Shit people say to skinny girls
Has this been done yet?
- Eat a cheeseburger! - Because consuming a single cheeseburger, at this exact moment in time, will instantly distribute fat to desirable places on my body and render me a weight acceptable enough that I am not mocked in public.
- Are you anorexic? - No, I’m naturally thin…
- No, no one is “naturally” THAT thin. I’m going to make sure the counselor/nurse/your parents know you’re anorexic
- Everyone is beautiful…except those disgusting, bony models portrayed by the media
- Real women have curves
- Zero/00 isn’t a real size - Guess I’m not wearing pants right now.
- I don’t see what is so appealing about looking like a 12-year-old boy/stick.
- Men don’t want women without a little meat on their bones
- You need to eat - You need a rusty nail in your lower intestine, but that’s not socially acceptable to tell a complete stranger, is it?
- Skinny girls are hideous…oh I didn’t mean you. You can tell you don’t starve yourself.
- You don’t need to excersie, you’re too skinny as it is - Because the argument “skinny doesn’t equal healthy” is only okay in support of OVERweight people!
- Toothpick/skeleton/other insult - Best told to complete strangers without provocation!
The problem with society’s portrayal of beauty isn’t that it depicts skinny as beautiful, it’s that it singles out skinny as beautiful. Why does curvy have to be more beautiful than skinny? Why can’t they both be beautiful? (obviously it’s a huge problem that there are women with eating disorders in the media shown as the ideal of beautiful, but I’m not talking about that in this case).
I’ve seen this picture posted around the internet and I originally thought, wow, I love this! But then I started thinking about it more and realized that by liking this picture, I’m actually hating on myself, in a roundabout way, for being naturally thin.
While I believe 100% that beauty shouldn’t merely encompass one size ideal (skinny) it’s also complicated because by fighting this one size ideal, some people take it in the other direction, saying that skinny is unappealing and curves are better… I’m a pretty optimistic person and I believe most people don’t feel that way, but even I (a very open minded person) instinctively went along with this image when I first saw it. On one hand it fights the stereotype, but on the other hand, it’s sending an equally bad message.
I can’t comment on how healthy each of the women are in the top line of this picture, but I have reason to believe (from interviews I’ve read and watched) that Keira knightly is naturally thin. In this picture, why is Keira Knightly “supposed to be” less hot than Marilyn Monroe? Why in our society do we always have to compare “who’s hotter”? It shouldn’t be skinny versus curvy. We should be thinking about the fact that we’re being told that certain sizes are better than others, and that’s wrong. We shouldn’t be thinking “they tell us skinny is beautiful, but skinny is actually less beautiful than curvy.” That’s totally unhelpful! The focus should be on ameliorating unhealthy diets or lifestyles (i.e. obesity or eating disorders), and not necessarily size at all. In an ideal world, all models would be hired under very strict health-assessment guidelines, and we would see models of all different shapes and sizes everywhere. Some people are skinny and healthy, and some people are curvy and healthy.
Everyone is different, but somehow we have a herding mentality and all want to be the same and fall into this “accepted” group. Its so hard not to fall into the trap of exclusionary ideals of beauty, and because of this, women are always being pitted against each other. We need to fight this with critical thinking! It’s the only way.
