I’m Not Fat, I’m Curvy

If Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively is considered too fat, what hope is there for the rest of us? Photo: SkinnyVsCurvy.com.

If you’re a woman, you just can’t win when it comes to your weight.

Either you’re too fat, or you’re too thin. For a few blessed moments, you might be in the sweet spot where you’re “just right,” but then people start watching to see when you’re going to gain a pound or two.

According to the gossip site SkinnyVsCurvy.com:

Blake Lively allegedly refuses to wear anything but a size zero, causing the Gossip Girl costume department to cut the tags from larger-sized samples.

Blake Lively?!!! Even she is insecure about how she looks?

Seriously, I would — well, I wouldn’t really kill anyone, but I would speak very harshly to someone if it meant I could look as good as Blake does.

If Jessica and Shenae are healthy, who says they’re too thin? Photo: SkinnyVsCurvy.com.

At the other end of the unfairness spectrum are 90210’s Jessica Stroup and Shenae Grimes, who are supposedly too thin. SkinnyVsCurvy.com reports:

“I’ve never seen Jessica or Shenae eat,” another show source tells Us. So shocking is the situation that their 90210 male costars are contemplating an intervention.

Now, Jessica and Shenae are quite thin: they really are a size zero. If they’re doing it because they feel good, and they’re healthy, then people should stop bothering them about it.

But if they’re doing it because they feel pressured to be too thin, then they are victims of the insane, male-defined standards of beauty that dominate our society.

So what do we do about it?

I admit that I’m as guilty as anyone of falling for stereotypes of what I’m supposed to look like. I read Vogue and Teen Vogue and Glamour and all the others that promote obsessive thinness. And I’m probably not going to stop reading them. But I try to keep those images in perspective.

We should stop letting others define who and what we are. They mostly define what we are, not who, because they’re treating us as things instead of as people. Nice, pretty things that brighten up a room, on which fashions drape perfectly, and which make good trophy girlfriends.

We should be true to ourselves and our own version of happiness. If we are thin and we like it, then we’ll be that. If we’re curvy and we like it, then we’ll be that.

Everyone else should go find their own version of happiness. We’ll be happy with ours.

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Copyright 2011 by Rinth de Shadley.