Fat bottomed girls……

On the weekend I saw something that disturbed me.  And the more I thought about it, the more disturbed I became.  I was visiting a nationwide chain department store and my daughter and I were browsing through the ladies section when we came across a rack of clothes that made me do a second take.  As usual, you scan the rack of clothes to look for material, patterns or styles of clothes that catch your eye but when I looked at the small, coloured, sizing clips on the top of the hanger, I received a surprise.  The sizes on the rack went 4,6,8,12 etc.  I looked again, checked which section we were in, then pulled out one of the “4”s.  The design could have been adult but could well have been a tween design also…shoestring straps, midriff cut, frill around the bottom, the material was nice and after checking the size of the item, it was clearly marked 4.  I checked some other racks in the same area and found more hanger sizing that started with 4,6,8.

My first thought was a puzzled “What the??” My next thought was “Has the world gone mad?”  My thoughts since then have been “Why?”  Any women shopper knows that sizing is definitely not universal.  What could be a size 12 in one brand could be a size 10 or 14 in another brand…and don’t get me started on the whole S, M, L sizing! Also sizing changes from country to country…you only have to pick up a fashion mag to see skin and bone models wearing size 0’s.  Is this where we are heading??  Is this the message we want to give to Australian women?  Have some of the brands in this nationwide chain store started reducing their sizes to accommodate to the increasingly skinny sized frames of women – Definitely not if you believe the national consensus that obesity is on the increase.  Or is it just another way that the so called importance of image is being shoved down our throats just to make us even more subconscious and guilty about the way we look?

I have a teenage daughter and I hope that I am succeeding in teaching her how to be confident and to have self-worth without having to starve herself to be stick thin.  Skinny models are everywhere you look, and in every magazine or paper you look at and in every ad and program on TV.  When is enough going to be enough?  I thought that the sizing in women’s clothes were adequate enough……obviously, I was wrong!

Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin’world go round….