Real Women Have Mitochondria
The day I
got training wheels was the day I realized I was “curvy.”
My dad came
home with a set for me when I was 7 or 8 years old, just a few days after I’d
ridden a bike for the first time down a hill with a speed bump at the bottom. My
skinned knees, wrists, elbows, cheek, chin and ribcage were not at all amused when I lost my balance
and made hard contact with concrete. I asked for a set of training wheels, post
haste.
My dad sat
down to affix the wheels to my bike while I pretended to supervise. He perused
the instructions and muttered to himself that the wheels were not suitable for
a child weighing more than 50 pounds. I felt my cheeks go warm with
embarrassment since I knew for a fact that I weighed more than these wheels’ apparent
max capacity. Dad took notice and said “Are you kidding me? You weigh more than
that?!? Yikes!” He said it with a smile and meant no harm, but I still left the
room with my head hanging low. I felt ashamed.
Just like
that, BAM! I was hyper-aware of my body. It dawned on me that 85% of my female
classmates were indeed smaller than I was, and that the boys liked those girls
better. An aunt had recently offered to pay me one dollar for every pound I
could lose, because didn’t I want to be prettier? When puberty struck quite
suddenly after an injury to my jaw did something wacky to my pituitary glands,
my insecurity level reached a frightening peak that lasted well into my
twenties. Body image issues followed me like a stage-five clinger with an axe
to grind; I spent years trying to be smaller and employed unhealthy means to
try and get there.
So
now curves have sort of made a comeback: joy to the world! You see it on TV, on
the radio, on the internet and on t-shirts bearing Marilyn Monroe or some other
curvaceous female’s image: real women have curves, it’s all about that bass,
and anacondas don’t want none unless you got buns, hun. You’d think I’d be all
about this refreshing mentality being of the curvier persuasion, right? Well…
about that.
Here’s my
first issue. The kind of “curvy” that’s lauded as sexy too often only refers to
the Jessica-Rabbitesque shapes of women with voluptuous hourglass figures and
not so much to that of plain ol’ fuller-figured women such as myself. I try so
hard to identify with the “curves are hot” thing because frankly it feels like
I should, and while I do appreciate society in any way embracing the concept of beauty being packaged in different
sizes and shapes, it doesn’t always feel like my particular body type is the
“right” kind of curvy. This is where social media can really make a regular
girl want to pull her hair out; the Instagram models and Kim Kardashian types
with their overabundance of self-indulgent photos make a great and maddening
case for the fact that my curves are for the birds in comparison to theirs; not
only my non-carved waist but my cup size, butt, nose, lips, eyes, pinky toe and
gosh-damn nail beds are apparently the wrong shape, size, color or model year.
This brings
me to my other problem with the “real women have curves” movement, and that’s
that it does the exact same thing
that the “skinny is sexy” ideal does: it defines beauty and sex appeal as only
applying to a certain type of woman with a certain set of characteristics. It not
only leaves out the women who don’t possess those physical traits but shames
them into feeling like they aren’t feminine if they don’t. What I’m talking
about is skinny-shaming, and it’s everywhere I look.
Given my life’s quest to be thinner, I’d never really given
much thought to this side of the struggle. Think about it though. Being told or
made to feel that I’m not beautiful or attractive because my body cannot fit
into a size 6 is annoying, no doubt about that; my hips don’t lie and they say
“we’re wide!” so I try and try to get their circumference down through healthy eating and exercise. Meanwhile a
slew of other women wish theirs were a little less modest and a little more
Minaj because in pushing the agenda for seeing beauty in a larger figure, smaller
girls have become the new punching bag.
This is very evident in media and music which have begun painting women’s
bodies as less desirable if they lack the certain curvature that has become so
synonymous with sex appeal, like when Megan Trainor’s momma apparently told her boys like a
little more booty to hold at night. I know a lot of people are giving her props
for the message behind that song, but that message is sullied for me because it
puts down the girls without said booty abundance. Then we have Nicki out here going
so far as to say “f*ck you if you skinny, bitches!” This grinds… my… gears. It
belittles women who don’t fit the big booty bill and is demonstrative of one of
my major hot buttons: women’s body-shaming coming from other women. Enough already. A naturally slender, less curvaceous
female is just as real a woman as Amber Rose, Christina Hendricks or Sofia Vergara
are, and no one should tell her or me or you any differently.
I’m not setting out to tell anyone to rewire themselves in
what they find individually attractive. What I do want is collective acceptance of the female body in all its
variation. I want for all of us to be able to feel comfortable in our own skin,
to be seen as perfectly beautiful, sexual, desirable creatures with appeal and
worth and value that isn’t measured by our waist-to-hip ratio. I find it unacceptable to define beauty in
exclusionary terms, and not just in how men see women but in how women judge
each other as well.
So here is
my own little body image manifesto: I think a woman should feel sexy whether
she’s shaped like a Coke bottle or like a Coke can. She should focus less on being thicker or thinner and more on being healthy. No woman should feel
pressured to wear makeup, nor should she be shamed if she happens to really like
putting it on. Let a girl wear sky-high heels whether she’s 5’6” or 6’5” and
don’t give her lip about it because that is her prerogative. Please, love the big
boobs or full derriere of women who possess these body parts- but don’t make the
women who lack these assets feel inferior either. Don’t assume that the skinny
girl is healthier than the one shopping for plus-sized jeans, but don’t discount
the slender girl, she might just teach you a few things. Gisele is a beautiful
woman, so is Tess Holliday. Curves don’t make a real woman and neither do six-pack
abs. You know what all real women have? DNA, cells, cytoplasm. Real women have mitochondria.
Put that on a t-shirt.