"When you look in the mirror, are you happy with the way your lips look?" ~Botox Commercial on TV.
I found this little quote while I was sorting through my writing drawer. Now, I have to say that the first thing I think of when I look in the mirror is not generally, "Gee, I wish my lips looked different." Go south, and change the "L" to an "H" (hips if you haven't caught on), and you find the area I am most unhappy with.
Generally speaking, I would say that I have an ass the size of Lake Superior, and while some might say that this means I have a superior ass, I have never been exactly content with it. Neither does there appear to be much I can do about it. Even when I weighed a lot less, my hips were big and my ass was large. I even did specific excercises to target those areas. My ass grew rounder. (Hence, the reason why I have hung up Nike's "My Butt is Big" poem in my bathroom: "10,000 lunges have made it rounder but not smaller [...] And those who might scorn it are invited to kiss it.") Frankly, I have come to terms with the fact that, no matter how much weight I lose, I will always be pear-shaped.
Nike and Dove both took a lot of heat for their "real women" ad campaigns, which I think is unfortunate. I can't tell you how much I appreciate the fact that somebody on the national level recognized that not all of us are going to be or want to be a size 2. If I were I size 2 (assuming that that's even possible given my bone structure and the size of my hips), I would look like a skeleton. I am too damn tall for that. Furthermore, I don't want to be a size 2. I want to eat Cheetos. I wouldn't mind being closer to what I was before I started working eleventy billion hours a week, but I don't want to be a size 2. And Richard Roeper really made me angry with the comments he made about the Dove billboards about how he didn't want to look at them. Good! Unless he's interested in Dove skin care for women, he shouldn't want to look at them. That's aside from the fact that those models were not, as many claim, "obese."
It really bothers me that people, and women especially, are so negatively obsessed with their bodies. I think it's stupid. I probably don't need to elaborate because I've written about this before, but I have to say that it especially bothers me when advertising tries to increase this obsession.
I mean, really? We don't have enough to worry about, so we are really going to start worrying about how our lips look? It's not bad enough that we have to be so skinny our pants fall off and our legs have to be perfectly smooth and our boobs have to be the size of cantelopes and our hair has to be flouncy and shiny and our eyes have to sparkle and our teeth have to be as white as a flourescent bulbs? In addition to having several types of eating disorders, we're going to start having lip obsessions where we go get Botox injections to make us all look like we got stung by bees?
Not me. I certainly don't have the time to worry about my lips. Especially when they've served me just fine up until this point. To quote Larry the Cucumber, "I love my lips," and no one is going to stick needles in them while I'm alive and well enough to stop it.
How about you? Are you happy with the way your lips look?
Posted by LoWriter at June 8, 2006 09:11 AM