After a photoshopping disaster involving yours truly, I must make a public apology—and set the record straight.
I am not naïve. Having worked in women’s magazines for 20 years now, I’m aware that it is standard practice to retouch photos, to bring already near-perfect models and actresses a smidge closer to divine. Oh, yes, I’ve seen it happen, up close and personal.
But this month, Glamour has gone too far.
How dare they take MY lumpy, misshapen postpartum abdominal overhang and photoshop it onto some smiling blonde model?
I was flipping through the magazine and there on page 194 was a relaxed-looking, confident model, leaning forward just so, and there, THERE on her midriff was MY belly! I don’t know how they got a hold of a picture of my tummy roll, but I know it’s mine because like Tina Turner supposedly did with her legs, I had it insured by Lloyd’s of London for $3.2 million. It’s highly distinctive.
And just as Kate Winslet did after British GQ slimmed her thighs unrecognizably in 2003, I feel I must speak out, so women don’t feel crummy about themselves when they see the picture.
That model doesn’t really look like that. Very few women do. Not everyone can have as impressive a pooch as I, and I truly don’t want to make anyone feel as if she’s falling short if her tummy is, I don’t know, flatter or more firm.
First off, I had twins—it’s unrealistic to expect that women should have to go out and carry multiples, have their abdomen rapidly blown up like a Bosu ball and then even more quickly deflated, just to achieve the look shown on page 194 of Glamour. I certainly don’t want anyone to have their stomach muscles surgically separated, as happened naturally with my pregnancy, just to look like me. It makes me sad to think that millions of women, after reading Glamour magazine, are probably making themselves sick eating too many carbs, just to have a gut like mine.
It’s no secret that the readers of women’s magazines, no matter their age, look models’ bodies and compare their own, most often unfavorably. I should know! I grew up reading Glamour, the now defunct Mademoiselle, Self and many other magazines I later wound up working for. As a teenager and young adult, I looked at Christie Brinkley and Cindy Crawford’s bodies, and then looked down at my own, and thought, “I’ll never look like that.” It wasn’t a good feeling, let me tell you. In fact, I feel that the unreasonable standards I internalized contributed in part to my developing an eating disorder.
