Still a Long Way to Go

I want to talk a bit about body image and body confidence tonight. I've been following a lot of fat acceptance blogs and Tumblr accounts over the past few months, and it's great to see so many positive representations of fat women. The fellas aren't getting that much representation much, but isn't it always the way when it comes to pictures of bodies?

Some of the good ones I regularly read are The Adipositivity Project, Fuck Yeah Fat Bitch and Hey Fat Chick. There are others out there.

One thing I am noticing though, is that the only fat bodies that seem to be acceptable to post, are those with seemingly flawless, soft, white, creamy skin, no trace of body hair, stretch marks, scars or other flaws. Occasionally you might get a gorgeous fat black woman, but again, miles and miles of perfect skin. And often it's quite obviously through snazzy lighting, flattering photography and post camera editing that we're being presented these images.

While I do think it is amazing that we have come this far, I do think we have some while to go before we're really getting the message ourselves, let alone sending the message out further to the rest of the world.

I think perhaps these arty, flawless shots, sometimes contribute to some of the body image problems we have. While it's good to see these gorgeous fat bodies, and we feel like we're closer to being something to admire, I wonder does the fact that EVERYBODY has flaws and blemishes somehow get missed with the message?

I know the guys are used to seeing their porn retouched for many years so that women are flawless or some image of flawless, and then the fashion mags picked up on it and have run like crazy with it too. But I'm wondering what the point is having "body positive" blogs and such, but still filtering out things that are labelled as "unsightly" or "unattractive" in the content?

The reality is though, that human beings are big old lumpy creatures, and they have hair, scars, stretchmarks, zits, pores, freckles, scratches, bruises, moles, pigmentation and all kinds of other marks all over them. It's all part of the complex system that the human body is. And despite all of these blemishes, the human body is still beautiful. Even because of these blemishes in a lot of cases.

How many other women look at photos like the one above and say "But she's gorgeous, I couldn't be seen in just my underwear, I look nothing like that."? How many men think that all women are as flawless as the young lady above? Are we striving even now for an unrealistic perfection, even though we're allowing fat bodies to be seen?

I wonder is it time we need to start being even more honest and realistic about human bodies?