I remember being very young when my mother and other family members told me that I couldn’t look at the magazine rack in the local store. I was a bit of a snarky kid, so this caused the inevitable “WHY?”. My ‘Why” was answered with, if you look at these images, you WILL get an eating disorder, and you WILL become influenced resulting in low self esteem, and eventually death. Great, right? Magazines will destroy you. HA! I don’t believe that for one moment. Why would a magazine, something me, as a child, would never look at, influence me? I mean, really? I would rather watch cartoons, or play outside (yes, I was a dirt loving tom boy).
But today, we have what so many who are proud to call “Girl shows” that have taken old cartoons and empowered little girls in them. Let them have feelings, emotions, disagreements, and be true to themselves without fitting in this mode of everyone should be constantly happy or in each other’s business. As awesome as this sounds, why the heck is every single one of these characters the exact same size, and shape? Yes, their outside color maybe different, but why don’t we see an overweight heroine? Or a girl in a wheel chair? I know that I am just reiterating what I have already stated in the past, but wouldn’t you agree? That if you had a girl/boy powered cartoon that had the hero as overweight, or with a disability, wouldn’t it make people more accepting of their faults, and less likely to ‘fit’ this idiotic ideal that we pressure onto our children everyday? Instead of saying that ‘magazines’ and ‘models’ are the reason we have issues with body images, why not have it be more main stream? So makers of hub/disney/warnerbros/etc, PLEASE, PLEASE put a war veteran, a crooked teeth, clumsy girl, a bespectacled over weight boy, an all star athlete in a wheelchair! I have three kids begging for it! 🙂
H. A. Lamb 