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Despite being in not the greatest of health, I went to Centre Parcs this weekend with my DH, and some long-standing friends. I figured that going to the Spa & steaming my ‘tubes’ with scented herbs might be a good thing. (And I’m reliably informed I was/am not infectious! Yep, I can brew these buggers all on my own!)
Anyhoo, on the Sunday I went to the “Subtropical Swimming Paradise” – aka a very large swimming pool with flumes and jungley plants. Very nice it was too… and, as writers are known to do, I people-watched.
Rarely does such an opportunity to observe people in very few clothes arise. And it suddenly occurred to me just how… erm… ‘unbeautiful’ people are - we are. We are pale – unhealthy shades of ghostly white to spammy pink – we are bruised and scarred. We are hairy (where hair was never intended to be). We are flabby and droopy, with stretch-marks and varicose veins. We are (increasingly) self-mutilated with crap tattoos that will look just like un-identifiable black splats in a mere couple of years, and belly piercings which were never intended to be on a size 20 woman.
Actually, it made me smile for a while; people are glorious in their humanity, their vulnerability, their downright ugliness. And no one seemed to care – well, no one was allowing their self-consciousness to manifest itself in more that the occasional tug at their knicker elastic…
But then I got to thinking (as you do) I am not the type of woman who reads ‘woman’s magazines’ [shudder] or cares about who so-called ‘celebrities’ are (a fact my hairdresser finds quite amusing as I flick through ‘OK’ or ‘Hello’ saying – “and who is that then?”) I pour scorn on the size zero models – have even been known to growl stuff like, “have a cookie, why don’t you?” at the tv, BUT even I was mildly surprised by the reality of so many human beings in one place. I realised just how insidious the cult of the ‘Beautiful People’ truly is (thanks MM!) when actually, something like 95% of British women suffer from self-loathing because we have come to accept the buff, tanned (orange), coiffed people we see in all aspects of the media as some kind of real default setting. (And why aren’t these statistics available about men?)
And then, I started wondering – am I guilty of only writing beautiful people?
After all, Fantasy does seem to demand such archetypes – at least, on the face of it. In fact, when I thought about it, I realized that in the written form we at least have the luxury of only sketching the picture lightly – the reader fills in the rest. I HOPE that my ‘heroes’ are admirable mainly because of the people they are, the actions they take, the stories they tell. But of course, I’m not adverse to them being beautiful – hell, this is Fantasy after all! I might think more carefully in future though about my beautiful/ugly ratio…
[btw, ‘Talisker’ was “a ging-er”]
[[Scots slang: ‘g’ = as in ‘give’]]
Oh, btw, I recommend watching Channel 4’s excellent “How to Look Good Naked” for a brilliant reality-check on this subject. No surgery to turn the participants into plastic Barbie dolls. Real people, real women. We like.
Anyhoo, on the Sunday I went to the “Subtropical Swimming Paradise” – aka a very large swimming pool with flumes and jungley plants. Very nice it was too… and, as writers are known to do, I people-watched.
Rarely does such an opportunity to observe people in very few clothes arise. And it suddenly occurred to me just how… erm… ‘unbeautiful’ people are - we are. We are pale – unhealthy shades of ghostly white to spammy pink – we are bruised and scarred. We are hairy (where hair was never intended to be). We are flabby and droopy, with stretch-marks and varicose veins. We are (increasingly) self-mutilated with crap tattoos that will look just like un-identifiable black splats in a mere couple of years, and belly piercings which were never intended to be on a size 20 woman.
Actually, it made me smile for a while; people are glorious in their humanity, their vulnerability, their downright ugliness. And no one seemed to care – well, no one was allowing their self-consciousness to manifest itself in more that the occasional tug at their knicker elastic…
But then I got to thinking (as you do) I am not the type of woman who reads ‘woman’s magazines’ [shudder] or cares about who so-called ‘celebrities’ are (a fact my hairdresser finds quite amusing as I flick through ‘OK’ or ‘Hello’ saying – “and who is that then?”) I pour scorn on the size zero models – have even been known to growl stuff like, “have a cookie, why don’t you?” at the tv, BUT even I was mildly surprised by the reality of so many human beings in one place. I realised just how insidious the cult of the ‘Beautiful People’ truly is (thanks MM!) when actually, something like 95% of British women suffer from self-loathing because we have come to accept the buff, tanned (orange), coiffed people we see in all aspects of the media as some kind of real default setting. (And why aren’t these statistics available about men?)
And then, I started wondering – am I guilty of only writing beautiful people?
After all, Fantasy does seem to demand such archetypes – at least, on the face of it. In fact, when I thought about it, I realized that in the written form we at least have the luxury of only sketching the picture lightly – the reader fills in the rest. I HOPE that my ‘heroes’ are admirable mainly because of the people they are, the actions they take, the stories they tell. But of course, I’m not adverse to them being beautiful – hell, this is Fantasy after all! I might think more carefully in future though about my beautiful/ugly ratio…
[btw, ‘Talisker’ was “a ging-er”]
[[Scots slang: ‘g’ = as in ‘give’]]
Oh, btw, I recommend watching Channel 4’s excellent “How to Look Good Naked” for a brilliant reality-check on this subject. No surgery to turn the participants into plastic Barbie dolls. Real people, real women. We like.
cheerful
drunk
grumpy