Some “Real Women” Don’t Have Curves

I stumbled upon this fantastic article from a friend’s Facebook posting this morning. (Facebook is good for something after all!) Author Starre Vartan takes a stand on the all too often used label of “real women” for plus-sized gals. She suggests that this label may be more damaging to women than empowering, which is certainly not its intent. But think about it, if we consider “plus-size” or “curvy” women to be “real” than what are we calling thinner ladies? Not Real. That’s neither true nor fair. Yet this “real women” phrase comes up more and more in an attempt to encourage larger women to take pride in their bodies.

Don’t get us wrong, we love when women take pride in themselves regardless of shape or size, but it’s important to do that without indirectly putting another group of women down. Girl C and I have both grown up on the slimmer side of the scale and feel thinner women get a bad rap sometimes. Call it luck, call it genetics, call it whatever you like but we assure you we are authentic women. Plus-size ladies are undoubtedly underrepresented in the media – that is the issue we should be addressing here instead of using this “real women” label in retaliation.
We all have so much pressure on us as females to look and act a certain way and we really should be empowering each other without slighting others in the process. We talk about girls being pitted against each other a lot here at Girl Hate and Vartan mentions it in her article as well:

Throughout the history of feminism, we’ve seen groups of women pitted against each other, whether it was the old conflict between Flappers and more traditional ladies in the 1920′s, or the newer conflicts between foreign-born nannies and their upper-middle class employers. The best way forward is to work together of course, and support the idea that ALL bodies are beautiful

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves!

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