Campaigning to keep Joan voluptuous

Put your head between your knees and prepare to kiss your ass goodbye. Christina Hendricks, the woman who made it OK to have a rump the size of Venezuela, is going on a diet.

‘She wants to drop 35lbs off her bodacious 39D-30-39 figure’, says a distraught blogger. ‘Yes, the figure that has had Hollywood talking and American men and women wanting to high-five Hendricks. Unlike so many stick-thin actresses, Christina, as Joan Holloway, in the Sixties-era Mad Men drama, has become an inspiring role model for real women, and a sex symbol for oodles of men.’

The story was originally published in the Mail on Sunday, which quoted an ‘unnamed source’ who claimed that Hendricks is forgoing carbs in order to land juicy Hollywood roles. But while other hot celebrity sidebar stories just waddle about on the Mail website (‘Hey big suspenders! Rihanna dons pink PVC hold-ups for raunchy new video’; ‘Uma Thurman takes powdering her nose too far’; ‘Aren’t you a little old for that style? Madonna wears pigtails for dinner’), the Hendricks story has legs – big chunky ones with cellulite dimples.

How could she do this to womankind? Doesn’t she know that Britain’s equality minister Lynne Featherstone considers her a role model? The news that Joanie is dieting has caused a flurry of comment from disconcerted womanhood around the globe, despite the fact that it sounds like a totally manufactured story.

It is always best to interrogate an anonymous source to see whether they sound like a sensible sort of person. Or even a real person. And this one sounds hysterical: ‘She’s gone against everything she believed in before by going on the first diet of her life.’ Everything she believed in? What was she, worshipping at an altar of molten butter? On a crusade against celery? Oh clotted cream tea, hallowed be thy name, thy calories come, thy will be done, in tum as it is in Devon?

Do women really feel empowered by the mere sight of Joanie’s magnificent breasts, hips and ass, all poured into those office dresses and topped off with pillbox hats? Sure, she’s mighty pleasing to look at, but who’s kidding themselves that Joanie’s bootyliciousness is any easier to attain than Angelina Jolie’s recent impersonation of a rake? And while Christina looks great in those outfits, they’d be about as comfortable as a corset to eat lunch in. If we’re talking about the image of Joanie empowering women just to be themselves, someone needs to let those seams out.

Several big-girl pin-ups (who are never very big and always have impossibly pretty faces), like Sophie Dahl, have gone from blow-up doll to lollipop stick in recent years. But any notion that Hendricks or Dahl slimming down is going to impact on anorexic teenagers will be way off the mark. Anorexia, despite the tabloid narrative, is mostly to do with deep-seated personal anxieties and issues of control – not, primarily, brainwashing via images of skinny models on the catwalk.

It is really no one’s business but Hendricks’ if she diets or not. However fabulous she is, this mini-furore seems to ignore that she’s an actress, not a permanent public monument to voluptuousness. And as is the way with actresses, at times she will need to alter her appearance in order to inhabit a part. If Hendricks really is dieting, chances are she’s doing it to get everyone to stop going on about her iconic body and instead to focus on how well she can act. So best to stop flicking through celebrity snaps of her fatness or thinness and crack open the Mad Men boxset for an appreciation of her Ice Queen putdowns. If anything is really empowering about Joanie, it’s surely her no-nonsense attitude to ruling the world at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

A damaging dream of Mad Men's Joan

When it comes to the ideal female body-shape the pipe cleaner is out, the hourglass is in – or at least it will be if the new equalities minister, Lynne Featherstone, manages to chisel out her will on the perfect body image.

"In the autumn the minister will convene the first of a series of roundtable discussions with members of the fashion industry, including magazine editors, models and advertisers, to discuss how to boost body confidence among the young," the Sunday Times reported yesterday.

One might think that one of the first steps to boost such confidence might be to abolish school weigh-ins and make puppy fat a normal rite of passage rather than the subject of a health warning via the National Child Measurement Programme. (Can any woman think of anything more likely to have produced a fear of being on the chunky side than turning up to school one morning and being plonked on a set of scales? If that's not going to make you skip your Dairylea dunker as a lass and develop a lifelong fear of bread, one wonders if a picture of Kate Winslet's thighs is going to do it.)

"All women have felt that pressure of having to conform to an unrealistic stereotype, which plagues them their whole life." Featherstone explained. "It is not just the immediate harm; it is something that lasts a lifetime."

And you might think Featherstone had a point – it is after all, pretty demoralising looking at image after image of Naomi Campbell after Keira Knightley after Eva Mendes and not feeling as though the jam doughnut you just stuffed in your mouth wasn't really so irresistible after all – but then Lynne goes and recommends that we now need a new set of curvaceous role models, to replace all the whippet-thin ones, like Christina Hendricks, who plays Joan in Mad Men.

So I'm sitting here, with my images of Joan, and I'm feeling a little queasy. I'm thinking even if I eat 12 doughnuts, my hips are never going to bloom out like that. What is she wearing, some sort of side bustle? Has she got pads on under there? There she is, Joan, with her immaculately coiffed red hive of a hairdo – while the Hill barnet looks like someone's just rubbed it very fast with a balloon. Joan's embonpoint is so formidable it could have your eye out – and the Hill eyes stare down at the Hill chest and command the Hill fingers to Google "conical bras – Madonna – Girlie Tour". Joan is encased in the best dress money can buy. The Hill wardrobe looks askance at the Hill wallet and sees a moth fly out.

It's time to get the point, Lynne. The Hill ain't ever going to look like Joanie. Giving the British woman Joanie as a role model is never going to make her feel good. At least Kate Moss's hair sometimes stands on end. At least Cindy Crawford's got a damn mole. If we're talking about images of unattainable perfection, Joanie, with her hips, bust and stature could take home a newly-invented Nobel for the accolade. Oh sure, she looks like she could pack a few Big Macs – although I'm sure Featherstone would warn us against those – but as an ideal she is quite as unattainable as any other. Her BMI, in fact, is precariously near that of a model's – at 5 foot 8 and 140 pounds it works out as 21.3 (according to Joanie's driving licence). In other words, she's the equivalent of an old-fashioned perfect 10.

Rather than replacing the old impossible images with new impossible images (as the creative director of Harper's Bazaar pointed out, the fashion industry exists to create the fantasy you'll never live up to) an equalities minister should throw out all notions of obsessing about feminine beauty and concentrate on helping young girls think about the size of their achievements rather than the flatness of their navels, and the scale of their ambitions rather than – in Joanie's case – the rather spectacular power of their bosoms.