the Dalaverse

I've never seen anybody who can pull off as many looks as Keira Knightley. Mostly I'm thinking about her hair -- short, medium, long, straight, wavy, curly, choppy, bangs, extensions, brown, black, blond, multi-toned...I don't think she's ever gone red. Maybe that's the one thing she can't look maddeningly beautiful with.

In an unrelated tangent (but really, why start a whole new post?) one of the many arguments I had with my mother over the last twenty-four hours was yet another over body image. We were flipping through People magazine, looking at a photo of Beyonce, and I made a comment about how I was kind of bummed that she lost weight recently. I wouldn't call myself a huge Beyonce fan, but I always thought she was rather inspiring in her curviness and her attitude. Come on, "Bootylicious" rocks. My mother was all on me about 'why don't you like thin people?' and I had to explain, and I feel the need to explain further now. It isn't that I don't like thin people, it's that I hate and resent how that particular body image is the media ideal -- that unless they go out of their way, that is pretty much the only shape young girls see on TV, in movies and in magazines, and it's entirely unrepresentative of the actual population. I really do not understand how my mother, who is not thin now but who dieted for decades to a point at which she really, truly looked anorexic, doesn't see how harmful this unbalance is.

I mean, it's not even that she lost this weight she did not need to lose, or that she did it for a movie role (which, according to my mother, made it okay). I wouldn't have even noticed if every time I've seen or heard her mentioned in the past few months, the weight loss wasn't emphasized, as if the media are saying, 'Yeah, we pretended to like you when you were curvier, but we're so very impressed that you're now thin!' The most commonly repeated phrase is 'newly svelte.' That phrase makes my blood boil and I don't know precisely why. It just looks so smug. They used it on post-pregnancy celebrities, too.

Uh, I don't know where I was going with this. I just needed to get it off my chest. I have enough body image problems without Beyonce going and sweating off her booty. Story time: when I was in seventh grade, my American history class had a really great student teacher helping out, and one afternoon she deliberately separated the sexes. At the end of class she asked us to write journal entries about our observations. I wrote about how the girls, even the outspoken ones, clammed up and didn't answer questions, and how the boys acted extra obnoxious even for teenage boys. In particular, I was appalled when they laughed at photos of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, and called them various kinds of ugly. No comments about the physiques of male social figures at the turn of the century were made. I am still appalled by this.

One last thing. Somebody slap me for adoring "Sexy Back" ::braces self:: I admit I am predisposed to like anything with 'Get your ____ on" where blank is not 'freak,' but honestly.

Okay, I've edited this post about seven times now, I'm going to bed.