“Oh the humanity!” she cried, as she sat and watched a group of young women step out onto the platform. Ranging in ages from 16–25, these women looked as if they had just been rescued from a Cambodian prison camp. Pale and emaciated they strut across the stage, smiling and waving to the audience. These weren’t prison camp survivors; these women had endured something far worse. They had withstood society’s concept of what is acceptable and what is beautiful, they were models.
Models of our society. Our society that considers grossly underweight women attractive. Yet this same society that frowns on third world nations, whose people suffer from starvation. We send them food and relief supplies, “Eat” we say, because lord knows they are too thin. But when we have people right here in our own country who look just as emaciated, we worship them as idols. We do everything for them. We put them on television and awe at their figures. Prance them around on catwalks, and make beautiful clothes that fit only them. And we tell every other woman in this country that they have to be just like them to be loved and adored.
And because of our society’s vision of an ideal woman, this has skewed men’s conception of what is beautiful. Men drool over these emaciated beasts. Women who make themselves up in the most decadent of clothing, scaring themselves with surgery to maintain that ideal figure. Surgery to remove fat cells, enhance bust lines, and lift sagging derrière’s. All for the sake of holding on to that “ideal”. Therefore the rest of the women in this country, women who unfortunately were born with parents who fed them and loved them and refused to let them get liposuction when they were twelve. Women who fight with the bathroom scale every day of their lives and curse their parents for providing them with a metabolism that just cant keep up with the “ideal.” Women who work hard every day at counting every calorie and fat gram that enters their body. Women who will go to extremes to attain that ever distant “ideal,” bingeing and purging, or even staving themselves to death. Women who take everything they have, go into debt, and sell their souls to the devil just to be accepted as one of our society’s beautiful people.
It’s sad. It’s sad that there are thousands of women doing this very thing every day. It’s sad that society accepts this as normality, even encourages it. Clothing designers have even given up on these women, “who cares about those fat chicks,” you might hear them say. They have the “ideal” to make clothes for.
So where does that leave the rest of us? Us women who are too short, too fat, and just not proportioned right? Where does that leave us? We are still beautiful women. We are masters of our lives. We have mastered careers, marriages, families, even in-laws. We make time in between working, dropping off the dry cleaning, picking up the kids, cooking dinner, cleaning the house, doing the laundry, and paying the bills, to work out. We make time to work out a minimum of thirty minutes a day, because that’s what they say will keep us healthy and fit. But why is it that we are still a nation of overweight people? Can a whole nation not be accepted as they are? Is it our fault that society frowns on a fat person? Why is it that if being overweight is such a horrible thing, then society, government does nothing to change that? Why is it that when you do attempt a healthy lifestyle, eating right, and exercise, that you go into a financial crisis yourself? Why is it the healthier foods cost more than the ones that are unhealthy? So I guess you have to be rich before you can be thin. That must be why you can eat a frozen burrito loaded with fat grams for less than one dollar. But if you want a healthy low fat entree it will cost you nearly three times as much. So now that’s two strikes against us. Not only are we fat, but we are poor too. That’s depressing. And isn’t it depression that drives us to stuff our face with French fries and ice cream?
