Lizzie Miller's Sudden Fame Reminds Me That Real Women Come in All Shapes and Sizes

When I was younger, I recall my mom once dismissing some fashion magazines saying, "I never look at those things; they just make me feel bad about myself."  Although, I was more focused on my punk rock zines, and feminist reads like Bitch and Bust, I occasionally took a peek at the beauty-shaping booklets that tempt us with promises of hot sex tips.  I realized at that moment, that those things made me feel the same way too.

Staring at a Jessica Alba's airbrushed pour-less skin, I'm intrinsically aware of the message of unattainability. The message is: you're not good enough the way you are.  Being aware of it doesn't stop the message from entering your psyche and doing some serious damage to what your eyes see in the reflection and what your brain tells you about who you are.  You can choose to not buy those magazines, but you can't escape them.  They're everywhere you look -- if not in the magazines then on billboards and on TV.  This message of "perfection," this relatively arbitrary ideal that media has collectively created, is staring you down hoping you'll break and believe the lie that you aren't good enough.

Most women's magazine's "health advice" often revolves around the idea of losing weight, along with pictures of women (Gisele Bundchen, or any of those Victoria's Secret women) who supposedly represent the ideal.  The perpetuation of this message isn't an elaborate, orchestrated plot by some super villain hiding behind a curtain, scheming to drive women crazy with thinking they constantly need to improve every aspect of their appearance.  It's more like a silent machine quietly moving things along, which makes it more dangerous.  It's just something that's there, on its own.  What can we do to change it?

Well, lots of things.  Plant new seeds, to make something new grow.  Here's one of them.  Glamour magazine did an issue on body diversity.  They included a model with clearly visible belly fat, which garnered a flood of positive responses from grateful women.  The Glamour spokesperson in the video says that readers were emailing her saying after seeing the photo, "this was the first time I've looked at a magazine and felt good about myself." 

This is what I love to see.  This gives me hope for the future.  However, the website where I stumbled across this story on feelgoodstyle.com did not make me feel so good.  The title of the story is "Glamour magazine features (gasp!) -- a Real Woman."  The article goes on to ask "Is healthy the new skinny?"

Um, okay...so am I not a real woman because I'm skinny?  Do you have to put one group down in order to feel good about another?

The message I gleaned from the interview with the Glamour model and spokesperson is that women want and deserve to see themselves accurately represented in media.  This means diversity -- add thicker women to the sea of slender women already out there, don't use them as replacements.   Also, I look forward to the day that magazines don't have to do a "special issue" to feature women who wear higher than a size 6. 

People often refer to super thin women as representing "unattainable standards".  For many women, that's true.  But for me, Lizzie Miller's body is unattainable.  I could probably never look like that.  This kind of language ("real women" vs skinny women) just shifts our thinking from one rigid ideal to another, when what we should be moving towards, is the idea that real women come in all shapes and sizes and it's normal to see all shapes and sizes in magazines -- not tell larger women they're too fat and tell skinny women they're not real. 

This "real women have curves" mentality just reinforces this idea that you can only feel good about yourself if you're better than someone else.  Whereas, in reality, you can feel good about yourself while still seeing other people as beautiful even if they're different than you.

They are both beautiful, and both real women.