EG Woman’s Website Becomes Internet Sensation

When EG resident Odessa Cozzolino became a professional photographer two years ago, she noticed a trend. Women - practically all the women - were very hard on themselves when it came to their bodies. But Cozzolino, looking at these same women through her camera lens, saw something quite different.

She saw normal, beautiful bodies. And she realized that these same women had no idea what they really looked like.

Cozzolino, who lives in the Hill & Harbor district of EG with her husband and two young children, thought there had to be a website where women could see what other women - real women, not photo-shopped magazine models - actually looked like. Nope.

“I figured it already existed, but when I found out it didn’t, I kind of decided I had to,” she said. Mybodygallery.com was born.

On the website, women are invited to post a photograph of themselves along with their body type, height, weight, pants size and shirt size. Or they don’t have to add a photo. By typing in their own body stats, women can search for photos of other women who share those dimensions.

Cozzolino recounted of one woman’s reaction: “I pulled up all the women of my height and my weight and they looked hot!” she told Cozzolino. The woman, convinced something was amiss, rechecked her own height and weight, twice. When they came up the same, she finally accepted that maybe her own view of herself was distorted.

The website was launched less than two years ago. For the first year, it “puttered along,” she said. Then, earlier this year, the Toronto Star wrote about it. Suddenly, the site started booming. And others called. Mybodygallery.com and Cozzolino have been featured in New York magazine, the New York Daily News and ABC News, among others.

In August, it got more than 8 million hits.

More than 9,000 photos are posted on the website. Many of the posters do not show their face, emphasizing the body focus of the site.

For Cozzolino, reading the stories that some women share is the hardest part of running the website. They tell of decades of unhappiness with their bodies. “It’s heart-wrenching.”

Women say things about themselves that they would never say about someone else, she said.

The website, then, is a place for kindness. Some of the basic tenets of mybodygallery.com are:

• It is not a forum for judgment.

• It is not a place where some women are welcome to post their pictures and others are not.

• It is a place for women to post their true and accurate pictures. And for other women to see that the world is not a place of cookie cutters. We are all different in our body shape and size as well as our place in our journey to loving our bodies exactly as they are, not as we (or others) think they should be.

• It is a place for us to be kind to others and ourselves.

For Cozzolino, it’s personal. She has a 7-year-old daughter and she does not want her to get caught up in the body-perfection swirl that is today’s culture. She cites statistics - the fastest rising age group to be diagnosed with an eating disorder is between 5 and 12 years old, the number one cause of death in women ages 15 to 24 is an eating disorder - and wonders why women are so hard on themselves.

It may not be just women. Men, it turns out, have written to Cozzolino asking that she start a mybodygallery for them.

Some feedback has been negative. “There are people with anorexia who post,” she said. “This is reality. It’s horrible, but it’s sad.”

That's made some people fear that the website is glorifying the very thing it purports to abhor. Cozzolino said she has talked to several psychologists about the site and she feels that her safeguards help to keep the site from glorifying one particular body type.

For instance, the website does not allow comments. And there are no forums. As Cozzolino said, “This is not a place for people to judge each other.”

Cozzolino - who has lived everywhere from California to West Virginia to Maine before settling in East Greenwich - said that same non-judgmental quality is one of the things she likes so much about life here.

“I feel more accepted here," she said. "Women are more supportive of each other in this neighborhood.”

While Cozzolino said she is "thrilled" with the website's response, she can't help wondering about a world where women weren't obsessed with how they looked.

"Imagine what we, as a gender, could accomplish if we thought about something -anything - else besides how we look?"