Positive entertainment sponsered by Barnes & Nobles

My roommates and I have this sort of weekly tradition, where we go to Barnes & Nobles, grab piles of magazines with the latest scoops on Hollywood, fashion and the “hottest” trends, and just sit in those highly uncomfortable chairs quietly getting updated/ bored for hours. Once in a while, one of us comment on a picture, an article or an out-of-our-reach item we would LOVE to have, we laugh or agree—depending on the nature of the comment—and then resume to our previous silent- concentration mode. As dull as it may seem, this routine is actually quite amusing in a town where there is absolutely nothing to do that does not involve the expense of at least 10 dollars a day (this of course is excluding the weekly trip to the supermarket in search for milk, cereal and snacks that ends up being a 20 to 30 dollar expense).
By this moment, you must be asking yourselves what makes this event a story worth “bragging” about? The answer is actually a bit long but since I find myself with a lack of activity and a necessity of using my brain in a useful manner, I’ll narrate it.

A week ago, as we were picking the magazines that were to make our day of more avail than usual, I started to notice the excess of the words skinny, weight and body on most—if not all— the entertainment magazines. I picked up a few of them even though I was extremely pissed about the fact that the media does not allow us to avoid thinking about weight a single day of our lives, and headed towards my usual chair. As I skimmed through each one, I found myself in a state of confusion/anger/envy/vanity that eventually lead me to hate myself for ever thinking about choosing those magazines as a resource for “positive entertainment.”

One magazine expressed their “utter” concern regarding Britney Spears’s fast weight lost, which I found kind of ironic considering not even a month ago she was being constantly bashed by the media for being “fat.” Others talked about the perfect legs, or the hottest summer bodies using as example pictures of Hollywood stars with their definition of the perfect body, none of which seemed non-fictional to an average college student like me.
The one that actually made me laugh out of pure commiseration for being extremely ridiculous was one that sadly commented on the possibility of Nicole Richie, Angelina Jolie and other A-list stars suffering—to their eyes—of eating disorders.

Ever since the whole drama regarding Mary- Kate Olsen’s anorexia issue, any star that looses weight extremely fast is put on the front cover as an anorexic/bulimic victim without any actual proof. I am not saying that the media’s necessity to highlight these so called victims is completely out of the line, but I do believe their concern is truly hypocritical and must be stopped before any actual harm can be done to our society. Writing articles about actresses with anorexia and pages later putting pictures of the “perfect” body everyone must have to consider themselves appealing does not seem to me as an actual therapeutically technique to those commoners who read magazines searching for solutions to their self-esteem issues. Isn’t talking about people that suffer eating disorders and as a result get skinnier and later on stressing that the type of body everyone must aim for involves a skinny one, a complete contradiction that only corrupts the mind of the reader? Personally, all I wanted to do was stop eating for a week and see if that way I would achieve the summer body of the year, yet thankfully my self-esteem was high enough to know that all this was nonsense. A nonsense I was able to escape but one that I am more than aware has gotten into many people’s mind and caused them to fall into the I-must-be-skinny-or-else idea.

I am sure it is obvious to any world-updated-person that the percentage of people suffering from eating disorders has sky rocketed over the last couple of years and even though there has been many attempts to help our society change their views regarding weight, nothing can actually be done as long as the entertainment magazines continue their weekly campaign to mess with our brains. I can bet anything that if these magazines vanished the words skinny, body, perfect and weight from every single issue for a month, a different perspective will flood the minds of their readers, a perspective that might actually do some good to our morally declining world.

I know this all seems as an out-of-reach dream for the battle against the media is one extremely hard to plan and an even harder to prevail, but putting these words down set my mind at ease. I know not much can be done by my significant piece of advice in my insignificant blog page but as long as I know those who read this will reflect on the matter and actually agree with me at some point I am satisfied. At the end what fills me with joy is the knowledge that it is me and not those ridiculous magazines who is in fact giving “positive entertainment” (even though the crowd is a bit small).