Hollywood affect female insecurities

Los Angeles.  Notorious for our association with Hollywood, Los Angelenos have a media-bred hypersensitivity towards skinniness, especially our female residents.  As heinous as it might seem for a 5'10" girl from a curvy line of women to fool herself into thinking she would look better as a size two, it happens on the daily here in the city of angels, and the obsession doesn't seem to be waning. To be fair, this attitude is infecting the rest of the country, working its way from the East and West coasts inward like a contagious disease.  And it is actually manifesting itself as a disease at times, in cases of bulimia and anorexia.  But those are extreme cases, and this will be focusing on majorities.

Skinny used to be the opposite of fat, remember?  It didn't used to be a compliment; it was a descriptive word for people who were noticeably below average weight.  But ever since "heroin chic" graced runways in the ‘90s, there's been a dramatic shift in cultural perceptions of the ideal female body type.

Societies go through cultural changes and preferences are bound to shift, it's a part of human life.  But what's wrong with owning your curves and having confidence in your size 10 pants?  Why are you expected to go on a diet at least twice a year?  Receiving evil death stares from chicks that choose to starve themselves when you indulge in that brownie that's screaming the name of every woman in the room is unfair and frustrating.  You shouldn't feel embarrassed for being the only girl around sane enough to eat what you want.

And what about getting the stomach flu?  It seems like nowadays, when women come down with a virus, one of their first thoughts is, "Oh, well.  Maybe I'll lose five pounds!"  Have you ever hoped to stay sick just a few more days so you won't eat for that much longer?

Seriously?  What about the misery of puking your guts out?  Worth it to fit into that itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka dot bikini? That's got to be a form of bulimia.  And even the most confident ladies fall victim to these thoughts.  We're bred to idolize skinniness.  It's like we were all baptized into the cult of skinny, worshiping protruding ribs and prominent collarbones.

Our only hope might be in African American celebrities, male and female, for writing rap songs or starring in music videos about thick bodies, juicy butts and big bras—but then we have to worry about objectifying women, right?

If you're one of those guys that jokes around about cottage cheese thighs and jiggly underarms, be careful.  You might be causing more damage than you realize.  This obsession is deeply rooted in our society, and even though you actually don't care and think your girlfriend is super hot, guaranteed she's not as sure.  Maybe shoot her some extra compliments and reassure her that you'd never want to date that pole-thin girl who probably does drugs and smokes cigarettes to maintain her figure.

What makes the situation even more convoluted is the obesity crisis our country now faces.  It's almost laughable that in a country where half the girls are living off of celery to adhere to media-created standards, the other half are keeping KFC in business and developing type II diabetes.

So let's try to balance the scale.  Stop supporting fast food restaurants like it's the family business, but maybe indulge once in a while.  We are always at one extreme end of the scale, whether it's anorexia or obesity, the majority of people are supposed to make up the middle.  If we stop living in such excess, both excessive exercise and dieting or excessive food consumption, health will increase on all fronts.  And then we'll probably blow ourselves up anyway.