Daily Front Row

2010 July 1

Ed Letter Analysis: Robbie's July Elle Missive

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Robbie Myers
ADRIEL REBOH/PatrickMcMullan.com View Gallery

Sometimes, ed letters are just a teensy bit fascinating! Behold a few bon mots from Elle-itrix Robbie Myers, as evidenced on her July 2010 page:

I said it. On May 3, I went on the Today show, and in a segments about the winds of change blowing down last season's runways, I uttered the words "[Elle Macpherson] is not a skinny girl." Not skinny as in, not one of the anorexic, near-dead models that Ann Curry and I had just been talking about. But no matter---the blogosphere isolated that sentence and sent it out under such headlines as "Editor of ELLE Hates Fat People." How ironic I was actually praising the presence of an almost 50-year-old demonstrably busty and athletic woman as a hopeful sign in an industry where the models have been way too skiny (definition: underweight). But that's not what the furor was really about. It was about what it was about 15 years ago, when I was an editor at Seventeen, and 10 years ago, when I was at Mirabella: In the "who's responsible for my self-hating body image" debate, there's no debate at all. As New York blogger Amy Odell put it, magazines for women "make us feel bad about ourselves." I wrote to Amy, hoping she might, as a smart writer who's certainly up on popular culture, explore that a little bit on assignment, but she never wrote me back. Alas.