The story:

The picture above of 20-year-old Lizzie Miller graced page 194 of the September 2009 Glamour magazine. Miller is a size 12-14 and heard from agencies that she was too big to be a plus size model. In the modeling industry, size 8-10 is the “plus size” range, which is crazy when you consider that Miller is an average (or even slightly below-average) sized woman.

After the magazine hit newsstands, the publishers received over 700 emails and comments from women delighted to see a normal-sized model on the pages.

The video:


The analysis:
Two things. One, the culture critic Stanley Crouch was, in the 80s, the only black American intellectual to openly defend Michael Jackson's decision to transform his nose from flat to narrow, from, in essence, African to European. According to Crouch, humans are always changing themselves, always want to be what they are not. We wear clothes, put on makeup, jewelry, perfume—where exactly should the line between our bodies and culture be drawn? Also, the argument against the narrowing of Jackson's nose was based on a problematic idea of what is natural and unnatural. Jackson's flat nose was considered natural (given to him by God), his narrow nose was unnatural (manmade). But what about spectacles? They correct the bad vision given to us by nature. Nature, in short, should not be our final standard. Crouch was correct: Authenticity is not all that.


Two: This business of "normal women" wanting to see in magazines models who look like just like them (and this is an old gripe) sounds an awful like people who want their leaders to think exactly as they do. Wanting to see someone who looks better than you is much like wanting a leader who knows more than you. The problem (to get to the point) is most of us are overweight and need to lose a few pounds. This takes work and time. Calories are not scarce in our society; they are everywhere. These thin women (and in my case, muscular men) remind us of the effort that's needed to improve or transform our unhealthy bodies. This is precisely why we call them models. The most human want is the want to be what we are not.