Episode 6: Can I Get an Airbrush?

Episode 6: Can I Get an Airbrush?

Excerpts from "The Petty Chronicles" every Monday (rerun)

I will never be thin enough to please my husband. He wants me to look like the bony, anorexic women who prance across the screen of our Plasma he watches, 8 hours a day. (It’s like he thinks it’s his second job.) When I point out that he’s comparing me — a real, three-dimensional-flesh-and-blood woman — to the impossible standard the media has brainwashed him with, he dismisses my idea completely.

Is he kidding or am I married to a man who’s really that stupid and shallow?

He devours hour upon hour of programming that features perfectly lit, digitally enhanced, starved, young bodies that have been painted, polished and coifed to within an inch of their lives and then when he looks at me he thinks, "What is wrong with this picture?" He can deny it all day long, but the shocked expression on his face is a dead giveaway and though he’d never admit it out loud, deep down I know he believes that if I were as thin and beautiful as his two-dimensional dream-dates, his life would be perfect.

The thing I can’t understand is why looking like a boy with tits has become the female ideal in our culture.  It wasn’t all that long ago that the ideal woman’s body was curvaceous, not concave, and I think some sort of mind-melding-IQ-lowering mass hysteria has taken hold of American men causing them to prefer the latter.

I lay the blame for this squarely at the feet of gay fashion designers everywhere (and Twiggy.) Let’s face it, culture follows couture and sometimes that’s OK. But instituting this Castrati-With-Breasts look is beyond ridiculous and reigns as the worst fashion joke to be played on women since the advent of Whale-bone corsets and I think I speak for women everywhere when I ask: when will this madness end?

Now I know I sound a bit angry here, and I guess I have chip on my shoulder, but you would too if you were married to my husband; a misogynist with the libido of a 12 year old who wants me to look like a fifteen-year-old girl, despite the fact that I’m a perimenopausal woman.

And it doesn’t end there. Oh no. Not only does he want me to subsist on carrot sticks and water, he thinks I should be able to bake him pies and cookies while not gaining a pound (I wouldn’t be tempted to sample my wares, right?) and makes a point of telling me how disappointed he is in my culinary failings.

Yea, I can see it now: a version of me as a Disney cartoon, baking pies, dancing about in a flouncy skirt, while precious little bluebirds flit around my enormous kitchen and vent piecrusts with their beaks. Oh yes, and I am smiling, singing, wearing a size 4 apron and 3-inch heels while simultaneously conducting a sales meeting on my Blackberry.

Will someone please get me an airbrush? Because something’s definitely wrong with this picture. This is evidently how my husband pictures me in the grandiose castle of his imagination and I hate to be the one to tell him, but it’s time to fade to black. 
 

Check out new episodes of The Petty Chronicles every Monday.

Click the following to learn about The Petty Chronicles and its author, Rachel Gladstone