I can’t pinpoint the exact moment that I became familiar with the term “Real Woman." A restrictive and insulting term created deliberately to strike down one group of our sisters, only in an attempt to validate another. If there are such things as "real women," who are the others that don’t fall into that category? Are they fake women? Fembots? Are these "real women" superior in some way ? If so, based on whose beauty standard? Is it based on how big her breasts are or how curvy her body is ? Whose definition of what a woman is are we following? Who is deciding what a woman should look like in order to be considered attractive or worthy of attention?
The answer is us. We do, ladies!!!! As women, we set this tone. Sure, the media intuits our hunger to judge and continues to give us the material. Putting out endless magazine issues that rate our cleavage and fill their pages with features on fad diets. It’s there because there’s demand for it. Don't you see? Every time we comment on some girl's weight or breast size we feed the stigma. Whether she is too big or too small, you are feeding into this ridiculous notion that there are real or unreal women out there. We are all guilty of this. So ask yourself, with all of these messages flying about , how are young women supposed to differentiate between what is “healthy” and what is not? I for one may not have a toned stomach, or perfect eyebrows, but I’m a real woman because I am alive and breathing. There is no such thing as one description of a woman. We don't fit into a perfect box . All of us feel the pains and pressures of wanting to be beautiful. So let's have a call to arms here and abandon all forms of body shaming. Let's rewrite the conversation . We start by reshaping our own perception of what is attractive. Then, instead of focusing on identifying with the idea of perfection, we highlight the versatility of beauty and how its shines through all of us.
