Curvy is beautiful too!

Okay, I hate to sound like I am a part of the bitter sounding club that spouts “real women have curves!” as if thin woman are somehow fake.  Real, beautiful, women come in all different shapes and sizes!  BUT when a former plus sized model (Crystal Renn) writes a book about getting over an eating disorder and learning to love her curvy, lovely self, and then immediately shrinks herself down to a strait size?  Not awesome.  She doesn’t even look like the same person, and in my personal opinion, she was so much more beautiful before!  Thank god I didn’t buy her book when I first heard about it. 

Crystal Renn then…

And now. 

Unfortunately, this type of conformity in the media is nothing new.  The second that I find a small shining example of an actress or model who is anything over a size two, they go and shrink themselves down to conform to the size norm that we are used to seeing in the media  (does anyone even remember how smoking hot Lindsey Lohan used to be when she was curvy?  Yowza! I forgive Ginnifer Goodwin for slimming down from her formerly more curvy self, but only because she always has such cute short hair cuts for me to look at).  Come on guys, we have enough role models for the skinny girls!  Just leave the world with a few examples of healthy, curvy women who are closer to an average girl’s size.  Please, please, please! 

Yes, some people really are predisposed to being skinny, even very skinny.  However, the majority of people that are represented in the media are dangerously underweight, not simply thin.   But we are so used to looking at images of women who are impossibly small that we don’t even recognize what a problem this is and how it affects our society as a whole.  Another problem?  We actually have more examples of overweight women than average, healthy weight women in the media, which I think is a shame.  It is as if you are really heavy, then they know how to label you, and if you are thin they know how to label you, but if you are in the middle you should probably just give in and choose a side already so we know where to put you!   All sizes should be represented, but why can’t healthy weight women be represented as the beauty ideal a bit more often?  P.S.- thank you Kristina Hendricks and Kat Dennings for giving two beautiful examples of hot in-between size ladies, but seriously we need more! P.P.S.-for a great example of a blog that celebrates the inbetweenies of the world, go to Style Has No Size. 

Healthy is beautiful, and healthy comes in many different forms.  But let’s face it; someone who is predisposed to be a size 8 is just not going to look as good at a size 0, and probably isn’t getting there in a healthy way.  Conformity is boring, and when I watch TV or movies or read magazines, I am bored with only having one body type to look at, especially because I cannot relate to it. 

Let me clarify.  I am not a big girl and I know that.  It also know that it annoys some people that I consider myself curvy, as if that word should be reserved only for really heavy women.  But the truth is that I relate more to plus sized bodies than I do to the skinny women that I am bombarded with every day in the media.  I sometimes want to label myself as a “healthy “size, but I think that could also be taken as a way of covertly calling myself fat, or worse could imply that people who are naturally thinner or heavier than me are not as healthy which is not necessarily true.  There simply isn’t a word to describe woman who aren’t skinny and aren’t plus sized, so I prefer to think of myself as curvy rather than just failing to pick a side. 

This issue of lack of size diversity in the media is exactly the reason that I started this blog in the first place.  I love fashion, but 90 percent of the blogs I follow are plus sized fashion blogs because there simply aren’t a lot of blogs that represent those of us who fail to fall into either category.  Beauty and style come in all shapes and sizes!  Let’s celebrate who we are and try not to let ourselves be swept up in conforming to the media norm.  We were all made to be different, and that is good!