March 9, 2010

SKYE BLUE

I was grappling with what to write on this subject until the stars aligned and Max left a comment on Sam’s Do All Men Prefer Skinny Women? post yesterday that included the line:

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“You know who prefers skinny girls? Women.”

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After reading that phrase I knew I had to write about the intense paranoia we women have with being “too fat” (bless you Max).

Readers, the sad truth is that for far too many women being even slightly bigger than their favourite female celebrity/models (who according to the stats I was able to dig up generally weigh about 23% less than the average North American woman) is too fat. As far as I can tell it is we women – not the men in our lives (as evidenced in yesterday’s post) – who are most inclined to associate thinness with beauty and being desirable. So much so that many of us attack and/or compete with women who are thinner than us.

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A few years ago I befriended a co-worker of mine, who I’ll call Sasha. Now Sasha was beautiful and petite, with curves in all the right places. Her only downfall aesthetically speaking was the fact that she didn’t have any fashion sense. Enter Skye, who after a few months of witnessing her wear one fashion disaster after another, both at work and in social settings, offered to go shopping with her.

“Are you sure you want to?”she asked me, as if I’d offered to give my life to save hers.

Confused, but undaunted by her response, I said, “Girl, I love to shop, especially when I’m spending other people’s money. It’ll be great.’

“Okay,” she said, looking real doubtful.

On the day of our big shopping trip, we headed down to Queen West and quickly developed a system. I picked out the clothes and she tried them on. Sasha loved not having to figure out what worked on her own and I had a blast rifling through racks of clothing trying to find the hottest gear to fit her tiny frame. It was like playing dress up with my favourite doll.

After an intense day of shopping ‘til we dropped, her credit card was begging for mercy. It was then that Sasha announced that she was going to treat me to dinner. Just as I was about to dig into the heaping plates of Chinese food we’d ordered Sasha stopped me and said…

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“Skye, today was the first time in my life any woman, besides my mother, has gone shopping with me and not been negative. I usually go by myself because I hate dealing with all the snide comments about my being small. Today really meant a lot to me. Thank you so much.”

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People, she actually had tears in her eyes as she said this. The shit was that real for her, which speaks volumes about the kind of frenemies friends she kept and the hate on a lot of women have for so-called ‘skinny bitches’.

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“We know that every woman wants to be thin. Our images of womanhood are almost synonymous with thinness.” Susie Orbach

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I suppose we could continue to blame our obsession with being “the thinnest of them all”on the media. After all it is the media who continues to uphold a beauty standard for adult women that is based on the airbrushed images of 14 year old girls splashed across the pages of fashion magazines everywhere. But since every female over the age of five eighteen understands (at least intellectually) that there is a big difference between the media’s representations of women and reality, perhaps we have to find another explanation for the hang-ups we women have with our grown up female bodies.

For the record, I also don’t think we can go around blaming the men in our lives, because I for one know more than a few dudes who work hard to let their partners know that they love their bodies just the way the are (if not bigger than they are). Furthermore, as Camryn Manheim a big, bold and beautiful woman, eloquently said,

“Handsome, thin, sophisticated men often fall madly in love with larger women, we just never see it on TV.”

So tell me ladies, what gives?

What are your thoughts on why so many of us women do all we can to uphold thinness as a beauty standard that we know:

1. Is unrealistic for the average adult woman?
2. Doesn’t necessarily make us more attractive to men?

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