Why I Shouldn't Be Allowed To Read The Internet

It starts, innocently enough, with a link on facebook. Then I read one article which links to another which links to another which gets me to this.

And then I get all aggro again.

"Real Bodies Unite is appealing to all those women fed up of being bombarded with unrealistic imagery in the fashion and beauty industry, by launching a global campaign to raise at least 10,000 signatures for the use of body diversity instead."

Flashback: the year is 1991. A certain young feminist author with a hot, new, provocative book comes to talk to our eighth grade class (yes, I just outed my age). She talks to just the girls in the class about how Vogue and, I don't know, Beverly Hills 90210 are forcing us to hate ourselves and how we look and how those are the reasons we have poor body image. A certain student in the class raises her hand and politely (ok, probably not that politely) asks the feminist author if she is smoking crack. How on earth can a magazine make us do or feel anything we don't want? Vogue doesn't make this young lady feel bad about weighing 150+ pounds at 14 - she feels bad about her weight because she looks bad. Objectively. Whether or not Anna Wintour exists. It is possible that said young student is forcibly escorted out of the room and counseled by a teacher to maybe stop with the talking because the feminist author's message will be important to some of the student's classmates and she shouldn't ruin it for everyone.

20 years later and this theory has become widely accepted and a cottage industry.

It is neither the anorexic model, nor the agency that employs her, nor the magazine that prints her, nor the designer who hires her, who is at fault in the tiresome lady-body-image debate. We, the ladies. We're the problem.

Yup, I said it. Wanna be taken seriously, ladies? Accept responsibility for your own complicity in this. Reading the Real Bodies Unite mission statement (which I sincerely hope was written by a teenager, otherwise I cannot excuse the poor grasp of the English language) would have you imagining that the media (capital-M, lowercase-M, whichever) puts thoughts into your head. Thoughts you can't un-put there. Like Son of Sam and his dog. She/we are powerless when the media speaks. The thoughts are unthinkable. Good thing it's only telling us to hurt ourselves emotionally and psychologically, otherwise the courts would be jam-packed with defendants saying "Glamour made me do it."

Even as the crusaders admit that they know the representations of women in the media are "not real," they seem powerless to separate fantasy from reality. Herein lies another gripe: designers don't design for "real women." (For real we should assume heavyish.) Sadly, there's a Freakonomics problem here: heavy women aren't wealthy. Only wealthy women buy designer clothing. Ergo, designers have slender women modelling their clothing. Take a look at the society pages and you'll notice that those women (possibly real, even) are similarly sized and shaped to the women in the fashion magazines. If you are 300 pounds, statistics suggest you do not have $7,000 for a dress. Why would the person selling a $7,000 dress care if you identify with his model if you're not the intended audience any way? The $7,000 dress is a fantasy just as the model is. Why isn't there a movement whose mission is to compel couture houses to make dresses that cost $70? After all, by the same logic, it's unfair to the rest of us that they don't. That we expect women to understand that ownership of a $7,000 dress is a fantasy, but ownership of the body modelling it shouldn't be, is a leap I am unwilling to make.

Women in fashion magazines, movies, television, are professionally beautiful. Being beautiful in an unattainable way is their job. They work every day to be that beautiful. Were that my job, I would lift more weights, clean my face on a regular basis, not consider exfoliation to be "a hassle," and never eat a carb. But since I don't get paid to be attractive, it's bread and sleeping in eyeliner for me. If you, personally, don't like their occasionally boyish figures or outsized busts, it shouldn't matter to you that you don't look like that. There is a serious disconnect between complaining about how unattractively thin models are and then complaining that the selfsame things you find unattractive about them, being unattainable for you, make you feel unattractive yourself.

Does anyone really, truly, honestly think that if there were women of all shapes and sizes in the media, that we women wouldn't find something else to be self-hateful about? Is it really that simplistic? Get a bunch of regular sized and lumpy chicks on the pages of InStyle and we'll all live in Utopian body satisfaction world? To quote the girl from 1991: are you smoking crack?

Want a great example? This photo. Oh, look, girls who also have rolls in their stomachs when they lean over. Bravo! But do you notice what these "real" women don't have? Here's a cursory list:

Cellulite
Scars from ingrown leg hairs
Any body hair whatsoever or the razor burn/waxing bumps to prove they ever had any
Thin hair
Split ends
Visible stretch marks
Wrinkles
Grey hair
Weird moles
Uneven skin tone
And so on, etc. etc.

