As far as I'm concerned, the norm for models has been way to far towards the skinny-almost-sickly end of the spectrum for way too long. It's nice to see that there's an attempt to go back towards a middle ground--where women aren't overweight, but you also can't shave your face with their protruding hip bone either. What still bothers me, though, is that now when a company features a "plus-sized" model, it just looks like a healthy, attractive woman with a little bit of curve to her. Why the need for the distinction? I feel like it creates a weird negative connotation whenever "plus-sized" is mentioned and it's totally unnecessary. I agree with Pimptress that people should work with what they've got and give a shit less about how the world perceives them, but with a line drawn in the sand between "normal" and "plus size" there's still a vivid stigma that a lot of people aren't capable of ignoring.
Runway modeling is ridiculous. It's literally the only job where being able to walk and chew gum at the same time makes you overqualified.
I'll be honest, the entire discussion about beauty in the media annoys the crap out of me. People like looking at beautiful people. That's life. Get over it. A couple points: - Virtually everyone can be at least decent looking. No, you might not be a model, but if you put effort into your appearance you'll be good looking enough to find dates. Almost all the people that are ugly are ugly because they're lazy. - What is the media supposed to do? Hire trolls to do their modeling so we can all feel better about ourselves? No thanks. Alt Focus: I've never felt much pressure personally. I'm a fairly short guy so there's been a few times I wish I was taller, but that's about it. It's never really bothered me all that much. Some women prefer taller guys and that's their prerogative. I don't want to date someone I find unattractive so why the hell should I tell them what to do?
I dislike the counter-narrative that runs about stick-thin models. While the high fashion industry might market experimental gaudy designs on 14 year oldxylophones, I think the majority of the received wisdom about who and what are conventionally attractive come from actors, singers, athletes, personalities, and porn. The first three have some talent and dedication and can be respected and looked up to for that alone but it's a shame that their looks overshadow that. When magazines rank the hundred sexiest women of the year, and when we post pics to the drunk thread, note how few of them are high-fashion models. Some of them are supermodels, of course, but those fall into the "personality" category. The counter-narrative to the (I think) false notion that those 14 year old haute couture models are conventionally perceived as hot cries out for "reality" by promoting curves as attractive and real and stick-thin as unattractive and somehow less real. I see it everywhere, this forum included. "She looks like a REAL woman!" Is a way of describing curvy, plus-sized models. The problem is that those photos of plus-sized models are every bit as photoshopped as the magazine spreads of conventionally attractive women. You simply cannot claim that one looks more realistic than the other. They are both equally unrealistic in their portrayal of what the model actually looks like. The perfect skin, absence of any cellulite, perfectly smooth, unwrinkled ass; they're all lies. One does not advance the cause of improving the self-esteem of all women by pointedly denigrating and declaring unattractive the skinny (and believe it or not, there are still skinny women left in the world) and holding up a photoshopped curvy model as attractive. "Women should have BOOBS and HIPS!" Does little to boost the esteem of someone with AA cups, and someone with actual curves and the imperfections that go with them is not comforted by seeing airbrushed perfection in her dress size either. The point of having a warped sense of body image is that when seeing a picture of someone of one's own body size, you can't relate that back to yourself. The's a show on in a few countries; I forget the English name but it's something like "look good naked". They take women who are perhaps curvy or modestly overweight but by no means unattractive - and who have horrible self esteem - and show them they can be beautiful. One of the first things they do is put them in their underwear and line them up against other, bigger women in their underwear and say "look, all these women look good and they are all fatter than you" and it's quite effective in getting the message across. But this is very in-your-face; to some extent, a notion so deeply ingrained as a warped body image takes that kind of harsh unapologetic action to dispel. Takes more than a Dove commercial, that's for sure. But the interesting question is in why these women can think, at once, that the other women in line are attractive but also have internalized the idea that attractive means "skinnier than me".
Perhaps, but there is definitely discrimination against "the plus-sized" in the workplace, especially in sales (unless the job is at Lane Bryant or Casual Male Big & Tall). They lag behind their work peers in advancement, raises, etc. Size really does matter.
