Apparently, "You don’t put a big girl in a big dress."

I’m not going to dispute that, because I’m not a fashion photographer or a fashion anything, but what I’m wondering is, when did lovely Christina Hendricks (5’7", statuesque, and pictured at left) become a "big girl"?

Only in Hollywood could somebody who looks like that even be considered "big." Most of us would kill or at least maim to look like Hendricks, who stars in the popular TV show "Mad Men."

The question is, did the New York Times, where a columnist stated "You don’t put a big girl in a big dress," back up the assertion by deliberately stretching a photo of Hendricks horizontally so that she looked wider? This is a controversial question.

The photo was definitely run out of proportion, but it may easily have been an accident, because there are plenty of lazy shortcuts you can take in most layout programs that size photos to fit the space, which is often quicker than sizing the space to fit the photo and then putting the article on the page all over again. Or maybe someone thought it would be funny to make the gorgeous Hendricks look wider to fit the column better. I can’t say.

But what’s really wrong to me seems to be the columnist’s blithe assertion that Hendricks was a "big girl" in the first place.

Apparently our definition of beauty has now become so narrow that even a big-chested, small-waisted woman is just a "big girl."