[Soapbox]"Real Women Have Curves"

You know how there are phrases that every time you hear them, you kind of want to roll your eyes and tell someone to shut up? This is one of them for me. I hate this saying.

Once upon a time, when we were itty bitty, we judged people for the important things, like whether they would share our crayons with us, if they ate sand in the sand box and if they liked My Little Ponies as much as we did. Okay, so maybe not important, but nowhere on that list is there judgement for how big someone was. Little girls (and boys, but this is predominantly about girls) were not born with a sense of thinking they were better than someone over something as arbitrary as their size.

The usual side of this argument that you hear is that "fat women are discriminated against just for being fat". Which is one hundred percent true. If you are overweight there are eighty million stereotypes that are used against you. People will assume you're lazy, eat half a box of cookies a night and cry into a cake unable to tear yourself away from it. I get it. I am a heavier woman myself, the looks are there and the judgement is there. On the flip side, people think that heavier women are more maternal and caring as well, but I suppose it's hard to see that when you think someone is picturing you with a pig tail.

Somewhere along the line, the backlash became an "us or them" mentality. If you're a persecuted fat woman, than clearly all skinny women are evil. Heavyset women will deny that this is the case, but let's face it, before you talk to someone you've judged that because they're a size 4, they're a judgemental control freak most of the time. Even if they aren't judging you. Or are just naturally small.

The fact is "real women have curves" sums up this entire mentality. Hate to break it to the world, but real women have a vagina and a uterus. That is what makes a real woman, whether she be a Kate Moss or a Marilyn Monroe. What makes us beautiful is not the size of our hips, the size of our waists, the size of our boobs: It's our ability to show compassion and live in a world with as little judgement as we can manage. Just because someone is not exactly like you, does not mean they are not beautiful. It just means their different.

A saying that doesn't piss me off: "Ugly is on the inside." Ugliness is not the size of your nose, it's the ignorance of your soul.

*steps off*

And I leave you with an interesting article from Glamour magazine of all places:

http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/2012/05/weight-stereotyping-the-secret-way-people-are-judging-you-based-on-your-body-glamour-june-2012

There are a lot of interesting thoughts there on how we judge. And how unfair those judgements usually end up being.