Appalled

When I was a young girl, I was obsessed with fashion. I wanted to be a fashion designer when I grew up, and I spent hours poring through Seventeen, Glamour, and Vogue. I had entire walls in my bedroom plastered with pages from these magazines and, like many girls my age, I used these publications as my reference point for how to style my hair, do my makeup, and as my lens into the larger world.

I heard an interesting statistic recently in the documentary “America the Beautiful.” They said that 70% of women and girls feel bad about themselves after just 3 minutes of looking through fashion magazines. I believe it. The magazine pages on my walls as a girl were soon joined by poster-sized pages of meticulously transcribed calorie charts.

A month or two ago I purchased mascara online and was offered a 6-month subscription to Lucky magazine as a “free gift”. Because it's next to impossible for me to say no to something called a free gift, I accepted. It's a useless magazine, dedicated to retail therapy, with no pretense of intellectual content. I could live with that. But when I flipped through the pages of the March issue and saw the above ad, I was appalled. It's hard to render me speechless, but that's just about where I am with this. It's so far off the charts that I don't know what to say. I could boycott Diesel, but I don't wear Diesel. I'm not their target market. And that's the problem, because they would never dare try that crap on adult women. They know we'd be up in arms.

But girls are vulnerable. They're being told in way too many places that being stupid (say, for example, taking digital photos of your crotch, presumably to post online, while being pursued by a lion) is ok. Better than ok, that it's what makes them fun. Obviously capitalizing on the insecurities of young women isn't new, but this is definitely a low point. I understand that these companies are in business to make money, but I don't believe it has to be done this way. In fact, I think it's their responsibility not to do it this way.

Needless to say, I'll be canceling my free gift.

31 Flavors

Photo by Amma Maw

This post is not about ice cream. Not directly anyway. It's about women, and our bodies, and our relationships with them. It's about the fact that multiple women, ranging in age from their twenties to their sixties have started conversations with me in the past few weeks about how they've gained weight and how unhappy they are about it.

This is a topic I have touched on before. And, in one way of another, it's been one I've been having my whole life. The degree to which I obsessed about my weight when I was a teenager is just sad. And now I'm stuck is this weird limbo, alternating between wishing various parts of my body away and the recognition of just how ok my body is. More than ok, really. I mean, I can walk and dance and make love and rock my child to sleep. And what more do we need a body for? And yet.

Without exception, the women who have brought up the subject of their weight to me lately are beautiful. They too have bodies that work, but they are also physically lovely. They have different shapes and sizes, different curves and soft places, and they all look great. And, even more than that, they are amazing people. Mothers, students, artists, academics. They are intelligent, creative, nurturing — so much more than the sum of their parts. And yet.

How much time have we lost punishing ourselves? Dieting, bingeing, suffering, opting out. And for what?

Please hear me: you are lovely. Look at the women around you. Not the ones in the movies and the magazines. Look at the women next to you in line, on the bus, at your child's school. Be as kind and gentle to yourself as you would be to them. Try experiencing your body for what it does for you and yours — the strength in your back and arms when you lift a child, the power of your legs as you walk up that hill. The hip onto which you can sling a kid or a sack of groceries (or both!).

Look, this is so easy for me to say and so much harder to live every day. But I know in my very bones that this is the truth, my truth. And I know how deeply sorry I will be as an old woman if I look back and see that I wasted not just the years of my youth, but these wiser years, when I knew better. Please join me.

And if you know a woman who is struggling, send her this link. Or better yet, call her up and tell her how lovely she is. It will mean the world.