“Why is it wrong to be fat? “I don’t see anything wrong with being fat.” That’s what Jim Morrison said in an interview in 1969, when a harmful ideal of beauty was increasingly implanted in the collective imagination: that of extreme thinness.
Just 3 years ago, the phenomenon of Twiggy had broken out, the British supermodel who became the icon of thinness, and who would obsess the fashion industry with said stereotype in the decades that followed. Of course, Twiggy was just a skinny girl; But years later, the ideal of having a body like hers would affect women around the world. And to men too, because in the case of men the aesthetic imposed at that time was that of thinness in the style of Robert Plant.
Body stereotypes also affected Jim Morrison
when I was a child.
But when the singer gained weight in the last years of his life, he no longer gave it the same importance. He had made some reflections regarding stereotypes, which he shared in an interview with Howard Smith in Los Angeles, and which the Blank on Blank studio turned into a fun animation:
Morrison not only praised fatness, but understood the unnecessaryness of stereotypes.
Although, as photographer Linda McCartney recalls in her book The Sixties: Portrait Of An Era, Jim Morrison had told her that “he had grown up as a fat kid that no one wanted to know about” and that this had caused him a lot of emotional pain. But in the interview it is evident that he managed to break those chains, crushing stereotypes in the way that rock ideology has always invited us to do.
It’s something that really bothers me. Why is it wrong to be fat? I don’t see anything wrong with being fat.
Furthermore, Jim masterfully tells how when he was in high school he gained a few kilos, and he felt very good about it:
Thus, about 3 months later I weighed 83 kilos. And you know what? I felt great. Like a tank. Like a big mammal, a big beast.
I wish more people thought like Jim, to stop tying ourselves to stereotypes and see beauty beyond what we are told is beautiful.