.SOMETIMES RAW.

Dear Women’s Magazines, and Fashion Show Photographers,

Congratulations on an excellent job promoting body confidence to women everywhere with your consistent covers featuring naked celebrities who are comfortable enough with their bodies to put their dumpy, veiny, stretch-mark-covered selves on full display. Of course, their cottage cheese thighs, waddle necks, and dangly, bat-wing arm fat are not at all visible in the flawless photos you publish, but regular women like me know they are there because of helpful headlines like “Love Your Body As It Is!” and “How I, as a Hollywood Actress with a 24/7 personal trainer finally made peace with my body!” and “The Fifty-Six-Year-Old Supermodel who Dared to Look her Age!” You don’t have to spoon-feed us with messaging that aligns with the accompanying photos. We are smart. We get it.

My first reaction to such images used to be, “Wow, these flawless, perfectly toned celebrities are nothing like me, a mom of a almost nine year-old son whose body exhibits many of the normal signs of aging that accompany a love of food and the privilege of not being dead.” But then I’d read about their struggles to cope with Hollywood’s punishing beauty standards and its practice of relegating into obscurity women who had the audacity to look human; I’d learn of how they’d empowered themselves to shun those unsustainable standards by deciding to live on their own terms. Terms that were more or less the same as the old Hollywood ones, only theirs. Terms that they establish by simply going on the record as saying, “I am now living on my own terms.”

If these celebrities can accept—no, LOVE—their bodies that have been ravaged by motherhood, time, and carbs, then so can I! In a recent interview, a beloved actress and mother of three proudly announced that in her house they ate butter, sugar, sodium, and oil because food played a big role in their joy. She has a bunch of kids and a personal trainer and a stylist and eats real food! Celebrities: They’re Just Like Us!

Being a woman edging towards forty-one, I felt especially seen by the cover story featuring an internationally renowned supermodel I’d been obsessed with throughout my early twenties. The headline, which heralded her as the rare woman who, at fifty-six, dared to look her age, was the perfect accompaniment to a photo of a lithe, naked (obvs), “makeup-free” beauty whose skin shimmered gold and a shiny, luscious, mermaid bra cascaded over her breasts. Just like other women her age! Talk about daring!

What I love most about your confessional, “keepin’ it real” content, however, is when celebrities admit their bodies—the ones they fully accept despite the effects of aging, having kids, and mainlining sodium-laden potato chips—don’t really look like the borderline-porn images we regular women have been zooming in on in search of a wrinkle, scar, or sign of humanity. They want us to know that it takes makeup artists and stylists to achieve their glow and the most flattering positions, the implication being that without a team of professionals, they would look like Jabba the Hut.

Women’s Magazines, these are exactly the kind of transparent celebrity profiles we need right now. They’re an antidote to the story about Kim Kardashian refusing carbs and anything other than tomatoes for a month before the Met Gala so she could fit into Marylin Monroe’s iconic dress. How unrelatable is that, starving yourself for an event that lasts only a few hours? I’d rather be like the actress who chomps on sticks of butter and eats her way out of a cotton candy machine, enjoying life while ALSO proudly flaunting the body she has, which resembles identically the satiny, bronzed, and edited life photos on your glossy pages.

And what better way to communicate to the masses that you’re proud of your saggy knees, pendulous breasts, and ripply hips than on major national magazine covers and photoshops —er, I mean photo shoots. So moved am I by your endless messages of body positivity, I’ve decided to live more of my life in the nude (weather permitting, of course). Neighbors will see how proud I am of my middle-aged body as I walk, naked, to put the garbage bins out for collection and my son will be inspired to be comfortable with who they are, which will now be “that family with the naked mom.”

I would be remiss, Women’s Magazines, if I didn’t acknowledge your dedication to promoting the importance of good mental health. No CBD oil, or meditation app has had as profound an effect on reducing my anxiety as seeing famous, successful mothers my age exposing their decimated bodies to the world. To paraphrase the words of a celebrity mom who recently posed in her birthday suit, the most important thing is to work on our insides. Upon seeing her smooth body in pose after flattering pose I thought, “Now, there’s a woman who really works on her insides!” Way to stick it to Hollywood with that shimmering body that sort of resembles an Oscar statue (or do I need to say “statuette”; not so sure these days)

Thank you, Women’s Magazines, for using your substantial reach to remind women that when it comes to loving ourselves, we are limited only by our own insecurities, not the image-obsessed culture that media engenders.

Warmest Regards, 
D. Henry

Welcome Aboard!

Henry Airlines has some great news: You no longer need to wear a mask on your flight with us. Why? Because we are not scared anymore. The government has decided that measurements are no longer needed. No more lockdowns, no more quarantine after you arrive at your destination, no more testing. Everything is back to normal, just the way it was before. Now take off your damn shoes in the x-ray area before you board the plane and put them in the tray so we can check if there is a bomb in your socks. Mam, put your sandals in a tray because you just never know. Also, put the computer in a separate tray. G-sus, doesn’t everybody know this by now?

