14 DAY TRIAL // The beauty of the human body is that you can hardly find two alike, which means that we all have almost infinite options. What is beautiful for one may be ugly to another, what is skinny and appealing to one person might not be the same for the next, because they prefer women or men with “some meat on their bones” / “some junk in the trunk.”
The fashion industry has been ignoring that until recent years, when bold voices started proposing a new type of body for female models, one that wasn’t size 0-2, one that actually had breasts and thighs and hips and buttocks. You know, the kind of things that you usually find on “real” women.
As if those models, as waif-like as they were, weren’t real.
In time, as more outlets, publications and designers embraced this new trend that was ultimately gunning for body diversity and a better representation in fashion, the conversation began to include terms that were hardly ever used before: plus-size models, curvy models, real women, average female body, all of these used in direct opposition to “models,” aka the un-real girls mentioned above.
A distinct shift from tradition was noticed, and while certain magazines would have never published editorials with fuller girls before, they now began to run spreads with overweight women because they were “curvy” and that was the hip thing to do.
So no wonder then that people started saying that all this hype around the term “curvy” was actually the politically correct way of saying “fat,” and that it was sending the wrong message to women: that being overweight was healthy, desirable, beautiful.
Take Lady Gaga for example: earlier this week, in response to criticism that she’d gained weight and her stage costumes were no longer fitting her, she posted a photo captioned “Curvy & Proud.” She actually chose a photo from when she was skinnier, if you can imagine.
The bottom line is that Gaga isn’t curvy now, she’s just packing a few extra pounds. She was always curvy, because she always had curves (duh!), but she’s using the curvy rhetoric because it’s serving her purpose. Instead of saying “I’m heavier now but I’m still happy with the way I look,” she employs this term because it allows her to tap into a segment of self-conscious women that she might convert into fans.
In almost no time, when she goes back on a diet and loses those extra pounds, she will have forgotten about how “proud” she was of being curvy. So yes, in her case, we have a clear case of the term curvy used for “fat(ter).” And you have Gaga to blame for diverting the attention from what is actually a noble goal.
“Curvy” was introduced because the women of the world were growing sick and tired of being told (by the fashion industry, through ads, magazine spreads and other media) that only skinny was beautiful. It was supposed to promote diversity in beauty, to be a more accurate reflection of reality than it was.
That didn’t mean that skinny girls weren’t “real,” but that they represented only a segment of the female population. Medium-sized and large-sized and all-sized women also want to be fashionable and they’re also beautiful – because, as cliché as it might sound, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.
This means that, objectively speaking, a woman is beautiful regardless of how much she weighs. It’s our choice if we like the image or not, but at least we should be presented with both images to be able to choose.
“Curvy” is often misused these days (the Gaga example is just the most recent from showbiz), especially by celebrities. Not few of these stars used it when they had gained weight and were unable to shift it for whatever reason, but they forgot about it when they were down to their regular size.
Christina Aguilera shamelessly played the “curvy” card for months post-divorce from Jordan Bratman, but the moment she found the motivation to eat healthy and hit the gym, she completely forgot about it.
But that does not mean that “curvy” always means “fat” or that it’s a bad thing, or that a woman who is curvy or plus-size is less beautiful than a stick-thin one, or that we should not see a model with a similar body shape modeling the latest fashions.
Remember that part in the beginning about how the human body is beautiful because it comes in such a diversity of sizes and shapes? It is! Thin, average, curvy, fuller women, they all have real beauty and a real story to tell. And we’d all stand to win more (in life in general) if we just dropped the hate and learned how to love – ourselves and each other.