ever thus

At the left: Variation #209,873 on making something completely out of one's control--body type--a fad, so as to spur impotent fanciful longing and money-spending, a reaching for an ideal that has likely SFA to do with what your own body looks like, however big it is or isn't. It is not possible, note, to move your body fat around like clay, to pad some bits ("keep your [socially-acceptable] curves") and lose the "extra." Not how the human body works.

When I was growing up it was all the same, just a different ideal: if you dieted and spent money and worked hard enough you could suddenly be a hipless preppy wonder. The ideal changes, the longing to change doesn't. "Spot-reducing exercises"...remember those? They were supposed to make the right things thin, leave the rest.

I hate when people push any look as the Real Whatever. The whole Real Women Have Curves thing, for instance, is such crap. Real women: have boobs, don't have boobs, have hips, don't have hips, are big, small, thin, fat, tall, short, blah, blah. Nobody needs the validation of "real"--any woman is a real woman. To use the word real is only, as people say, to suggest its opposite.