My feminist rant

Okay, so I'm usually on a feminist rant of sorts, but this one angered me enough to share.
If you will, check out the Miss Digital World site, its a beauty competition for digital women. Oh look, yet another way to keep us feeling terribly about ourselves.

Not only are all of these women disgustingly disproportionate (don't believe me? Please search all the 'models' and look at their bios, measurements are included) they are generally scantily clad, and just enhance the terribly unrealistic expectations that are placed upon women every single day. Not one of these so-called 'women' are natural. Yes I recognize, thanks, that this is a contest for digitally created, and therefore fake, women. It makes me so angry I can barely type coherently. Oh and another thing, their facial expressions. I'm sorry, but why is it that in order to be attractive, women these days are expected to have some slightly angry, pouty, distant, superior kind of look on their faces? What happened to good old-fashioned smiles? Since when did smiling become unfashionable? Apparently teeth are out this year.

I feel sick to my stomach just looking at this. Are we a sick society? Maybe not, but I know a lot of girls who are sick because of these sorts of images. I have friends, stunningly beautiful, intelligent, sexual, strong women. Women I admire, women I love. Women who think they are unattractive because they don't fit that mold. Women who cry about their bodies, which I think are beautiful, and who cannot hear me when I tell them. Women who disregard it most of the time, but late at night, alone, will stare at themselves in the mirror and wish away their stomach, their thighs. Women who are twisted inside and can't figure out why they feel so empty.

I am lucky, I have never had to worry too much about this, I've generally been slim, and as long as I watch what I eat most of the time I will hopefully stay that way. But in the past year I put on ten pounds. People tell me I look better, but I can see my body is different. I can see the slightest changes and I hate them. Ten pounds! I am freaking out about ten pounds!! And now I catch myself questioning what I eat, thinking about how I look more often. It disgusts me and yet I can't help thinking about it. I look at myself in the mirror sometimes and wish my ten pounds away. Why am I so obsessed? Look around you, look at the women in magazines, on billboards, in movies, walking down the street with their collarbones protruding a little too much, their cheeks a little too sunken. Look at Miss Digital World.

You can see it everywhere, and as soon as you start looking it becomes all too frightening. That face that we've come to identify with beauty? That distant, disinterested stare? That isn't sexy, that is starving. Women don't look like that because they are beautiful, they look that way because they are wasting away, mind, body and soul, to look skinny enough for you to think they are beautiful.

So here is where I get off the rant, because I know that I am beautiful without my old body. I know that we are all beautiful as we are. I look at my friends, at the women sitting around me in class, and think how stunning we all are. Beauty is not about bodies. No diets, no starvation, no collarbones. I know, deep down we all know, that the most beautiful women needs to do nothing but smile.