From the serious to the ridiculous. Yahoo News, which seems determined to lower the human IQ, today features a woman who did not feel "good enough" to wear a bikini but in a great act of self-esteem has decided to wear one anyway.
This interests me for three reasons. The first is that I tried on a bikini when I was 27 or so, as athletic as I am ever likely to be, and about 117 lbs. I looked in the mirror and took off the bikini because, slim as I was, I looked all wrong for a bikini. Women in bikinis in photographs are all one colour, whereas some parts of me were white, other parts were pink, and still others slightly freckled. Moreover, despite trying to feel all sophisticated about it, I was just not comfortable wearing what was really just glorified and expensive underwear in public.
The second reason is that goodness had been conflated in this woman's mind with looking a certain way when wearing the glorified and expensive underwear in public. I can understand doubting one's ability to please the human eye, but I simply cannot understand what virtue has to do with voluntary near-nudity.
The third reason is that in our benighted culture, this is now held out as a human interest story and a woman overcoming great odds to-----have a great day out on the beach.
Here is a link to the article and the photo of the probably overweight heroine, with the advice that this is not suitable viewing for clerics and little brothers. I very much doubt the woman's appearance would be of any interest to anyone on the beaches of the Mediterranean where elderly ladies tanned inside with cigarettes and outside with sun wear such costumes all the time, heedless of the collops of skin hanging from their frames. That said, if she hadn't shaved her head, she might have attracted some interest from the men around, as men are rather less obsessed with thinness in women than are women.
No comments:
Post a Comment