Real women: a rant

After seeing yet another use of the term ‘real women’ today, I sort of lost it a little. Ok, a lot. Over the past few years this seems to be the buzzword bandied around for advertisers who want to feel clever and attempt to promote their products by telling us that ‘real women’ will use them.

For some reason, they’ve decided that ‘real women’ usually look a little larger than your average model, smile a lot and are quite happy to parade around in their undies selling everything from deodorants to sweets.

Well, I’ve had enough. I’m fed up of brands telling me what a ‘real woman’ is supposed to look like. Because, ya’ know, we’re actually all ‘real’ women. It doesn’t matter how you look – real women can be a size 6 or a size 26; they might have ginger hair, dark hair, light skin, dark skin, big boobs, a tiny bum, the list could go on forever.

I wish we would stop being bashed over the head with some sort of ideal that a ‘real woman’ has to have curves. Non-curvy women are ‘real’ too. Having one thing doesn’t make us more of a woman than someone without it and trying to use some sort of rubbish ideal of ‘real’ just makes you look out of touch from reality.

If you identify as a woman, as far as I’m concerned, you’re a ‘real woman’, so can we  please, please, please just stop using this term? Today I saw it being used to advertised an online sweet shop. With a graphic of a ‘real woman’ in her underwear who was around a size 16, in her 40s and white, it was a very bad parody of the controversial Protein World adverts that are in the process of being taken down. The fact that it said ‘real women think sweets are better than eating protein’ actually made my head want to implode. So I’m not meant to enjoy a cheeky KFC more than a packet of Haribo? Oh how wrong you are…

If you’re a PR/Advertiser/Brand reading this and thinking of using the term ‘real women’, I beg you to stop. No-one needs that sort of bulls**t shoved in their faces. Let’s just get over it, accept that women of all shapes, sizes, colours, whatever are REAL and move on. And never, ever, ever mention the term again.

Rant over.