Cristina Toscano
What’s a person to do when he or she is praised and simultaneously condemned for having a certain body type? Cassie Smith, a 20-year-old waitress at Hooters of America, Inc. in the Metro Detroit area, experienced that firsthand.
She was at a Hooters conference in Georgia to receive her yearly evaluation and was told she had a little more pudge around the middle than they thought the customers would prefer to see. At the time, Cassie fit into an extra small sized uniform.
I can understand Hooters has a specific image it expects from its waitresses in order to maintain male customer satisfaction, but, in my opinion, Cassie is by no means overweight. If they thought she was attractive enough to hire in the first place, then her body type fits Hooters’ hopes. It probably isn’t because of their sensational plate-balancing abilities that most women get the job at Hooters anyway, is it? But can you expect anything more from a restaurant whose title is an innuendo for women’s breasts? Probably not. Which then makes me wonder: What are people honestly expected to look like anymore? We are put on a pedestal if we are super thin and also are praised if we have some killer curves. Those same people can be criticized for being “too thin” or put on work-probation like Cassie for being “too overweight.”
How someone’s body looks might be the first thing we notice, but it shouldn’t be the only thing we remember. There’s definitely more to a person than their scrawny arms or their — for lack of a better term — hooters.
For example, I grabbed two random magazines and the covers validate my point of how the media will taffy-pull us in different directions regarding body images. One cover had a headline that read, “How to Eat and Drink and not gain Weight,” yet on the same cover it says, “Relax! 7 Reasons why Guys love You just the way You are.”
Although I typically take magazines with contradictory cover pages with a gigantic grain of salt — even though it is believed that salt makes you fat too — I’m sure there are other people out there who can be very influenced by everything they read in those glossy magazine pages.
These images in the media of how females and males are expected to look bombard us everywhere we turn. There are countless articles, books, television shows and movies about how the media affects body image and have a certain expectation of how good women and men could look if they spent a good portion of their time doing so. Look closely and one can see that many of these images are Photoshopped. Not even the “perfect looking” girl is perfect by any means.
MSUMost of the time, the emotional effects on one’s self-esteem can hurt more than the physical effects on one’s body — especially when it isn’t even from a magazine article of “How to Lose Belly Flab,” but when it’s your own parent.
With these Photoshopped advertisements of the overhyped and underweight, we are placing too much value on how good we should look and not enough on how happy we should feel with ourselves or how deeply we can think. Are we really making improvements or just being more destructive?
If we keep setting practically unattainable body image expectations on the youth of America, pretty soon nobody will fit. Literally.
Cristina Toscano is a State News guest columnist. Reach her at toscanoc@msu.edu.
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