What is a "Real Woman", Really?

This afternoon, The Huffington Post angered a number of fans on its Facebook page when it posted the following:


The commentary contained a link to this article, which showcased a slideshow of real Huffington Post readers in bikinis. The angry commenters' problem was that they believed HuffPost's characterization of the women in the slideshow as "real women" was a statement that the only real women are women with curves and bigger bodies and that "thin, healthy women" are not in fact "real." However, this wasn't the commenters' real problem. Their actual problem is two-fold: (1) a lack of reading comprehension [actually, a lack of reading, PERIOD, as they clearly did not read the article], and (2) a failed logic whereby they think thin automatically means healthy and thick automatically means unhealthy.

Not reading the article is really a sad problem, considering it is only two paragraphs long. The article makes it very clear that HuffPost sought after photographs of real women in order to combat the extremely airbrushed images that assault us from magazine aisles, along with the notion that the only way a woman should ever don a bikini is after she's lost 40 pounds. The article plainly says, "We happen to believe that if you're physically able to put on a bathing suit, you're bikini-ready." It also plainly states that it wanted the pictures it received to be "unstarved and unairbrushed." "Unstarved" doesn't mean, "zaftig only." Plenty of women are unstarved and thin, just as there are many women who are starved and thick [more on that point later]. The key here, though, is unairbrushed.

Anyone who clicked through the ten-picture slideshow would easily see that the women included in the slideshow came in all sizes. There are plump women and thin women. There are tall women and short women. You know what kind of women you won't find in those ten pictures, though? Airbrushed and Photoshopped women. Not one of those women has had dimples, cellulite, moles, birthmarks, or discolorations removed. Not one has had her lines smoothed and/or her body liquified [the Photoshop editing job of making someone skinny] to three times smaller than her actual size. These women, thin and thick alike, are "real" because they look the way any woman would look on the street. And if you think Kate Beckinsale or Snooki looks anything in person like what you see on the cover of a magazine teaching you how to look just like her [but ignoring the main tip of, "and then Photoshop yourself"], then you are exactly the type of gullible person to which these articles are marketed.

Now let's get to the second problem, the idea that thin means healthy and thick means unhealthy. BEEEEEEEEEEEP!!!!! WRONG!

Look, I don't dispute that someone who is morbidly obese is probably unhealthy. When Ruby Gettinger weighed more than 400 pounds, she was undoubtedly, not healthy. But where people often go wrong is when they make the automatic assumption that someone who is thin, whether naturally thin or not, is healthy and that someone who is overweight (not obese, but just outside the realm of their ideal weight) is unhealthy. There have been several studies that disprove this theory. What you see on the outside doesn't necessarily indicate a person's eating habits or exercise levels. Yes, people who eat right and exercise and stay or maintain a thin weight as a result of their healthy habits should be applauded for their discipline. Where we get off the rails, however, is when we assume that because someone looks "good" on the outside, this matches what is happening on the inside.

This is what is so wrong with a thin-obsessed culture. The emphasis should never be on "thin," it should always be on "healthy." If "thin" is a level you achieve when you become "healthy," then great. But there are far too many people, women especially, who develop very unhealthy habits (anorexia and bulimia being only two of these) in pursuit of "thin." However, society is much better off when people are eating well and exercising--regardless of what size or forms their bodies take as a result of this healthy living.

Here's my "real" time....

I have been my current height (5'7") since I was 13 or 14 years old. Including pregnancy, at this height, I have been every weight from 80 pounds to 200 pounds. I was not starving when I was 80 pounds; it was the result of my natural metabolism, inherited from both parents. My parents should have been my cautionary tale. I should have known that my metabolism wouldn't last forever. But because of partly acting out because of all the hurt I experienced when I was younger, when my peers had no problem making fun of my weight ["toothpick," "anorexic," "Olive Oyl" -- I've heard it all] and largely having formed awful habits as the result of having no visual consequences to my lifestyle, I formed awful habits. By high school, I had actually started lifting weights, because I had read in magazines that doing so would help me gain weight. I was also eating ten times a day in an effort to gain weight--mostly junk food, fast food, and anything I could get out of a vending machine. I never did any real cardio until law school, because I found it "boring" and "I didn't need it." In fact, the only time I did cardio even in law school was during dance practice or when I decided to walk 20 blocks to go shopping (or, more likely, to a bar) because I couldn't afford a cab and didn't want to take the subway. Despite eating Taco Bell and other awful takeout nearly every day for lunch and dinner, my weight never went over 120 pounds until long after graduation, when I went on a medication that had the side effect of making me gain a ton of weight quickly. I didn't just gain weight, I got "puffy." To combat that weight gain, I basically tried to starve myself back into my size 0 clothes. I rarely ate breakfast and lunch. For dinner, whether or not I ate something healthy depended on my mood. But, hey, whatever worked to keep me within or under my "ideal weight" and BMI, right?

Wrong. Everything about my old lifestyle was wrong. And it wasn't until a few months before Pop Culture Dad and I got engaged--when I got a personal trainer who knocked some sense into me--that I realized how wrong my previous lifestyle was, regardless of how good I looked on the outside.

