14 DAY TRIAL // Zoe Saldana is now promoting her role in “Star Trek Into Darkness” with an interview and spread in Allure magazine. Besides the fact that the spread has her dropping trout, the issue is also getting plenty of headlines for “unnecessarily” revealing her weight.
As you can see in the photo attached to this article as well, the actress’ weight is revealed right on the cover, where she’s described as “115 pounds (52.1 kg) of grit and heartache.”
OMG Yahoo! points out that pinning a number to Saldana’s figure is equal to taking a step back in the way women are portrayed in the media, where, for some reason, their weight is still used to describe them.
Harvard sociologist Hilary Levey Friedman agrees, saying that many of today’s women usually refer to Body Mass Index instead of weight, so Allure’s choice to name the weight is “an interesting” one – and outdated too.
“It used to be common to share numbers like weight and measurements,” Friedman says.
“While it is still common within the modeling industry… more mainstream pop culture has shied away from it. Even the Miss America Pageant stopped listing the weights and measurements of its competitors by the 1990s,” she adds.
More importantly, by revealing Zaldana’s weight, particularly in a context in which it was very clear that she was slender and very fit, is sending female readers a very wrong message.
“[It says that] you need to be thin and strong. Just one isn't enough anymore. This only puts more demands on women and can lead to varied types of disordered eating,” Friedman points out.
On a related topic, in the accompanying interview, Saldana talks about being done with dating actors (she wouldn’t rule out raising her kids with a woman because she’s “androgynous” like that, she says), fighting misogyny and racism in the industry, playing Nina Simone, and her skin-tight outfit in “Star Trek.”
The interview is here.