Emmys 2010
Recently, while home for winter break, I attended a gathering at my brother’s house. It began like any other night, hanging about, playing cards, having a couple of drinks—nothing out of the ordinary. The conversation, while a little less than stimulating, flowed comfortably and everyone was having a good time. Eventually we began talking about our “dream celebrities”—you know, those celebrities who you would give your left foot to look like/hang out with/ seduce/pull a Freaky Friday with. This line of discussion is not unusual in a social situation. There are certain women we can all agree won the lottery in the looks department (yes, we KNOW that Beyonce is a goddess...can we move on now?) Some celebrities, such as Angelina Jolie, are more controversial (she is a beautiful woman, undeniably, but a little TOO out—of-this-world for my taste.) So amidst cries of “Lindsay Lohan!” and “Mila Kunis!” I fearlessly added “Christina Hendricks!”
Full disclaimer: To me, Christina Hendricks is the epitome of womanhood. Not only is she flawlessly beautiful, she is an actual SIZE. And the best thing about her? She doesn’t harp on about it. I’ve always personally felt that “larger” women in Hollywood (I put “larger” in quotation marks because that word constitutes someone, well, normal, in the Entertainment Industry) who feel the need to constantly make statements about being “big, bold, beautiful women and I proud of it” almost just as bad as the skinny standards that make us so insecure. To me, that just sounds like “SEE SEE SEE I AM COMFORTABLE WITH MY BODY SO I’M GOING TO SHOUT ABOUT IT SO I CAN’T HEAR THE INSECURITIES RUNNING THROUGH MY HEAD!” But I digress.
Christina Hendricks is poised, kind, and on a purely surface level (which was the point of this conversation, initially) physically flawless. She is not gorgeous because of her size; she is gorgeous because she just is.
So you can imagine my horror when, upon my proclamation of my girl X-tina’s bodacious bod, a girl across the room wrinkles her nose and yells “No way! She needs liposuction!” I imagine the look on my face was just as murderous as the thoughts running through my head, because my brother quickly tried to shush the completelyandutterlycrazy witch sitting across from me. But she stood strong.
“Have you SEEN her thighs?”
I took a deep breath, I counted to ten. And then I said, with utter conviction “You, my friend, are everything that is wrong with our society.”
And I stand by that statement. It would have been bad enough if the girl had suggested that Hendricks needed to jump on a treadmill or go on a diet (Read: she doesn’t.) But things were taken a step further when this girl’s first thought was that a beautiful woman needed surgery to somehow “fix” her body. A woman who is proportional, a woman who is comfortable, a woman who is healthy. Is this actually what our world has come to? At the first sign of physical imperfection, our first thought is to go under the knife?
First of all, I’m the first person to be all: “People are dying of AIDS and malaria all over the world and you think a major medical concern is cosmetic fat surgery????” I am of the opinion that for every dollar a person spends on gratuitous cosmetic surgery they should have to match that dollar amount and give it to AIDS research.
But this isn’t exclusively meant to be a tirade against plastic surgery. The main point here is as a society in general WE HAVE TO STOP THINKING THAT WE CAN “FIX” OUR BODIES. Don’t get me wrong, we can be healthy and we can tone, etc. But the thing that society has failed to teach us, especially young girls, is that you cannot change the actual shape of your body. There may seem to be a certain element of “no duh” in that statement, but having suffered under the misconception myself for years, no matter how much dieting we do, how much we exercise, or how much surgery we get, that will not automatically make us have a Keira Knightley-esque bone structure. Our bodies have certain blue prints that are just never going to change. I’ve found that this is something I have to remind myself of everyday, but this is a truth that once you truly internalize it: I promise YOU ARE FREE. By all means, exercise and be healthy, take care of your body, be the best “you” you can be...just remember that in order to be that, you have to stop fighting against yourself. It is a losing battle, I promise. We will never all be the Jessica Alba’s and Biel’s of the world, but we can all at least one day be comfortable.
And for goodness sake. Leave Christina Hendricks out of it. She is a goddess.
Courtesy: Page Six Magazine
Courtesy: New York Magazine
