Here's my proposition.  We choose a reasonable weight and height.  Let's say around 5"5" and 140 pounds and work from there.  Let's stop young girls from starving themselves into palpitations and no periods.  Instead of already beautiful, normal sized women starving themselves into a size that only about 3% of American woman can even physically achieve, let's find a normal size and stick to it.  Instead of women having to fight down cravings to eat normal amounts of food, let's have them working to gain.  Doesn't that sound fun?  How many of you ladies would melt if gorgeous man came up to you and said, "You are sooo beautiful!!  I love how cuddly and warm and soft you body is.  Let's go out for steak."  I am in no way trying to make light of the pain that very thin people go through in regard to self esteem and smart remarks from others.  I think that if you are not happy with your body, fat or thin, it's a sad situation in which to be.  In speaking about the average sized person, we can reference the "Just My Size" commercials where they are working to take back the market by saying, "Hey, listen, THIS is the norm now!!"  We've all seen the internet letter going around about how Marilyn Monroe, one of the goddesses of our time by most people's standards, was a size 14.  If you were to suggest to a soap star that they fatten up to a 14, they'd either die of joy or of horror.  In many stores, size 14 is in the full figured section.   This is just insane.  We are praising the figures of starving people who have had their breasts artificially pumped up by bicycle pumps and their thin little faces injected with Botox to give them shape.  Those are not real people!  Those are manufactured people born from the imaginations of a species that is no longer in danger of extinction and has no need to glorify a healthy woman who looks like she could bear children without breaking in half!!  No, no, no, I'm NOT talking about women who are a nice size and shape, but want to have their breasts a little larger or smaller or their noses fixed or their tummies tucked.  Surgical enhancement for self-esteem is a wonderful thing if you can afford it.  I'm talking about the cartoonish, exaggerated forms that come from the minds of men who took childbirth away from midwives and made it something to be overseen by Godlike men and micromanaged with machinery in a place set up for sick people because Lord knows childbirth is dangerous and women sure can't handle it!  I'm talking about a society that creates an image of beauty that is NOT attainable for over 90% of the female American population!!  It's as though we WANT women to feel inadequate instead of the beautiful creatures that they are!

I know that men are very visually stimulated when it comes to sex and it is probably fun to have sex with someone that you can pick up and throw around with as much effort as it would take to move a blow up doll, but I would think it would be great to not ever get a pubic bone bruise or have those bony razors digging into your ribs or getting clipped by a collar bone or catching her in bad light and being able to make out her skeleton beneath her skin and having to stifle a scream with your fist.  I would think one would be afraid of possibly breaking someone who is painfully thin.   "I'll just have a salad."  How many people have said that when they didn't want to say it and heard it when they didn't want to hear it?   By all that is holy, woman, pick up a fork and tear into something wonderful without a moment of remorse or a second of guilt!  I'll bet a lot of women out there can't even remember a time when they could eat without guilt and shame being attached to the act!  Eating is a glorious, intoxicating, event of the senses that has become cloaked in such negativity and judgment that it has to be enjoyed, if at all, in secret and then followed by intense self-flagellation (look it up in the dictionary, dirty minds).   That is nothing less than a crime.  We now have 9-year-olds worried about exceeding 1000 calories a day because they want to look like Brittany.  We have men on Dr Phil's show telling their wives, the women who have borne their children, what cows they are because they don't look the same way they did when they met years before.  Hell, we have Dr Phil who made his wife, Robin, PROMISE before they conceived their child that she would not change from the slender, sexy, vivacious woman he married.  Guru, my ass!  We have women putting themselves through extreme self analysis, trying to dig up something, anything in their past or their sub-psyche that is a great pain they are numbing with food.  Hey, food tastes GOOD.  Food is comforting!  Food is FUN!  Food never lets you down!  Food can turn around the darkest of days!  Sometimes, I think, there really isn't any great secret about it!   I mean, aren't we the only self-involved, sick society to invent a disease where in a nation of plenty, women starve themselves into heart attacks because they are so terrified of being fat?  Where women will eat a perfectly fine meal because they are hungry then make themselves throw it up to try and keep from absorbing the calories?  What does this have to do with the soaps??   EVERYTHING.  Absolutely everything.

Most of us started watching soaps with a mom, a grandma or a babysitter.  For many, it's our first foray into "grown up" shows.  There we see pictures like those above as the essence of beauty.  There, we see commercial after commercial of beautiful women who have successfully managed themselves into a size 2 (that's a few sizes lower than Marilyn!) with this diet or that diet, with the small print of "results are not typical."  Women invest millions and millions of dollars into diet products and exercise programs that "when combined with a sensible diet and 8 glasses of water a day" will cause weight loss.  Well, duh!  Air is free and when combined with a sensible diet and 8 glasses of water a day will cause weight loss.  So yes, I hold soaps responsible for this disaster.  They are definitely a piece of the pie (that must not be eaten!  oh no!!)

Added on Oct 15, 2002:  !!  A friend just told me that Elizabeth Hurley is credited (poor choice of words) as saying that SHE WOULD KILL HERSELF if she were a size 16.  WTF?  So in essence, that's saying, "I'd rather DIE that look like you people!"  Go to hell, Hurley.  A hell in which you walk in the shoes of a 250 pound woman and know how she lives before you start casting your smart assed remarks around.  Bitch.

So enough of that and back to the soaps.

Go on.  Hit your back button.