Can we please stop using the phrase ‘plus sized’?

Oh the wonderful world of fashion has ‘let us know’ that ladies (and vunerable teenage girls-myself included) have to be skinny to be beautiful as seen by the Victoria’s Secret ‘Love my body’ campaign:

And then they invented the sub-category for beautiful models called ‘plus sized’ just to really add salt to the wound. Although they don’t mean ‘plus sized’ like the beautiful Tess Holliday:

They mean ‘plus sized’ like this perfectly average sized lady with a beautiful stomach and legs for dayzzzz:

So it’s pretty confusing and not to mention all around stupid, theres nothing ‘plus sized’ about this woman, and even the phrase ‘plus sized’ is offensive, it suggests that you can’t even fit into regular sized clothing! 

And what really annoys me about this label is that every Jane,  Sandra and Susan is a ‘plus size model’ just because they might be slightly curvier than your average model, but they are still long, lean and cellulite free. Which means where normal women (who’s average size in the UK is a size 14-16) thought they had found a sub-category they could perhaps relate more to are in fact told that they aren’t even ‘plus size’ anymore, they’re more…

And the reason I’m writing about this….

I saw an article on Facebook (I know I’m such a teenager) about this so called ‘plus sized’ model who uploaded a ‘belfie’ (butt selfie) to ‘fight’ the beauty ideal that you can’t be beautiful without stretch marks. So i clicked, thinking that this was going to be finally someone that I could maybe relate to, but no sadly again it wasn’t our idea of plus sized, it was this stupid industries:

  
I decided to not include that famous ‘Belfie’ because I thought maybe it was a little racy. 

But you can see there is abosutely nothing ‘plus sized’ about gorgeous model Iskra Lawrence, she’s a size fourteen and 5’9 but she’s certainly not your average Jane. Now obviously Iskra has a good heart but at what point did she go from calling her body slim/curvy/beautiful to plus size? 

Why we have to act like this industry is doing us a favour by using the term ‘plus sized’? Because really this is yet again another body ideal that we just can’t reach.

Love Robyn

P.s. This is not an outlet to bodyshame anybody, any comments like that will be deleted x