Damn a magazine, these are God's fingerprints*

So I check out Shakesville quiet often, especially now that I am on this little vacation (which will end soon sadly), and there have been a lot of posts about body acceptance recently. These are all interesting to me as I think about the message that we send out constantly to the women and men in our society. Also, because I work with young children I think about what messages we send to them in commercials and toys they are supposed to play with (I could go into gender roles and how we force that upon children but that is another post). I thought about how the dolls that we give to little girls are all these skinny things that do not reflect an accurate body image. They are all Barbies who have the perfect hourglass figure, are blond and have blue eyes. There are an increasing number of dolls that are supposed to cater to children who are not white, so the skin color is now darker, but... the figure is still the same like this one or this one. What the fuck is going on, hell for me to even find these dolls on the Toys R Us website I had to look in the Ethnic dolls section. Why can't dolls all be placed in the same section? Back to my original point which is that we do not portray a range of body sizes for little girls so they grow up thinking they have to always be skinny. As has been posted at other places, your body shape is as much if not more a product of your genes than your diet or exercise and yet our children are taught that if they are not skinny than they are not valuable.

We can make dolls with a variety of skin shades and colors and yet they all have the same body shape, what the hell is this? That makes no sense. Women do not all look the same and not all guys are looking for the same body shape like this ad implies.



In case you can't read it, the ad says: Forget about it. Men’s preference will never change. Fit Light Yogurt.

What a load of shit. I find this women very sexy and damn the yogurt companies for saying otherwise.

*Brother Ali-"Forest Whitaker"