The other day I was looking through the PopSugar Fitness website (formerly known as FitSugar), because apparently I like to test my ability to read complete garbage without throwing up. If you aren’t familiar, PopSugar is a group of websites that, according to them, “delivers the biggest moments, the hottest trends and the best tips in entertainment, fashion, beauty, fitness, and food, and the ability to shop for it all, in one place.” Well, that sounds just fantastic, doesn’t it?
Except for that stuff about beauty and fitness. Because PopSugar Fitness is all about the skinny. How to get skinny, how to stay skinny (ha, good one!), how skinny is obviously the ultimate goal of every woman, everywhere. Okay, okay, they also like to talk about pretty a lot. How to get pretty, how to stay pretty, how pretty is another goal of every woman, everywhere.
While a lot of the articles on this site are fat shaming junk, one from this week that was (surprisingly) not about body size and how to shrink it really caught my eye. Ready? It’s “Everything You Need to Look Good Crossing the Finish Line.” Yep, this is an article about how to look pretty when you race.
The intro paragraph pays lip service to how what you look like “should probably” not be a concern, but then proceeds to list a bunch of products that will help you to look stylish, pretty, and camera-ready on race day. Let’s see… We’ve got waterproof mascara, LEG MAKEUP (I am not making that up, I swear), lip treatment, and of course $130 sunglasses. All told, their list of products totals over $250.
I can’t even.
There are a bazillion reasons why people find it difficult to make fitness a part of their lives, from family and career commitments to lack of funds and lack of time. To add “looking good while sweating” to list of expectations of women is just ridiculous – and that’s not even to mention that stupid price tag. So, now I not only need to work out to be as skinny as possible (which of course is always the goal of working out), I also need to look freshly made up and glowing while I do it? Great. Way to raise expectations for women to a ridiculous level.
So, why am I even bringing this to your attention, if I think it’s terrible junk? Because a little over a year ago, I read this website (and others like it) on a daily basis, hoping for tips to make me look, feel, and be “better.” Now I can see them for the body-shaming drivel that they are, and I hope that by talking about them, you can see it, too, and make more informed decisions about the kind of information you absorb and follow.
We live in a world where celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow gives us tips on how to live our best lives at any cost, where countless companies fight for our attention and our dollars, where we are constantly bombarded with messages about how we are not good – thin – pretty enough.
After I read that ridiculous “run pretty” article, I came across this quote from Dr. Gail Dines:
If tomorrow, women woke up and decided they really liked their bodies, just think how many industries would go out of business.
That’s a tomorrow I can’t wait to see.
