A Letter to Zara From My Fat Arms

Dear Zara,

I am a loyal customer. One who often makes purchases from your online store as well as the high street. I mostly buy knitwear, but occasionally dresses and accessories as well. Of course I understand that clothing sizing isn't always fair, but I believe that can change with your help.

Here's the deal - I can't fit into your size L shirts. My big ol' arms straight-up can't squeeze in. It's like a hulk situation and I could burst through the seams at any minute. How is that possible? My arms are in perfect proportion to the rest of my body which fits in the shirt. I can button the buttons with room to spare, but I can't bend at the elbow. Whose body looks like that? Big torso, tiny arms? Give me one real-life example! It's clearly not me.

When I posted my angst on Twitter I was reassured by one of your agents that a Zara size L equates to a 12 and that it should fit; thus adding insult to injury. Not only am I too fat to fit into said shirt, but now my actual size was being questioned by the very distributor who set me up for this crushing failure. It's all too much. 

I'll have you know that I am a perfect size UK12/US8. My measurements are 36-28-36, a mere 4 inches away from being a brick house. Only in a parallel universe should this be considered "large." Not that I object to being labeled as such. My issue is how your sizing makes people feel who shop at your stores who are bigger, but less body confident than me.

There are so many people you are excluding with your microscopic sizes. Think about it! Adele and Lena Dunham can't shop at your stores. Ella Henderson and Rebel Wilson probably can't even buy socks at Zara and that's ridiculous. With the average size in the UK being a 16 and a 14 in the USA why are you limiting your clientele in this way? You're missing out!

I am a young, successful, marginally attractive woman. I go on holidays to places like The Maldives and Nice. I have an expensive haircut and get facials. I am fancy, dammit! I am who you want to see walking down the street with huge Zara bags. But I can't. Because your bags are bigger than your bloody clothes. Curses!

Just for fun I compared your shirt to some of the others in my wardrobe and the results are astounding. Your size L shirt was significantly smaller than size M button-down shirts from both Topshop and Primark. If you want to go high class, your top was also miniature compared to tops from the equally upscale American retailer, Express. When I compared your shirt to one created by legendary designer Diane Von Furstenberg, her size L garment was a good 2 inches bigger than yours in the arms and the body. Explain yourself!

By making your clothes so small you are creating anxiety in the minds of women everywhere. You are undermining our body confidence, which at times is shaky at best. I know I'm not obese, but for a crushing second I felt I was and immediately had to take a photo of myself in my underwear to reassure myself. This is not the solution and is wildly impractical. But I just can't understand how can I be a size M in every other store in the world, but not even fit into your size L.

Something is wrong. Your system is broken. We fancy, important, curve-having women want to buy your clothes. Can you please create them in sizes we can wear?

Sincerely,

Size 12  

Fifty Shades of Sex Policing

So I haven't seen the movie yet, and I'm sure as hell not paying to see it, but I have read the piss-poor book on which the film was based, so I think I have the right to an opinion.

For the last two weeks or so I've been seeing blog after blog after article posted on social media as well as world news sites condemning Fifty Shades of Grey for the message it's sending to young women about what love and sex is. Do these people not understand that there was a book, a book that most of these young women have read and that their protests are a little late? Believe me, anything that a film company can distribute with the rating R isn't half as twisted as the stuff we can think up in our powerful, wonderful imaginations.

Fifty Shades is an incredibly poorly written account of a young woman delving into her sexuality, love and a pretty fancy lifestyle. It's not torture-porn. I fully believe that anything consensual between lovers is A-OK. When I was experimenting sexually in my first relationships I used handcuffs and ties and was the benefactor and beneficiary of the occasional spanking. I cried for attention and emotionally manipulated my partner. I wasn't a depraved sexual pervert, I was in love; crazy, burning, scarring, tortured love and it was incredible and awful at the same time.

People do all kinds of things in and out of bed to please their partners and, if you've read the shit-storm of a book you'll know that Ana, as well as her "inner goddess" were really into Christian and his red room of cliches. Both characters were adults and both knew what they were getting into. There was a written contract, for Christ sake. No nasty surprises were lurking, it was all very open, measured and clinical. 