Also these women may be non-thin, but none is fat. Also none is over 30. If you want to pay money to look at a non-thin-but-not-fat, over thirty woman with thin hair, stretch marks, scars on her knees from summer camp, broken blood vessels on her nose, and the remnants of a manicure from October, I'll start telling you where to send the checks. The women in that picture are no more representative of the rest of us than Kate Moss. They're merely 40 pounds heavier than Kate Moss. Everything else remains the same (it should be noted that I have no idea if there are Supermodels anymore, and Kate Moss is the last one I remember who was very skinny - I realize Kate Moss is now well over 30).

So putting beautiful women 40 pounds heavier than Kate Moss, but whose skin, hair, etc. is equally airbrushed, who have spent the same number of hours in the stylist's chair prior to being photographed, in magazines, as opposed to only showing women as thin as Kate Moss will do absolutely nothing to improve women's self-image issues. And anyone who says otherwise is an imbecile.

A dangerous imbecile who is doing exactly the same thing to women as he/she claims the media is: reducing an entire gender to a group of mouthbreathers incapable of making decisions -good and bad- for itself. Oh, don't blame that woman for her poor self-image; the magazine made her do it. She couldn't possibly be expected to stand up for herself on her own. We need to change the magazines so that the poor thing can get out of bed in the morning without wanting to take a razor to her fat, hairy wrists.

These purported feminists are doing more to halt women's progress than any fashion magazine could ever claim to do. I don't want my raison d'etre as a woman to be perpetual victimhood, nor am I comfortable with the notion that until some third-party changes its ways, I will be unable to change my own.

There is a self-image problem that exists for women, but the hard truth is that in many cases it is created by women. We are the consumers and the judges of other consumers. Beauty as a status symbol is a tenet upheld by us all and no amount of media manipulation alone will change that. Belief that we are all equally beautiful negates the very idea of beauty. Admitting that beauty is both subjective and rare doesn't hurt the feminist cause. Attempting to deny subjective beauty makes us both naive and fatuous. The actual challenge is creating a hierarchy where beauty is not the only barometer of success for women. Ignoring beauty as a factor in how we evaluate others does nothing to broaden the scope of our evaluations; it reinforces a narrow view of worth in women. If we, as women, are only evaluating ourselves and others by their beauty, we're the problem. And we need to change. Otherwise, the magazines could print blank page upon blank page, and we'd still be no better off.

Where There's A Will, There's No Effin' Way

In fairness, The Gap is liberal with its sizing.

Yesterday, a dress I had been lusting after went on sale and the store at the White Plains mall had one left in stock. In the size I wanted. Clearly the universe wanted me to have this dress. Now malls perplex and frighten me and I try to keep our interactions to a minimum, but since malls force you to pass by 1000 stores prior to arriving at the one you were searching out, I found myself in the Gap. Which was good because the Gap jeans I was wearing were officially getting too big.

I grabbed one size down from what I was wearing in every style and hustled into the dressing room. But there was a problem. The one size down from the style I was currently sporting went on without a hitch. You might think this is good, until you remember that jeans now have a bit of lycra in them and if it fits in the store, it will be hopelessly and oft-times irretrievably stretched after a single wearing (I know from experience that chucking one's too big jeans in a very hot dryer only stays the inevitable - that is throwing the jeans out - for a moment or two). With a mixture of disbelief and euphoria, I got the next size down. A size really only reserved for Kate-sized people and their ilk (as an aside, devoted partner and I have started referring to our combined weight loss as "we've lost a Kate"). But even the Gap salesperson agreed that these were the pants I wanted to buy. Because they were a little tight in the dressing room meaning they'd be good once a day's wearing had been accomplished.

I was a little giddy as I checked out, but also sanguine: after all if the Gap is saying that a size 4 is a 27" waist, then it makes sense that my 28" waist would snugly fit. It's just that I don't believe the real world has the same sizing.

So across the mall to the store where my dress was being held. Part of me just wanted to buy it and flee the mall (harder than it seems, actually, as the access to the parking garage is limited to only certain floors - it took me about 10 minutes to get back to my car), but I decided to try on the dress before buying it - especially as the last time I had tried this dress on, it was a size larger and I was only guesstimating that I would need the smaller size.

