I’ve been blogging now for almost eight years, and during that time I feel like I’ve been able to sit front and center as society has moved closer to a general acceptance of women of varying shapes and sizes. I’ve tried to do my own small part by featuring both traditional and plus size clothing on this blog from day one. In the past few years we’ve literally gone from a handful of stores carrying (lots of ugly) plus size fashions to stores like Eloquii actually making fashionable styles designed for curves to blogger GabiFresh encouraging women to embrace their curves and wear a “fatkini” with pride to ModCloth deciding to make nearly all of their clothes in all sizes to a plus size woman appearing on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition to plus size women walking the runway at New York Fashion Week. In a relatively short amount of time, acceptance of plus-size women – or at least of their buying power – has come a long way… but has it come far enough?

Refinery29 just announced a new initiative in partnership with Lane Bryant and Aerie, See the 67% Percent, where they are going to make a concerted effort to use larger women (those wearing a size 14+) on their site – and they’re encouraging other media outlets to follow suit. They want to start seeing a more realistic portrayal of women, which is certainly commendable and history will show that they’re on the earlier side of this movement than the latter. As a leading women’s lifestyle website, I only wish Refinery29 had tackled this issue earlier, but better late than never.

It seems hard to fault Refinery29 for wanting to be more inclusive, but the Facebook post where they announced this new initiative has comment after comment from women (and a few men) beating the same old drum and talking about how terrible it is because plus size women are unhealthy and/or plus size women are lazy, how a campaign like this glorifies plus size bodies, or even how not enough attention is being paid to women who get skinny shamed. I don’t even know why I read comments sections because they’re so  freaking depressing.

We all – each and every one of us – have our own battles that we face every single day.