This kind of criticism of Fifty Shades sounds a lot like slut shaming to me. "Good girls don't do that kind of thing." "Poor Ana allowed herself to be corrupted by this man." "Protect your daughters..." From what exactly? From experimenting safely with their partner? From exploring erotic fantasies? From potentially finding a fulfilling relationship that isn't exactly like a Disney fairytale? Now I know I'm giving this film too much credit, but so are its critics. There are hundreds of films I can think of that have more potential for damage than this one, yet Dr. Grossman actually says this in her blog: "Excluding hard pornography, I believe Hollywood has never produced a film so hazardous to young women." That's right, a doctor and a woman said that. Sigh.

Let's think back a few years to the film The Secretary (2002), a film I think portrays BDSM in a much more quiet and sinister way than Fifty Shades. In this film Ed, the male lead also controls Lee, the female but through their sexual relationship, though potentially violent and humiliating to the outside world, it is actually safe and transformative to the psychologically damaged Lee. This film was not shouted down as being pornographic or damaging despite the humiliation and control exhibited by Ed. Spoiler alert: Lee becomes so obsessed with Ed that she sits at his desk waiting for him for days, not even leaving to use the toilet. To my recollection Ana never pisses all over herself in desperation in Fifty Shades, so why all the fuss?

Most likely publicity and recognition. People are all trying to jump on this juggernaut to get a piece of the action. It's a money making machine and we are all desperate to give it an MOT. But let's face it, it's out there, it's been out there and the only harmful thing about it is its horrible use of grammar and repetitive metaphors. The same middle-aged women who were flicking their beans to the book are shouting down the film. We all know this book and film are not going to make young women everywhere want to be pooped on. It's not going to make young men out there everywhere want to beat their partners, but if history has taught us anything it's that the more the status quo dislikes something the more likely the youngens are to try it. So let's stop giving this topic so much negative attention.

Policing young women's bedrooms and shaming them for wanting to try new things is what's damaging. So let's all give it a rest. Regrettably we've all read the book and most likely all already coerced our poor partners into giving us a good spanking. We women aren't as weak as these critics would like to think. We have the power to control what happens to our bodies and ourselves, but some of us occasionally like to give the control over to someone else and that's OK.

I get it for the articles

Let it be known that I am not the biggest Sports Illustrated fan. Mostly because I'm not a sports fan, but secondly because, since I was a child, their infamous Swimsuit Issue has given me body insecurity like nothing else could. Year after year the magazines would pile up at my childhood home and I was unable to resist peeling back the cover to see what was inside, or rather who was inside.

The Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated is objectifying women, let's not pretend it has any literary value. There is no reason for those women to decorate those pages rolling about in the sand in their bikinis, as unlike in women's magazines they're not actually selling anything. Their soul purpose is for the titillation of the subscriber. The models are literally objects to be admired and nothing more. In fact, the issue's inception came about as a way to sell magazines during a particularly slow month when the motivation was less about the content and more about pushing sales. I mean, who cares about articles when there's scarcely dressed women inside?

I get it, sex sells and the women featured in the Swimsuit Issue are nothing if not sexy. However, as a woman I can't help but wonder what value this magzine actually has, as all it seems to do is perpetuate a very specific type of beauty. A very singular idea of sexy. Since 1964 the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue has featured stunningly beautiful women modeling swimwear, but they've always been of a similar shape, size and even color. Tyra Banks was the first black cover girl and that wasn't until 1997, 33 years after the first issue went to print.What a shame.

However, over recent years Sports Illustrated has began to widen the scope, ever so slightly of what they consider beautiful by allowing Kate Upton to grace their cover for the past two years running. Yes she's still blonde and yes she's still a size 8US/10UK, but in the modeling world that's plus sized. So Ms. Upton is a slightly different size of beauty and that's progress. Now I'll never be a subscriber to this publication, but I always give credit where it's due and I have to admit, that if I saw Kate's soft, curvacious body on the cover of my dad's magazines as a kid, I might have felt more positively about what was going on underneath my own clothes. 

Kate Upton has changed the conversation. Especially about what men find attractive, what kind of a woman men want to look at and what will get them to open their wallets. As a result Sports Illustrated is being patted on the back again for featuring a plus size woman in their most recent Swimsuit Edition. Joining Kate Upton in the 2015 issue, Ashley Graham is all set to break the internet with her shoot weighing in at a size 14US/16UK. Each nation's average, I'd like to point out. Graham is an accurate representation of what most women look like in the nations that buy the most issues of this magazine, so it's about time that she and other women who have other body types joined the Heidi Klums and the Rebecca Romijns on the sandy pages of Sports Illustrated.