And then it happened. And dear readers, I can only imagine how bored you are by now. Please forgive me. It's just that I'm continually amazed by my body's changes. It really isn't bragging, and I hope it doesn't sound like it, it's disbelief. Because even when I dreamed of what smaller me would look like, she looked bigger than I am today.

So I had a little cry in the dressing room. Because the girl in the mirror wasn't fat. Not even a little bit. The girl in the mirror was normal. The girl in the mirror could choose to stop dieting right now and it would be fine. The girl in the mirror is losing another 8-10 pounds out of vanity, not necessity. It is, without reservation, BANANAS!

Biting the Cheap European Bullet

Midway through week 3 of rifling through the goodwill bags looking for something I could get away with wearing, I caved and went to H&M. I simply had to admit that I had run out of clothing and that, despite the Saturday Night Live sketched of my youth advising me that most fit problems could be solved with "cinching," I had few alternatives to actually replenishing my wardrobe.

However, since I had been burned before and now have an unfortunate number of unsalvageable skirts in sizes I won't be again, I decided to do the honorable thing and go to the cheapest store in the mall to buy two things: one black skirt, one tan skirt. I figured between those and my one pair of jeans, I could be ok until June.

Oh dear, I forgot how unpleasant it is to shop at H&M. If attention deficit has a mascot, it would be this clothing store. I have a lot to say about "kids today," but if the layout of this store is any indication of how their brains work, please excuse me because I am way behind on my Mandarin lessons. There is no rhyme or reason to the store and no salespeople to answer questions. A reluctant shopper like me has to navigate by color.

And boy is this clothing cheap. I have shopped at H&M over the years for disposable clothing (and I was extremely sad to notice last summer that my favorite piece, a simple khaki skirt that had seen me through many an island vacation, was literally threadbare), but the quality is really appalling. Nevermind, I was there to buy temporary clothing. Something to get me from my current shape to my final shape without looking like I was wearing sacks.

And luckily, there were skirts. Mostly plain skirts. Tailored in such a way that not a centimeter of fabric was wasted. I gathered up as many as I could find in as many sizes as I could possibly be, and tried them on. For much of my life, I bought the smaller size as an aspiration and ended up squeezing myself into horribly undersized garments. Of late, I have attempted to correct these years of mistake-making and buy the size that actually fits. I considered this admirable until it dawned on me that I was, actually, losing weight and the clothing of right now only remained so about a month and a half. So I bought two skirts that barely fit right now, but that will fit perfectly in 5 pounds and won't stop fitting for another 15 or so - and that's about how much I have left to lose.

I hope when next I must wardrobe augment, I'm in the financial position to skip H&M, but for the moment, I am inordinately pleased that for $50 I can avoid looking slovenly and aesthetically lazy.

Say Yes to the Dress

So, unexpectedly, I bought a wedding dress this weekend. I'm not going to tell you where, or what it looks like, but it was sickly inexpensive and almost fits the bill. What happened was this: I saw a wedding dress in a magazine article online and found out that a store in Manhattan might have one in something approaching my size for me to to try on. With mom in tow, we went to play dress up on Saturday afternoon. The dress was fine, but not what I was looking for. which was ok, it was just an experiment.

On a whim, I asked the saleswoman if I could see another model I had spied online - one I thought would be just the wrong look on me. She brought it in a size 2. So there was that to contend with. Mom and I just held the bodice up to me and then looked at each other in a kind of shock. We liked the look of this one. Unzipping the thing as far as it would go, we shimmied it on me (note to girls: getting into a size 2 dress when one is demonstrably not a size 2 is funny; ok, I lied. It was funny this time because my actual size, 10, is one I am eminently happy with; when I was a size 14, this would not have been funny and might have resulted in tears). Though the dress was angry at me for having attempted to wedge my hips into it, we could still pull it up so that it looked somewhat dress-like on. And we still liked what we saw. At which point the saleswoman interrupted us to bring in the same dress in a size 10 in black. This would have been useful to have before I needed mayonnaise or vaseline to help myself out of the size 2.

