To think that Bridget Jones is a terrible role model for women?

[malificent7]

I quite like the films...they are funny... but they do make me cringe.
Bridget overhears Mark Darcy slag her off. ( calling her a spinster- terrible sexist word) then ends up obsessed with him.
She has a perfectly lovely figure but we are led to believe she is fat as she permanently struggles to loose weight and become like her "stick insect" love rivals..
She is quite inept and bumbling....adorable but useless.
That bloody song " all by myself!"

I know as women we can probably all relate to Bridget on some level ..especially her insecueities but bloody hell...we should not want to be like her!

Am I missing the point here? Are the films/ book sexist or are they trying to highlight sexism? Either way...Bridget Jones is anti feminist .

[IntermittentParps]

someone very insecure and recording her weight and cigarettes smoked daily

That really pissed me off about BJ. Another female character obsessed with her weight. So fucking dull.

[Pyewhacket]

It's a fictional character. A construct in Helen Fieldings head. She wrote it to make money. It's not real.

[OnceUponAnEnzyme]

@hopefulhalf

I was 23 in 1999 Bridget was not so much a role model as a cautionary tale. I think she is supposed to be mid-thirties in the books, but pyschologically stuck in adolescence.

Thinking about it like this - the book would appear to be ahead of its time because I think now (even more than in the 90s) adolescent-thinking lasts quite a long time into adulthood, with many of us still feeling 'not very grown up' into our 30s and 40s.

[GabsAlot]

i actually hate the fact she lost so much weight in the 3rd film but was still bumbling bridget and the baby daddy thing was stupid

[Madcats]

Helen Fielding's column resonated with me (I was a bit younger than "Bridget" in my first job in the City). It was very "work hard, play hard" and an incredibly sexist environment at a great many companies. Females were not necessarily promoted for their talent.

Times have changed A LOT.

@BrizNiz interesting. I'd not heard that.

[Lobelia123]

I have enormous affection for Bridget as I see so much of myself and many of my lovely friends in her, as we are today and as we were in the past. All these things are part of the experience of life....having to grow into your career, being immature, thinking the wrong things about yourself and completely missing the point that you are worth being treated with love and respect just as you are. How boring life would be and how tedious human beings would be if we were all so woke, aware and evolved, eh

[MagpieSong]

@hopefulhalf

That quirky corner flat must have been worth approaching a million

Actually not in 1994 when the column was started . It's in London Bridge/ borough which was considered pretty grotty in 1988 when Bridget might have bought.

I think there was an article highlighting this in the Indie, that Bridget Jones thought she had it bad whereas now millennials can’t get on the housing ladder and that flat would be unattainable. (It was full of YABU for writing for indie and having audacity to complain comments beneath, oh and YABU to talk about Bridget as a real person. May as well have been on mumsnet!)

Anyhow, YABU O, as the point of Bridget Jones was she’s a mickey take of a typical woman in that time. Obsessed with weight needlessly, drinking and smoking, in 30s but not married with close group of bonkers friends, making the same resolutions yearly whilst not really wanting to stick to them (bar when she goes to an event and wishes she was 10lbs lighter) and never managing to stick to them. It highlighted a more chaotic family than the nuclear mum, dad and 2.5 kids with Bridget's child being fathered by one man with the other looking to adopt them, this chaotic description of family was something in the media a lot at the time. Partly because women no longer had babies whisked off to be adopted out if wedlock and were no longer ostracised by society for daring to bring up a child without a man. The first novel/film was a modernisation of P&P so insulting her was necessary as it occurs in P&P when Darcy says, “she’s not handsome enough to tempt me”. That kind of allusion is common in literature - and film actually. She’s a wry chuckle of recognition, not a beacon to aspire to - hence awful colleagues like perpetua and characters like Magda with her ‘ defecational prodigy‘ son and jokes about rich Rebecca and her friends dressed like mad hippies.