We need to change the conversation about beauty because it's not going away. Modifications need to happen. Every size, every color and every shape is beautiful. But it's going to take a lot more than the voice of this blogger to change the beauty narrative. We need more body types to be visible and accessible to young women, so they can feel more comfortable in their own skin. We need more publications pushing a body-positive initiative and I never thought I'd say this, but some magazines could learn a thing or two from Sports Illustrated. 

Mr. Mom Rules

I am not a parent. I have no kids and I probably never will, but parenty-type things are still part of my world. Diaper commercials, screaming children on public transportation and being mowed down and removed forcibly from the pavement by women with prams...I got that shit.

I usually don't get involved in parenty-type things because they are none of my concern. What the hell do I care if the shampoo is tearless? What's wrong with a little crying? WTF else do babies do anyway? Why should bathtime be any different? I'd be all about tearFUL shampoo. I mean, toughen up kid, it only gets worse. See...I obviously don't get it and should never be allowed a human baby of my own.

But I want to weigh in on this...commercial? I mean what is it advertising anyway? That there is a crazy underworld where people with babies fight each other? Is it a public service announcement? If so what is it announcing? That people with new babies are all secretly aggressive douchebags? Or is this just one of those parenty-type things that I just don't understand?

I watched it until the end because I wanted to know the message. I wanted to know why all of these people with small babies were being mean to each other and judging each other and why they wanted us non-baby-havng people to see this really unattractive part of parenting. And then the ad/announcement finished and the tagline appeared: 'Welcome to the Sisterhood of Motherhood.'

What the fresh hell? So if I ever do become pregnant, I have not only the joy of obliterating my vagina to the point of eternal incontinence with another human's head, but I then have to worry about a bunch of asshats who, instead of watching Judge Judy and icing their vaginas with me, will be judging me and my decision to not feed straight from the boob? Sounds terrible. But wait! All is not lost! If your kid is in mortal peril these people who have so much to say about how you raise your kid won't all let it die. Got it.

This ad/announcement is not helpful to current parents either. My main issue is that there are a variety of 'types' of mother portrayed here; 'yoga mom', 'business mom', 'cuddling mom', 'lesbian mom who is also black mom' (nice twofer), 'breastfeeding mom', 'bottle-wielding mom', etc. They are all terrible, of course. All bitchy, and none foster or support any difference outside their own little mommy-communities, but at least this ad/service is acknowledging that there are different types of mothers. However, the piss-poor pool of dads in this work of mediocrity is embarrassing.

The only dad I see is 'J Crew dad' and I find it offensive. This portrayal of fathers as one dimensional supporting characters to the main cast of mothers is not helpful and it's fucking sexist. Why are the men only hanging out together? I know a lot of men who'd be hanging with the yoga moms or the lesbian black moms. They wouldn't all be huddled together in one little group, because men have different personalities and interests besides hanging with other men. Surprise! I want 'biker dad,' 'tattooed dad,' 'hipster dad,' 'business dad,' 'gay dad,' 'hippie dad.' I want all the dads! 

We need to recognize that the number of stay-at-home dads has quadrupled in the last 25 years (Dailey 14) and celebrate that. It's insulting that ad/announcements like these still paint a picture that these men are like fucking unicorns and that it's in any way appropriate for them to be isolated from the moms. Parents need to get with the inclusivity. Classes with titles like 'Mommy and Me' wit their crazy gender bias need to staaahp because the more we as a society paint this picture of men who choose to parent as feminized and rare, the harder it will be for us ladies to break the shit out of that glass ceiling.

We need help. From men and men are helping! Men are killing it in the parenting department. Men are choosing to support their families by letting their badass ladies pay the bills while they look after the kids and that is fucking awesome. Let's give these men bigger parts, more faces and more choices.

At first I appreciated that men were even included in the ad/service at all which is sad. But then that sad got trumped by their shitty, shitty tagline. Let's see it again - 'Welcome to the Sisterhood of Motherhood?' So. Much. Gendering. Why? Why not 'Welcome to the Community of Parenting' instead? BOOM! I just rewrote your damn slogan whoever you are that created this diaper filler. You're welcome. It's now an inclusive message that actually makes much more sense combined with your crappy, unhelpful campaign.

