Why I don’t want you in my ‘big women’ magazine!

This week my housemate told me about a new magazine she’d read about – a magazine which promised to feature no airbrushing, no diet tips, and no skinny models – in fact, none of the models featured in the magazine are below a size 14.

Excitedly, I rushed to my laptop to look it up and sure enough there it was, “Just as Beautiful”, a new publication which until now has been available only on the internet, a magazine featuring only women of size 14 and above. I was over the moon.

My housemate immediately took issue with it, however. She was annoyed that the magazine claims not to discriminate against size and yet they are discriminating against anyone who is below a size 14. She, a slim size 12 herself, agreed that the magazine was a good idea, and certainly a positive move, but still discriminatory.
I came across the same argument when I posted the link on the FemSoc Facebook wall. “What if you are a size 12, which still isn’t featured in the mainstream magazines because you’re not a skinny rake... fml” – it would seem that you can please some of the sizes sometimes, but you can’t please all of the sizes all of the time.

I understand the argument – there are very few, if any, size 12 women in mainstream women’s glossies and fashion magazines. I understand the point that this sends size 12 women the same message that it sends to size 14, size 16, size 18 (etc.) women – that they are too big to be models, too big to be featured in magazines, and too big to be considered beautiful.

It would seem that the solution is to feature size 12 women in this magazine too. But with this I have a real issue – I don’t want size 12 women in a magazine intended to feature what the fashion industry would dub ‘plus-size’ women. As a size 16 myself, if I pick up a magazine which is supposed to feature ‘larger’ women, I’d feel pretty miffed to see size 12 women. To me, size 12 isn’t big – granted, it’s bigger than the skinny skeletons featured in the majority of magazines and in shop windows -- but it’s still pretty damned thin. There are some days when I see size 12 women walking around and think I might be tempted to kill someone if it meant I could look like them.

Given that the average dress size for women in the UK is now a size 16 (up from a 14 less than two decades ago), a magazine featuring women of size 14 and above really shouldn’t be anything groundbreaking – these are normal sized women – they’re average, and they’re beautiful. So when I heard about the magazine, I was thrilled – finally a publication which isn’t going to make me feel like I should be on some kind of crash-diet (whatever the ‘diet of the month’ is), show me lots of clothes which wouldn’t even get over my thighs, and chastise celebrities for adding a couple of pounds to their coathanger-esque frames.

Here’s the issue with featuring size 12 women in this magazine: they’re not big enough. They’re two sizes below the national average, and they don’t belong in a magazine for ‘bigger’ women. The main issue is not that I’m jealous of size 12 women (well, maybe a little...) and I’m certainly not telling any size 12 women to stop complaining –a lot of size 12 women face exactly the same body hang-ups as I do, I’m sure, but my point is that if I picked up a magazine called “Just As Beautiful”, featuring larger women, and saw size 12 women, I’d be really angry with the publishers.

Case in point: A couple of months ago I was watching TV and an advert for a ‘plus-size’ clothing catalogue came on – this was a catalogue aimed at women sized 14-28, and yet the women in the advert were a small size 14, they just happened to be quite tall. I was so angry – even an advert aimed solely at women above a size 14 was afraid of showing (SHOCK HORROR) a woman who was actually above a size 14. Yet more not-so-subtle messages from the mainstream media that no-one wants to see an average-sized woman. Not even a BIG woman, just a normal woman; I was absolutely livid. I wrote to the producers of the catalogue, but I never received a reply.

So there is the crux of my argument against my size 12 housemate – if I pick up a magazine which promises ‘normal sized’ women, I expect to see normal sized women, and if I see thin women, I’m going to interpret that exactly the same way I do when I see a size 8 woman (or smaller) in Vogue or Cosmopolitan; that I, as a size 16, am too big because I’m bigger than the woman I’m seeing pictures of.

In fact, featuring thinner women alongside the ‘average’ sized women is going to send the message that the larger women are there to fill some kind of ‘quota’, and the size 12s are there to make the magazine more appealing to the ‘mainstream’.

So my message to the magazine “Just As Beautiful” – thank you. Thank you for existing, thank you for making me actually feel good about reading a magazine, and thank you for not showing me women who are a lot thinner than me and making me feel like I’m too fat to be attractive even though I am, more or less, average.
And here’s my message to the size 12s – I understand that you, too, are shown images of women thinner than you, and that you too feel like you’re being told you’re too big, and that you too have hang-ups about your figure, thanks to the media input we experience every day of our lives. But to me, you are thin, and you make me very jealous. If you are included in my ‘big women’ magazine, you’re just going to make me sad, and angry with the producers of the magazine. Please, respect the integrity of the magazine and don’t feel bad that you’re not being represented in it. It just means that you’re probably thinner than you think you are ;)

Zoë Scandrett