While clothing sizes are supposed to be helpful, they can also be something women use to measure and compare themselves. That's not helped by the fact that they're wildly subjective. We've always had a hunch that different stores use different sizes, but this woman on Facebook just proved it. She posted a collage of all the different size pants she wears, and a harsh message to the fashion industry about body image.
Cosmopolitan reports that Deena Shoemaker, a 27-year-old teen and preteen counselor from Kansas, uploaded this photo to Facebook.
In the collage, Shoemaker is posing in six different pairs of pants, each a different size, each fitting her body perfectly. What gives?
"Let me explain why I'm not happy, America," she continues. "You photoshop models and actresses and slap them on the front of beauty magazines. At this point it's a pretty universally known truth that you're lying to us and those aren't accurate portrayals of the human body...But when you resize a girl's pants from a 9 to a 16 and label it 'plus size,' how am I supposed to fight that?"
For Shoemaker, who leads young women who are often self-conscious about their bodies, this is not okay. We've been so conditioned to identify with the number on our clothes that it's hard to not listen to it, even when it's a lie. This is when Shoemaker really drops the mic.
"STOP telling my girls that a size 4 is the "ideal body size" and the "epitome of beauty" if you're going to change a size 4 into an 8 or a 12 or whatever number you feel like on any given day."
Nobody wins if the goalpost keeps moving, but everyone wins if we just acknowledge that people are more than their labels. This is just another reason to forget society's standards and love yourself exactly the way you are.