Real Women

I love Whoopie Goldberg and all that she represents which is so not what our society considers beautiful or popular.  Here is a woman who with all of her differences and who admits she is not the picutre of beauty who becomes successful beyond what most of us have.  To me she is beautiful in her own right and to me she is an amazing person who has managned to live her life without buying into the stereotypes of what a famous person should do say or be like.  In fact she is such a force that few women can say they have done what she has done.  She has been as stand up comedian, She was on Hollywood Squares (likely the first Black person) and she has been an actree in movies like "The Color Purple" and "Carina Carina" where she plays a maid who ends up in love with a whitle man who had hired her and fell in love with her.  Now she is a lead host in The View and is the only person on a panel of women who dresses out of the box and wears these outfits that one would think a producer might protest yet she has expressed her style in her own way with no interventions and protests even from people like Barbara Walters who was the big force behind The View.  In fact she was well liked by Barbara.  When Whoopie played in the color purple and they got to the scene where she confronted her abusive husband who she was originally sold to it was like a magical momemt and one that we all wish we could confront if we were in that same situation.  Whoope once said about acting work: "if you cannot get the gig you want take the one you can get".  She was willing to do many things including playing a "valley girl" on stage and made herself consummable by being willig to do that and much more.  I remember her being on Hollywood Squares with a gay male whom I cannot recall his name and between them they rocked the show out and were both the reason I watched it as a young person.  Paul Lynde!  That was his name.

With all this said I truly want to talk to women who don't fit the mold of either Hollywood, Vogue, Banana Republic or the Gap.  Once again after seeing the movie "Advanced Style" about older women who became style icons in New York seeing thinking about Whoopie makes me smile because as hard as Vogue has tried to make people believe that beautiful women are young and a size 4 women like these have broken that myth apart and blown it right out ot the box of what stylish is.  Thses women and many others are finally making the statement that fashion is not limited to what the most popular magazines and shows on TV are selling us.  In fact the average woman's size is a 14 and that is average.  It doesn ot mean that women cannot be beautiful at any size but the presssure to be a certain kind of woman to be considered valuable and pretty is awful and against the grain of what the truth is about women.  We are still not embracing the average woman and in fact the magazine BBW, Big Beautiful Women was not successful and to this day there is not a magazine I know of that represetns the real woman.  Although there are a couple of stores for women starting at size 14 and up there should not be a reason to seperate these women from others.  There should be garments in all the sizes in all the stores and the fact that there isn't makes a statement of shame towards women who are fuller and happen to have more curves.

I will never forget my personal quest with clothing for my daughters.  Both are taller than average and both were average sized kids but every store I went to there was a struggle to find things in their size that was appropriate for little girls.  I could see the reaction on the faces of the slim store clerks and at one point I recall asking why they only catered to think girls.  Of course all I got back was this mortified look of disgust and I am sure I embarrassed my kids at least one or two times.  My girls are those women of today like Whoopie and Oprah.  They are 5" 8" and one is a size 10 shoe.  They are the real women of the world like the ones we see every day yet we are still catering the other women and ignoring the real girl.  My daughters make me so proud because they have found their place in a world that defines pretty in a way that is not aligned with them.  I am proud of all women that are like my daughters.  The short ones, the tall ones, the ones who make their own style and don't apologize for it or get in the back seat about it.  Actresses and women like Queen Latifa have broken the mold and made the statement that women mostly look like my daughters and not like that woman on the cover of Elle.

One of my favorite moives about fashion is The Devil Wears Prada with Meryl Streep.  In the movie Anne Hathaway plays a girl who knows nothing about style but ends up getting hired by Streep as a secretary/assistant to her.  As the movie progressed Anne becomes the girl that was not size 4 who was transformed into a sylish assistant in Chanel and Prada.  But in the end she realizes what a price she was paying to be this high powered, face paced personal assistant to the editor of the magazine that was mimicking Vogue and she walks away from all of it.  Despite the jealousy and the other disapprovals she endured in the movie she madea  point and that was that one can be fashionable even if you don't fit the mold.  In the final scene she walks out of the limo and goes in the other direction oppposite Streep and throws her cell phone into a pond.

I love movies like this because it confirms the obvious.  The women who are making this world go around don't look like the ones we see in magazines or TV commercials.