Now here’s some flaws.

It’s not often, you would see a photograph of me in something above the knee let alone my swimmers, or God forbid my underwear. But after sitting back and watching the Jennifer Hawkins debate unfold over flaws and all naked marie claire cover, I felt that in this case words just wouldn’t be enough.

As Hubby and I flicked through the weekend papers yesterday and I saw the Jen pics, my first thought was: flaws and all my arse. Good for her for stripping down and good for marie claire for putting her on the cover un-re-touched. But hello people, if I had Jen’s body, I’d do the groceries with no bloody clothes on.

There has been criticism of ‘Jen bashing’ and saying she’s not real, and I think it’s a shame that when it comes to body image we get off track and sometimes don’t maybe express our opinions the way we should. All women of all shapes and sizes are real women. Some body types provide a more positive image than others, yes, and is Jen’s one of those bodies? Well that is the million dollar question.

Do I like looking at Jen’s body, and admire her hard work and/or freaking good genes? Yes, I do, and I can appreciate her as a lingerie model and her job that requires her to look a certain way. But out of all the women in the whole entire country, was she the right one for the magazine to make a stand? Probably not. Maybe the right person to make a little bit of ripple, but to try and cause a tidle wave of support for body image, for the AVERAGE Australian women, no.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have my head stuck in the sand, and I think that someone like me or fellow potential covergirl Kerri Sackville would outsell Miss Universe herself in the magazine stakes, (although I’m sure we’d give her a good run for her money), but it still saddens me that at the end of the day whether it was a close second or still the top priority, magazines, like marie claire have a duty to their advertisers to sell magazines. And shitloads of them.

And so here I am flaws, creases, cellulite and all. Why? Well why the hell not? I know I’ve put on weight, about 10kg over the past couple of years. And yes sometimes I have extremely unhappy and p*@$ed off days with my body. I hate my thighs and tummy every single day. But I also know that this is the only body I’ve got, and while I whinge and moan about clothes that don’t fit anymore, I know I’m not fat, but sometimes it still sucks.

But would you catch me like this standing next to Jen. Um, let me think about that. HELL NO!

UPDATE: So after pondering all this for a few hours I felt the need to add something else. Someone wrote on Twitter last night about how they felt when they saw Jen naked on the cover of marie claire. And basically it wasn’t good. I felt the same. I thought if that’s a flawed body then what hope do the rest of us ‘normal’ non-supermodel people have. Um, how about zero. Yes we are all very different shapes and sizes and we should all learn to love the skin we’re in, but comparing ourselves to Jen, which we would all naturally instantly do, is not going to help.

Lastly bravo to Madison Magazine who unfortunately didn’t seem to drum up the same publicity as Jen, but their spread on Aussie’s baring all was a little more comforting in that you could look at women of all sizes and relate. And that’s what we want. To see people who are just like us.