Anyway, I know Renée Zellweger was made to gain weight for the film, but I thought it was only to normal BMI as Bridget BMI wasn’t supposed to be below 18 (which Zellweger was prior to Bridget). There was a big hoohah about her being portrayed as chubby at the time, but her BMI was completely normal, it was 23-25 at various points in filming as far as I remember. Yeah, she was 30lbs heavier than before, but she was at BMI 17.5 before which meets the criteria for Anorexia Nervosa. Hollywood’s always been rubbish about weight, their actresses are made to maintain far too thin a figure. Down to my own ED at the time, I was pretty obsessed about all this crap, so unfortunately I remember.

To put it in perspective, despite the media claiming it was 3 stone it was 30lbs, which is 2st2lbs. You could be 10stone2lbs with a bmi of 23.6 (healthy) and be just in the lowest side of healthy at a 2st2lb loss coming in at 8stone with a bmi of 18.6. However, the media wanted everyone to see her as ‘fat’ after the weight gain, so that was the story they told despite it not being accurate. The methods to gain and to lose were unhealthy, but given the timescale and the fact films were involved, that’s unsurprising.

Sorry for Daily Fail but it was blooming years ago and is now the only source I can find to back up what I’m saying. This was after but was her returning to her pre Bridget weight, not losing beyond what she had been at before. www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-41011/Does-Bridget-Jones-look-better-fat-thin.html

[D4rwin]

Errrr. I though t the whole point was that she isn't a strong woman? That she desperately wanted to be cool, calm and in control? She is presented as desperate and quite flawed, terribly lacking in believing in her own self worth so seeking external approval.

[MilkandWater]

BJ is a set of standard chick-lit tropes, cooked up into a novel by two journalists ('likeably' flawed heroine with 'relatable' emotional issues, physical flaws, kerraaazy friends and family, relationship troubles, choosing between 'bad' and 'good' boyfriends etc etc etc) off the back of a column. I never read the newspaper column when it was running, but I imagine it worked better as short chunks than at novel length, because it's so obviously a cartoon.

I personally find it baffling that anyone 'identifies with' BJ at all literally nothing about her life resonates with me as in any way to do with mine but then I find the equally prevalent mum-lit set of stereotypes equally alien.

The novels must feel pretty dated by now, surely -- the obsession with smoking alone feels like a fictional character being irritated by her crinoline.

[CrappleUmble]

@D4rwin

Errrr. I though t the whole point was that she isn't a strong woman? That she desperately wanted to be cool, calm and in control? She is presented as desperate and quite flawed, terribly lacking in believing in her own self worth so seeking external approval.

That's how I always read it.

[MilkandWater]

Oh, and I actually remember when Renee Zellweger was 'working' semi-undercover at Random House for the role (and I think to practice her accent.)

[lottiegarbanzo]

Have now read and enjoyed reading this thread. A few thoughts:

Yes, Kate Winslet could have been a good choice. She was, at that time, slagged off endlessly in the press and in Hollywood for being fat, even though very slim, just because she has an hourglass figure, so hips, and isn't a tiny stick-insect-framed person.

Whereas RZ was tiny and truly perpetually dieting, in a strict, Hollywood professional way and I remember seeing an interview with her where she giggled girlishly about having to put weight on, so having cheese and a can of Guinness in her fridge (can you imagine!), which played to the idea that Bridget was actually fat, rather than a normal but attractive young woman.

Friends, a few years later, is a pretty good comparison, about the unexpected imperfections of the characters' 20s and joys found in friendship. But there, the actresses were tiny professional stick-insect versions of themselves and the 'joke' about Monica having been fat as a teen was played as grotesque mockery.

Mostly, what strikes me is the absurdity of the idea that any prominent woman must be a representative of or role model to all women, because woman is a single type, we are all one entity and all responsible for each others' actions. Woman as a single character (or maybe three or four types, if we're feeling generous). Not women as people.

Try applying that to male characters in film and literature and to real men's responses to them.

[UpHereforDancng]

This opinion has cropped up in many conversations I've had over the years, usually with intelligent feminists, and it always surprises me as it's satire - you're meant to laugh at her not identify with her!

Bridget Jones started as a very funny satirical cartoon in The Guardian for a long time before it became the novels.

