What Sex Blogging And The Freshman 15 Taught Me
As someone who’s felt like she’s been subject to ridiculous standards of beauty in the past, I feel compelled to chime in with my support for Jessica’s post about The Top 7 Butterbodies. This Spike.com article lists Hollywood actresses with pretty faces but “blubbery”, “pudgy”, or “chunky” figures (direct quotes). Who are these actresses? Women like Drew Barrymore and Liv Tyler. It kind of makes you wonder, if they’re not considered attractive, then who is?
What Crisci Likes responded to Jess saying that the piece isn’t sexist since men are held to the same physical standards. After all, she says, “How many times have you laughed at the witty joke of a very intelligent but unattractive man and thought to yourself ‘God, if I was just attracted to him…I would have jumped his bones yesterday.’”
Well, first of all, not everyone is attracted to conventionally beautiful people (like Jessica, I think attractiveness is a highly subjective matter). Secondly, though Crisci argues that “women pass equally horrendous judgment” on men (thus making this issue not about sexism), there’s a difference between one woman’s personal opinion of a man’s attractiveness and the frequent, public, media-assisted judgments of women. A women’s magazine is unlikely to publish rankings of supposedly fat male actors and consider that funny or entertaining, simply because guys aren’t held to the same standards that women are. Sure, there may be expectations that male celebrities be fit and muscular, but they won’t face nearly as much ridicule if they fail to conform to that expectation.
Having publicly written about sex for over two years, I can vouch for the fact that women’s looks matter far more than they should. Sadly, the biggest critics of my blog are not people who disagree with me ideologically, but are people — men and women alike — who don’t think I look good enough to be writing what I’m writing. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been called fat or chubby or not hot enough to say anything about sex. How my looks are relevant to my writing is beyond me, but I can think of countless male relationship and sex writers out there whose appearances are never questioned or at the least, are secondary not primary considerations. This isn’t to say that men don’t face sexism as well (for example, they are expected to be breadwinners, which is obviously an unfair double standard). However, women bear the brunt of the burden to be beautiful.
The author of The Top 7 Butterbodies seems to believe that it’s reasonable to expect celebrities to maintain perfect bodies since they base their careers on their looks. I disagree with this because one’s ability to act or sing (like my ability to comment on sex) is not contingent on appearance. More importantly, holding the famous to these standards means perpetuating them as the “ideal” to which regular women have to aspire and that itself is harmful. I can bet that every girl can cite personal experiences of having to deal with these pressures.
I, for one, never felt comfortable with my body even when I was essentially the ideal size and weight. At my skinniest in late middle school and early high school, I was a bulimic head case obsessed with weighing myself and examining my body. Ironically, it wasn’t until college, until after I gained 20 pounds within the first four months of freshman year, that I was happy in my own skin. Here are some of the lessons my stretch marks have taught me:
- Men don’t select their romantic or sexual partners on the basis of skinniness. The Freshman 15 was not the end to my love/sex life, and I’ve been told by countless guys that it’s your comfort with your body and not your actual body that matters most.
- Skinny women have the same insecurities as everyone else. I have girlfriends with insane metabolism who desperately wish they could put on weight because they think they look “like boys”. They actually say that they’re afraid their bodies aren’t sexually attractive because of this.
- The amount of time and stress wasted over the guilt of eating something fattening or not going to the gym would be better spent making peace with your body. Punishing yourself with unreasonable diets and fasts only promotes unhealthy habits and thinking. At 14, I threw up after a big meal. I’ve long since stopped feeling bad about dessert.
If you want to lose weight, then more power to you, but I fear that too many women aren’t doing this for the right reasons and further, that they believe reaching some “fitness goal”, as Crisci calls it, will fix their problem. The sad thing is that I don’t think there is an attainable goal to reach. After falling in love with my larger frame, I ended up losing all the weight I gained and more (most of it in the past year). I’m now at my lightest since puberty, and even now, I still get the exact same comments about being chubby and unattractive. I’m a size 2/4. I can assure you that even if I were emaciated, I would still get these comments.
As the Spike.com article indicates, even the most beautiful of women (people like Beyonce and Tyra Banks) simply aren’t beautiful enough. What does that tell those of us who are normal? There isn’t ever going to be a “good enough”, and that’s the biggest problem about these standards. So if you’re aiming for perfection, you’re going to be terribly disappointed, and if you’re going to slim down, then do it for yourself because what society expects of you is certainly not attainable.
