On Body Image
This is a true story, a little snippet from my life once upon a time. The dialogue has been altered, as this took place over ten years ago and I am not a stenographer, and the names have been changed.
“I just want a bagel, but they’re full of carbs.”
Tagging along with two classmates/colleagues on a shoe shopping expedition wasn’t normally how I would spend a lunch hour. But I had been in desperate need of some cold medicine, and perhaps some interaction with peers, so I had hopped in the back seat of Amy’s car and gone along on the mid-December expedition to the chain department store that offered to fulfill our needs, from the mundane (the aforementioned cold medicine) to the questionably trendy (those boots that were suspiciously/appropriately named).
Then again, peers might have been a bit of a stretch. I had nothing in common with Amy and Loe other than the fact that we were the same age, female, and were all studying to become teachers at the same institution.
Maybe that should’ve been enough.
“So get a bagel,” I piped up from the backseat in an attempt to be helpful that I knew was probably not. But I was 22 and liberated and believed that feminism should include women eating carbohydrates.
Predictably, I was answered with a mild tirade about beauty standards, one that I tuned out in order to cast an appreciative look over Amy’s frame. She was the definition of curvaceous; breasts and hips and legs thick, but not fat.
I didn’t look down at my own extra fat on my stomach and thighs. Obesity resulting from that perfect combination of genetics and lifestyle choices.
My train of thought was interrupted by the end of Amy’s tirade: “I just don’t understand why the twelve-year-old boy physique is supposed to be attractive,” she groused.
“Oh thanks,” Loe’s usual mild manner was replaced with a quick and scathing reply. Amy’s shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly; she’d been mired too deeply in her own body image woes (and perhaps, her hunger. I thought, once again, about suggesting that she purchase that bagel after all) to realize that her friend next to her possessed a somewhat typical physique for her ethnicity; slender, with less pronounced curves.
Neither of them fit into the Hollywood ideal: Amy too thick, too Midwestern perhaps, with her dirty-blonde hair and round features. Loe, well, too Asian, though her eyes were large and brown and her skin was the color of honey.
They were beautiful, the two of them. Fit and strong and bright-eyed, sleek hair and clear skin, both of them well-dressed and clearly having risen early enough to apply makeup and manipulate hair into exactly the patterns they desired.
My nose was red, my eyes probably dull from illness. My face was, as always, free of makeup, and I had barely run a comb through my hair that morning, deep in the midst of a quarter-life crisis borne from disappointments that were months old but still stung because they reminded me of just much I didn’t fit in to the world and how little the world cared.
“You don’t look like a twelve-year-old,” Amy replied.
Eventually, we found our way back to the break room at work, Amy with her bagel clutched firmly between two hands, only half of the cream cheese having been scraped off. Me, with a bowl of homemade soup, complete with a generous helping of carbs; pasta made from the dreaded white flour, rolled out with my mother’s hands, hands that she complained about occasionally because they were veiny and aged from years of hard work, hands that had cared for the very young and the very old alike. They were hands that would never be seen in a magazine spread. That was okay; such things were beneath those hands anyway.
“I just want a bagel, but they’re full of carbs.”
Tagging along with two classmates/colleagues on a shoe shopping expedition wasn’t normally how I would spend a lunch hour. But I had been in desperate need of some cold medicine, and perhaps some interaction with peers, so I had hopped in the back seat of Amy’s car and gone along on the mid-December expedition to the chain department store that offered to fulfill our needs, from the mundane (the aforementioned cold medicine) to the questionably trendy (those boots that were suspiciously/appropriately named).
Then again, peers might have been a bit of a stretch. I had nothing in common with Amy and Loe other than the fact that we were the same age, female, and were all studying to become teachers at the same institution.
Maybe that should’ve been enough.
“So get a bagel,” I piped up from the backseat in an attempt to be helpful that I knew was probably not. But I was 22 and liberated and believed that feminism should include women eating carbohydrates.
Predictably, I was answered with a mild tirade about beauty standards, one that I tuned out in order to cast an appreciative look over Amy’s frame. She was the definition of curvaceous; breasts and hips and legs thick, but not fat.
I didn’t look down at my own extra fat on my stomach and thighs. Obesity resulting from that perfect combination of genetics and lifestyle choices.
My train of thought was interrupted by the end of Amy’s tirade: “I just don’t understand why the twelve-year-old boy physique is supposed to be attractive,” she groused.
“Oh thanks,” Loe’s usual mild manner was replaced with a quick and scathing reply. Amy’s shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly; she’d been mired too deeply in her own body image woes (and perhaps, her hunger. I thought, once again, about suggesting that she purchase that bagel after all) to realize that her friend next to her possessed a somewhat typical physique for her ethnicity; slender, with less pronounced curves.
Neither of them fit into the Hollywood ideal: Amy too thick, too Midwestern perhaps, with her dirty-blonde hair and round features. Loe, well, too Asian, though her eyes were large and brown and her skin was the color of honey.
They were beautiful, the two of them. Fit and strong and bright-eyed, sleek hair and clear skin, both of them well-dressed and clearly having risen early enough to apply makeup and manipulate hair into exactly the patterns they desired.
My nose was red, my eyes probably dull from illness. My face was, as always, free of makeup, and I had barely run a comb through my hair that morning, deep in the midst of a quarter-life crisis borne from disappointments that were months old but still stung because they reminded me of just much I didn’t fit in to the world and how little the world cared.
“You don’t look like a twelve-year-old,” Amy replied.
Eventually, we found our way back to the break room at work, Amy with her bagel clutched firmly between two hands, only half of the cream cheese having been scraped off. Me, with a bowl of homemade soup, complete with a generous helping of carbs; pasta made from the dreaded white flour, rolled out with my mother’s hands, hands that she complained about occasionally because they were veiny and aged from years of hard work, hands that had cared for the very young and the very old alike. They were hands that would never be seen in a magazine spread. That was okay; such things were beneath those hands anyway.