Attack of the clones

Yes, here it is, yet another article all about the world's obsession with thinness. I know that this debate appears with mind-numbing regularity in hundreds of magazines and newspapers, all which come to the same eventual conclusion: that it's bad. Things are even starting to look up, with the current trend towards plus sized models on catwalks, and celebrities like Mad Men's Christina Hendricks showing the world that curvy can be sexy. So this may seem like an odd time to open the whole can of worms again.

But I have a problem. The curves that these people are starting to promote just aren't real. Or, rather, they are, but they seem equally or more impossible to obtain than the skeletal look. How many real people that you know really have that elusive, perfect hourglass figure? What we're seeing is not a more realistic view of women, but an exercise in public relations. People complained about the media's promotion of an unhealthy, stick-thin look and so it is replaced with an (admittedly healthier) but equally impossible standard.

Apparently the choice is between starving ourselves or magically looking like Marilyn Monroe when we put on weight. When I put on weight it doesn't make me look like a goddess. It makes me look lumpy. And even if I did look goddess-like, I wouldn't have the clothes for it - a recent trip to Topshop showed me that high street fashion isn't generally sympathetic to people with a few rolls here and there, and it's almost impossible to find clothes to suit you if you have any kind of cleavage - I always either look like a porn star with bosoms spilling out everywhere, or like I'm hiding some kind of deformity beneath the straining fabric.

Personally I'm mystified by all of these people we put on a pedestal and try to look like. What have they ever done to earn our idolisation? They're mostly vapid, self-obsessed and somewhat ridiculous. They're great to laugh at, but they aren't role models. They're just models. It also only seems to be women that have this need to change their bodies to fit an image perpetuated by the mass media, and only women who care much about the results.

Men, as we're frequently reminded, will rarely notice if you gain or lose a few pounds. And as we're also frequently reminded, they like all sorts of body parts that we hate in ourselves. They like boobs. They like bums. They even like love-handles. A boyfriend of mine once went so far as to confess that he liked my much-despised stomach, complete with undulating fat-rolls.

I suppose that that point I want to make is that people come in lots of different shapes and sizes, and that's as it should be. Wouldn't it be terrible if we all looked the same?

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