She Eats Like a Horse Who Eats Chocolate

A few days ago I finished reading a book with a primary female character who had the strangely common and rather annoying characteristic of being able to eat gargantuan quantities of food while maintaining a perfectly slender wisp of a figure. The first time I really noticed this phenomenon was as a teenager reading Martha Grimes’ fun but utterly static Richard Jury mystery series, in which the ever-brooding Richard Jury is regularly being heavily come on to by his ravishingly sexy young (but fully adult) neighbor who always seems to appear with a plate of brownies or a gallon of ice cream or some other implausibly large sweet that she consumes in its entirety.

At the time, I thought this was just a defining feature of that particular character – a way for the author to display that her physical “appetites” are voracious and thereby frightening to the melancholy, pensive, and passive (though intelligent, ultra-handsome, and completely single) Richard Jury, who somehow manages to never sleep with this woman (or any other) despite having every opportunity. (It occurs to me that Jury is similar to Angel from Buffy & the Vampire Slayer in many ways, except Jury can go out and walk the lonely rainy streets of the city during the day, and having sex is not going to literally turn him into an evil monster, although you couldn’t tell that by his inexplicably monkish behavior. My best guess is that Grimes recognizes that a certain kind of loyal female fan believes deeply that if only she were to appear in Jury’s life… etc., and Grimes thus keeps him unattached to prevent these women from becoming jealous and sending her hate mail. Or it could just be that Grimes is totally incapable of developing a character in any way whatsoever.) But since then, I have encountered it so many times that I have come to recognize it as a standard fantasy. I’ve seen it in books written by both men and women, though I think it is slightly more common in ones that are targeted to a disproportionately female audience. However, I’ve been surprised at the number of thrillers written by men with male protagonists and a generally male sensibility that feature a woman with this characteristic in the role of “hot woman the hero will soon start fucking.”

Although this character does not rise to the level of Wacky Neighbor, Token Religious Black Woman (about which more later), Amazingly Resourceful Friend (you know, how characters in fiction so frequently happen to have a friend who can with almost zero notice arrange, e.g., a wedding ceremony or a set of false identity papers), or Really Stupid Guy, Skinny Woman Who Eats All the Time has made it on my personal list of fictional stereotypes.

I am now mentally prepared that one day I am going to be reading a book in which after a walk on the beach in the tiniest possible bikini, the Skinny Woman Who Eats will go up to the snack bar with Her Man, and she will say “Two cheeseburgers, two large fries, and two chocolate milkshakes… and whatever he is having.”