Don't Hate

Via some guy on facebook.

This little lady was all over facebook this week. It's definitely part of an interesting trend; ladies - and some men, too - railing against the media's idolisation of stick-thin women as the height of beauty.

Now, as a curvalicious lady myself, I'm all for supporting the idea that larger ladies are beautiful and shouldn't constantly be bombarded by glorified images of thinner women. I like my body the way it is - with meat on the bones and not a straight line in sight, and I wish more women felt that way. And yes, certainly, I identify more with the Marilyns of days gone by then by today's Keiras and Megan Foxes.

 But then it hit me -- isn't this image doing to slender women exactly what glorified images of tiny supermodels does to larger women? Saying, quite explicitly, that they shouldn't be valued the same as other women?

And then I saw this one on Afternoon Snooze Button:

From here.

Now, I don't know many women who identify with the Mona Lisa -- especially since current research indicates the model for the Mona may very well have been Leonardo's male lover -- but it's a nice reminder that at one point in history, pretty much every "type" was considered hot. Remember this babe from Art History?

What size bra would she need? from here.

 Yep, the Venus of Willdendorf was a type A hottie around 22,000 BCE.

So, what to take from this? Sure, it's frustrating when your body type isn't the "hot" one in popular culture. But tastes change--sometimes radically--and it's just sheer dumb luck who gets to be "hot" that decade. And instead of hating the women that get chosen for that honor, let's work on the system that makes us care about what we look like so much in the first place.