jennifer love hewitt makes the tabloids.

grrr. i'm so upset. if SHE'S fat, what chance do the rest of us have?!!?
jennifer love hewitt goes to the beach, playing with her family, whatever. a normal-person thing that even starlets like to do.
and some lame skeezebag takes pictures of her in her bikini, zeroes in on her cellulite, and calls her fat.
the woman is a size two. TWO!
i'm sure the photographer himself is thin as a rail.
gag.
if someone who is a size two can be called fat, then the rest of us have no hope at all.
i was laughing at the ludicrous statement about natalie in 'love actually' - the other women call her "the chubby girl." hugh grant's eyebrows shoot up and he goes, "oooo, would we call her chubby?" surprised at anyone thinking her to be the least bit chubby. and honestly, she's probably a size nine - maybe an eleven. and she's beautiful. way more beautiful than the woman who called her chubby. it was kind of funny - because it was so obviously ridiculous, the way women think about other women.
it's not even close to funny when it happens in real life. especially to someone who is so so so thin as jennifer love hewitt. it's just gross.
it's gross that we buy into a society that sets a really rigid parameter for beautiful and gawks at those who don't fit its most stringent requirements.
it's gross that, instead of looking for beauty, we look for ugliness. why do we see magazines with zoomed-in cellulite circled in bright yellow lines? why didn't the photographer show jennifer's relaxed smile as she enjoyed a refreshing day at the beach, her gorgeous figure, or her lovely hair?
is it because we want to see one of the perfect ones as less-than-perfect? because if they're imperfect, they have no right to lord it over the rest of us?
well, they don't have that right at all anyway. but we give it to them, we welcome it - we worship the set standard of beauty and close our eyes to the magnificent panorama of loveliness that is everywhere.
instead of tearing down beautiful people for not being skin-and-bone perfect, we need to see that more people are beautiful than we ever thought.
beauty is so so so much wider than we allow.
one guy wrote about jennifer love hewitt: "unless she's pregnant, she's a little bit bigger than i like my starlets to be."
that's disgusting.
he sounds like he's at mcdonalds, expecting his fries to be the same in l.a. as they are in pei. for mcdonalds - sure, that's how we want it - predictable, so we can decide what we like and stick with it.
but people are so much more than fast food. people shouldn't be commodified like that, as if you can put your quarter in the slot and out pops a cookie-cutter movie star according to your preferred and expected specifications.
people are whole-package, one-of-a-kind deals that God makes uniquely. unlike our society, God loves variety. He makes stars of every shape and size and puts them in the sky. He doesn't tell the southern cross to be the north star, or make the whole sky a copy-cat of big dippers. there are thousands of types of trees, millions of different bugs, hundreds of beautiful butterflies, a million changes of sunset. nature is gorgeous. and no two people are completely identical.
trying to squish a whole world of beautiful women into one size and one shape is just wrong.

think of all the beauty we will lose if we succeed.
think of all the beauty we lose as we try to make ourselves into that camazotz-nightmare.

look for it. try to find 'beautiful' in the unexpected. email me or post your replies with what you find. really.