Ladies, Take Cover: 'Pre-Cellulite' Is Coming for You

Hear ya, Maria Menounos!

We’re all human.

Some more than others.

If I want to get rid of it, I know what I have to do.

I love this sentence because it almost sounds evil, like Maria Menounos will be visiting shady parts of town and trekking up dark stairwells and knocking on weird hidden doors and asking for Ashraf. But um, what-huh? What would you do, exactly? I thought the whole thing about cellulite, pre- or post-, was that you couldn’t do anything about it, whether sensed emotionally in its infant stages or well after it is full-blown on your body, no questions asked, because there is nothing to be done, particularly if you’re already doing all the things you could do even theoretically in the first place, like eat well, exercise, and drink tons of water, as one presumes Maria Menounos already does. Maria Menounos you are beautiful AND confusing!

Like Erin Gloria Ryan once laid it bare when underbutt hit the streets:

The cure for cellulite isn’t science, diet, exercise, or bullshit creams that are somehow supposed to change the inside of your body from the outside; the cure for cellulite is reality.

And the reality is that cellulite is constantly framed as a weird aberration that we’re supposed to spend thousands of dollars to fix (or hire assassins to kill, maybe, Maria Menounos?), even if the risk of those so-called cures is a leg needing to be drained every day for months because of fluid buildup (damn, you, seroma!) or a thigh looking like as if “holes had been carved out by a potato peeler.”

And yet, we chase the cellulite cure breathlessly anyway because we have been made to feel so freaking terrible about its curse-like presence. Jezebel has covered it a bunch, natch, and Dodai busted out some truth right here:

Thanks to a steady stream of advertising, movies, TV and magazines, we’re inundated with images of women, but between lithe models, Photoshop and swimsuit issues, we don’t “see” cellulite in the media unless it’s in a “bikini blunders” story, on other people on the beach, or on ourselves. Therefore, we’re not used to confronting it. Our eyes register it as ugly, unsightly, a blemish, an ailment, an embarrassment. We think we’re abnormal, and the flawless thighs in magazines and on the silver screen are normal. When they’re the exception to the rule.

Someone else who is the exception the rule is Maria Menounos, who is gorgeous and all the things one needs to be to be on television and female, or just exist while looking great a lot. I’m not laying any of this at her pre-cellulite thighs — for one, she sounds like a person with a healthy attitude toward her particular relationship to being fit, and like I said, when it’s your job to look good, you probably do have to develop a preternatural ability to detect all possible flaws in advance, because that’s your livelihood, and I don’t see how we could expect anything less, even if it’s a major bummer.

But as usual, this level of scrutiny is yet another thing women have to make room for in the Bin of Bad Feelings About Our Bodies, the anti-Hope Chest that never gets dusty on account of us constantly having to open it up and pile new things in. So, scooch over, wrong boobs and weird clavicle, and make room for pre-cellulite, the newest wonder of the worry-world.

Image by Tara Jacoby.