Apparently “women’s lifestyle” magazines are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. Women like me complain that their covers are constantly adorned with stick-thin sexbots. When they respond by putting pictures of normal-sized women in their pages, and with their editor saying that she’s a pretty average American woman at a size 12, so-called “anti-obesity advocates” go ballistic.
In response to Redbook Magazine’s March 2006 Issue and cover story, “We Love Your Body From Size 2 to 20,” anti-obesity advocate MeMe Roth calls for a boycott of the magazine citing its piece as “reckless in the age of obesity.”
March’s issue, with rocker Sheryl Crow on the cover, features a seven-page spread of women of varying sizes, many of whom are Redbook employees. Half the women are visibly overweight and some “plus sized.” Height and Body Mass Index (BMI) are excluded.
In her opening letter, editor-in-chief Stacy Morrison bemoans the fact that many of her favorite fashions are not made larger than size 12, while also heralding that she is “quite proud” to be a size 14. Later within the article, it is pointed out the average American woman is a size 14. Noticeably absent are facts that the average size 14 woman is 5’ 4”, overweight and at risk for heart disease, diabetes and cancer, as well as a host of additional medical complications.
“Redbook always has had a friendly tone, but don’t let that friendliness lull you into comfortable obesity,” said anti-obesity advocate MeMe Roth.
No, you should read magazines that reinforce your self-hatred and remind you that the only way to be healthy and attractive is to be 5’10 and 110 pounds.
Now, I personally think that Redbook (“The Married Girl’s Guide to Life”) is a shitty magazine. I also think that obesity-related health complications are indeed problems, particularly in this country. But assuming that skinny = healthy and fat = not healthy just isn’t true.
With obesity comes a series of health risks. Anorexia brings a lot of health risks with it, too. So does smoking, working in a nail salon, and coal-mining. The difference, of course, is that we don’t teach smokers, nail salon employees, and coal miners that they should be ashamed of their very existance; that they’re universally unattractive; and that they’re lazy, stupid, and justly on the receiving end of bigotted jokes. This is what we tell fat people.
“Redbook is a popular title and certainly knows its audience and advertisers. It’s quick to point out the “W” in plus-sized clothing stands for ‘woman.’ I wonder if that’s what Gloria Steinem and her contemporaries had in mind?” said MeMe Roth. “In Manhattan there’s a window etching that reads, ‘Life equals outrunning lesser versions of yourself.’ I couldn’t agree more. Name one men’s magazine that would parade its overweight employees? Redbook needs the courage to be honest with its readers and stop the patronizing articles. Instead of extolling the virtues of loving your body at any size, let’s ask women to love their bodies by keeping them healthy-and certainly offering advice that women become physically fit well before having children.”
Uh… you have no idea what Gloria Steinem and her contemporaries had in mind. You can love your body at any size and be healthy at any size. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Then there’s the extra fact that MeMe is part of “The Wedding Dress Challenge,” which reminds women that there are three primary goals in life: (1) Be skinny, (2) Get married, and (3) Be extra-skinny when you get married. Hey, what better way to prey on all of our insecurities and reinstate all sorts of cultural bullshit?
And all kinds of skinny women aren’t healthy. We don’t shame them. Obviously we should emphasize health, but not at the expense of one body type. Personal anecdote: I’m doing this triathlon training course right now, and pretty much everyone else in the class is in much better shape than I am. They can run and bike faster and further than me (although I can out-swim most of those suckers). The fastest person in the class is built like a triathlete: She’s tall and lean and muscular. There’s another woman in the class who’s bigger than the rest of the women. Not obese by any stretch, and I wouldn’t call her fat, but MeMe Roth might. Anyway, Saturday we did a half triathlon to see where we were all at, and this woman kicked my ass. Big time. She out-ran me, out-biked me, and I don’t remember if she out-swam me, but she came damn close if she didn’t. And she beat out most of the other people in the class, including a lot of the “I run six times a week” men.
She isn’t skinny, or even thin. I guarantee I wear a smaller dress size than she does. I’ll bet if you put us next to eachother in our underwear and asked, “Who’s in better shape?”, 9 out of 10 people would pick me. The rest of the people in the class all have pretty average bodies — but I’ll bet if you put us all on a scale, I’d be in the top five for most ideal BMI.
But out of the entire class, I’m in the worst physical shape. By a lot. There’s only so far that body size and weight will take you in terms of physical health. I know a lot of women who work out more often than me and eat healthier than me and who probably have stronger hearts than me, but who are “fatter” than I am. So this “fat is always unhealthy” line is total bullshit. And I say that as someone who, though definitely not skinny, is not fat either.
So fuck this “showing women above a size 2 in magazines encourages obesity” noise. I’m a friggin size 2 and I’m sick of it, because reading these kinds of magazines makes me self-conscious that I’m not tall enough / that my hip bones don’t stick out enough / that my thighs aren’t skinny enough / that my stomach isn’t flat enough / that my calves are too thick / that my cheeks are too chubby / etc etc. Some women come skinny. Some women come fat. Some come somewhere in the middle, and beauty and health can certainly be found in all categories.
I don’t look at a picture of a bigger woman in a magazine and think, “God, she looks great. I need to start binging right now so that I can look like that!” I also don’t look at pictures of skinny women in magazines and go on starvation diets. The difference, though, is that looking at pictures of bigger women doesn’t make me feel as bad, maybe because I can relate better to them — her knees aren’t knobby! her body curves out at the hips! If images of skinny women were just one part of a broad spectrum of female images that we were exposed to, they wouldn’t be so harmful and I wouldn’t resent them. But because they’re really the only image of femaleness that we see with any regularity, they end up representing an ideal that most women just can’t reach. And that ideal has nothing to do with health.
As much time as we spend in our daily lives interacting with other women, we rarely see “normal” women’s bodies on display (I put normal in quotes because I don’t want to imply that skinny women are abnormal; they just don’t represent the majority of women in this country, even if it does feel that way in New York). Now, there’s a problem with putting women’s bodies on display in the first place, but I do think that it’s healthy and good for women to see what other women look like. There’s an almost child-like curiosity about it, at least for me, and it’s validating to have visual evidence of the fact that not all women are stick skinny, and beauty isn’t limited to the thin.
Anyway, I’ve gone on far too long about this, but suffice it to say that although I can’t believe I’m actually standing up for Redbook, I am. If you have a few minutes, write them a letter to the editor supporting the representation of diverse female images in their pages.