Am I a picture of perfect health today? No. But, sadly, I am much healthier now, in my greater attempts to eat home-cooked meals more often, to buy organic fruits and vegetables (and even starting to grow my own), and in trying to incorporate more physical activity (even if it isn't always "exercise") than I was when I was back in my "hot" days in my early and mid-20s. Am I as healthy as I could be? Absolutely not. But I'm working on it. Although I would ultimately like to lose some weight and trim down from the healthy changes I continue to make to my lifestyle, in the end all that will really matter is that I have improved my quality (and length) of life by making these healthy changes. I will also have given my daughters the benefit of hopefully long and healthy lives by not teaching them--as I sadly had learned--that it doesn't matter what they eat right now, because they have the metabolism that I used to have, and they can basically gorge themselves on anything and everything without consequence until they turn 25. That was a bad lesson to learn, and it has been a hard habit to break.

In any event, I will continue to be a "real" woman. I'm not going to Photoshop my imperfections before posting pictures to Facebook out of fear that people will judge me if I don't look "perfect" and skinny. If I ever again achieve what I believe to be my ideal body [not weight; weight tells you nothing] again, I will still be a "real" woman, because I will remain unairbrushed and true to myself.

(L) High school and (R) law school. "Real" and unairbrushed, but an unhealthy version of skinny.
Pop Culture Dad and I at our healthiest--on our honeymoon in 2008, eating well and being active (although 50 pounds heavier than I was in high school/college and 20-30 pounds heavier than my heaviest law school weight -- both times living off fast food). Unstarved and unairbrushed.


Me today. I'm still "real" and unairbrushed. Still not as healthy as I could be and have been, but 100x healthier than my college and law school skinny days (and noneyabiz how much heavier).

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So Over Justin Bieber B*tching About His 19th Birthday

Poor rich and famous Justin Bieber. You see, he's so very famous that his fans wanted to spend his 19th birthday with him--those stupid, overly aggressive dummies!-- and that made it just horrible--in fact the worst birthday of his whole 19 years. Those rude people who won't let him have the life in the public eye he wanted all while maintaining extreme privacy! And then those same rude people had the nerve to insinuate that he had underage kids with him at a nightclub celebrating his birthday--an allegation the nightclub backs up. If those haters had been paying attention, they would have known that one of the rich and famous underage kids just "Gave Justin His Cartier Then Went Home." That's not at all the same as going to a nightclub... even though he kinda did [just didn't stay]. And he was in London for cripes' sake. London!! Just awful. Horrible. Inhumane!

Oh, gee! Poor baby! Too many people wanted to spend his 19th birthday with him, and the nightclub didn't bend the rules of legality to allow him to celebrate his 19th birthday the way he wanted, with all of his not-quite-yet-18 friends present and zero fans. First world problems doesn't even begin to cover this. Meanwhile... somewhere in the world, some kid didn't even make it to his 19th birthday, because he starved or was killed by violence long before that. But let's all take a moment of silence for Justin's awful £8,000 party....

Okay, I won't begrudge the kid (too much) bitching about his birthday or other first-world (and 1% of the first-world) problems. We all bitch from time to time. But even without the extremes of starvation/early, violent death vs. not-getting-your-wayitis, the kid still needs to learn some gratitude?
 
Here's the story of my 19th birthday: I was taking summer classes, so I was living in the international wing of my dormitory [which, with its high, black iron gate, somewhat resembled a prison], while the rest of it was closed for the summer. I didn't know a single person (out of the 35) in the dorms that summer. All of my friends were gone. My parents each went out of town (separate trips). Neither called me on that day at ALL. They had absolutely forgotten about my birthday. 
 
While I was moping in the tiny courtyard, one of the other students found me, asked why I was glum, and then he felt bad about my parents and friends forgetting my birthday. So he took me to Whole Foods and bought me lunch. He didn't even know me. It was a really sweet gesture. Later that day, there was a knock on my door. The kind no-longer-stranger had told his roommate that it was my birthday and that my parents and friends had forgotten about me. His roommate came to let me know he was going to a party, and even though I probably didn't know anyone there, I could come along. I went. And he was right, I knew maybe one person who was there. But everyone was super duper nice, and all told me stories about how much their 19th birthdays sucked. Apparently, 19 is the most forgotten birthday. It's wedged in between the "you're officially an adult" birthday and the "congrats, you're in your 20s!" birthday, so people just don't give a crap about 19. One of the people who shared his "19 sucks" birthday stories with me was in the hospital on his birthday, so... ya know... could be worse.

Even though my 19th birthday started out pretty sucky, in the end, it wasn't bad. When I think about that birthday, I always laugh about how everyone had forgotten it; but their forgetting actually made it one of my most interesting and coolest birthdays. That was the day I experienced an incredible kindness from complete strangers. These guys didn't know me at all and had no reason to try to cheer me up, but they did it anyway. There were no ulterior motives behind it. They were just genuinely nice people. All of the people I met that night were generally just nice people who didn't want me to finish off my first day of 19 on a crappy note. For the sheer fact that it restored my faith in humanity [only for it to be later destroyed... but that's another story], my 19th birthday kinda rocked.

The thing is, all of us with 19th birthday horror stories had been forgotten.  Bieber's problem? That too many people remembered. People wanted him to feel loved and adored. Instead, he felt annoyed and entitled. Suck it up, dude!

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Photograph: Alex Davies/FilmMagic
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