It’s a familiar line in movies and television shows. The beautiful, thin, courageous female lead wants nothing more than to be valued for something more than her perfect body but she’s just too beautiful to be considered a rational, successful, and trustworthy human being.

Really?

If this is true, why are only thin, conventionally pretty people booked for leading roles in shows? Shows that people watch because they take the characters seriously and think of the actors as being believable people. I’ve worked on film sets for the past year in a mid-sized market in the U.S. and I haven’t yet met an actress playing a lead character or romantic interest who is anything other than incredibly petite, white, and dramatically thin. Next time you flick on the TV, look at the actresses. See how thin they look. They might look fine–like “normal” straight-sized people. But in person, these girls look like they could be blown away by a gust of wind (this also has to do with the “matching” process in casting, where the female lead ideally has to be 3 to 6 inches shorter than the male lead and a heck of a lot slimmer–and the male actors are quite thin and short to begin with–so that they fit into stereotypical masculine/feminine physical archetypes). I work with models who weigh more, and not just height wise. What does this say about society, when this type of person is seemingly the only type capable of being a “regular” human woman?

I would love to live in this magical universe where “ugly”, fat women are taken seriously while beautiful thin people are not. Because the exact opposite happens in real life. As a conventionally unattractive woman (at 5'10 and 210 pounds, I’m far too tall and broad to even be considered a woman in the industry), I am taken less seriously than my thin and pretty peers. If I can’t be expected to do the most basic job a woman must do (i.e. be conventionally beautiful), I am deemed incapable of other tasks. I’m not even a human. And I’m sure this isn’t just a show business thing.

Thin privilege is finding a way to twist your privilege into a problem (“Boo hoo, I’m so beautiful and perfect that I’m never taken seriously.”) and have it seen by society as perfectly acceptable and realistic misfortune.