Okay, Ellen DeGeneres isn’t exactly Pamela Anderson. And Katie Couric is no Kathie Lee Gifford. But I gotta say, it still rings a little hollow when these two broadcasting divas get on that old “sexist culture” soapbox.

I won’t lie, though. I completely agree with what DeGeneres said when she told Couric in a recent CBS web-only interview:

“It’s a double standard” when it comes to women and body image.

“There are men with really beautiful women that don’t have great bodies,” she said. “Yet nobody is saying anything about that.” [Ed: Except Pasta.]

“It’s not fair,” Ellen added. “The way that magazines airbrush everything, women are looking at bodies like that going, ‘my stomach doesn’t look like that. I’m supposed to look like that?’ So they starve themselves and they work out like crazy . . . We put the wrong emphasis on what beauty is, and what health is.”

True. Buuuuut …

In their own small ways, couldn’t both DeGeneres and Couric be seen as just a teensy bit complicit in perpetuating women’s unhealthy obsession with body image? Perhaps, as NewsBusters’ Candance Moore notes:

. . . the reason for [women's obsession with body image] is not because of domineering men. Maybe girls feel pressure to look better because their Idols like Ellen DeGeneres tell them to.

Hmmm. Let’s see if Ellen can explain to her fans how her decision to become a CoverGirl spokeswoman (complete with airbrushed photos) fits in with that whole healthy body image thing. Isn’t trying to make a 52-year-old look like a 22-year-old kinda the same as airbrushing a little cellulite off a celeb’s thighs?

Or perhaps she would care to comment on what exactly it was that she found so attractive about the tall, leggy, and formerly anorexic Portia de Rossi? I’m sure it was her taste in books. Or movies. I mean, is it just me, or doesn’t the Better Off Ted blonde bombshell sort of epitomize our sexist society’s female ideal?

Oh, it’s just me? Oh, okay.

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