On My Skinny Soapbox

I was surfing the dub today and I came across this. The web was all atwitter about Kim Karr's big, brown booty slipping past the photo-shop and accidentally making it onto the complex.com site. It was taken down when some peeps realized she looked a little too... realistic maybe? But not before it could circulate cyber space.

I live in a notoriously narcissistic city where youth and beauty are social currency and lacking either marginalizes you at best, renders you invisible at worst. Sitting in the thick of the stench of superficiality means I'm acutely aware of the lies we're sold about beauty. Messages are embedded all over the glossy gossip magazines, plastered on the billboards that line Sunset Blvd- this could be your life, buy this. Though most of us shrug off the possibility that those ads are influencing us, I'd argue they shape our consciousness in covert ways every day.

Take this pic of pseudo celeb Kim Kardashian- yeah, the photo-shopped version may have shaved a bit off the boot but that's not the most noticeable difference to me. What I saw first was the way the blotchy redness of her thighs has been removed and replaced with a pretty (whiter?) tone in the second picture. I know that blotchy, red flesh. I have it myself from time to time. What's wrong with it? Why is it deemed ugly and digitally erased? Would keeping her legs the color they really are have affected the number of issues sold? Would it disrupt her wannabe celebrity status? Would it help girls and women to see one of our own sporting blotchy legs like the ones we're walking around with?

I don't really know the answers to these questions but I do vividly recall my seventeen year old self flipping through Cosmo and secretly feeling like shit. I wasn't skinny like the girls on the pages and my hair wasn't soft and glossy like theirs, I didn't have perfect breasts and although I shared their height, I felt like a big, behemoth version of those bitches. After enough self-loathing I finally quit reading those shitty mags and you know what? I started feeling better about me.

I'm not saying that at twenty eight I pick up a Maxim and feel riddled with shame that I'm not Giselle. Jesus, I'd like to think I've evolved just a bit in the last decade. But the point is that when I was really in the thick of the insecure, pimple-faced hell of puberty seeing those pictures of perfect girls didn't do much for the ole self esteem. As a "grown up" with a bit more insight I realize that those girls in the mags aren't perfect; in fact, those girls aren't even real. They are a digitally enhanced version of a person who looks a lot more like you and me then we ever see.




More photoshop magic here.
Kim Kardashian pic courtesy of Gawker.