Update on Crusade "Size 0"

Before the year ends - and I stop bitching until the 2nd of January next year - I will give you an update on my crusades and other interesting topics. So be careful: Bitching ahead!

About my first crusade - "Size 0".

Still, whenever I look at the glossy magazines in passing, there's a thin model on the cover.

And I wonder why. Various models have actually died during the last year, because they had to be too thin to get work. More and more girls (and boys by now) get bulimic or anorexic - and some of them will do real damage to their bodies or even die. And the actresses of Hollywood slowly start to resemble zombies - even when they're not working for a horror movie. Scratch that, I've seen zombies with more decomposing meat on their bones than some of those actresses and nearly all of those models.

It seems as if someone has taken that stupid proverb about a woman never being "too rich or too thin" to the extreme. Unfortunately it has been someone who's got the power to actually enforce that female role model.

The distance between "what a woman looks like" and "what a woman should look like" (as dictated by the fashion magazines and designers) is getting bigger and bigger. While, in all so-called 'first world' countries, women and men are getting heavier (not healthy, too, I know), the magazines and designers in the same countries are designing 'fashion' (if something next to nobody outside the 'business' can wear, can be considered fashion) that will never, in a million, zillion years fit those people.

Girls physically 'age' faster than in the past. When I was a teenager, I started looking like a woman around the age of 14 or 15. When my mother was a teenager, she started looking like a woman around the age of 15 or 16. Today girls start to look like women around the age of 12. Mentally, of course, those girls aren't grown women, but they look the part and are easily mistaken for adults. And, like all kids that age, they want to be seen as adults and use that.

But while girls are physically growing up a lot faster than before, fashion designers make it 'chic' to look like a pre-pubescent girl, even if you happen to be 29 already. The woman in fashion isn't a woman with all the curves and shapes that meant once. It's an androgynous creature, a little girl playing an adult, a being that could, with different clothes, easily pass for a teenage boy.

This seems to be what men want - or at least what the fashion industry thinks men want: a little girl. I won't say men today are paedophiles, because that would be wrong, but what they seem to want isn't a grown up, self-assured partner. What they want is a little girl that will look up at them and find everything they do and say awesome.

Of course, that's not what all men want. But, at least to a certain degree, it's an ideal a lot of men seem to be able to live with.

Fashion and beauty ideals were always dangerous. Women would even take poison to get that 'in' look (while paleness and wasting-away were 'in'). But the trend fashion has today, is far more dangerous, because more people subscribe to being 'trendy' than in the past.