Today Meagan Rodriguez is a healthy personal-fitness trainer who stays in shape by exercising and eating right. But when she was in high school, she struggled mightily with bulimia, an eating disorder in which sufferers binge and purge. She got down to 103 pounds on her lithe 5-foot-6 frame. Now 20, she has the benefit of hindsight and can say with certainty that part of what contributed to her illness was a larger society that demanded she look a certain way to be considered adequate and desirable. “It was the Victoria's Secret models,” she recalls. “Everybody was skinny, everybody was perfect. I wanted desperately to look like those girls, but I would look in the mirror and think I was fat. What you don't take into consideration is that everyone has different genetics, everyone has a different body structure.” What Rodriguez was reacting to is a media culture - TV shows, magazines, commercials, runways - that says women must conform to a thin, perfect ideal to be judged attractive and even normal. But some say there are a few chinks appearing in this judgmental cultural wallpaper, a growing mini-trend that says women should accept and embrace their bodies just as they are. “It's more than a mini-trend, it's huge,” avows Denise Brodey, editor-in-chief of Fitness magazine, a glossy that devotes every issue to the concept of healthy self-acceptance. “Millions of women are posting images of their real bodies online, they're blogging about it, they're celebrating reality. I think it's kind of a perfect storm.” An article in the May magazine explores the recent viral trend in the female blogs and posts that say to hell with struggling to match the Gisele Bundchens of the world. One such online community even celebrates the post-pregnancy body. “Women feel under assault from images that don't look anything like them, and the online community offers an opportunity to say, `There is nothing wrong with having an average body,'.” Suzanne Reisman, 32, founder of BlogHer.com, a feminist blog, told the magazine. Probably the start of the mini-trend can be traced back to 2004, when Dove launched its Campaign for Real Beauty advertising campaign that sought to widen the definition of beauty and dispel stereotyped ideas about women's bodies. The campaign was triggered by a global study that found only 2 percent of women around the world describe themselves as beautiful, and a full 81 percent of women in the U.S. strongly agree that the media have set an unrealistic standard of beauty that few women can achieve. The campaign uses ordinary women of all sizes and shapes - not models - to hawk Dove products. (Including, it must be said, products like firming creams, which seems to argue against the notion of accepting your body the way it is.) “I'm proud to say we have received tremendous feedback and an overwhelmingly positive response from women of all ages and nationalities,” says Kathy O'Brien, Dove marketing director. “Nearly 4.5 million people from around the world have visited campaignforrealbeauty.com and have shared words of encouragement supporting the efforts to widen the definition of beauty.” More than 2.5 million people have viewed Dove's short Web movie “Onslaught,” which seeks to enlighten girls and their mothers about the danger of absorbing Hollywood's ideas about beauty. Another campaign is aimed at getting women older than 50 to love their wrinkles and gray locks. Donna Arevalo, a 26-year-old marketing manager, remembers seeing the first Dove ad and rejoicing. “I love it,” says the curvaceous Latina. “Anything that allows women to say, `I accept myself and you should, too' is wonderful. It's all about loving yourself and viewing your body as sacred and not destroying it. Not every woman can be a size 4.” Even the fashion world is getting in line, at least in some places. In France, lawmakers took the unprecedented step of making the promotion of extreme dieting a crime punishable by fines and prison time - a move aimed at making the runways unsafe for anorexics. Spain has banned models with less than a specified body-mass index. Other countries have passed similar laws. The list goes on. In ads for Jenny Craig, the company's new spokeswoman, Queen Latifah, emphasizes that she's not dieting to get down to a certain size but rather to get to a size “healthier.” Donna Reamy, associate professor of fashion at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has studied female body image, says the trend in self-acceptance is being fed by consumer demand. “Consumers are driving the advertising and this is what they want,” she says. “They don't want to look at skinny models anymore. They want to be OK with their own skin and celebrate that.” - San Antonio Express-News __
