Christina Hendricks: 5'7"
INTERESTING!!! Put “warning labels” on pics that have been airbrushed, and start using buxom models. Here, here!
Here’s one article from the BBC that makes a great point: “Identifying any particular body shape as the ideal one is fraught with difficulty and can just add to female anxiety. Hendricks has a much more realistic figure than many models, but women looking to match it will end up falling short.”
And another article here, with bits below.
Role model: Mad Men actress Christina Hendricks is famed for her hourglass figure.
All women should aspire to be a size 14 with buxom, hourglass figures, the new equalities minister claims.
They must not be made to feel inadequate by stick-thin models staring out of advertising billboards and magazines.
Instead, they should regard curvaceous women such as Christina Hendricks, star of the TV series Mad Men, as their ultimate role models, Lynne Featherstone said.
The Liberal Democrat minister described the actress, who plays Joan Holloway in the popular American drama set in the 1960s, as ‘absolutely fabulous’.
She said that too often, women were made to feel wretched about their size as they were constantly comparing themselves with ‘unattainable’ figures of celebrities and models.
This posed a ‘significant risk to the physical and mental health of young people’ she added, and in the worst cases could lead to anorexia and bulimia.
By contrast the minister wants buxom women such as Christina Hendricks become increasingly dominant in the fashion and advertising industry.
‘Christina Hendricks is absolutely fabulous. We need more of these role models,’ she added.
Later this year the minister will put pressure on magazine editors and advertisers not to use skinny models.
She also wants all airbrushed photographs to carry a health warning either as a kitemark or in small print just underneath the picture.
Lynne Featherstone
This would advise people that model or celebrity’s figure was not realistic and that it had been slimmed-down or retouched to accentuate certain features.
The minister, who was voted Parliament’s most attractive MP earlier this year, added: ‘I am very keen that children and young women should be informed about airbrushing so they don’t fall victim to looking at an image and thinking that anyone can have a 12-inch waist.
‘It’s so not possible. Advertisers and magazine editors have a right to publish what they choose, but women and girls also have a right to feel comfortable in their own bodies.
‘At the moment they are being denied that.’
She added: ‘All women have felt that pressure of having to conform to an unrealistic stereotype, which plagues them their whole life.
‘It’s not just the immediate harm, it’s something that lasts a lifetime.
‘Young girls are under intense pressure the whole time. I was a young girl, many moons ago.
‘By no means are we excluding men. The pressure is on everyone to look perfect.
She said that by using airbrushed photos, magazine editors and advertisers were regularly breaching their codes of conduct by misleading people and potentially causing harm to children.
‘Magazines regularly mislead their readers by publishing distorted images that have been secretly airbrushed and altered.
‘Likewise the advertising standards code says no advert should place children at risk of mental, physical or moral harm, but adverts do contain airbrushed images of unattainable beauty in magazines aimed at young teenagers.’
Earlier this year Christina Hendricks, the minister’s role model, was named Esquire magazine’s sexiest woman in the world.
Since the Mad Men series was first screened on BBC4 two years ago she has been credited with making women feel good about their curves.
Read more here.
Other also read:
Is Britain’s size 14 the same as ours? I understand his concern about stick-thin models setting the bar for women, but size 14? Seems we have two competing evils here, emaciated and obese.
Dear Robert- I am a size 14 and not at all obese. Not even by the doctors definition. And I still get a decent amount of male attention so sz 14 must not be that grotesque in everyones eyes.
Size 14 isn’t obese for pete’s sake! It’s that exact additude that is so destructive. Labelling a woman “obese” is just plain rotten to start with. And then making out that a size 14 woman is unnacceptable is downright stupid. When is our society going to move beyond having to have someone to hate and degrade? Chinese, Irish, Blacks, Jews… now “obese” people ~ we always have to have a “group” of people we can look down on, don’t we?
A person has no control over his/her race, but “fatness” is totally within one’s control. Being fat is the same a choosing to be lazy or Republican.
I think stereo-typing in either direction is a bad thing. Since some people think obese is a “hate” word I will say this. If my wife needed to wear size 14 clothes she would be fat; her bone structure is not meant to support a size 14 body. Women and men should both be taught to keep themselves fit and healthy and more importantly…..virtuous.
Weston, you have said what needed to be said, and many have felt like saying, but for whatever reason, have not. We have those people who want our females to look like skeletons with skin or, at the opposite extreme, will not be satisfied unless all females are a size 40(or more). Rosie O’Donnell, M’Onique, and Camryn Manheim have even put down other women for NOT being fat, which is the same as putting down someone for being fat.
That blue dress is definitely not modest. That part of her image is certainly not good role modeling!
Evidently, a size 14 in the UK is a size 12 in the USA: http://www.frenchfriends.info/practical_travel/clothing_size_conversions
I’m over six feet tall….so a size 12 or size 14 would fit on my frame and I wouldn’t look obese.
I think the MP’s point is that a size 0 isn’t real.
As if just by gaining a few pounds, all women could have an amazing hourglass figure. Sometimes, gaining weight just means we’ll continue to have a tiny, nearly non existent chest, a bulge of fat around our middles that hangs down when we lean over and outsized thighs and backside so that we’re shaped like a “lovely” pear. Everyone is different and weight gain is not necessarily something to recommend. If only (!) I could just suddenly be more “womanly” if I put another 20 p0unds. How nice that would be! AS they say: dream on.
LOL!!! So true, Lisa. SO TRUE!!! DREAM ON! Or bring out the ice cream.
I know that for a woman to be a ‘plus size model’, she has to work out JUST AS MUCH as a ‘bathing suit’ model. Those size 14 pounds have to all be in the right areas, as you say. Muffin tops need not apply!
Weight gain actually is something that I think needs to be recommended to a LOT of young women. Along with some added weight, though, these women need to add some physical activity or work out. The goal for most women is a dress size or weight rather than a healthy body. I can be an unhealthy size 4 and look fabulous but be extremely unhealthy, weak, sedentary and otherwise unfit or I can exercise and eat well and be a very healthy size 8-10. It’s not all about your weight or dress size but that is the only thing most people focus on and I think that does women a great disservice. Even women need to be physically active.
I agree wholeheartedly, Mary! I saw an article recently that charted the increase in obesity over the past couple of decades. Television, video games, online social media…reminds me of that part in the movie Wall-E where everyone was obese and sitting in their moving chairs with monitors in front of their faces.
[...] just as bad as an airbrusher. But I would like to hear more about what you have to say about those health warnings. You know who else should hear about them? Mr. David [...]