Skip to main content

Curves are... good?

These days, curves are infinitely preferable to straight up-and-down body types.  Or so we're told.  But we're also told that said curves have to be wee and firm, taut and high, perfectly rounded and impeccably proportioned.  So all those curvy chicks out there, flaunting their J-Lo asses and Christina Hendricks breasts (DROOOL), and ostensibly shattering the myth of Twiggy, serve less to comfort me than as an even higher standard of sex appeal which I'll never reach.

As a result, I often feel disappointed when I buy a dress I think looks great on me, only to see it on the model (or mannequin), with her (its) perfect, bounce-a-quarter-off-that-ass curves and realize that the dress only looks great on me in comparison to other items in my closet.  From a more objective, overall, survey-the-world sort of view, it looks just ok, mostly due to my many lumps and bumps, and my massive hips.

BUT.  This past weekend, I was in New York with the bf, and he insisted on going into the big, beautiful Anthropologie in SoHo, and of course I found two beautiful dresses to buy.  One was a sale item; the only size left was a 10, which fit, but wasn't very flattering (read: pancake titties)– the loverly sales staff managed to find the dress for me in a 12, in Baton Rouge, and sent it off to my SF house.  The second fit perfectly as soon as I put it on, and is immensely flattering– the waist looks teeny, the bazongas look massive, and the hips look lump-and-bump-free!  Amazing.

Even more amazing, though, is the fact that when I went online to find photos of the dresses to send to friends, I realized that I looked better in them than the dressmaker's dummies!!  Who knew it was possible?!

Turns out, extreme curves (and my hips are definitely extreme) can be an asset.  Case in point: the dresses in question look kind of boring, and even a little boxy (still ADORABLE, though), in the photos:

Whereas, on me, well let's just say VA VA VOOM.

And thank god for that, because I really needed a body boost.  Things have been bleak and blubbery lately, so even though this dress discovery may not seem exactly post-worthy to you, I'll take anything I can get these days!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Do fat women have it worse than fat men?

I've always said that being fat is harder on women than it is on men.  Not only is there a lot more societal pressure to be stick thin rather than just healthy, which men don't seem to get, but it's a lot harder to be seen as physically attractive if you're even ten or fifteen pounds overweight. Anyway, it seems I'm not the only one thinking these things.  There's an article in the NYTimes today about overweight and obese women doing worse than men financially, an interesting angle on the effects of obesity, and in it they say: Why doesn’t body size affect men’s attainment as much as women’s? One explanation is that overweight girls are more stigmatized and isolated in high school compared with overweight boys. Other studies have shown that body size is one of the primary ways Americans judge female — but not male — attractiveness. We also know that the social stigma associated with obesity is strongest during adolescence. So perhaps teachers and pee

Can technology help me Lose It, or will I get lost in the numbers?

A few weeks ago I downloaded a new app for my iPhone called Lose It. It’s a calorie counter, but it also incorporates exercise, and the best part is that it’s pretty non-judgmental, as these things go. It lets you choose your own goal, and how fast you want to lost the weight, and then it just calculates the numbers for you. For example, I told it my current weight (I don’t want to talk about it) and that I wanted to lose thirty pounds (yes, hopelessly idealistic) in six months (hey, you gotta have some realism). And it told me my calorie allowance was roughly 2,100 per day. Way higher than I expected! Which is the other thing about this app: it makes me feel good about my eating habits! I have it tracking my nutrients as well, and besides the fact that I eat about twice as much sodium as I’m supposed to (yeah, yeah, whatever. Salt is gooooood), I’m pretty on-target with everything else. And I’ve been coming in under my calorie count pretty much every day. Even Easter! And I

Hitting bottom.

“Well, maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” my mother says when I tell her I can’t eat and I’m losing weight as a result of my most recent heartbreak, “maybe when all this is over you’ll look in the mirror and –” I have just enough strength left in me to stop her before she completely echoes the voice in the back of my head, the one that’s been telling me that not eating for days, while it might fuck up my metabolism in the long run, might also make me more attractive to potential new men in the short term. But I don’t want to be attractive to new men – never mind the nagging fear that it's impossible.   I just want my man to come back and erase everything he’s done to me in the past nine months.   I want to wake up tomorrow and have this all be a bad dream – the cheating, the lies, the images in my mind of him holding that conniving, revolting, vile girl in our bed, the searing pain in my heart that keeps me awake nights – and I want to roll over and playf