Mirror, Mirror...

My husband and I were watching the news last night after we put our daughter to bed. We are horrible citizens and DVR our news so that we can fast forward through anything that doesn’t interest us, including the Portland traffic, because frankly, we live on the coast and well, we don’t care. I do want to say that I am so sorry for anyone living in Portland, when I do fast forward and see the lines and lines of cars on my TV screen I thank my lucky stars that I’m not sitting in it!

Anyhow… one of the stories we did watch was how Hollywood men are getting “chunkier” and that they are still “leading men.” Our initial reaction was “whoopty fricken doo, are they seriously paying someone to report this crap?” But after a few eye rolls we did talk about this phenomenon and how women are constantly under the cruel attack of anyone who thinks they know anything about fashion.

I think about the Jessica Simpson pictures that plagued the checkout line at my local Safeway. Here she is one of the hottest women in the world, and she gained a few pounds and now she is the biggest “cow” in the universe. How horrible! Most women may secretly love to see pictures like this, they may be secretly thinking. “Ha-ha Miss Jessica, you fatty!” Not me, to me when I look at the picture of her on the cover of those “magazines” I’m thinking, “holy crap she looks 50 times hotter than me and they are calling her FAT?!” What is also amazing to me is my husband’s reaction to these pictures,

“She’s still hot.”

Ah-hah! See that is one of the lovely and wonderful things about men, when they see a hot woman they don’t usually care about what anyone else thinks or what the stupid “magazine” cover is telling them to think, they see someone hot, well damn it- THEY’RE HOT!

So who is deciding that Jessica Simpson was a cow in those pictures? And who is deciding that men can be chunky leading men but women actresses must be a size zero? I can guarantee you that it isn’t the majority of straight American men; nope I think it is the women. I think that as women we are so self conscious and so damn competitive that we will take any chance to cut one another down. It’s the good old “if I can convince everyone to look at how horrible she looks then they won’t be looking at how horrible I look,” which of course is just a horrible way to do life.

If women banded together and chose to stop cutting each other down, if we agreed to dress modestly, if we agreed to be healthy rather than skinny, well we would change the definition of sexy. Men will always think women are attractive, if all the sudden all the women on film and in magazines were a size 6 or 8 or 10 then men would find them just as attractive as the size 0 that they were being told was attractive a year ago. As women we have the power to control this, and yet instead of changing things we diet, we whine, we develop eating disorders to please men, but really men don’t care! In fact they find it more annoying because as women we are constantly complaining about having to do all those things, when sadly we don’t have to do them at all.

Unfortunately I don’t think that I have the power to change the current situation, yes maybe a few women will read this blog, maybe a few will leave comments, but really what can I do?

I can teach my daughters to be different. That’s it! Maybe I can’t affect all the brain washed women and teenagers that are already out in the world ruining things for other women, but I can teach my daughters what true beauty is all about. It is about confidence, grace, and health. It is about modesty and gratitude. It is about loving life and actually living it. I’m only one woman, but maybe I can influence 2 little girls and maybe those 2 little girls will influence everyone in their circles someday.

I can also support companies like Dove Cosmetics, they have focused on health and true beauty for years now and to me this is inspiring. In our society any company that is willing to market their true morals and not just what is a money maker, well that is a company that I like to give money to! I can only hope that more companies will arise that support true health and beauty for our future generations.

Women: Let’s break the cycle of low self esteem and depression, let’s build each other up rather than tearing one another down, no one suffers but us and our little girls… and frankly when you’re dead who is gonna care how big your butt was, what they will care about is how much of your life you wasted while you worried about it.