I tried on the black dress and again, mom and I were kind of stunned. This really very cheap dress was really very much fitting the bill. Now there's a little something it is now important to mention: my mother is going to make my wedding dress. After discovering that asking someone else to make a wedding dress is the same kind of financial investment as asking someone to sell you his second-hand car, I decided that I would prefer to have a second-hand car (or a trip for two to the islands) instead of a dress I'll wear once. My mother, who crafted such awesome pieces as my sophomore year and senior year prom dresses, stepped up, with some trepidation, to fill the void. With my labor coming at no cost, the only expenditure would be the fabric. And even if we bought medieval tapestries for fabric, it would still be less than what we saw at Sak's. The question remained: what kind of dress would I want?

Wedding magazines were zero help. I am not a Ukranian hooker, nor will I be auditioning for the ice capades any time soon, so most of the glossy paged advertisements weren't going to be of help. Things I knew I didn't want: tulle, lace, beads, rhinestones, feathers, hoop skirts, sequins, tiaras, wings, jacquard, or snow leopard pelts. This narrowed down my choices significantly. I don't want to worry about tripping on the dress, or the dress falling off, or the dress being too heavy. I just want a dress. A simple whiteish dress. And finding this, future brides, is not an easy task.

Because brides are princesses and should dress as such. Even if that means being immobile. We're just not going to be having that kind of nuptial affair, so I thought I should keep it simple. The saleswoman, however, was unmoved and briefly tried to upsell me some plastic blingy jewelery which I did my best to demure respectfully (though in my head I was thinking that anyone who wore those monstrosities could only be doing so ironically, and devoted partner has made copious mention of the fact he doesn't think irony is appropriate at our wedding).

So we bought the dress. As a prototype. I can't say I'm disappointed in this. It is true, we have two additional scouting opportunities coming up (it should be noted we still don't have a finalized wedding date or location, but the more things I can dispense with, the better). And the best part is, I felt like Yelena in the dress. One of the things that has been causing me heavy to oppressive anxiety is that notion that there's an expectation that I be somehow better than myself when we get married; that the bride is an idealistic object that has to be perfect. Whereas, I'm really keen on being myself, just properly washed, on my wedding day. This dress looks like something I would wear if we were going to opening night of the opera, or someone else's wedding (obviously not in white). That appeals very much to me and the [dreaded word] vision I have of my special day.

Fur is Fabulous, As Are the 70s

Much to devoted partner's delight chagrin, I found a television channel that, at truly uncivilized hours of the day, shows old Charlie's Angels episodes. Now the DVR is packed with them. I am not a Farrah-come-lately in this matter. I have ALWAYS loved Charlie's Angels. Loved them as a young child, loved them as a teen, forever loved. Loved in a way I didn't love Love Boat or Dukes of Hazzard or any of the other similarly ridiculous shows of yesteryear. Charlie's Angels was special.

I covet (past/present/future) Jaclyn Smith's hair. If the genie came to grant me a single wish, I would seriously pause for a moment deciding between gobs of money and Jaclyn Smith's hair. Mostly because I'm not sure any amount of money will get me her hair.

And their outfits. Oh sweet jeebus. It was like Barbie writ large, but with guns. And judo. And the exceptionally tingle-inducing sound of John Forsythe's voice. Remember when Vanna White wasn't made of robot parts? And she wore spangly dresses and was resoundingly awesome? That's what the angels look like in every episode. And don't even get me started on their Mustang Cobras etc. In short, they can do no wrong. I am even generous with the later, forgettable angels in a way I have never been with the later execrable Timothy Dalton Bond (who starred in a Charlie's Angels episode, by the way, as the jewel thief boyfriend of Farrah Fawcett come back for a special guest star role).

As luck would have it, this week's assortment of reruns included a two-parter. Set in Vail. Where they skied in fur hats. Actually, the hat Sabrina wore is in my closet. I must remember to wear it more this winter. When they weren't in their ski garb, they were in the most fantastic assortment of 70s fur things. I wanted them all. Similarly, Helen Mirren wore a fur jacket in Red that fostered the same neediness within me.

I have only a passing consideration for living things - mostly the living things I like, so fur has never even registered on my list of things that are horrible. The differences among wearing fur, wearing leather, eating a hamburger, shooting at stray cats with a pellet gun, are small (you're welcome, AB). You should have seen me when we went to Montreal and to the fur store - I was seriously smitten with everything. It is my lifelong dream to own, and pull off, a muff. So seeing the wide array of furstrosities modeled by the Angels was and epic merge of two things I unashamedly love despite good taste.

And if you're really curious, or really bored, the nice kids at YouTube have a condensed version of the episode.