Friday, October 29, 2010

Learning to Love Oneself

Being a woman has historically been pretty stinking hard.  We've been objectified and vilified since poor Eve wanted a snack, so I guess I shouldn't have been so shocked and saddened by a recent post on the Marie Claire blog.  If you haven't read it, I'll distill this piece of garbage down to one smelly turd for you: fat people aren't allowed to be happy.

Yep.  Pretty crazy that a writer, Maura Kelly - to name names, can PUBLISH a piece of hateful bigotry on a nationally consumed magazine site.  The whole blogosphere has been "shame on the editor!" and "shame on Maura!" but, honestly, this is a big shame on US, as a society.  Shame on our cultural norms that still make it ok to make fat jokes, put on reality tv shows that torture overweight people to a smaller size, or cancel shows that humanize overweight people.  Shame on our cultural norms that still insist a person's worth is a number on a scale and how photogenic their profile is.  Shame on us for letting fodder like this article surface on the Internet and get over 200,000 hits in two hours.  Shame on us for not stopping this horribleness.

Being a young woman in America is tough.  Now, don't get me wrong, I know there are still atrocities occurring to women as a whole in other places in the world as I type, but that falls in a completely different stratosphere of hardship.  I would NEVER lump the issues women face in America today with the human rights violations women survive in other parts of the world, that isn't what this blog post is about.

To teach a young woman, on every medium possible, that, sure, she can be smart and go to college and all that crap, but she won't really, truly be happy until she's skinny and pretty, is atrocious and unacceptable.  To teach a young woman that two people expressing love and affection is "gross" and "distressing," is just setting her up for a lifetime of judging others and being judged.  In some way I feel this is the start down a slippery slope of de-humanizing a group of people, as a whole, and it needs to stop. 

SO, instead of ranting and re-posting and linking to this article (which I totally just did), let's take today (and this weekend, for that matter!) to let ourselves be loved.  No matter what size, gender, ethnicity you are, try to really believe that you are deserving of love, because you absolutely are!  Don't listen to what tv shows, magazines and blogs have to say (except this blog, of course;)), I'll tell you, because it's true, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL. xo.

(Photo of the show Mike & Molly, the sitcom that started the whole thing!)

3 comments:

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