talknerdytome
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I refuse to buy 'Heat', 'Now', 'More' or any other temple for celebrity worship and have done for years. Whenever I've flicked through a friends copy, I have always become enraged by the juxtaposition of articles. A perfect example was in one of Britain's best selling newspapers today, in one article it says 'Diet hurting you like Gwyneth's?' and in the next article it says 'Obese sisters made me slim'.
What really makes me angry about these articles is that they claim to want to boost your self-confidence; don't you know they're doing this for your own good? We couldn't possibly be left to make up our own minds about how we feel about our bodies, god forbid, if we did that we might not go out and buy all of Dove's new products after being told how much they love our bodies too (it helps that they are probably sponsoring said magazine or newspaper).
I could probably just about swallow this sickly sweet fairytale about how wonderful everybody thinks our bodies are, if on the next page they weren't telling us how to change it (and how we should change it if we wish to be happy and successful). Now, like I mentioned before, I do not buy these magazines anymore, so why should I care? I care because lots of young girls do buy them, and when I was 13-16 I believed everything that was written in these magazines.
The feminist inside me wants to blame the (male) editor of heat for this travesty against women, but I can't bring myself to do it. This is because most of these articles are written by women, so why are we doing this to ourselves? Have we been so brain-washed that we have not only become converted to 'self-hate' but are also preachers for it too? I look around me and I see women competing with each other about who is more pious in their self flagellation of starvation diets and brutal workouts. Why can't we congratulate each other on gaining a pound and not caring?
If you carry on reading these magazines, that's fine. I just hope that you can look at these articles with a critical eye, and realise that they are hypocritical and only end up lowering self-esteem.
