Woman

A few months ago I found myself watching a dance scene from one of the teenage beach movies of the 60's. The Frankie and Annette genre. The girls in the bikinis all had one thing in common. Today they would be considered fat. They had hips, a tummy, and legs that looked like they were meant to transport this healthy torso around for many years. They would not make it on a beach movie today, or any episode of the old "Baywatch".

So, this post has been brewing in the brain for a while and finally composed as I sit and watch my daughter and wife take in the latest episode of "Project Runway".

Before anorexia became a trait of beauty, there were women on television and in the movies.


Maureen O'Hara


Real, normal, female humans. Not fat, not skinny, somewhere inbetween, give or take.




Donna Reed



When I was a kid and mad at my parents I wanted a mom like Donna Reed and a dad like Fred McMurray. Perfect folk who never got mad at their kids, never spanked them, never sent them to their room. I digress.






Ann Rutherford

These women were beautiful but not unbelievably so. Not perfect. Look at them a while and you'll find something you don't like. A nose too big, lips too thin, crooked smile... you know, humans. Healthy, tough, well fed. Like our grandmothers or great grandmothers these were the type that, if they had to.... could survive wartime or famine or pestilence. At least they look like they could. Or make it a few days without food. Carry a weapon, hoe a field, raise a roof. Illness hits and they've got the constitution to fight off the normal physical calamites and assure that the family survives.
Elizabeth Montgomery

When God created the first woman, I know she probably didn't look like Elizabeth Montgomery.







Woman

But, perhaps something like this Somali woman. In any event all of these are closer to what a woman looks like than the sacks of bones stumbling down Project Runway.