That’s right: even though COVID is still transmissible, we are just not that worried about it anymore. Just like that. Out of a sudden. We are relaxed. Whatever will be, will be! Now walk through our full-body X-ray machine so we can make sure you didn’t swallow a grenade before you got here. Throw out all liquids (especially bottled water) before the security check but purchase way more expensive, mostly unhealthy food and drinks afterwards. Yeah, we do make sense. But take that damn belt off. Who knows what you are hiding underneath that small buckle.

On our plane are two hundred strangers in a small tube in the sky, and any of them could be carrying a new variant of the virus, but who cares. We are done with it. WHO CARES! A bottle of shampoo larger than 100 ml? Put your hands in the air and don’t fucking move. That bottle could be carrying anthrax, or worse: expired shampoo.

As a Bavarian airline, we don’t want our fellow Germans to feel restricted in any way, and that includes having to wear a piece of smelly, toxic fabric over their mouths for a couple of hours! We make you aware that you will hurt your lungs in the long run by breathing in your own moist Co2. You will be full of mucus when you arrive at your destination. To be clear, things that are still completely restricted include nail clippers, hiking poles, scissors, and Magic 8 Balls. And Kindersurprise Eggs. I mean c’mon, we don’t want you to smuggle drugs. Do the decisions we have made for this airline recently make any sense? Outlook: not so good.

Look, Henry Airlines is to being unrealistic about all this. The virus hasn’t gone away – our concerns have gone away. We have decided to stop being concerned with pretty much everything at this point. Now take a seat in this windowless interrogation room for five hours because you didn’t want to hand over that nail clipper of yours and didn’t want to take your belt off because it usually never “beeps”.

If you still want to wear a mask on a plane, we won’t stop you. But we are not going to force any individual passenger to be responsible for the safety of everyone else on this plane. Now, if you happen to be sitting in the emergency exit row, you are responsible for the safety of everyone else on this plane. And we mean everybody!

So sit back, relax, and breathe in! Ah, isn’t this great? It feels good not to be so anxious anymore, doesn’t it? Oh, you do you want to wear the mask 24/7 just to protect yourself and others? Then fly to China with. Henry Airlines offers a special discount to Wuhan. Now put your goddamn phone on airplane mode or we are all gonna die.

*when things were so much better.

Joel: “Mom, how was it back in the days when you were a kid?”

When I was a kid, we were tough. We didn’t whine like kids today. Nobody had “peanut allergies” back then. Sometimes people’s throats just closed up for no reason, and we accepted it. We didn’t get “participation trophies” back when I was a kid. Actually, we didn’t have trophies, period. If you accomplished something, your reward was that no one pushed you in a lake or teased you until you had to move. It separated the winner from the losers.

And no one wore seat belts back then. If you got in an accident, you just got sewn up and didn’t complain. And look, many turned out fine! Many of my friends didn’t, but you would never hear them whining about it if they were still here.

Everyone smoked back then, too. Parents smoked. Doctors smoked. The babysitter smoked. And, let me tell you if you were in a crowded room, you were grateful for the smoke because it made it harder to see all the car-accident scars.

We didn’t bother with sunscreen when I was a kid. You were lucky if you lived long enough to get cancer. We used to throw a block party any time someone got a tumor. Tumors were a symptom of longevity. Suddenly, what, everyone’s too good for cancer now?

When I was a kid, if an adult handed you a shot of whiskey, you drank it. There was none of this namby-pamby “What’s in this drink? Why does it taste funny?” You were lucky to be given anything at all! We didn’t have these nanny laws about kids needing to stay sober all the time. What do they need to be sober for? It’s not like they’re driving anywhere.

No one ever wore helmets in the good old days, unless they were going into combat, and, even then, all the helmet did was slow the bullets down. “The skull is nature’s helmet,” my gym teacher used to tell us.

We didn’t worry about “spaying” and “neutering” our “pets” back in the day. We just had some stray animals that came around for food. And, where I come from, your neighbour’s cat’s sex life was none of your business! No need to change anything.

I am old enough to remember when married couples actually stayed together. When a spouse died, which they did often, the marriage kept going. Widows wore their husband’s ashes around their necks in a jar, and everyone respected that. If a man lost his wife, he got the next oldest sister who wasn’t already spoken for. Lucky broad. Am I old?

That’s another thing—people used to have respect in the old days. We said “Herr,” “Frau,” “Officer,” “Your Honor,” “Warden,” etc. None of these strange kid names like Apple and North and Olive or Moonshine. Or Sparrow James Midnight, whatever the hell kind of name that is.

And there wasn’t any “sleet” or “thundersnow.” There was sun, wind, rain, snow, and that was it. None of these fruity combinations of weather. Sleet is for people who can’t make up their minds about what’s going on. Fruit combination for gender I wonder?

Kids have it so easy these days, with their recovering-mask-bullshit-clean lungs, and thankfully intact skulls after all this time. I would like to take them out back, force-feed them peanuts, and send them into combat. Actually, I tried to do that recently, and am no longer allowed within a hundred meters of the local playground. But, one of these days, those kids are gonna find out what the real world is all about, and, boy, oh, boy, I can’t wait to laugh it up on my back porch while enjoying the fifty degrees November heat that my generation created. You are welcome, Sparrow Moonshine.