In Chicago there’s a theater my friends and I liked going to when we were in high school. It was a “dollar theater.” Cheap tickets for movies that were already out of the regular theaters and on their way to DVD.

The Logan Theater was a relic of classic old cinemas. A bit out of date, dusty, but decent enough if you were broke yet had at least three bucks on you for a movie– A staple of my childhood. It was recently renovated to cater to the influx of hipsters taking over the Logan Square neighborhood and I’ve found myself avoiding it like the plague. Also movies now cost seven bucks and I can watch new releases for four at the ghetto theater by my house.

In my high school, once a week we had a half day built into our schedule. On those days we were given the opportunity to take two one and a half hour seminar classes on different interests and then have the rest of the day for ourselves.

I remember one half day sitting in the Logan, empty save for myself, a few girlfriends, and the maître d, and watching “Real Women Have Curves.”

This was America Ferrera’s break out role as Ana Garcia, the young Mexican-American girl, coming of age in Los Angeles, trying to live her dreams, trying to stay true to herself, her family, and her culture.

Trying to make it in the world as a fat girl.

I loved that movie.

I loved it.

My girlfriends loved it.

“Yes!” I remember thinking, “real women have curves. I’m not an anomaly, something gross and wrong the way TV, movies, advertisements, the boys on the playground had led me to believe.“

I was not disgusting. I was a real woman.

In the movie Ana meets a boy who thinks she’s beautiful in spite of her body. They start dating and finally they have sex. Suddenly she’s body confident, she decides she’s going to go to a good university instead of working in the sewing factory and she loves herself.

Yes! Go Ana!

I’m oversimplifying things, of course. There’s more to it, it’s been years since I thought about this movie, I just remember what teenage me felt at the end of the movie. I wasn’t fat. I was “curvy.” Real women weren’t Victoria’s Secret models or Kate Moss, they were women that looked like me. And I remember thinking things would be better if I could just find a boy that liked me and could confirm that.

I think in hindsight, that was the saddest thing I took away from that movie.

Recently a tweet by Catherine Tydesley bringing up Calvin Klein’s decision to use a “plus size” model, brought some controversy to the twittersphere and it trickled down my tl.

Myla Dalbesio: Size 10

She’s absolutely gorgeous there’s no question, and her body is beautiful.

But it’s not plus sized.

If she’s plus sized, then I’m Jabba the Hut. And I’m real tired of feeling like Jabba.

I watched some people on the interwebz argue about what it meant to be a real woman.

“How about you use real women instead?!” One person asked, outraged in the same way that I was at seeing Myla being toted as a plus sized model.

A friend of mine brought me back to the reality of the issue by the way she reacted to the word “real.”

My friend is thin and gorgeous. She’s the kind of thin I would never be able to achieve in my life time, even if I stopped eating till the day I died.

But her body size is not what defines her the way my body size is not what defines me.

“Stop using the word ‘real’ when describing people!” She tweeted.

And I completely agreed.

Thin versus fat–and the whole spectrum in between.

Is one person more real than the other?

Are my feelings and emotions more validated than hers because the fashion industry sample size is a size two and I’ve been left out my whole life?

Does that mean she never feels any sort of body image issues? Because in my eyes, and society’s eyes her body type is the one that we would like to obtain?

Here’s the question I’ve started to ask myself as I’ve gotten older, ” what the heck does it mean to be a real woman? And why does it always have to do the way she looks?”

And if we’re honest with ourselves, nothing in the fashion industry is real.

It’s an illusion of an unattainable beauty that even the women in those magazines can’t achieve without the aide of Photoshop and the kind of airbrushing that makes Cher and Madonna look younger than I do.

We are all REAL women.

And I don’t say that in the rose tinted sunglasses, happy go lucky way that we’ve grown accustomed to hearing. Being nice for the sake of being nice.

No.

We are all REAL women because, we are living, breathing, thinking human beings. We are real people who have our own thoughts and opinions, interests and ideas, pleasures and dislikes. We have feelings and quirks and characters that make us unique and imperfect.

We all look different.

We all have different bodies.

We all have different features.

And that is what the world needs to showcase, different bodies, different people.

We need to stop letting men and even other women pit us against each other in the battle of being real and thought of as beautiful.

Enough looking for real, when “real” is all around us.