‘Real’ Women

I am going to start this blog post positively, what with it being the New Year. I am fully behind any campaign that makes women feel comfortable about their bodies. It is great to see more realistic images of women being shown on social media and in magazines. Often aimed at the larger lady, these campaigns can help women to feel normal and happy in whatever body they have. However, a term that is often thrown around and is in no way progressive is ‘real women. Originally the term ‘real women’ is likely to be a response to the mass of photoshopped images that we are faced with daily on various forms of media. Yet now, it seems to be a term applied to women who are overweight or have unusual body shapes. It is very important to note that I am attacking people that use the term ‘real’ and not the bodies that are representative of the term.

By using the term ‘real women’, in the hope that you make certain women feel that they are true women who are more accurate portrayals of the general population, you insult those that do not fit into this category. By all means criticise the overuse of Photoshop, but don’t criticise the models that are the subject of the cutting and cropping. Just because these models (or anyone else for that matter) are skinny, it does not make them any less of a woman. A larger woman may certainly have more skin or fat to her, but that does not make her more ‘womanly’ than someone who is a size 6. Like many women who feel they are just big boned, many women feel that they are naturally skinny or slim and will be just as insulted if they are criticised because of their weight. By using the term ‘real’ you can target the wrong person. Rather than targeting the companies that live by Photoshop you target the women who do not have curves or are not as voluptuous and make them feel inferior.

Though showing a range of body sizes in magazines is a good thing, at the same time it is important to promote a healthy lifestyle. It is a fact that there is a line between being curvaceous and being clinically overweight. Whilst it is important not to criticise the way overweight people look, I don’t think calling rolls of fat ‘curves’ is very helpful either. In the same way it is not a positive thing to show an underweight model, it is not positive to show an overweight one. Rather, we should be seeing a happy medium of healthy bodies. Being underweight or overweight is unhealthy and in the campaign to see more ‘real women’, what I have seen is an increase in images of people who although seem happy, are also overweight. As it turns out, hopefully not as a surprise, all women are real; your BMI does not affect how real you are. Slim women without curves are just as real as bigger women with curves and it seems strange that I even have to say that. All of the women that you see in magazines or on adverts are real, it just may be that their images may have been changed by others. It goes without saying that when referring to a woman you are probably talking about one that exists. So, there is no need to use the word ‘real’ as if it were a helpful predicate.

This is an example of a non- real woman. Although impressively she does somehow have curves whilst at the same time having a body made of blocks