I Choose to Remember

Holocaust remembrance day in the UK was January 27th and this year also marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. That's a pretty big deal. But here in the UK we had our chief news network, the BBC asking the question on Twitter 'Is the time coming to lay the Holocaust to rest?' The answer? No it isn't.

When do we ever lay history to rest? That's what makes it history. The systematic killing of over 11 million people; Jews, homosexuals, communists, disabled and anyone who dared to speak against Hitler is a dark blemish on history that needs to be dissected, mourned and remembered. I can't fathom this question being asked about any other time in history. Can you? 

I wasn't strolling mournfully round the Killing Fields of Cambodia thinking to myself: 'jeez, they should really get over this genocide thing. It was ages ago.' Because that's fucking ridiculous and incredibly disrespectful and offensive. We need to remember these horrible times in history so that they are not repeated, but also so we can see how far we've moved forward as humans and be proud of that.

I wanted to post something on my Facebook wall last Tuesday to mark the day. But I didn't. Facebook can be a bit of a scary place for voicing political or religious views. However, that had never stopped me before. What is making me more cautious now is that there is a faint whiff of intolerance on Facebook that I started to smell last summer, with the heightened tensions between Israel and Palestine and has gotten only stronger since the recent terrorist attack in Paris.

Instead of posting I downloaded Night by Elie Weisel and promised myself I'd read it on my trip to Scotland the following day. I understand that this book is compulsory reading in many American schools, but it wasn't in mine. In fact, all we ever learned about WWII was how the Americans saved everyone. My knowledge of the Holocaust was gained through synagogue and from the mouths of survivors.

Every Holocaust Remembrance day in the USA, which takes place in the Spring, my family and I would go to a special service and there would always be a speaker, a survivor. This particular year I'm remembering there was a violinist. I wish I could recall his name, but I remember his face; so kind, but very intense, like his thoughts were trying to escape through his eyes. He told us how he'd been taken to Bergen-Belsen  with his family, but only he survived. After several months in the camp he was approached by a guard one night who asked him what he used to do. 'I am a violinist' he replied. A few nights later he was summoned by this same guard and transported by car to a building a few miles away and asked to wait with three other men.

After waiting for what seemed like an eternity the guard called all of the men into a room and there sat Hitler. Just feet away from him, he cold smell his cologne. The men were lined up and the first man was presented with a violin. Hitler asked him to play something. The first man began playing something slow and melodic, I believe it was Handel. Hitler shook his head and the guard lifted his gun and shot the man in the face. His body fell the the floor like a sack of turnips and the blood began to pool at the other men's feet. The guard pried the violin out of the dead man's hands and passed it to the next in line. The second man artempted to play, but his hands were shaking so severely that he too was shot directly in the face by the guard in a mater of minutes.

By this time, the man telling the story had tears rolling down his cheeks and his gaze was focused somewhere very far away, out of that room and into another life. Finally, he continued, it was his turn to play and to his horror, his mind went blank. The blood-soaked violin was placed in his hands but he couldn't remember what to do with it. His beloved instrument felt leaden and foreign in his hands. The guard shouted at him and before he even understood what was happening; his hands, totally independently began to play The Blue Danube.

In the room where I was sat listening to this story, the man hummed a bit for us then, so we could recognize the tune. A lot of people chuckled, because this was such a simple melody and was used so often in cartoons that even I understood and laughed. Hitler let the man play on for what felt to him like such a long time, but it couldn't have been because the song wasn't over. He called over the guard and whispered something to him. The man with the violin closed his eyes and began to pray. The guard unholstered his pistol again, strode over to him-the man telling the story, the man with the possessed fingers, the man who had watched the execution of his wife and child, the man who then heard the guard shoot the man standing next to him, spraying his own face with blood and brain matter. He didn't look, he didn't stop, he just kept playing.

I will never forget that story. I will never forget that man and no, I don't think it's time that his story was laid to rest. When I turned that last page in Night it never occurred to me that Elie's story was over and we should all just let it go. He's still alive, you know. As are thousands of other survivors who tell their stories and share their pain and their lives with us. How dare anyone say that we should put their stories to rest? That we should not acknowledge their horrific experiences with somber ceremony. But more importantly that we should not celebrate the miraculous fact that they survived. Against all odds and against all reason they survived.