Skinny Girls With Body Issues – Latina Edition

When my abuelita tells me, “Estás muy flaca,” I am usually pretty comfortable knowing that she’s not, exactly, on track.  After all, I don’t know many abuelitas out there who are EVER satisfied that their grandchildren are fully satiated, but that’s just my personal experience.

Something that’s troubling for me in our current world is this totally ridiculous and overwrought idea of what women are “supposed” to look like.  In case you haven’t been reading, Televisa expects there to be 50 million Latinos in this current Census.  That means something like one out of six people in the U.S. will be Latino, and not to stereotype or anything, but I don’t know a whole lot of Latinos that have the bodies of Jennifer Aniston or Julia Roberts.

The problem is, these women are our standard but “we” are increasingly composed of individuals for whom those body types are not merely a matter of not enough gym time, but rather, genetic impossibility.

Enter young white women who, despite their fame and wealth, also have problems with this body image.  A story this week in Jezebel talks about how everyone form Hilary Duff to Kylie Minogue to Lindsay Lohan has regretted being “too skinny” but, for me at least, the problem with this is that these women were skinny by my and my abuelita’s standards to BEGIN with!

So you take a thin woman, take away 10 pounds, and she regrets being too skinny?  The literal shape and look of this country is changing right now — as you read these words — but the way we THINK about how women and men “should” look isn’t changing.  That troubles me because it’s a recipe for disaster; we’ve written about the pressures driving young Latinas to attempt suicide more than girls from other ethnic groups, I don’t see how these types of polar messages about body image could possibly help.

What do you think?