Ugly? Who says its ugly?!

I love flicking through a glossy magazine or seven, but I am sick sick SICK of those advertisements claiming to have the 'cure for unsightly cellulite'.

They invariably involve tubes of pricier-than-saffron cremes and a mutant oven mitt to 'brush your thighs with daily - it's so simple'. Of course it is. And my left arse cheek is housing the hidden city of Atlantis.

Why do we do this? Why do we, as a society, decree that cellulite is unsightly? Babies have cellulite for goodness' sake and unless bubsy is a butt-ugly inbred we don't squeeze the tops of its thighs and wrinkle our noses in horror, do we? (On second thoughts, maybe we do; especially when those limbs are so close to the nugget filled nappy).

Most women, including myself, take secret glee in buying those nasty NW and No Idea magazines with the cover story 'Celebrities with Cellulite.' Those pictures show that even human hairpins like Nicole Richie and ex-buddy Paris have cellulite somewhere on their person. Only a good studio shot and full airbrush treatment should fool us into thinking that a starlet/harlot has silky smooth thighs. And yet, despite these photos, we still look at our own cottage-cheese-wrapped-in-cling-wrap acres of flesh and fret.

Again, why? Who said that something we were born with is ugly and should be removed instantly? Why choose cellulite as the offending material? Which committee of cavemen, knights of the dark age or 1950s beatniks elected it as the body's boogeyman and why was their judgement accepted without question? Whichever bunch of clowns it was, it has led to a towering industry that promises a permanent cure but ends up with a waifer-thin wallet.

It leads me to wonder - what permanent parts of the body would I decree 'unsightly'? Hmmm, let me see...... I've never been a fan of elbow skin. As said before by Billy Connolly, it looks like the place where God placed the leftover testicle skin. It sure as hell doesn't improve with age either, but gathers in folds. What looked like cute little dimples at age five ends up resembling your great nanna's neck when you hit your thirties.
Let's petition Medicare to provide complementary elbow tucks and botox injections for any person over the age of ten.

This may be a tad blunt, but what about the arse? What's so attractive about it? Forget the function and the smell, what about its appearance - that aint a star I want to be gazing at any time soon. Think about it - we don't wear clothes that reveal it, nor do we see too many artworks with the arse as the main subject or any products named after it. There's no 'Arse scented Soap' available at Coles, nor are there arse-shaped Champagne bottles on sale.
Let's contact L'Oreal, Estee Lauder, Chanel et al to invent a creme and oven mitt to change the shape of that unfortunate poo pipe to, say, a blue love heart.

Bra fat is definitely a substance worth further investigation. Let's take it for granted that the other issues of obesity and wearing bras a size too small have been tackled without success. As such, when viewed from behind, the girthy gal has what looks like a fleshy set of brackets on each side. From the front she appears to be storing a couple of boiled eggs in her armpits and a garden hose directly under the lower elastic. Babies don't have this sort of fat. Well, they do, but at least we don't shove them into bras and make them appear like the love children of the Michelin Man.
Surely Blackmores, Nature's Gift or Fat Blaster could develop some tablets that smooth down the ripples, at a cost only twice that of the average fortnightly mortgage.

Finally, knees. Knees are ugly. If you're skinny they look painfully knobbly and if you're fat they look like tree trunks with faces carved into them. Childrens' knees look fine, but as with elbows, knees rapidly turn against you when you hit your twenties. Little chicken breast-sized pockets of fat stubbornly move into the area; or alternatively, every bit of muscle and sinew shrivels to reveal a skull-like knob of mallee root. Both effects result in a very creepy part of your body's neighbourhood. Any woman caught wearing shorts or mini skirts above the age of forty should be taken aside and lectured - nay, indoctrinated - on the evils of exposing such terror to unsuspecting members of the public.
This is endemic, especially in South Australia at the height of summer. Our local members should be petitioned to introduce a law effectively banning the exposure of knees by people over thirty. No creme, spray, pill or oven mitt will cure those shockers.