Let's Feed Kate Moss to Precious.

I suppose the time has come for two admissions to be made. 1: There will never be a Mexico Part 2 entry. Sorry. Long story short, we got pulled over by guys with machine guns and searched for drugs, went snorkeling in an underwater state park where we saw a "little" shark that was about six feet long, and Dad and I got Montezuma's Revenge, which is one of the most horrible things ever. 2: My blog posts seem to be products of sleepless nights away from the frenzy that is college, so they will never be regular. They will, however, bear interesting time stamps.

I love StumbleUpon. Unlike MyLifeIsAverage, Facebook, LameBook, Shitmydadsays, or any of the other time wasters I love to frequent, StumbleUpon will never run out of material. It takes material from all the dusky corners of the Internet and delivers it to your computer screen, custom fit for your enjoyment. You check some boxes and find random stuff that makes you happy. It's great.

Recently, I Stumbled Upon this fantastic page from a fashion magazine. Apparently the editors had decided to do a "Curvy" issue, so they found four beautiful models who fit the plus size criteria and took crazy gorgeous pictures of them. (Here it is, for reference: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/7poIV1/models.com/v-magazine/v-size-2.html).

If you're like every other person conditioned by thin being fabulous, you may be struck (especially by the first two pictures) at how uncomfortable it is to find this body type appealing. This changes by Picture 3. By this point, I was struck by how fantastic these women looked. Exquisite faces atop voluminous goddess bodies, these women embodied the ancient ideal of the Roman and Grecian female. As I scrolled down to the picture of all four models in one shot, I was struck by the fact that these women were unlike any plus sized models I had ever seen, some of them even being on the small size of curvy. After seeing all the pictures, the first two grew more beautiful by the second, especially in keeping with the idea that the camera adds ten pounds no matter who you are, and most women look like this, some not even lucky enough to have the incredible faces to accompany the controversially gorgeous bodies. A few males who happened to be in the room found themselves in agreement, and I was satisfied with the experience and ready for more Stumbling.

Recently I revisited this site. Seeing that there were comments on the post, I read through about half of them and found myself ready for another rant. You're excited.

Perhaps an illuminating backstory is in order. You know me. I used to be a rail thin little girl, so androgynous that girls used to suggest that I drink Miracle Gro for breasts (we were like eleven, all these girls are obese now). I was incredibly self conscious, then literally overnight I became a victim of puberty and my life changed. All of a sudden, my mother was (and still is, despite my no longer being fourteen) constantly admonishing me to pull up shirts that had always fit me fine so that my cleavage was covered and the gross old man behind the counter could finish bagging our groceries without dropping the eggs again. I became the recipient of constant lewd gestures and remarks from total strangers. I found myself in a new and confusing territory: developing the skills to know when a person actually finds you interesting and is worth your time, or is only offering you a summer job because you look like a fourteen year old Betty Boop and his wife stopped having sex with him once she found out he was a pedophile. I suffered a horribly embarrassing moment when the principal of my middle school (it was a small school) pulled me aside and advised me to start wearing a bra because it was distracting to the other students. Shit. When had this happened and how should I deal with it?

(I know, I know. What a terrible dilemma to have, right? Oh wow, you've got breasts and people get distracted by them. Poor you. I bet you bitch about winning free shit off of Coke bottle caps and whatnot, don't you? (No. I love free shit.))

Unfortunately, along with the with-great-cup-sizes-comes-great-responsibility deal, there's also the added issue of body type. I will never again be the kind of girl who can wear clothes without trying them on. I don't just have curves up top, I've got them everywhere. God, if being in high school isn't torture enough, being curvy in the age of walking coat racks is. Jeans today (especially skinny jeans) create a muffin top that highlights your midsection even if you're a size two. If you've never burst into tears because you can't zip up a dress past the middle of your back, count yourself lucky. Being ashamed of your body is a terrible thing, but what's worse is being ashamed of a body that men like Botticelli thought was ideal to use in depicting a GODDESS. A freaking GODDESS. Not just any Goddess, mind you, but freaking VENUS. Literally every guy I have ever dated immediately began dating someone noticeably smaller, and the recent hipster clothing rage has officially designated me a Size Large. (I'm a size 6-8, and almost 5'9) All of this is enough to make even my boy Botticelli's Venus start crash dieting. Where can we turn for guidance to normalcy?

Um...not magazines, that's for damn sure. The obesity epidemic in the U.S. has forced the magazine industry to put really really fat people into their magazines under the plus sized category and call them curvy to make people feel better, but the actual plus sized label starts at a size 8, in some cases a 6. What is a growing young girl supposed to find healthy, then? The unhealthy, obese girl under the "curvy" category in Seventeen, or the unhealthy, androgynous girl in the advertisements? Shit. Sorry, female high school classes of 2018. You are gonna have body issues for a long time and it's Kate Moss's fault. Apparently that bitch once said, "No food tastes as good as skinny feels." I almost feel bad for her, she's clearly never been allowed to eat anything but rabbit food, and WOW I could kill for some fettucini alfredo right now.

So. Back to the comments on the StumbleUpon spread. While many women were impressed and stunned by the beauty and normalcy of the women depicted, an alarming number of people seem to find these ladies "fat," "obese" and "gross." These people claim to be "all for curves," but leave no room for anything but runway sizes. One person actually stated "too skinny" to be a size 4 and below, and "plus sized" to be a size 8 and above. So...size 6 is it, huh? (What size are you, I wonder?) What's worse is that someone wrote in to say that that they actually knew most of the women in the pictures, and that they all lead healthy lifestyles with ample exercise. So these women are beautiful, make good lifestyle choices, and are unfit to grace the pages of a magazine because they have the defining characteristics of a woman? I know it's a tired argument, and much of America's fault lies with the aforementioned media sanctioned extreme, but if it's enough of a problem to affect an otherwise self confident, reasonably intelligent young woman, what is it doing to young girls who have no one in their lives to remind them that they're beautiful? Ironically, I read Cosmo like Kate Moss reads her bathroom scale, and recently they released a little tidbit stating that men generally like women about two sizes bigger than the ideal that women have jammed down their throats like Mary-Kate's post meal finger. Hmm...what size is that, now? Ah. About sizes 6-8. Yet when I turned the page to read about the Ten New Ways To Make Him Your Bitch, the female model they had owning the hot guy was no bigger than Kid Rock, with about the same amount of estrogen.

I go to school with an official model, and her suitemate is my best friend at Yale. My friend recently informed me that her suitemate's rib is doing just fine, but apparently someone hugged her a bit too hard and broke it. That's what people pay money to see wear the clothes that will soon be available to them in generic form at their closest Macy's. Meanwhile women who look like Precious are our role models for curves and those of us who will find ourselves neither on a 60 Minutes special on obesity nor at hipster parties wearing an American Apparel lace body suit and pulling out a microscope when men want to see our breasts are forced to haul out the Ben and Jerry's and pray for the return of the fashionable poncho: Hollywood will never love us, so we'll embrace our inevitable spiral into the land of the Big Dawgs clothing store and hope we're already married by the time we forget what our feet look like.

(Okay fine fine we're all beautiful as long as we're healthy, skinny could never feel as good as eating sushi to the point of bursting, and Kate Moss probably has a terrible sex life. (Just Googled it. She had sex with Johnny Depp. Fuck. Big Dawgs, here I come.))

T.