The author said in interviews that it was based on a certain type of upper middle class young women who would often work in admin type roles in the publishers that I think she had a more senior role at. She said she found their lack of ambition funny and disappointing as most had had expensive educations and yet all they seemed interested in was their looks and marrying a successful man.

[BikeRunSki]

So that's what the character is about. Someone bright, capable and in some ways impressive career-wise but at the same time, massively self-doubting and obsessed by introspective detail.

This is how I saw the books

[lottiegarbanzo]

Oh and yes to the point that women having this extended 'young professional / would be professional' stage of life, while in and out of relationships, rather than married straight out of university, being quite new and uncharted.

Maybe it became a norm in the 80s. My parents' generation, graduating in the 60s and early 70s all married in their early/mid 20s, all to people they'd met at university and, when viewing my generation's activities, really couldn't comprehend people staying single or waiting to meet 'the one' beyond about 25.

I appreciate far fewer people went to university then but that's part of the point - the widening of higher education creating aspirations that couldn't always and immediately be met.

That change in access to higher education meant that everyone but women especially, had false expectations based upon the successes of previous generations of much smaller, more elite groups of graduates, who did therefore become the professional elite with relative ease.

For women especially, and I remember feeling this, almost the only professional women we saw were deeply impressive, exceptional people. The false logic was to think 'if that is what women with degrees and some drive become, then if I get a degree and have some drive I will become like them.' Then gradually realising that actually, just having a degree, ambition and enthusiasm did not make one brilliant or exceptional. That there was a vast hinterland of 'tolerably ok' to navigate, without a map. That's what Bridget was doing too.

[UpHereforDancng]

This is a really interesting article on how it began (it was the Independent not the Guardian).

www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/the-true-story-of-bridget-jones-533042.html

[Newkitchen123]

Why can't you just watch it for what it is?
A lighthearted film!
Why does everything have to be analysed to death!

[lottiegarbanzo]

It was a weekly column in the Independent, on Wednesdays in 1994/5 not a cartoon. It was very well-written, funny and strangely beguiling, given, at the time, I thought Bridget herself a cheerful idiot.

[AryaStarkWolf]

I definitely never got the idea that BJs was being put forward as a role model.........the total opposite actually

[CounsellorTroi]

There were loads of articles at the time about how Rene Zellweger who played her the film had to stuff herself with cream cakes to get her weight up to 9st in order to play Bridget convincingly.

Yes - one such article has always stuck in my mind, she said how great it felt to be “voluptuous”! She looked amazing in that bunny girl costume. Not fat at all.

[TatianaBis]

@MilkandWater

BJ is a set of standard chick-lit tropes, cooked up into a novel by two journalists ('likeably' flawed heroine with 'relatable' emotional issues, physical flaws, kerraaazy friends and family, relationship troubles, choosing between 'bad' and 'good' boyfriends etc etc etc) off the back of a column. I never read the newspaper column when it was running, but I imagine it worked better as short chunks than at novel length, because it's so obviously a cartoon.

I personally find it baffling that anyone 'identifies with' BJ at all literally nothing about her life resonates with me as in any way to do with mine but then I find the equally prevalent mum-lit set of stereotypes equally alien.

The novels must feel pretty dated by now, surely -- the obsession with smoking alone feels like a fictional character being irritated by her crinoline.

Totally agree.

I find chick-lit and mum-lit clichés - eg sitcom Motherland - perplexing.

Why do women portray themselves as incompetent?

[picklecustard]

I’ve not read the books but I saw something on twitter about how, in the films, we are supposed to see Bridget as a bit of disaster and a mess when she’s actually young and attractive, no supposed ‘weight issues’ at all, owns a flat in London which must be worth a fortune, has a firm set of friends and social life, secure job and money, it doesn’t really work

[TatianaBis]

Why do women portray themselves as incompetent?

Alternatively, why do female writers feel the need to portray women as incompetent in order to find favour with a female audience?

Dick-lit is mainly men performing heroic feats, getting hammered or dominating women sexually.

[KarlKennedysDurianFruit]

I'm not sure she was meant to be a role model

[Osirus]

YABU.

She was never supposed to be a role model. That’s the point.