Image by wolfgang Lützgendorf from Pixabay
Today's prompt from 52 Weeks of Writing was "hey, Ornery, it's Blow Your Stack Saturday! Is there anything you want to bitch about?"
Okay, that was my interpretation of today's prompt, and yes, there is.
I recently fell down the syrupy Hallmark channel rabbit hole and have been watching Cedar Cove. Like so many romantic visions of television utopia, this one has a seedy underbelly. By seedy underbelly, I don't mean that Walter White has set up a meth lab or there is a prostitution ring. I mean that behind the perfect facade of perfect people in a perfect town there is some perfectly putrid prejudice that nobody wants you to notice.
Cedar Cove is the whitest place anywhere. I have not seen a single non-white person even in passing. Everyone is straight and attractive by Hollywood standards. Look all you want, you will see none of those unsightly disabled or fat people. Disabled people simply don't exist and fat people are a bugbear used to scare the Perfectly Pretty Able-Bodied White Straight populace into earning their eating-disordered binges through orthorexia.
Shows like Cedar Cove are the television equivalent of the ladies' magazines you see at the checkout stand in the grocery store. These initially appear to be innocuous fluff but they are actually fronts for insidious attitudes designed to keep impressionable women buying products to keep themselves looking impossibly young and girlishly thin. Do you want to eat a slice of that delicious cake on the cover? Better get ready to force yourself to vomit, take a few laxatives, and engage in a few hours of punishing exercise, you slovenly oinker!
The photoshopped cover models for such magazines have no lines on their faces, no stretch marks on their bodies, and not an ounce of fat. Any model deemed too dark-complexioned has their skin tone lightened. These magazines are chock full of "inspiring" stories of women who lost half their body weight on the latest fad diet. Never mind if you have to cut out entire nutrient groups on these diets and never mind that weight reduction dieting only works long term in approximately five percent of dieters. You don't want to be a bad fatty and not try yet again, do you?
I used to spend a fortune on these dreadful magazines hoping that I was going to finally find THE DIET that was going to work permanently so I didn't have to be ugly anymore. Approximately twelve years ago I realized that the messages these magazines promote are even uglier than I am. I raise my middle finger to the beauty, diet, and fashion industries. Fuck a whole lot of that shit.
Spirit of the Universe, please help me accept myself as I am. Please help me to keep making improvements that will truly benefit me rather than trying to fit someone else's idea of what I'm supposed to be. Amen.
~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~
Fat and Ornery
Free use image from Open Clipart Vectors
Hangry isn't having it.
Free use image from Pixabay
Fabulous selfie of my actual middle finger by me.
You can't touch this.
It's not like I really care that much, it's just that I know that most people are cunts.
The Icky, Sticky, Nit-Picky Legalese If You Please (Or Don't Please)
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