It has been a little while since Halloween, but this has been sticking with me.
Each year, I look forward to seeing the Halloween costumes unveiled on The Today Show. It is great fun to see what a professional wardrobe and makeup crew can accomplish. My favorite is probably the time Matt Lauer and Al Roker dressed as Siegfried and Roy.
This year, the theme was the Saturday Night Live show. The Blues Brothers rocked the house, and Wayne and Garth made an appearance.
And then there were the female cast members who recreated the pseudo-commercial for “Mom Jeans.”
You know, Mom jeans. The extra-roomy, high-waisted, anti-fashion statement.
Meredith Vieira, Savannah Guthrie, and Jenna Bush Hager proudly sported Mom jeans, exiting a minivan butt-first. They continued prancing around the plaza, leading with their butts.
It was hilarious.
Except for this: after the sketch concluded, an announcement made it clear that the women wanted it known that they were wearing padding.
Specifically, butt pads.
Even with butt pads, they looked pretty darn svelte. They were still a smaller size than many women.
In fact, each padded-butt woman was smaller than many women’s goal weight.
This made me ponder our society’s obsession with thinness. Okay, I ponder this topic on a regular basis, but this was a great example.
Body shaming shows up from the most obvious to the most subtle of ways.
To hear that someone in a silly costume needs to defend her body made me ticked off.
How far gone is our culture that people wearing a costume that made them look like – well, normal people – is a cause for defensiveness and embarrassment?
I’m in on the Mom Jeans joke. It’s the [subtle] body shaming I’m not cool with.
