Just Shameful
I am very ashamed of myself, I am supposed to be a grown up enlightened young woman. Who is not fettered by society's concept of female perfection. (Utter bollocks, but it's my blog and I'll write what I want).
Anyway, last night L brought a copy of heat back home. Heat being the sort of magazine where you can actually feel yourself becoming stupider as you read, though not as bad as OK or Pick Me Up. Heat are always banging on about how skinny celebritys are and how bad it is to be bombarding young girls with these images (stop pissing photographing them then!) and how we should all be happy with our curves. Yet this week they have done a survey of women to ascertain the size of the average British woman.
And to my eternal disgrace I acually sat there comparing myself to this survey.
Boobs bigger than average (surprise, surprise), waist, hips and dress size smaller than average (yessss!), just shorter than average (again, not a big shock). Sad case that I am.
But how exactly does this fit in with the whole 'don't compare yourself to others' campaign? Am I just a victim of media propaganda? They tell me if I lose another 10 pounds my life will be perfect as I will be thin And thin = happy. How pray tell?
No one I've ever physically met has told me my body is particularly hideous, so why does it matter if some stranger publishing a magazine tells me I need to be skinny to be attractive?
I know that magazines won't stop publishing this drivel just cos I or anyone else stop reading it. But I really am disappointed in myself for actually buying into that comparison crap for even a few minutes.
3 Comments:
I'm sure these magazines are paid by the fashion, makeup and dieting industries to instill a sense of insecurity into women. Subliminally, of course. After all it'll benefit all of them. It works though. Nearly all the women I know think that they need to lose weight, when they clearly DON'T. I think I need to lose weight, not because I look in FHM and think "Damn, i'm a bit lardy!". No, its because I do need to shed my lard.
The solution? Women's magazines should NOT feature articles about dieting at all. Or pics of the latest celeb with an eating disorder. Articles like that are sick.
Damn. I can babble. :D
Bored one evening at work, I leafd through a copy of some glossy womens mag (I forget the title, it wsn't cosmo but it was of that ilk). The cover price was almost three quid. For that you got about 200 pages. However, every other page was a full colour spread advertising clothes. You can't tell me that they paid for those clothes. Or that they weren't encouraged to print them by the makers (interestingly, none of them were marked "Advertisement feature" - thus presumably no money was paid directly by the creators to the publishers). The only original copy was a handful of "interviews", consisting of a half dozen crap questions and again all the clothes were labelled with their prices; a shockingly bad letter page and a few generic hosorscopes.
They are a license to print money. The amount of advertising revenue alone must have paid all of the overheads. I would love ot know how much profit they make per copy. I have a sneaking suspicion that the cover price is all profit.
It's true that most magazines especially the glossy ones are chock full of adverts.
And deep down you know it is stupid to compare yourself to these women, but when you are constantly surrounded by these images it gets difficult not to be affected by it.
I'm more comfortable with my body now than I have been in a long time, but I still have a loooooooong way to go in the self esteem stakes.
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