{"id":5752,"date":"2022-06-03T04:59:41","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T04:59:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sometimesraw.com\/?p=5752"},"modified":"2022-06-03T04:59:41","modified_gmt":"2022-06-03T04:59:41","slug":"body-image-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sometimesraw.com\/?p=5752","title":{"rendered":".Body Image."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dear Women’s Magazines, and Fashion Show Photographers, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first reaction to such images used to be, \u201cWow, 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.\u201d But then I\u2019d read about their struggles to cope with Hollywood\u2019s punishing beauty standards and its practice of relegating into obscurity women who had the audacity to look human; I\u2019d learn of how they\u2019d 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, \u201cI am now living on my own terms.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If these celebrities can accept\u2014no,\u00a0LOVE\u2014their 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\u2019re Just Like Us!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being a woman edging towards forty-one, I felt especially seen by the cover story featuring an internationally renowned supermodel I\u2019d been obsessed with throughout my early twenties. The headline, which heralded her as the rare woman who, at fifty-six,\u00a0dared<\/em>\u00a0to look her age, was the perfect accompaniment to a photo of a lithe, naked (obvs), \u201cmakeup-free\u201d beauty whose skin shimmered gold and a shiny, luscious, mermaid bra cascaded over her breasts. Just like other women her age! Talk about daring!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I love most about your confessional, \u201ckeepin\u2019 it real\u201d content, however, is when celebrities admit their bodies\u2014the ones they fully accept despite the effects of aging, having kids, and mainlining sodium-laden potato chips\u2014don\u2019t really look\u00a0like 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Women\u2019s Magazines, these are exactly the kind of transparent celebrity profiles we need right now. They\u2019re 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\u2019s iconic dress. How unrelatable is\u00a0that<\/em>, starving yourself for an event that lasts only a few hours? I\u2019d rather be like the actress who chomps on sticks of butter and eats her way out of a cotton candy machine, enjoying life while\u00a0ALSO\u00a0proudly flaunting the body she has, which resembles identically the satiny, bronzed, and edited life photos on your glossy pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And what better way to communicate to the masses that you\u2019re proud of your saggy knees, pendulous breasts, and ripply hips than on major national magazine covers and\u00a0photoshops<\/del>\u00a0\u2014er, I mean\u00a0photo shoots<\/em>. So moved am I by your endless messages of body positivity, I\u2019ve 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 \u201cthat family with the naked mom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would be remiss, Women\u2019s Magazines, if I didn\u2019t acknowledge your dedication to promoting the importance of good mental health. No CBD\u00a0oil, 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, \u201cNow,\u00a0there\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>a woman who really works on her insides!\u201d 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)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thank you, Women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Warmest Regards,\u00a0
D. Henry<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “.Body Image.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_ml_titleColor":"#000000","_ml_titleFont":"Roboto","_ml_titleFontSize":1.136,"_ml_titleFontWeight":"400","_ml_titleLineHeight":1.3,"_ml_metaColor":"#708090","_ml_metaFont":"Montserrat","_ml_metaFontSize":0.6785,"_ml_metaFontWeight":"400","_ml_metaLineHeight":0.92,"_ml_bodyColor":"#a9a9a9","_ml_bodyFont":"Open Sans","_ml_bodyFontSize":0.85,"_ml_bodyFontWeight":"400","_ml_bodyLineHeight":1.2,"_ml_wooPriceColor":"#666","_ml_wooPriceFont":"Open Sans","_ml_wooPriceFontSize":0.9,"_ml_wooPriceFontWeight":"400","_ml_wooPriceLineHeight":1.27,"_ml_headingColor":"#000","_ml_headingFont":"Merriweather","_ml_headingFontSize":2.02,"_ml_headingFontWeight":"700","_ml_headingLineHeight":1.47,"_mlglobal_userfontcolors":{"headingColorUser":[],"titleColorUser":[],"metaColorUser":[],"bodyColorUser":[],"wooPriceColorUser":[]},"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minimalism-lifestyle"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t