A Conspiracy Revealed

By Krista Thom
Contributing Writer

Okay women – I see you out there, counting your calories and looking through the September issue of Vogue. Stop it! Stop it, I say! You’re wasting your time. I have a secret to share with you that’s more interesting than what you’re doing anyway. Are you ready? Okay, here it is – you know those skinny jeans and bikinis that you’ve been killing yourself to get into? You won’t be able to! It’s not possible! Of course, you will try. You will try very, very hard. But you will not succeed. Here, have a cookie while the disillusionment sinks in.

Now then, here’s the good news. It’s not your fault! Really! You did your best; good for you! Don’t be discouraged just because your efforts were in vain. The truth is, these clothes are not supposed to fit you! In fact, they’re not supposed to fit anyone. Don’t take it personally. There was nothing you could do.

It’s all a scam cooked up by the fashion industry. They design clothes that are not meant to be worn by actual people, and then they convince us that we must (must!) wear their clothes, otherwise our repulsive bodies will become invisible to even our own families. It’s quite diabolical, really.

Have you noticed that clothes shopping is different from other kinds of shopping? Normally when you shop, you go into a store with a specific item in mind, like batteries, or a liter of coke. You usually know whether a store will have an item before you go in, and you generally know where it is. You get your item, pay for it, and leave.

This is never how clothes shopping works. With clothes shopping, you might enter a store with the idea of buying, say, a red sweater. But no matter which store you walk in, what the current season is, or what the current fashions are, you will not be able to find it! Ever! If the store does by chance have a red sweater, you will discover it creates bodily flaws on you that certainly weren’t there before. Lumps of fat will appear on your midsection. Extra veins will pop out. Your whole body shape will be contorted to the point where you could lose a beauty contest with Quasimodo. The whole experience is part of a two part scheme to, 1) break down your confidence, and 2) convince you that with the right clothes, you can disguise what a repugnant sack of flesh you really are.

By that point, we’re so broken down that we’ll buy anything just so we can leave. Of course, we never wear these clothes, once we get home. By then we realize how terrible we look in them. But we will still believe that the right clothes will turn us into a knockout. So we go back and buy more clothes, and of course, those never look good either.

You might be wondering how I figured all this out. I’ll tell you. It started yesterday, when I went
shopping for a new pair of jeans. The last time I went jean shopping was about a year ago. At that time, I searched for days to find some decent pairs. I tried on dozens of jeans, each of which alerted me to new and different physical flaws. In the end, I bought some jeans that were at least not ugly, and that almost fit me.

At the time, I was a size 12, and I was convinced that designers didn’t make clothes for tubs of lard such as myself. In the following months I lost weight, and by the time I went shopping for jeans yesterday, I was down to a size 4. I thought that maybe, maybe, I’d have better luck. I don’t know who I was kidding. Not only could I not find a single pair of jeans, but everything I tried on looked worse than my current pants, which are three sizes too big.

I did find out that my hips are too big. Unless my thighs are too thick. And – is that cellulite? Can you really see that through denim?

And I’m sure it’s not just me. I’ve gone shopping with plenty of other women, and I have yet to see one person find that truly magical pair of pants. Instead, I’ll see a normally-shaped, attractive woman will put on a pair of jeans, and suddenly look like Jabba the Hutt. I think every woman in America has suffered from shopping fatigue in the not-too-distant past. It’s amazing we still decide to get dressed every day.

I’m sure you’re wondering how we can fight back and defeat this evil system. I have a plan for that, the key point of which is: don’t let yourself get discouraged. I mean it. With all the work people go through to convince us that we’re the wrong shape and size, that our legs aren’t long enough and our boobs aren’t big enough, it’s no wonder that we sometimes start feeling like chopped liver.

But here’s what we need to remember – if the clothes don’t fit our bodies, maybe the problem isn’t our bodies. We’re all built differently. That doesn’t mean we’re built wrong. I’m not saying that looks have no importance (I live in the real world), or that we shouldn’t put any effort into our appearance. But we don’t all need to fit the same mold to look good. Each of our bodies is unique, and each of us can look beautiful if we respect that.

So remember that. Also, if you do come across some perfect jeans, let me know where you found them.

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