Did I miss a meeting or did I fall asleep?

During a recent conversation with Editor Jane that it was decided that I am virtually impossible to offend. This because she had been instructed by a friend to ask me whether she had inadvertently offended me the previous day.

Her initial response was ‘No that’s just Scotty. You can’t offend him’.

Which to all intents and purposes is true, but the other side of the coin is that, while people I know can’t offend me, there are things out in the world that offend me deeply. Most current Top 40 music, for example, offends me. A Current Affair, conservative politics and, of course, repugnant journalism dressed as social comment offend me to the point of nearly (but not quite) incoherent rage.

Which brings me to Susie O’Brien!

Her article (written for the News Ltd papers mind you) dedicated to the new ‘fad’ of applauding plus-size models and the alleged harm this is doing to our society, gave me the drizzling shits.

I thought encouraging self-confidence, positive self-esteem and happiness in one’s own skin would be something to be encouraged, but apparently, no, this is A Bad Thing.

O’Brien explained that it is so very, very wrong to find any merit in fashion shows using anything less than the picture-perfect-but-still-needs-to-be-airbrushed-for-publication-example-of-how-women-should-all-bloody-look model because it would promote obesity.

This completely contradicts an article she wrote in January this year about how dangerous it is for people, especially women, to consider they are waging war against their weight; an article in which she stated ‘The winners are those who feel good about themselves and their bodies - whether fat or thin’.

You cannot champion the positive body image cause one day and then, a few months down the track, contradict that opinion by labelling moves in the fashion industry to right a huge wrong as ‘a dangerous fad’. O’Brien uses the term normal in adverted commas when it is adjacent to the term women.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t women come in a variety of shapes and sizes and who, besides the hopelessly deluded fashion industry, made the distinction between a normal woman and an abnormal one? If it were up to me I would choose to see more of Laura Wells (who is a beautiful woman and, despite not being the modelling world’s ideal, is a healthy human being) over the skeletal likes of Jodie Kidd and Kate Moss.

Maybe I’m not the best person to comment about this, because I really couldn’t give a shit about fashion. I generally find most of the models that inhabit that world irrelevant at best and repugnant at worst, but I don’t like the idea that gaunt, anorexic-looking teenagers are the ideal image for any woman, young or old.

This may surprise some women, but that kind of image is actually quite repulsive to most men, certainly at least for those of us who have a fully developed frontal lobe, functioning opposable thumbs and do not support Collingwood.

O’Brien is ignoring the positive effect that having models like Wells, or in the past Sophie Dahl, on a catwalk can achieve. Yes there is a growing (pardon the inevitable pun) problem with obesity in Australia, but having normal looking women on the cat walk does not encourage obesity, it just says that women don’t have to achieve an unobtainable and unhealthy skinniness to be beautiful. How is that wrong? And, for those people who do have chronic weight problems, wouldn’t having an achievable goal to strive for, rather than the disorder-inducing stick insect, be more helpful?

More normal healthy happy women and less anorexia / bulimia inducing clothes racks is a good thing for all of us! And Susie O’Brien shutting the hell up would be even better!

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