Thursday, May 17, 2012

Models v. Most Women: A Growing Weight Disparity


Following up on the post about Jennifer Hudson’s motivation to lose weight, I came across an eye-opening report recently.  It is available at the link below:




I mentioned in the prior post that the entertainment industry is notorious for holding up unrealistic standards of female beauty.  The women promoted in the industry use all kinds of artificial means to meet those standards.  They aren’t natural beauties.  Or if they are, that is not what we’re being shown.  As a result, as a society, we have lost sense of what women naturally look like.  The images in media are such a distortion of reality.

But the report at the link above focuses on just one aspect of this—the weight of today’s models.  There has always been a gap between the weight of models and average women.  But the report describes how in recent years that gap has dramatically increased.  Models, who were celebrated in the 1980s and 1990s, would be considered fat by today’s standards in the modeling industry. 

Indeed, today’s models often look grotesque.  Long thin arms and legs without padding on the bones.  Protruding rib cages and hip bones.  Today’s models are so thin they are reminiscent of what human beings looked like when the Allies liberated Nazi death camps or when there is dire famine in Sub-Sahara African.  Those are such horrifying, tragic associations, I’m not sure why such extreme thinness is held up as a standard of beauty.  To me, it is just evidence of a person’s physical starvation and ill health.  It is tragic and sad, not a source of beauty.



1 Peter 3

Rather, [your beauty] should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.


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