4/25/2007

Don't bring me down

I know its cliché to say that women’s magazines are cruel to women’s bodies, but its just increasingly bothersome to me lately. I subscribe to good housekeeping (it was five dollars!) and I think it was the February issue that had the beautiful Kate Winslet on the front cover with a caption reading “I don’t care about my weight anymore” What?

I hate the message and that one quote from her interview made it to the cover to sell magazines. I feel like there is this weird divide between reality and the reality in magazines. When I picked up a recent Vogue with Scarlet Johansson on the front it read “curvy and cool” and the article focused a lot on how shocking it was that she accepts her body. Are these people serious? I was reading that magazine in the bathroom and to my surprise Josh picked it up and read it (not surprising because ol Scar’Jo was on the cover) and he was annoyed with it as well. He came out of the bathroom and was like “why do you read this?” and was baffled that looking like a model was the standard these women hold themselves and other women to. If they don’t look like that and are OK with it they are like “oh my god, she’s okay with her body, but secretly we are not”. I feel like women are our biggest enemies with self-acceptance. Most men like a healthy and confident woman. If you happen to be model thin naturally, you should be happy with that as well as being happy if you weren’t born with a models body.

I proceeded to show him the models that they were showing in the magazine as “plus size”. We all know plus size women are exceedingly beautiful women in real life that are approximately a size twelve and over five foot nine. He couldn’t believe that they were considering these women to be “full figured”. He doesn’t have a fat fetish (despite being with me, heh) and prefers healthy looking women, so I wondered “ who are the men that like their women looking like they haven’t eaten since the 80’s”?

I don’t want to go on a tirade about fat acceptance and all of that because I personally do not believe in being fat (obese) not because of appearances, but because I know the personal issues and how physically hard it is to have 100+ extra pounds on my body.

What I am saying is, its tiring to see so many gorgeous women hating themselves. And even more tiring that magazine editors feed into the self hate. I was reading a blog recently called “the skinny website dot com” and I just felt tired and sad for the blogger. Maybe she would feel the same for me too? She basically makes note of celebrity weight fluctuations and then slyly mentions what size would be unacceptable for her.

My wish for myself and for all women is to learn to be comfortable with your appearance and size. If it needs work, then work on it, but out of love not self-hatred. On that note I will continue to roll my eyes to the women that say “I would absolutely die if I gained 10 pounds or looked like her

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1 Comments:

Blogger Lily T said...

Personally, I don’t know any guys who like sticks for women. If you look at a man magazine, the women have way more meat on their bones. I read somewhere that the new stick look steams from women wanting to be more masculine. I had a homosexual co-worker that believed that male homosexual designers were causing this infatuation to basically look like guys in drag. But hey, these are only theories.

8:46 PM  

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