Topics like this make me even happier than usual that I ended up with the genes I have. Aside from feeling a bit too skinny in junior high, I've used the least amount of my limited brain power as possible caring about my weight or physique. I eat fairly healthy, in the sense that I cook 3/4 of my meals, and they usually include a sald, and I drink lots of water and stay active, but none of this is because I've ever felt anything resembling pressure. I feel so bad for girls. You guys saying you do feel pressure -- I believe you, I guess, but you can't seriously mean it's anything compared to what girls feel...can you? At the same time, I've sort of always not got why girls feel pressure from runway models, or even actresses. To me, they're artists, or at least artistic-ish, and it would be similar to me feeling pressure from Jack White because I suck at guitar. I mean, I'd fucking love to play like him, but knowing he and people like him are out there doesn't cause me any measurable amount of stress. In the same sense, why do you feel pressure to compete with someone who's sole job in life is to accentuate their already existing natural looks (unless you're trying to compete in the same field)? Also, in my experience talking with other guys about this, we don't jerk off to models and actresses, we jerk off to you. And I'm only saying in that in small part to be funny. I think Jessica Alba is the most beautiful woman to ever exist, but her pics only get me in the mood, they're not the show. The mental energy I've spent thinking about girls I've been with, or (real life) girls I'd like to be with outweighs models/actresses by about 98%, and I'm quite certain I'm well within the norm on this one. So at the risk of asking an incredibly stupid question: when you say you feel pressure, where exactly is it coming from?
It's sickening the way they pressure women to look skinnier, healthier, more glowing, more radiant, etc. and other bullshit to pile on stress. Everywhere you fucking look and on the cover of every stupid magazine you pass by at the check-out counter you get atricles not ass-wipe worthy with cryptic subheadings like 301 REASONS WHY YOU'RE UGLY AND HE'S FUCKING YOUR BEST FRIEND and other such dreck. Women are supposed to feel comftorable in their own skin, and pop culture seems to have a sociopathic retort towards that. Nowadays, we have an emerging epidemic of pregnant women suffering from fucking anorexia. Why? Because they don't realize why their pregant heroines on TV can afford the sort of shit that turns them into freaks of nature without killing them. They can afford top-notch personal trainers and whutnot. Most people can't. BUT YOU SHOULD STILL BE SKINNY LIKE THEM, FATTY! Fucking sad. For guys, there are those who don't give a fuck, those who "look after" themselves and those who believe appearance is everything. These are the assholes that I don't like: the ones who instantly became obsessed with abs ever since they saw the ones Michael Keaton wore when he played Batman. I always compare adult male insecurity to schoolyeard bullies: the bigger the asshole that they are, the more insecure they are.
This is true to a certain extant: to most people the average models are anonymous and fairly out of mind. We don't know them by name, and few people watch runway shows. However, isn't that effect largely counteracted and probably overwhelmed by the sheer volume of advertising that the average person consumes in a given day? The average person watches a few hours of television a day, plus whatever they see as far as Internet ads and billboards. That's a lot of images, volume wise. And most of the women in these advertisements, outside of Metamucil, are likely to be very conventionally attractive. As are the actresses, singers, etc. So I'm not sure that shifting the focus away from runways changes much of the narrative here. Beyond saying that anything can be Photoshopped, I think there are a few other good points in here. Yes, there is something wrong with saying "This is what a REAL WOMAN looks like!" because it's counterproductive. It still amounts to selectively legitimizing some body types and not others. Secondly, there is enormous focus on thin-as-such being unrealistic and unattainable for the average woman, but someone like Kat Dennings is in probably equally genetically improbable. Extreme hourglasses aren't exactly a typical shape either. JLo's ass or Katy Perry's boobs don't usually come with their respective waists. There may be a slight difference between the two in that skinny may be perceived as "attainable if I just work hard enough" whereas I assume no one tries to will themselves into tits, but I don't know whether women actually find this to be a salient distinction. This may be well and good on a personal level. If you feel this way, great. But given that many women ARE insecure enough to be bothered, it seems kind of useless on a societal level. It's sort of like looking at poverty and saying "Well, I manage my finances well so *shrug*" It doesn't help with changing what is a prevailing problem. If you think having that attitude is the answer, why do you have it when so many other people struggle with it, and how do we encourage that on a wider basis?
