Why Just Cellulite? The Body Is A Wonderland of Wrinkly Bits To Arbitrarily Hate On.

Erin Gloria Ryan has a hilarious defense of cheeky shorts up at Jezebel, which she loves for exposing a dirty little secret that the fashion industry had previously done a startlingly good job at concealing: That everyone has cellulite. Fat people have it. Skinny people have it. Old people have it. Young people have it. I suppose some men don't have it, but when it comes to most women, cellulite is not evidence of some kind of personal failure to adhere to beauty standards through hard work so much as simple hormones plus genetics. It gets routinely airbrushed out, however, creating the illusion that not  having it is a frequent occurrence. But that is a lie, as Erin notes:

Hear me out: if a child (or weird teen) is afraid of monsters hiding under her bed, a parent or caretaker's best course of action is to demonstrate to the child (or weird teen) that there's nothing under her bed. See? Right there behind the bed skirt? Nothing. No monsters. Now please go to sleep; your parents are trying to sleep/sex each other. In the same way, ubiquitous underbutt on all body types proves that there are only, like, 6 people in the whole entire world who don't have cellulite, and that's just perfectly fine. In fact, the idea that somehow we should all strive for some smooth-buttbottom ideal has been bullshit all along.

Of course, this fat dose of reality will only work on some. As the world will always have assholes and idiots, so too will the world always have a bunch of people who think they're special snowflakes that the rules don't apply to---even the rules of scientific fact---who will be suckered in by the fashion industry's attempts to convince us that cellulite is this thing that you can overcome with effort and perhaps creams. "Maybe you will be stuck with cellulite forever," they say to you, but actually only to themselves because most people who think this way are merely self-deluded and not actually assholes, "But I know that I can overcome."

Because of this, I do wonder at times why the fashion industry has stuck to just trying to convince people that they don't have to have cellulite. There's a whole world of bumpy parts and weird wrinkles on the body that everyone has that you could totally Photoshop out of pictures, making them think they have to try to Photoshop said bits off their actual bodies. I thought I could make a helpful list, in fact:

• The wrinkles on your fingers where your joints bend. First of all, wrinkles, ew. Just because even small children have these wrinkles doesn't mean they're not unsightly evidence of aging. Get rid of them.
• Knees. Who's brilliant idea was to make them bumpy so they stick out a little? Wouldn't be more aesthetically pleasing if your legs were a smooth line all the way down?
• Finger and toe nails. Yes, people do try to paint them and spruce them up a bit, but at the end of the day, it's just lipstick on a pig. They're hard where the rest of you is soft and just plain weird-looking, if you think about it for a moment.
• Earlobes. Same story as nails, but with earrings. You're not fooling anyone, people. Having anything on your body that dangles is gross. Photoshop those suckers out. And while we're at it, the ear is generally kind of weird-looking. Why can't we have simple, triangular ears like cats? How much nicer that would be.
• That weird little bump on the corner of your eye where it meets your nose.
• Nostrils.
• Elbow wrinkles! See: Finger wrinkles and all attendant problems.
• Nipples. Jesus Christ, talk about something that screws up what otherwise could be a smooth, sloping line. They're already subtly Photoshopped out of lingerie ads (most of the time, anyway), but if we could get the porn industry to get on board, we'd have women getting them surgically removed in a decade's time. Let's do this thing.