Onslaught

This is an apt description of the body image issues women face. I worry about my daughter, but I also know the devastating effect this type of media onslaught has on the grown women I know. We reduce women to things. Are you a pretty thing or an ugly thing?

Guess what? We’re not things. We’re people. We think, we feel, we nurture the young and care for the sick. We are women and to allow the entire marketing industry to turn us into things has to stop somehow. Why do you think men think it’s okay to use us up? Because they see the same images that turn us into too large or too small or really pretty or not pretty enough objects. You don’t have to respect an object.

If you’re a woman who feels too fat or thinks she has too big a nose, ask yourself why. Is it because you really are or because you’re told a million times a day that a size 10 isn’t pretty? Is it because every billboard, magazine or television show talks about the size and the shape of your breasts? And then we offer our perfectly normal valuable selves to Dr. Frankenstein to reconstruct on Dr. 90210?

Has it occurred to anyone else that just maybe who we are isn’t the problem, it’s the message we allow them to sell us that is the problem? I think it’s time we stop buying it.

More on this at Queen of Violets and So Sioux Me.