Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Hayley Williams On Cosmo Cover: 'Sexy Is Whatever You Want It To Be'

Hayley Williams can currently be seen on the cover of the May issue ofCosmopolitan magazine and, somewhat understandably, she's excited ("really excited") about that fact.
But rather than just let the photos speak for themselves, the Paramoresinger has decided to talk about them — and her decision to do the cover shoot in the first place — in a new blog post on her band's LiveJournal page.
"I wanna talk about the Cosmo cover. It's a little more than a big deal to me," she wrote. "To the general public, Cosmo is either a) a woman's obsession, or b) a woman's demise ... Honestly, either of the two options equal out to be the same damn thing. It's easy to let all the images of all these Godlike-looking women whisper to us how we think we're supposed to look. It's like, 'Here, look at my boobs! Don't you wish you had these?'
"And you know what? It's never gonna change," she continued. "As much as I tell myself I don't care and I wear whatever I want, there will always be those moments when I'm at the checkout line at Target and I see some gorgeous person on the cover of any ol' rag, and I'm like, 'Ugh, is that how it's gotta be?' Only to realize that, next month, that girl on the cover is gonna be me."
Williams then goes on to explain why she agreed to do the Cosmo cover, and how it fits into not only her role within Paramore, but her new outlook on life, as well.
"My #1 goal when the band began was to make myself invisible. Not only did I not want to be the focal point, I wanted to be unseen! And honestly, it never made a difference," she wrote. "It never made people focus on me any less ... so this time I'm taking a different approach. All three of us in Paramore have our own roles, and finally I will accept mine. I'm going to be okay with being a 'powerful female.' And if that's what it is, I'm going to use that role to make a difference.
"Here's my course of action," she continued. "I will be myself. I will grow up. And I most definitely will find the time in my own life to be sexy if I feel like it. Who wrote the rules? Who said that a girl that lives in this same T-shirt and jeans nearly every day won't wanna wear pumps and a short skirt tomorrow. And I'm hoping by seeing my crazy mug on a magazine cover, some girl who's having a not-particularly-liberated day will think to herself that the May cover looks just a little different than the usual Cosmo cover and hopefully they can even be inspired. No, I don't think I'm some kind of saving grace ... but I do know that I never thought of myself as conventionally beautiful nor sexy. ... I'm hoping that the more a magazine will take a chance on a girl like me, the more a girl will have a frickin' chance in hell to be unique, powerful, strong in her weaknesses, confident in her flaws. Because that's who I'm trying to become."
She closed by telling her fans that "sexy is whatever you want it to be ... it's up to you," and then backed up that assertion by poking fun at the rather unfortunate cover line ("75 Sex Moves Men Crave") that accompanied her image.
"For the record, I really was hoping one of the headlines would be '69 Ways to 69,' but I guess it was a no go," she wrote. "Honestly, I don't think they could come up with that many."

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