Mamamia's Body Positive Challenge

Are you sick of seeing women who look nothing like you in magazines and on shopping websites? Us too. So let’s put our bodies where our mouths are (or something) and change this shit up.

As part of our Body Positive push on Mamamia, we’re looking for real life women (as opposed to the computer enhanced fake images we’re all surrounded by) to be photographed for Mamamia.

If you live in Sydney, can get yourself to the CBD for a few hours on a weekday and want to help us shake up the way women are portrayed in the media, in fashion and online, please send some images of yourself and your dress, pants & top sizes (no, it’s not a beauty contest, we just want to make sure we select a diverse enough mix of women to shoot) to: jasmine@mamamia.com.au.

Body positive. It’s what we’re all about at Mamamia….

What is a woman *supposed* to look like?

You.

There is no one-way to look.

We're all different.

Although sometimes that’s hard to believe.

The way women are portrayed in the media is not pretty - or rather, it's ridiculously pretty. ONLY pretty. And these days, impossibly pretty. Literally.

The types of women we see in fashion, advertising and magazines (tall, thin, usually blonde and anglo-saxon) comprise maybe 0.0005% of the population.

And then even this teeny, tiny fraction of women are deemed not good enough, needing to be 'improved' with photoshop.

We can live with the fact we’re not Helena Christensen. But don’t you think it’s majorly messed up that even Helena Christensen (whenever she appears in print) is not Helena Christensen?

That’s not right.

When we ran the Mamamia Body Image Survey last year, only one in five respondents told us they were happy with the way they currently look.

Nearly a quarter of respondents told us that they couldn’t stand the way they look naked.

When we asked what impact body image had on their day-to-day life, 75 per cent of women said they had not worn certain clothes due to poor body image.

Is that good enough?

Absolutely not.

Instead of shouting about the fact there's something wrong with the media, we overwhelmingly turn our criticism inward and decide there's something wrong with us.

We're too fat, too thin, too tall, too short, too round, too straight, too old, too wrinkly, too freckled, too cellulite-y, too stretch-marked, too pale, too dark, too pigmented.....

And then we have surgery or contemplate it, we have botox, we go on ridiculous diets, we over-eat, we get depressed, we feel like crap.

How is any of this OK?

Advertising doesn’t just sell us products. It tells us who we are. It tells us what’s desirable. What’s NORMAL.

But is this normal?

Is this real?

Imagine if the world was full of pictures of naked men – with photoshopped penises -on billboards and the sides of buses. Do you think normal men might look down at their natural trouser snake and feel a little…. deflated?

Because that’s exactly what it’s like to be a woman in today’s media landscape.

What does it mean when a 13-year-old girl is not just considered an adult but the ideal physical representation of a woman?

And when the only body type that’s being reflected to us as ideal is size 6 and close to 6 foot tall?

New mothers are constantly guilted by the media into erasing every physical sign THAT THEY JUST GAVE BIRTH TO A HUMAN.

You know what the human body looks like after giving birth? It still looks pregnant. Like this.

And this.

Bodies don’t bounce back after birth.

These are the untouched, unfake breasts of a 33-year-old woman who has breast fed two children.

This is what many many women see when we look in the mirror. And other than the mirror, it's extraordinarily rare to see other real boobs.

If there were more real boobs depicted in popular culture, perhaps more women would be happier with what they had.

Women are sick of being lied to.

We’re sick of looking at images of people who don’t exist.

We’re sick of being told – by photographers and editors and advertisers – that even the most beautiful women in the world are themselves not good enough and in need of (often) drastic airbrushing.

We’re sick of looking at images of people who don’t exist.

Literally, there are NO women in mainstream print media and advertising who are human.

What's up with that?

And why do we so passively accept it?

Well here at Mamamia, we don't.

We want to see more images like this.

This.

And this.

Tags: body-image

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