I never thought I'd be saying this, but on Friday your favourite purveyor of self-esteem-lowering lady misery, Femail, featured a size 16 beauty queen... with no catty captions, no thinly disguised digs at her size, no 'affectionate' comparisons with cute but huge animals (like whales, or pigs, or hippos. For example.) and no 'concerned' mention of the obesity crisis. They were careful not to use any nice words of their own to describe Chloe Marshall, the 16-year-old, size 16 winner of Miss Surrey, who'll now go forward to the final of Miss England (a dubious honour indeed), but they did manage to include words like 'luscious' and 'gorgeous-looking' in quotes from other people.
Do my eyes deceive me?, I hear you cry. Has the Daily Mail turned over a new leaf?
Can the average-sized British woman at last find other average-sized women in the UK's second most popular daily newspaper (second after The Sun, no less) who aren't being berated for looking too fat, or too thin, or too thin during pregnancy, or too fat during pregnancy, or too thin after pregnancy, or some other version of just not good enough?
Well, in a word, no. Because alongside 'luscious' Chloe in Friday's Daily Mail, there were eleven women and one man condemned for their looks, from Nicole Kidman looking worn out at her husband's gig (um, famous pretty people do get tired, in public, when they're pregnant) to my favourite of the day: Eva Longoria papped *gasp* without make-up and apparently letting herself go 'now that she is no longer on the market'. Ah, yes. We silly girls only bother with brushing our hair, putting on make-up, showering even, until we've bagged our man and dragged him up the aisle. Once that ring's on our finger, gone are our pretty dresses and personal hygiene; its time to reveal the beast within!
Closer to home, Kim Wilde was 'practically unrecognisable from her chart-topping days', when she was photographed out shopping with no make-up and faded clothes. But it's OK, because she's still 'a sex kitten', apparently (although, as far as I'm aware, it's illegal and nasty to touch animals in rude places, no matter how much you love them).
So - it's official. We can't yet expect Femail - the section of the Daily Mail designed for women, written by (mostly) women and read by women - to help women feel good about themselves or each other, but we can take heart that occasionally, just occasionally, an average-sized woman can appear on its pages, criticism-free. I could wax lyrical about how she only made it into the paper in the context of winning a beauty contest - beware fatties with no make-up! - or about how the newspaper itself couldn't bear to utter positive words about her (they were reserved for quotes from other people) but that would just be depressing. Instead, I'm going to cut myself a nice, big slice of cake, curl up, and eat it with a smile on my face, and the plate resting on my size 16 belly. You can't touch me, Daily Mail.