It’s not easy being a woman who is merely human, eh?
If you’re a woman, you know what I’m talking about. We have lumps and bumps; rolls and “handles”; have too little in some places, and too much in others. Magazines give us advice for tightening various body parts, slimming down, and how to shop for bathing suits and jeans that will accent our assets while playing down the “problem areas”.
Yes, we’re given the talk by our mothers that it’s our inner beauty that counts, and that people who truly love us will find us
beautiful because they see all of us—including the inner stuff which makes a woman “glow from the inside out”. Self esteem self-help books abound, we’re told to live healthy rather than try to be skinny…blah blah blah.
Yup…we are told all of that…and then we look at the magazine covers, and the billboards, and the commercials, and the pictures in the ads on facebook, and any other internet page we look at…and the covert message is: “you’re UGLY”.
We don’t measure up. Not at all. There’s hardly a woman out there who doesn’t look at those pictures and wonder where she went wrong, and how come she wasn’t given an appearance like “them”—the models. Sure, there may be a few of you who can get past all of that, and completely revel in your appearance, but most of us are working towards that…and not there yet.
A reader of the blog sent this to me last week:
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Powerful stuff, eh? Changes how we look at the billboards. I know the models are airbrushed and electronically tweaked, but I liked being “hit over the head” with that message. I remember one “cover girl” saying she couldn’t bear to look at her own covers, because she knew she was really so much less attractive than her own image!
But didja wanna know what was the most powerful part of this “stuff” for me? Guess who sent it to me?
An adolescent boy.
A teenage guy.
Apparently he gets it. Maybe he understands…and maybe, just maybe, the women he relates to over the years will be changed because he…and other men like him…will know the truth about what real women look like. They’ll understand how artificial the images are, and advertisers will figure this out, and use real people to sell products.
And it will start to change how women see themselves, finally loving their bodies as perfectly imperfect.
Here’s hoping it spreads!
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