For decades, magazines and advertisers have made super models and their size zero bodies the opitime of what women everywhere should look like. And women and girls everywhere found it impossible to measure up. For the first time, Sports Illustrated’s famous Swimsuit Issue has featured a plus sized model, Hunter McGrady. It’s one of the most bold and progressive moves the magazine has ever made. McGrady is the first representative of a real woman ever to don the pages of the most famous swimsuit collection in the world.
Looking huge is something we are programmed to physically recoil away from in utter disgust says Amanda Richards of Bustle Magazine.
“As a plus size woman, I’m incredibly familiar with these sentiments — coveralls your stomach, hide your arms, correspond the length of your hemlines to the place that the cellulite starts on your thighs,” Richards said.
She goes on to describe the incomprehensible number of tricks women put themselves through everyday simply to appear smaller — especially when a photo is involved. Hold your bag in front of you, stand behind a friend, or, better yet, volunteer to take the photo so you don’t have to actually be in the photo.
Enter Hunter McGrady. Not only didnt she do any of that, she proudly dons her bathing suit and proudly owns her size, in fact, her SI photos are a celebration of size, an “ode to the power of a woman who takes up space that wasn’t just given to her, but that she claimed for herself,” describes Richards. In fact, McGrady is actually larger than a normal plus sized model, and that is spectacular! She’s beautiful, confident and is, in the words of the late Whitney Houston, every woman.
SI should be commended for being bold, progressive and McGrady should be commended for showing plus sized women everywhere just how beautiful the larger woman can be. I may purchase my very first copy of the SI Swimsuit edition simply because it finally features a real woman.
Congratulations SI and Hunter McGrady.
