There's a website called SoulCysters that was designed as a resource for women with PCOS. I don't often visit it, because I'm generally alright with the diagnosis and don't really need a shoulder to cry on, but earlier today I was hunting for information on something in hopes that it was just a consequence of PCOS (no luck, so I'm dreading the visit to the doctor later this week). After hunting for information with no success, I decided to browse the forums.
I found a topic titled "Stupid Things People Say" and on Page 3, I found this:
"One time i had this very very gay manager of mine annouce that all the men must love me because of my big titties, and grabed them and told me I was sexy. that actualy made me feel good for some weird reason (we had a grabby kind of relationship). He had this whole thing about celebrating what is female, and female is round, and you know...other ignorant people aside, i'm gonna go with that. It makes more sense then society lifting up girls who look like little boys with a bra on."
I'm not sure I can really explain why, but this quote filled me with an enormous amount of joy. Why don't we, as a society, celebrate that which is genuinely female?
I've noticed that only a handful of societies buy into this concept that a woman should be wraith-like, starved and deprived, and practically all of them are "Western" societies--patriarchal, Christian, and the like. Don't get me wrong, this isn't an attack on Christian values, only an observation that countries that place this type of pressure on women are also, predominantly, Christian.
I can't help but wonder whether this is a result of the type of society that we've had for so long. Feminism came through and turned the male-dominated world upside down, but as a result, women had to become so much more masculine--they had to go to work, in many jobs they had to start dressing more masculine to properly perform the job, they had to give up their roles in the homes in order to make time for money-making. And I know those weren't really the goals of feminism, but they certainly are consequences of the freedoms won for women. (I won't go into all that... that's a topic for another day LOL)
I keep wondering whether this drive to do all the things men do has encouraged women to look like men--after all, consider the weight and body fat percentage that is considered "healthy" versus the weight and BFP of the women on the covers of the magazines that tell women what they should look like. The women on those magazines fit the body types of men much more closely than they do women. Why is this? I've had guy after guy tell me that it has very little to do with their preferences... So why do women want to look like little boys?
I think women have just lost sight of the value they have simply as women, rather than as women who are fighting to do the things men do. There's reasons why religions such as Wicca have such an appeal with people today, particularly among young women, and one of those many reasons is that they feel like it values women alongside men simply for being women, not because they're women who learned to fit into a masculine role. It values women of all shapes and sizes, of all walks of life, and encourages true feminine beauty. And for as much as I love my Christian beliefs and heritage, there's not much of a role in Christianity for women (the OT has quite a bit for women but it's the Jewish tradition, not so much Christian itself). Modern Christianity has created space for women, but in its traditional form it's male-dominated and has a nasty tendency to cast women in a less-than-holy light. Just look at what history has done to Mary Magdalene! Of course I'm also trying to take into account that the Bible we have now was passed down through generation after generation of scribes, with their own thoughts and agendas and varying foreign-language proficiencies, and that many of the traditions I've seen in church might not be the teachings of Jesus as much as they are the skewed ideas of some priest or another, or the misinterpretation of some scribe, or whatever.
Anyway, religion aside and back to my point: There's a lot of beauty in being a woman, and you don't have to be 6'3" and 110lbs to be beautiful. You don't have to be the woman who looks like a little boy in a bra in order to be beautiful, and you certainly don't need a bust size to rival Pamela Anderson or a bank account like Oprah Winfrey's.
It was beautiful and acceptable to be a curvier woman until fifty or sixty years ago. Enter birth control, equal pay for women, and low self-esteem. Suddenly the standard of beauty was something much, much smaller, and women have had to try harder and harder to see their own beauty ever since.
I'm one of those rather unfortunate women who went through a period of rapid and (we thought) fairly unexplainable weight gain at a young age. When I finished my freshman year of college I was at about 125lbs, only up five pounds or so from my much-more-active high school weight. A so-called friend of mine back then had me convinced that I was fat. I was miserable and I probably had lower self-esteem then than I have at any other point in my life. Then in a four year period I've gained about 70lbs and my actual weight has fluctuated up and down. The thing is, though, that I've learned to appreciate my body more, and I'm far more capable of seeing the beauty in it than I was. I'm not happy with the condition my body is in, but I've got recent history to compare it to and it's a hard trasition to make, from itsy-bitsy to more-to-love. But you know, I've come to love my curves. Sure, I need to get rid of some of the bulge around my middle, but what's wrong with having boobs and hips and butt? Not all curvy women are unhealthy, the way so many magazines want us to think; an enormous number of larger men and women are far healthier than their thin counterparts.
I'm not in any way saying that people should do things that are bad for their bodies, like put on weight when it would be medically unwise for them to do so, but I don't think women should be made to feel like they are less beautiful for being 38B rather than 32D, or size 14 rather than size 4. I think people, as a whole society, should remember their mothers, most of whom weren't stick figures. They should remember the early movie stars, most of whom were very curvy and who were loved for it. Remember the pin-up girls who kept the soldiers sane through several wars, and the standard of beauty that has prevailed for centuries (with the exception of the few-decade lapse in the last century and this one).
Why not celebrate womanhood in its many shapes and sizes, rather than convincing millions of women that there's something wrong with them because they don't look like one individual girl in a magazine?
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