Being Real Sucks

I give up.

That's it. I simply give up.

It all started with an innocent flipping through a silly gossip magazine and coming across pictures and a scanty article on the Victoria Secret models diet secrets, which includes juice fasts, eating for blood type and eliminating all intake of liquids and solids for 8 hours straight. I suspected as a reasonable person that this was dangerous, so I casually consulted a health care professional, she being my best friend who had come over for dinner one night, on the health implications of no solids or liquids in the amount of time that is equivalent to a North American working day. She confirmed that the effects of dehydration of this type includes all the usual consequences, such as light-headedness, weakness and death.

Fair enough. We're not all going to be lingerie models, we shouldn't all be lingerie models, and a lot of us wouldn't accept millions of dollars in exchange for that kind of punishment.

Then I came across an online article which states that H & M is computer generating their perfect models. We've all heard about air-brushing and trimming curves in pictures to 'enhance' models, but H & M is taking it one step farther by actually designing these perfect 10s and then pasting clothes on them. It's like a sick virtual online dress up party.

At this point, I'm about ready to put my head in the oven with a platter of Christmas cookies.

So it's not news to me that the fashion industry is all about making me feel bad about my body in an effort to increase my appetite for expensive clothes to compensate for my lack of physical perfection. What's really killing me is the idea that competition to be the body beautiful is so fierce that even real people can't meet the standards anymore.

H & M is insisting that they don't want to push perfect body image-they simply want to show off the clothes. If that was the case, the clothes should really speak for themselves, and possibly should be hung on hangers, unless those hangers need to be further digitally enhanced for not being thin enough.

The virtual world has already dashed the hopes of lots of real women. The constant competition with virtual girlfriends in countries like Japan, the constant competition with online games for attention from real boyfriends when we're lucky enough to have them, the constant threat of Facebook seekers looking to re-connect with exes and now computer generated goddesses. It's no wonder that I want to give up.

People will say that a real person can't be replaced- but we're being replaced all of the time. If it's not for a virtual person connecting online, it's for a computer generated image which has no place in reality. Being real sucks.

I'm going now to pick up a book. Made with paper.