Curvalicious

This woman is Fluvia Lacerda, who stands 5'8 (very short for industry standards and very tall by average women's height) and wears a 14-16. She is at the far end of what even the plus-size industry will show on its covers.


The average plus-sized model is closer to 6' and wears size 12 clothing.

I've been doing some reading again on media and the curvy girl. While I have a goal of slimming down some more, all the exercise and eating right in the world isn't going to erase these curves. And as a turning-40 woman, I'm proud of them.

But what I see on a daily basis tells me I shouldn't be. My arms are too wide, my butt too big, my thighs enormous. My legs are too short, my face too broken out, my skin too pale. These are messages that I don't want to be bombarded with. This unattainable perfection, even when I know images are photoshopped and women starve themselves to appear thin, is still at the back of my mind when I see pictures of myself at unflattering angles.

Ask my kids how bonkers I get at the checkout line looking at the magazines, especially Women's Weekly. Every stinking cover, without fail, touts two things: how to lose weight fast and how to make some amazing calorie-laden dessert. Watch for it. These headlines are side by side without any irony. You have to be emaciated to be beautiful, but real women should also be focused on providing a 14 layer chocolate truffle peanut butter cream cheese dream whip cake to the family every night after dinner.

Maddeningly, the magazines airbrush and photochop their models to sell headlines touting the "easy" rules to become beautiful yourself. Here's the bottom line: invest in photoshop and never leave the house. Problem solved.

Look around you. What real woman could ever compare? And yet, although we see reality around us all the time, the media's influences still trumps our own sense of what we "should" look like. What kind of insanity makes a size 10 a plus size model? The size 4 girls report getting turned away because they can't compete with the size 00s (Yes, that really is the perfect industry size. We've gone down the rabbit hole. Next season we'll see negative numbers.)

I used to show this clip in the classroom from Dove's Evolution demonstrating the lengths media goes to "beautify" a woman already beautiful. The problem? Dove's media campaign is still advertising. Their company also owns dozens of brands that use the same stick thin, impossibly beautiful fantasy models to hawk their other products. Even the "Real Women" campaign photoshopped its "real" models (see Newsweek link below).

So the reading and sharing of messages that counteract this negativity are incredibly important to me, especially as the mom to a teenage daughter who hears and sees the same crap all around her.

Click here to see the Newsweek gallery of comparison shots of perfectly healthy people being made thinner by magazine editors who defend their actions by claiming they do nothing outside of "industry standards." Isn't that the entire problem?

Did you know there is a Lifetime program that celebrates all body types and that the larger women admit to only liking themselves when they don't know it's their body that they are viewing? That's how deep this problem goes -- we can even sometimes appreciate the curvy girl, as long as it's never us.

I posted a link to Curvy Girl's report on the study finding men's brain chemicals went wild when shown curvy women (compared to similar shots of the same models with their curves reduced) and within minutes I had women and men responding favorably. We're short circuiting human nature by telling women they need to lose all roundness in their hips and thighs to be attractive. Note, no one is telling us we need to slim down the bust. Twig arms are required and a waist to bust ratio naturally occurring in less than 1% of the population is preferable, but the booby curves can stay. No pressure. Personal note: when you start to lose weight, guess one of the places it comes off first? That's right, the chest. You pray for some alien shape shifting superpower so that your thighs will might transfer their bulk up to the boobies. It never works. But you don't stop wishing.

Why? Because you want to be beautiful like the Victoria's Secret models, even though you're a foot too short. You see these on every channel. The best part, though, is when you discover that your friendly ABC and FOX affiliates balk at running a Lane Bryant lingerie ad because it's too... sexy? Watch the VS and the LB ads back to back and tell me what's really going on here.

(I chuckled at Bob's response: well, the woman in the Lane Bryant ad is hot.) Yes, as much as I would like to believe the moguls at the networks were worried about the amount of sex appeal in a commercial, sadly I'm afraid we're not there yet.

Lizzie Miller was rejected as a plus-size model because she was too big. This is the first time I had seen a woman with a belly ever published in a magazine. I stopped and stared. It was a revelation. And I want more.

Lizzie Miller, the 20-year-old model in question, agrees that it's astonishing that, at 5ft 11in and 12.5 stone she's considered a "plus size" model. "It's sad," she says. "In the industry anything over size six is considered a plus-size." Miller, who is around a US size 12-14 (that is, either average or slightly below average) lost about 60lb when she was 13 but today she is considered too large to model for plus-size lines Marina Rinaldi (she says, "they like girls who are an 8-10") or Elena Miro. She says that the overwhelming reaction to the tiny photograph, buried on page 194 of Glamour magazine "shows that the world is hungry to see pictures of normal women."