Victoria, keep your secret to yourself!

I watched a horrifying Victoria's Secret ad a little while ago, and I am still mad. Picture, if you will, a group of underwear-clad lovelies talking about loving their bodies. They are all painfully thin, with ribs showing and gaunt faces. No one who truly loves their body would starve it down to boniness. While some other companies are making a valiant effort to come to terms with the bodies of real women, Victoria's Secret is steadfast in their insistence that beauty only exists in a size zero. Sadly, there are still a great number of women who have been trained throughout their lifetimes to believe this.

In this country it starts very young. I have read that a significant number of 9-year-olds report that they have already been on some kind of diet. There is still an alarming number of girls who suffer from bulimia and/or anorexia. The last statistic I read said that 20% will find their disease to be fatal.

For some reason we women have been well-trained to look for self-satisfaction in our exterior, when in reality it is the interior that should be well-crafted, finely honed, and educated to respect and even like itself.

Now I will switch to the first person. Me. I am a not-so-thin woman, who wears sizes 14 to 18, depending what part of my body is being covered. I spent many years of my life as a size 5, so I have been in both places and have developed a pretty good sense of what it's like to live in both worlds. As a size 5, the primary thing I discovered is that individuals of the opposite sex think it is open season on your figure. They also assume that a large part of your brain must be missing.

I vividly remember appearing as a model back then in a fashion and hair styling competition, with a gorgeously crafted hairdo and a slinky halter-top black jumpsuit. The other girls in the show were introduced by their names, then some complementary statement about their style. When I hit the stage, the only comment the announcer could come up with was that I was wearing the "new bra-less look." I am sure the judges couldn't have survived without that information.

I spent a large part of my life hearing about what a great body I had (as a swimmer and a dancer I was pretty athletic), but very little attention was given to the rest of me. Now that I am well into my sixties, the tables have definitely turned. Actually, they started turning when I was in my thirties. I have been very active politically and socially from my late teens to the present, and when I finally started to gain recognition for my writing, I started to realize how held back I had been by the standards of beauty of the times. Nobody had expected me to have the teeniest bit of intellect.

We have come a long way since the 60's, and women are finding their way into new and better lifestyles. The understanding is out there that we should love, honor and obey our bodies. Loving them means looking in the mirror at a few saggy items, scars, and an extra roll here or there, and being happy that this body has done well by you, taken you through some tough times as well as joyous ones. It deserves respect.

Honoring our bodies means keeping them active, feeding them properly with great, fresh food. It also means not kicking yourself around the block when you eat a jelly donut. Obeying your body means understanding what it needs and following through on achieving that goal. That body is the best judge of what is good for it, and when you feel a strong desire for an activity, an escape (Calgon is acceptable here), or a splurge, go get it! Even chocolate and red wine are allowable, just not as the mainstay of your nutritional intake.

I still see far too many women who believe in the artificial standards, however. They complain constantly about their weight, while forgetting to look at the rest of their unique selves. I know I have found that when my brain is well-fed with interesting information, I tend to automatically take better care of the rest of me. This is the teaching moment: We need to stop worrying about what the advertising media and their Photoshop and airbrushed and starved role-models seem to be dictating as a reachable goal. Friends, it is not going to happen!

Having given my lecture for the day, I will jump back into the advertising world with one two-part question: When the hell are they going to wise up and start looking at the beautiful women who populate this country, in all shapes and sizes? And when are they going to decide to appeal to our intelligence? I will never buy underwear from Victoria's Secret. I don't care what her secret is.