Let's Get It Together...

The photo was sent to me as part of a joke package of Barbie items. Artist unknown. .....Let's imagine this scenario, shall we? You pull into a gas station and ask for two gallons of gas. You pay and leave. At some point down the line, you pull into another gas station and ask for two gallons of gas and they give you half the amount of gas. Of course, I am assuming full service still exists, but I digress. How long do you think this would go on?

.....Well, it happens all the time in women's clothing sizes. There is no such thing as standard sizing. We leave it up to the manufacturers to determine what their version of a large will be, or even what they call a size four. As I said. There is no way we would accept this in the distribution of any other goods. Milk is always sold in the same predetermined container. They don't just decide to wing it and call it what they want to call it.

.....Men would never put up with this garbage. They would be crazed. Men like to have a garage full of tools in which each little screw driver is hung on the wall in its exact little spot. Do you think they would tolerate the whims of designers that have no standard of sizing?

.....I find it difficult to wrap my brain around the half sizing and misses and juniors and all the other nonsense that goes on. Add to that the idea of European sizing as compared to American sizing. Then, if you go to a retro store you discover that sizing has changed. Just like intelligence has dumbed down, so has our figure. You know how they always try to tell us that Marilyn Monroe was a size twelve? Well, actually she was not. The size twelve of today is not the size twelve of yesteryear. The cut has changed.

.....There was a brand of jeans that I had become used to buying. Now, there are many brands of jeans that I like, but it's hard for me. I am a strict vegetarian and for some reason designers are intent on sticking that stupid bit of leather at the back. I do not eat meat for moral reasons (it has nothing to do with health). Do not worry; I will never lecture. I believe it's like a religion and best kept to yourself. I finally found a pair of jeans that I liked that did not have that piece of leather and didn't look like Mom jeans.

.....I was in a rush one day and I tried a pair on. I knew that I had not lost weight, yet somehow my normal size did not fit. I asked the sales woman what was going on. She told me that the brand had changed the sizing. I am no fool. A miracle of God had not taken place. The jeans did not hold the long, lost answer to weight loss.

.....So, basically what it amounts to, I said to the sales woman, is that the designers think that women are so gullible and vain that they will buy the jeans if the size is a smaller number. The sales woman told me that it works and that all the designers are doing it. It is an effective marketing tool. This only served to piss me off. On principle I did not buy the jeans. So, I am now walking around in a really old pair of pants.

.....If this nonsense keeps up we will be walking around in negative numbers soon. Please. We need to have numbers that we know mean something. When I bake something I know that the measuring cup equals one cup. Why can't we get standards set up that we know for certain that when we buy something that x=x? Is that too much to ask?