Today I saw a picture of a beautiful curvaceous woman in an ad on Facebook labeled, “Curvy women are better than skinny women”. I clicked on it and read the caption quoted by the women.
She said,”The heavier I am, the more I like my boobs and bum, and the happier I look. I’d rather eat and have boobs, a bum and a bit of overhang than be really skinny and have sad, sagging boobs and a flat bum.”
While this may sound like a healthy attitude, it is actually just contributing to societies already judgmental attitude toward women’s bodies. The title of this ad alone offends me. Women who have round ‘bums’ should be proud of them, but that doesn’t give them the right say that all women should be curvy.
Just as we don’t need curvy girls trying to starve themselves, we don’t need skinny girls chowing down on artery clogging junk to try and catch up with the latest body phad. I, for one, am one of those girls who is just plain skinny. No matter how much weight I gain, healthy or non-healthy, I will never be able to have a ‘great bum’. When I gain weight it all goes to my belly and chest, which is actually much more of a health hazard than a woman who is overweight and carrying in her butt.
The questions I have are…
* who decides who has a great bum and who doesn’t?
* When are we going to stop telling our sisters and daughters what their bodies should look like?
* When are we going to stop allowing advertising to place these ridiculous ideals in our minds of what is beautiful, weather it be skinny or curvaceous?
* When are we going to start minding our own bodies, period?
Furthermore, while I appreciate the Dove Real Beauty campaign, I wish it put more emphasis on being generally healthy. We certainly need to address our counties alarming rates of eating disorders, but we can’t forget about our other serious health dilemmas either. Our country alone spends more on healthcare than almost every other county combined, and still we are the sickest country in the world.
While loving your God-given curves is beautiful, you won’t actually know which curves are God-given until you practice healthy living. This consists of moderate exercise, healthy eating and a healthy mindset.
Until we stop putting these ridiculous expectations and standards on other women, our sex will never be free to experience beauty in the way we were meant to. Each woman has been given a beauty and light that is unique to her, and for one woman to pour water on someone else’s light will only extinguish the beauty of her own.
The only constructive thing any woman can tell another woman about her body is that she should embrace it. Variety is the spice of life! If we were all skinny, things would get pretty boring pretty fast, and the same would be true if we were all curvy.
Ladies, embrace your bodies! Love yourselves! Maybe you feel you are too skinny right now, or maybe you’re on a weightless journey, either way the first step to healthy is to know that you are enough already.
We’ve all heard it a million times, but it’s more important now than ever to realize the truth of this old saying now – Beauty is on the inside.
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