Guest post by Cat Feathers of Tea and Feathers
Here we go again. There's a photograph online of a slightly-larger-than-is-typical model and out come the comments. You know the ones I mean - they appear almost every time a larger model is brought to people's attention. 'It's nice to see a real woman for a change' 'Finally! A real woman, not one of those stick insects' 'Hooray, she has curves, like a real woman'.
Ugh. Can we please stop this? Whether we're tall or short, slender or larger, black or white, with disabilities or without, flat-chested or large-breasted, none of us is made from spacedust and marzipan. We are all real. There is not one single female body type from which only the unworthy deviate. That 5'11" slender soul gliding along the catwalk? She's as real and as much of a woman as you, me, and Marilyn Monroe. Is she representative of the whole of womankind? Well no, no more so than you or I. But not being everywoman (and who can be that?) doesn't make her less of a woman.
At 5'4" and a UK size 12-14, I'm never going to have a typical model look, so you'd think that I've no vested interest, that it doesn't wound me when someone with a very slender body is dismissed with a 'someone feed her a sandwich'. It does wound me, though. I'd argue that it wounds you too, whatever your shape, height and size.
It's highly desirable for women of all shapes and sizes to have greater prominence in the media, I think we can all agree on that. But we should be calling for exactly that, not slapping down the slender-framed while the curvier among us try to get a foothold. 'Fat cow' might be a horrible thing to call someone, but so is 'stick insect'. It's no less hurtful to tell a slim woman she'd be better if she put on weight than it is to tell an overweight woman that she'd be better if she lost some.
And why on earth do we think it's our business anyway?
Women's bodies, often the honed and toned bodies of models and actresses whose trade is in their looks (and that's a frankly depressing state of affairs that could be the subject of a whole different article), are everywhere for our consumption. We are encouraged to pick them apart, to make comparisons: between us and them, between them-at-the-oscars and them-nipping-out-for-a-pint-of-milk, between any one of them at various weights, between two arbitrarily selected women who happened to have a similar dress on, and so on. Women's bodies are under so much scrutiny in the media that it's no wonder we often place our own under a microscope and find it wanting. But it hurts all of us to buy into this rather than fight against it. We're none of us here for anyone else's entertainment, and we all have differences which should be celebrated and not sloughed, sliced or siphoned away.
Frankly, how dare one woman suggest that another is not a proper woman, just because hers is a different sort of beauty? How dare we think it's acceptable to insult the attractiveness of someone just because they don't look like us? It's a cliche, but the more you really look at the women in your life the more you realise it's true: we are all beautiful. It's no single woman's fault that her body type or colour is being held up to us as a standard, and we shouldn't pillory anyone for fitting that ideal, any more that we should pillory those who are the opposite of that ideal. Let's face it, larger ladies don't seem to get any better a deal than their svelte sisters. If you'll pardon the pun, there's a really narrow field of 'acceptable' when it comes to typical ideas of women's bodies and that hurts all of us.
It's taken me most of my 32 years and an awful lot of tears and soul-searching to realise that I, too, am an attractive woman (and I've typed and deleted that 8 times so far, it feels so alien to dare to say), wobbly stomach and fluctuating weight and all. I never did achieve Cindy Crawford's amazingly toned stomach and arms, and my legs didn't magically grow several by several inches, but I'm decent looking, and I'm neither more nor less real than she is. The idea that many pre-teen girls of today will be just the same as I was if we, their older sisters, mothers and mentors, don't do something about it is frankly appalling.
So the next time you come across one of those comments about 'real women', then unless it's coming from the uber-exciting forthcoming magazine Basse Mode and therefore means only 'not airbrushed into plasticism and drowning in clothes worth more than my car' (that's another whole different article...), do real women of all shapes and sizes a favour.
Call them out on it. Get them to stop and think.
Remind them:
We Are All Real
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