Vocalist.org archive


From:  "Carol Spradling" <cspradli@t...>
"Carol Spradling" <cspradli@t...>
Date:  Fri Feb 9, 2001  2:33 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist] female morphology, weight etc


Linda wrote,

| As for the clothes thing: when is someone going to design clothes for a
| larger shape which don't seek to flatter by making you look thinner, but
| rather by making a skinny person wish they could be a bit fatter so they
| too could look good clothes like those?

As long as the idealized sexual woman is rail-thin (and it doesn't matter
what real men like or think, it's the film casting directors and fashion
editors that create these icons) I can't see this happening, more's the
pity.

When M. Monroe was the sex symbol, I think she represented men's real
turn-ons: T and A; curvy. Jayne Mansfield even more so. Va-va-VOOM. These
were women who made the skinny-Minny teenager yearn to be curvy and
voluptuous.

Now teenagers obsess about nothing except being thin. I met Princess Diana
at a charity benefit for Jose Carreras when I worked for PolyGram. Later,
chatting with one of her aides, I asked what her tour to the USA had been
like and the aide commented that it had been a grand success, but puzzled
over how all the Americans could talk about was how thin Diana was. Teenage
girl after teenage girl interviewed in the media going, "Oh my GOD. She's
so THIN. I would DIE to be that THIN".

And it's true. We'll do anything to get thin; believe anyone's improbable
pulp, do things to our own bodies that make you wonder about the theory of
evolution, we're so dumb.

Rats; I'm depressed now. Excuse me.

Carol S.

Carol Ansell Spradling, Mezzo-soprano
Director of Music, St. Augustine's, Syracuse
http://home.twcny.rr.com/spradling






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