Baby Driver - Aphrodite

This just made a thought coalesce for me.

So, basically, daphnep  is ranting about reproductions of famous sculptures/art that are tweaked to conform to modern (insane) standards of beauty. And looking at the reproductions side-by-side with the originals, I realized why modern beauty standards are so ridiculous. The reproductions have been slimmed to a ridiculous degree, of course, but the proportions have also been changed. Waists, shoulders, wrists and ankles are narrowed, feet and hands made smaller, chins pointed--they're trying to make these sculptures look like thirteen year old girls instead of adult women. Even very slender adult women are rarely proportioned like that; the look is that of a girl who has just hit puberty and its attendant growth spurt, but hasn't yet filled into her new shape.

Adult women carry weight in our hips and asses. We have rounded muscle, dimpled thighs, breasts that sag a little unless they're teeny. We have more fat on our bodies than adult men--even thin women do. This doesn't mean that we're flawed; this is how women are supposed to look. There are some women who don't gain much weight, sure, and even some women who remain more or less the same shape as they were when they were thirteen. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's also no reason to make them the ideal.