Too Busy to Worry About My Bum
I recently read an article – I would love to be able to quote it to you but I gave the magazine to a friend who was just about to get on a flight to Australia, I remember the gist, though – in which Anita Rodderick attacked media and the fashion industry for making women hate their bodies by giving us such unrealistic images to aim for. A couple of creepy statistics: twenty-five years ago, top models weighed 8% less than the average woman. Today that figure is 23%. The current “ideal weight” – as dictated by fashion and Hollywood – is estimated to be achievable by less than 5% of the population.
All of which sounds very terrible, but hold on a second: why on earth would any more than 5% of the population want to achieve such a ridiculous weight? If my job was being a supermodel (I mentioned this to a couple of my best friends at lunch the other week and they fell about laughing,) if my livelihood depended on me possessing minus 0% body fat or whatever it is that models weigh these days, then I might see reason to eat a handful of seeds and three lettuce leaves a day; but as a normal average person with a busy life I have neither the time nor the inclination to count calories nor give an arse about how many carbs I consume. I don’t really know what size my bum is, I rarely see it after all, much less spend precious moments when I could be thinking about much more interesting things (like J.D. Fortune’s bum, for example ) and the only time I am the least bit bothered about my dress size is in January, because it is so boringly average that it’s always the first to go in the sales. According to what I read, all of this makes me an utter freak of nature.
Why is it, that over the last 30-odd years, we women have run countries and conglomerates, travelled the world and raised families, spoken up for ourselves and generally knocked the socks off all those around us – and yet are not credited with enough intelligence to see the difference between an image on the pages of Vogue (or US Weekly or Heat for that matter) and ourselves? In the same way that I can’t sing (and I don’t just mean that I don’t sing to professional standard – people actually request that I don’t join in on Happy Birthday because it ruins the party) so I won’t be a popstar, I am not especially stunning so I am not going to be a model… and, err, so what? There are plenty of other things that I can do (make my friends laugh, figure my way around strange cities, make pumpkin pie – my sole, but glorious, culinary achievement – beat my Grandma at a variation of Scrabble called Upwords, to name a few) that will see me through a rather more interesting life than being skinny and exceptionally beautiful would.
Perhaps I am being somewhat hypocritical here, because I own make up and hair straighteners and even use them on a fairly regular basis, but I simply refuse to see what I look like as the be all and end all of who I am. On the mornings that I hit the snooze button two or eight times more than I should so run out of time to fix my hair or put my contacts in, do I do my job any worse? Do I lose my friends? Does my family refuse to speak to me? Not that I notice.
Everyone gets their down days where we feel blah and crap and if we happen to feel blah and crap about our bums or the size of our noses and bury ourselves in a tub of ice cream and a Desperate Housewives marathon, well fair enough, I don’t think that anyone would judge. All I ask is that sometime, somewhere, when some annoying person bleats on about the pressure women are under to look perfect and weigh nothing, one of us replies “that’s a load of nonsense, I have much more interesting things to worry about, thank you very much.”
