For every Kim Kardashian,who focuses on body image and striving for perfection, there’s a Pink, telling girls to be who they naturally are and how that’s plenty good enough.
The father of two young girls once showed me a video of them and their friends dancing around a room singing along with Katy Perry’s Roar. It hit me how far we’ve come from the days when I subscribed to Cosmo magazine so I could pay for the privilege of being told how I didn’t measure up. If you don’t treat Katy Perry right, you’re going to hear her roar. Damn right! (And the guy she roars at should expect to be treated well, too.)
Pink shares with her 33-million Twitter followers the realities of being the Mom of two and not aiming for perfection.
When Pink told an interviewer that she and her husband Corey Hart went nearly a year without doing anything physically intimate, the you’re-not-good-enough magazines went crazy. They’re in the business of keeping up the ruse that everyone who’s anyone is perfect and if they’re rich, their life is perfect too. Pink is all about truth and authenticity. She shattered the illusion and a generation of girls will be better off for it.
Tiny, perfect Ariana Grande has 54-million followers. She tweets a lot about love and positive girlish things, aimed at the young females who mainly make up her fan base. If you haven’t seen her imitate Cher, Britney Spears, Whitney Houston and Celine Dion, get thee to YouTube and look up the SNL skit in which she does this. She is a wonderfully talented mimic and a tiny, positive force of nature.
There are others, too. Icons for young females who are vulnerable and self-effacing instead of airbrushed little liars.
Kim Kardashian West mainly sends sales messages to her 60-m Twitter followers but I hope that once those shamelessly self-promoting images are mixed in with the others, they lose some of their power. Back in the day, before the Internet, the microwave, electricity and running water, when we weren’t on butter churn or weaving our own bloomers, all we had were magazines. Their influence was overwhelming. The only way to fight back was through song and Helen Reddy scared some of the menfolk with her feminist hits. Here she is, roaring long before Katy Perry was even born.
Wow, that song brings back fond memories of my 9-year-old self belting it out in the car with my sister and Mom. If you google Helen Reddy, you can see her performing the same song at age 75. She can still rock it. Here’s hoping the Kardashians don’t have the same longevity.