Dear American Culture, 


     Big is beautiful too! Body image has become so distorted in our society due to the media images of "beauty." All around us are photographs of “beautiful” models: an image that as females we are supposed to emulate. They are a picture of unhealthily skinny women with perfect hair and a style of clothing that would only fit someone who is shaped like a stick. In “The Beauty Myth,” Naomi Wolf states “thirty three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal.” By being constantly bombarded with images of models, who, apart from being unnaturally skinny, are often airbrushed to look even thinner, American women have an unhealthy idea of what it means to be beautiful. A woman who is at a healthy, beautiful weight is trained to believe that she is not thin enough if her legs are not stick thin and her stomach is not perfectly flat.


     Historically, the larger the person, the more beautiful they were. This was due to the socio-economic belief that the larger you were the more money you had. This just goes to show that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The thing our culture needs to realize is that real people are beautiful. It is rare that a real person measures up to the Photoshopped bodies that our culture immortalizes through the media. 


     Whether you are a female who actually has curves or a man who is not built of sheer muscle, you are a real person and that in itself is beautiful.