One big reason I don’t miss the DELi*As catalog

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Clik here to view.Today I spotted a Buzzfeed article called 19 Reasons Why You Miss Getting the DELiA*s Catalog, and was instantly reminded of the one BIG reason I definitely DO NOT miss the DELiA*s catalog. The DELiA*s catalog was how I learned to hate my body.

Sure, DELiA*S wasn’t the only publication out there with images of thin teenage girl models. But I never had Seventeen or Cosmo magazines, so largely and for the most part, the DELiA*s catalog was the only collection of images of skinny girls I could take up to my room and stare at for hours, alone, wishing I was thin. That was my DELiA*s ritual — a deep, dark secret known only to me, my teenage self, and I. Until now, anyway.

Once a month or so, I’d spot the DELiA*s catalog in the pile of mail on the counter, grab it, and go up to my bedroom. I’d pour over each page, looking not at the clothes but the girls. I took in every detail, every airbrushed line. (Of course, at the time I didn’t realize they were airbrushed.) I even cut out a few of my favorites — girls with hair, outfits, and bodies I wanted — and pasted them into my journal.

I would strip to my underwear and look at myself in a full length mirror, strategically covering the parts of my body that weren’t “right” — the love handles, the belly, etc., and imagine myself without them. I used to fantasize about a magic knife that could simply slice off the extra that didn’t belong. I would visualize slicing, slicing, slicing, in long, fluid motions — literally carving my body into the shape I thought it should have been — the shape of the girls in the DELiA*s catalog.

Sick, right? Describing this behavior is weird and when I write it down, it sounds completely pathological. It’s horrifying to remember this part of my past. But if I were a betting woman, I’d bet that a lot of my peers were doing similar things.

I’ve come a long way since then, of course. Despite my perpetual and (unfortunately) NORMAL struggle with body image, I managed to develop a healthy self-confidence about the way I look. There are a lot of things I’ve always loved, and some that I’ve learned to love, about my body. And my feminist awakening, graduate research on body image, and introduction to Health At Every Size certainly made a huge difference in how I feel about my own body image journey.

So yes. I didn’t share this embarrassing secret so that people would pity me, nor did I share it to brag about how far I’ve come since then. I share this embarrassing secret because the Buzzfeed article about the DELiA*s catalog made me realize how glaringly absent my experience was from this ever-so-nostalgic account of what the DELiA*s catalog meant to girls who came of age in the 90s.

I can’t help but imagine how different my experience would have been if DELiA*s models exhibited the varied and beautiful range of body diversity in our world. What if some of those teen models looked like me? (What if the clothes they were selling actually fit me?)

I just read an amazing piece on XOJane about Lena Dunham’s audacity in showing her own, “imperfect,” body on screen — and how much people seem to really hate the fact that she’s doing it. It says:

For all our talk about wanting to see more so-called “real women” in the media we consume — a problematic category itself, as all women are “real,” no matter how near or far they might be to the female beauty ideal — we are awfully quick to condemn a woman who is showing us reality in a very plainspoken, unvarnished way.

The aghast controversy evoked by Dunham’s nudity shows us just how much of this “real women” talk is lip service, and how very far we have to go before we can socially deal with the fact that different bodies exist. Truth is, we’d all probably be a lot less neurotic about our own bodies if we could get used to seeing and accepting the natural variety in other people’s — without shame, and giving no fucks.

So maybe I, too, would look back with loving nostalgia on the DELiA*s catalog if it showcased a cohort of teen models who reflected the wide and diverse reality of what girls look like, and if those girls modeled not only quirky 90s fashion, but also how to not give any fucks about what other people think about their bodies.

Now, that would be a catalog to reminisce about.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.