figure, Chloe ought to own up to the truth. She is fat and she got that way by over-eating.
It would send an appalling — and very dangerous — message to other young women that it's OK to be fat. Chloe is a stark reminder that obesity is now virtually normal in our society — and we should all be hanging our heads in shame.
Beneath Ms. Grenfell’s bile and spleen lies a valid point: How do we strike a proper balance between acknowledging and celebrating the wonderful variety of the human form and our serious concerns for the health and well-being of our children? In my opinion, Chloe Marshall falls far short of the level of excess weight that we really need to worry ourselves about. She is in no way morbidly obese. She is not obese at all. Chloe has a big frame, and she fills that frame out. Yes, she probably weighs more than the charts say she ought to, but she is plainly healthy, happy and beautiful exactly as she is. The judges who have selected her over her more slender competitors are not fools, and they don’t want to be seen as fools. They have looked at Chloe and seen a woman of extraordinary beauty and poise. They had the courage to vote their consciences, convention be damned!
We all know that true morbid obesity is a terrible scourge, and we must do all we can to ensure our childrens’ lifelong health and fitness. At the same time, we cannot deny that human beings are astonishingly diverse, both in their body types, and in their aesthetic responses to those types. I love big, beautiful women! But I don’t fetishize them. I want no one to feel sick and miserable because of their weight. I am not turned on by Type 2 diabetes, hypertension or heart disease. I love women, and men, for who they are. And for me, sexually speaking, big, beautiful and fundamentally healthy people are, indeed, a turn on, and I will never apologize for that.
Yes, we want people to be physically fit, but we don’t want them to feel like shit about themselves because they can’t possibly meet an arbitrary standard that excludes 99.9% of the human race. Chloe Marshall is more beautiful than, let’s say, 99.7% of the human race, yet simply because she’s not a size 2, she has the capacity to help countless people learn to love themselves, even if they could never hope to match her remarkable achievements. I’ll be happy if she goes no farther than she has, but dammit, I want her to go all the way!
