Go shove your squiggles up your ASS, Cosmo

This weekend I was reading Cosmo.

Now, let me just stop and point out that yes, two solid days of playing Pokemon, reading Cosmo, and watching daytime TV probably pegs just exactly how culturally ignorant I am. Rest assured that I'll be listening to some kind of obscure indie rock or visiting an art museum or tuning in to NPR later to make up for it.

One of the little articles in Cosmo was about the new fashion trend, the skinny jeans. Here's an actual text excerpt of the article:

Trendy slim-cut pants suit just about everyone, but there are a few things to keep in mind when wearing them: If you're curvy, go for a more forgiving (yet just as foxy) straight-cut style. If your frame is squiggle-free, shimmy into a tighter, supertapered type.

Let's forget for the moment that "supertapered" isn't a word.

Oh fuck it, I just can't. "Supertapered" isn't a word, dumbasses. Even I know that, and I spent a significant portion of yesterday trying to catch a rattata so I could win my Pokemon battle!

Let's look at the two bits of that excerpt that make me angry.

First of all, they say that curvy girls need a more "forgiving" type of jeans. The next step in that train of logic would be that curves need to be forgiven, that they're undesirable or bad somehow. And by looking at those jeans, I'd say a curve would be any distribution of body mass that could be defined as something other than "skeletal."

The second and more irritating bit is that they refer to skinny girls as being "squiggle-free." Now ask me how I could possibly feel good about my body when every lump and bump is referred to as a "squiggle." If I thought that "curvy" implied fat, what the hell do you think my psyche does with "squiggle?" Goshdamn.

When I showed the article to Mike he just shrugged and continued to chew on his saltine. When I got indignant and asked, "Well, doesn't any part of that seem offensive?" he replied, "Well, I can see how they're using 'curvy' in a derogatory manner, but I think that curvy is attractive, and if they don't like it they're lame."

Indeed.

But Mike's not PMSing like I am, so I'm entitled to a little more rage.

So shove your squiggle-talk up your ass, Cosmo. I hope that next fall the style is super-baggy jeans, ones that you need actual hips to keep from falling down.