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in my bathing suit! I don’t even
know if I can go to the beach!” declared my college roommate
late one evening during our freshman year. She was packing
for spring break in Hawaii.
“You’re so skinny, you’ll
look great,” I said sleepily from my bunk.
 “I do look bad in my suit and
I am going to prove it to you!” With no further discussion,
she got her bikini out of the suitcase and put it on.
Grabbing the minuscule bit of thigh she could manage to
pinch, she looked up at me triumphantly and said, “There!
See this chunky, cellulite thigh? Just what am I going to do
about this?”
“You have no thigh at all,
missy!” I was leaping out of bed now and heading toward my
dresser. “I have colossal thighs compared to you, and I can
prove it.” With that, I dug out my swimsuit, put it on, and
said, “How would you like to go to Hawaii with these thighs?
You have got nothing to complain about.”
 Just
then, our third roommate returned from the bathroom. Finding
the two of us standing in our bathing suits in midwinter at
11:30 at night came as a great shock to her, but when she
understood the nature of our argument, she piped in with a
claim of her own. “I have bigger thighs than either of
you, so I have the authority to demand that you change out of
those ridiculous suits and go to bed.” We all threw our
heads back in laughter and decided to take pictures to
preserve this hilarious roommate bonding moment.
Alas, this is a typical way
that women bond these days. We proclaim that our physical
flaws are worse than those of our friends or else we
commiserate about the things we all hate about our bodies.
 It
is no surprise that we do this. We’ve been totally programmed to
do so by the barrage of media images that feed us a steady
diet of unrealistic pictures of women. The images we see,
particularly in advertising, feature women who are beautiful
and well below average in weight. They’ve been completely
altered by hairstylists, make-up artists, and fashion
designers, then lit perfectly and photographed by
experienced professionals. And if that’s not enough, the
images are digitally edited. Virtually no advertising image
today is free of such editing. The finished product is
completely unreal. Supermodel
Cindy Crawford is quoted to have said, “Even I don’t
wake up looking like Cindy Crawford.”
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Making
peace with our bodies
