I was just watching the morning news, and the usual “health” segment came on. I don’t tend to pay any attention to them. On a good day, it’s just a bit of fluff news reporting, and on a bad day, it’s totally lacking in facts and full of inaccuracies. In other words, not worth paying attention to, no matter what the subject. But I looked up just in time to see the graphic they’d chosen to use for their “heart vs. pear shaped body type diabetes warning” … and it annoyed me enough to write this post.

As the newscaster said the words “A man with a waist of 40 inches or more” the photo used was a naked man’s waist with a tape measure around it. The numbers on the tape measure read 40″, and it was obviously an accurate representation of a less than buff man’s waistline.

As the newscaster said the words “A woman with a waist of 35 inches or more” the photo used was a naked woman’s waist with a tape measure loosely held around it, the numbers unreadable, and it was obviously an image of a very buff woman’s waistline.

Now I am not all that buff, but I am (and always have been) rather small in size. I have also sewn more small-sized women’s clothing than I care to admit. I know what smaller waist sizes measure within an inch or two without having to get out a tape measure. The waistline used to graphically represent a woman’s waistline “of 35 inches or more” was smaller than my own waist measurement, which means it’s was in the low twenties … at least more than ten inches less than the 35 inch diabetes “warning” measurement.

And people wonder why women have a skewed perspective of their own bodies? This is a perfect example of the sort of –for lack of a better word– programming women get. Men’s bodies depicted accurately and discussed accurately, and women’s bodies being represented irrationally. A twenty-something inch waist being shown to demonstrate a 35 inch waist. It’s a two-fold negative message.

Women who are aware of what a 35 inch waist actually looks like, because they do or have owned one, are reminded that a woman with a 35 inch waist isn’t appropriate or okay enough to be show on the morning news. Women’s waists should always look like flat boards or they shouldn’t be seen publicly.

Women who own small waistlines, in the range of the image shown or smaller, are made to feel that they are in the range of body sizes that need to worry about pre-diabetes, and they better not gain any weight at all or they’ll be unhealthy. They might even get the impression that they are already overweight, if they are the sort of person prone to eating disorders and/or skewed personal body image.

Anyway, it chapped my hide enough in my pre-coffee state to write this post, mostly because I’ve been in women’s clothing departments a lot lately shopping for new clothes, and I’ve noticed a few annoying instances of the misrepresentation of women’s bodies out there too. For example, images of women wearing the clothing on sale in the juniors and standard sized departments who are those sizes and women in the plus sized department who are also small enough to wear junior sized clothing and not the plus sized versions being sold below them. If there are any images of women in the plus sized department at all.

As a society, we are quite honest about the varied and sundry shapes of the male form, and so all but the most extremely large men own bodies that are viewed as natural and acceptable. Women’s bodies are nearly always depicted as Playboy Bunnies or runway models, and so anyone who doesn’t happen to fit into that particular mold is seen as fat/ugly/unfit/unnatural … and unacceptable.

If we could just start showing real women’s bodies as they actually exist, at least in health segments on the morning news, if not in advertising, it would go a long way to making the female firm of all shapes and sizes acceptable by society, and maybe women could stop stressing out about their waistlines and start loving themselves.

And now I’m going to go make my coffee and change the TV channel before the morning news rotates around to that health segment a second time and raises my ire again.