How far will we go to achieve perfection?

When Jessica Simpson gained a measly couple of pounds recently, it sparked a national outrage. The President commented on it, and Perez Hilton didn’t look on it too kindly, either. Soon, everybody was talking about it. When reading the most recent ‘National Enquirer’, I was startled to find that within the section on “Hollywood’s 20 Fattest Stars”, two average-sized women graced the pages. Of course, the stars new scapegoat, Jessica Simpson, was on the list at a whopping ten stone. It claims that she “ballooned to her curviest”, which is the weight she is at now. Ten stone. Next to her, Janet Jackson covers her excessive nine stone five with an oversized hoodie. Her blurb tells me that she “had shrunk to a super-sexy 108lb last May”, but that poor Janet has now “packed on 23 pounds”, taking her up to her current weight. For all of us who are unaware of the conversion between pounds and stone, Janet’s “super-sexy” weight was seven stone seven. Forgive me for thinking this, but that seems awfully unhealthy. Janet is of average height, thus making her previous weight ridiculous.

We, as a society, have shrunk. Physically, and mentally. We have decided that people who aren’t as thin as a select few are ugly and unattractive. Programs like “Ugly Betty” portray women who carry some extra junk in the trunk as ugly, and those who have glasses, braces and frizzy hair end up as lost causes.

Models on the catwalk are getting skinnier and skinnier, as they are designed to be the hangers on which clothes fall. You aren’t supposed to focus on the people wearing the clothes, but you can’t help but gaze at the skeletal frames that float down the catwalks. If these are the women that appear in fashion magazines as being the ideal, then all of the women who don’t look like them are going to feel like something is wrong with them.

What the magazines fail to mention is that it’s incredibly unhealthy to be so skinny, and that the ones that aren’t perfect get Photoshopped beyond recognition. Now, if the only images we are presented with are of seemingly “perfect” women, surely we’re only going to feel worse about ourselves and strive to look like them, regardless of the impact it would have on our health.

Commercial sharks have decided to prey on the vulnerable among us and ply us with adverts promising “miracle diets”, guaranteed to help us lose enough weight to fit in. “The Pink Patch” regularly appears on my Facebook page, telling me that I’ll lose stones if I wear it. It tells me that it’ll curb my appetite, subtly saying that it will stop me eating. But is this an anorexia advert? Saying that not eating is the best way to lose weight, alongside lots of exercise, of course. What people fail to observe about anorexia, which is often beautified for the television and movie industry, is that it kills you off slowly. It is literally starvation, but self-inflicted. Your body starts to freak out, and all of your major organs stop being able to function. You might think that you look great, but the truth is, your body now equals that of a dilapidated OAP. Even though you can squeeze into a UK4 pair of skinny jeans, are you truly happy? Your skin won’t be getting the vitamins it craves, leaving you grey and emaciated. Very attractive.

And the worst thing about it is that the people who are being targeted by these “icons” are getting younger. I work in a clothing boutique, and we stock clothing from a US size 0 to a UK size 26. More frequently now than ever before, primary schools are hosting proms, and we’ve seen an influx of ten and eleven year-olds trying to grab the latest garb. Their comments? “It makes me look fat.” I understand that we live in an obesity-fuelled society, but these children aren’t fat. They’re child-sized. They can go into Mothercare and still be able to fit into something!

I’m possibly bitter, because my Wii fit told me that I had gained a stone this week. I didn’t stop eating, nor did I wallow in the fact that I could possibly be mistaken for a whale. Instead, I ate my lunch, and I got on with my life. Now, I’m not fat. I’m ten stone. I carry a “burden” of child-bearing hips, which essentially means that I have thighs. But what I found out is that I weigh more than two of the celebrities named on the “Fattest Stars” page, and this makes me angry. How thin do we have to be to be recognised as being perfect? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the magazines we read. They cannot and should not dictate to us what we know is unachievable. We will never look like the models they use, no matter how little we eat or how much we work out. We need to realize that we are beautiful no matter what size we are. We’ve reached a point where we are judging people on their size, ignoring all of their other attributes. If a model has a beautiful face but she weighs more than the other waifs, will she be ignored?

And so, I ask you – how far will we go? When the next anorexic model dies because of her plight for perfection, will we sit up and take notice? No, because there will be twenty other starved and decrepit models waiting to take her place. If we continue portraying the ideal woman as something that comes with a side-order of death, then that is what we will continue to celebrate. If, however, we put real women in magazines and beauty campaigns, we might realize that we have more to offer the world than a protruding collar-bone and a lack of individuality.

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