Rant Of The Day — skinny.

Thank God fashion week is over. The pretensiousness and crowding in New York is back down to a manageable level. Best of all, the city can breathe a collective sigh of relief and let our guts hang over our pants again. The models have left! They scurried away into their cashmere transatlantic tunnels, where they sheild their precious skin from the sun and chew on cigarette butts until next season.
I feel bad for thinking this way, but I do. I am so relieved to not have to lumber around the subways surrounded by girls twice my height but half my width & age. I feel cruel and twisted walking behind them wondering if their hollow bones would splinter if I bumped into them. These girls aren’t like ballerina-muscley-skinny, they are refugee-weak-skinny. Watching them wisked into tents and onto magazine covers — defining the standard of beauty — worries me. Like “doom! Doom! It’s the end of the world!” type of worry.
Why is skinniness so attractive? Really, in a practical sense, it’s mostly a problem. Skinny people don’t have as much muscle or insulation as normal sized people. Not only does that make it hard for them to lift things or go whaling, it also makes it harder for them to carry babies. So the attraction to thinness is not related to health, or procreation. Maybe thin is in because it’s so impractical. Like a sportscar or one of those illegal giant housecats, thin girlfriends are alluring for being special and not terribly functional.
Or — here’s the doom part — perhaps it’s the weakness itself. Maybe these women aren’t seen as attractive in spite of the fact that they look a breath away from dying, but because of it. Somehow being small and anemic — unlikely and unable to fight back — has become sexy. That is truly scary and gross to me. To we attractive we must be fragile — and what is next? How weak can we get? How tiny? Are we trying to disappear?
The smaller they get, the more women get rewarded. The pursuit of these rewards has even led young girls to create online PRO-ANOREXIA societies! That’s right, we’re BUYING INTO THIS CRAP! We’re actually going along with it! No one is slapping forks out of our mouths or cinching our waists for us — we’re happily skipping into the slaughterhouse.
This is what’s running through my mind when I see a fashion model walk through the tunnel between the A, C, E and the 7 train in Times Square. This thought makes me want to tackle her to the ground and scream “It’s not just a job!!!! Don’t do it!!” I know it’s not really all her fault, but if women weren’t so complacent and complient with the whole thing — who would set that standard of beauty for us? If WOMEN weren’t the ones praising each other for being thin, if we weren’t agreeing to get and stay so tiny, who would do it?

Plus, models make me feel fat.

* to read more about skinniness from someone on the inside, please check out Jen MacNeil’s blog