Anyone who sees Marilyn Monroe as a positive role model for anything worries me. To borrow a quote, she's not a good example, she's a horrible warning. In my opinion this misses the point a bit. Most people are decent looking, but a large and growing number of them don't believe they are good-looking enough. Evidence? I've been trying to find decent stats on body dysmorphic disorder but they are harder to come by than you'd think. That notwithstanding, the number of people having cosmetic plastic surgery is ramping right up. There isn't a definitive answer on why, exactly, people have cosmetic surgery, but I think this quote is probably fairly accurate. My emphasis. Of course, the really disturbing idea is that the above quote is flat out wrong, and that people are essentially using cosmetic surgery not so much in an attempt to attain that look of airbrushed perfection but to game human nature. After all (from the same study),
Now that I think about it, that actually raises a fascinating (to me) question. The percentage of the population that is overweight is growing. The percentage of the population that is getting cosmetic surgery is growing. To what extent do these groups overlap now, and to what extent will they in the future? Would this damage or reinforce the narrative that fat people are fat because they don't care enough about their appearance? Or, to put it another way: It's a paradox we call reality, so keeping it real will make you a casualty of abnormal normality.
I have a client who works out two to three times a week at my gym. She never finishes last in a workout, and she does most of them with little scaling or modification. She runs, jumps rope (though, I'm about to put the stop to that, I don't like her heartrate going that high), lifts weights, does pullups, box jumps (though again, I'm about to put a stop to that, because I don't want her to fall). She's six months pregnant with her first child. She started CrossFit in February and got pregnant in March. She eats fairly well, though she does indulge once or twice a week in pregnant food, and she and her baby girl are doing absolutely fine. The average woman, in pregnancy, uses the fetus inhabiting her womb as an excuse to turn into a human garbage disposal...citing cravings, "eating for two", etc. Hell, I did it in my third pregnancy. I found a picture from the week before I had my third child and was horrified at my appearance. The "average woman" gains far more than the recommended weight and more than likely starts out already overweight. So is that normal? And if it is...why in the world would we celebrate that? Didn't we JUST have a thread talking about that state of our nation's health? Average doesn't mean healthy...it seems like average is becoming more and more UNhealthy, actually. That said, I LOVE the fact that a pregnant woman walked the runway and looked sexy doing it. People have an aversion to thinking pregnant women are beautiful, and the people who DO think pregnant women are beautiful are often called fetishists. She's stunning, pregnant or not...and incredibly lucky genetically. Many women at her stage of pregnancy (regardless of weight prior to conception) wind up with some NASTY stretch marks. Not getting stretch marks is a genetic lottery that she, apparently, won.
Oooops. I was referring more to the post you quoted; didn't realize it was JWags' comment rather than yours.
You're not saying anything different from me. Ok, so a lot of the images of attractive people are in advertising, but the people who appear in them are often actors, etc. Point is, those images feature women whore the definition of conventionally attractive; they rarely contain horrifyingly skinny models, meaning those skinny models that everyone loves to denigrate and hold up as an example of everything wrong with the world are not the problem.
Why do women in the US spend $8 billion annually on cosmetic products? I think they're hiding something.
What is considered a cosmetic procedure? Is it augmentation/surgical intervention or are we including injections? Because I'll tell you right now, when done right, botox isn't Nicole Kidman horrifying.
I agree with this. When fashion designers hire a model, isn’t it their intention to select a walking coat hanger? Men focus on breasts, hips, and faces, so by selecting a model who deemphasizes these characteristics, designers are better able to showcase their clothing. It’s not meant to be a statement about what women should look like. Far from it actually.