As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been taking a pottery class. In fact, I finished a session and have actual pottery to show for it. I’d show you a photo, but in reality, it looks exactly like what your kindergarten kids bring you home for Mother’s Day. There are some misshapen bowls, an interesting vase, and a votive holder that represents my first successful wheel throwing, and other than that, nothing other than a few plates and something everyone keeps calling “the ashtray” (it’s not an ashtray, but yeah, it does look like an ashtray). I signe
d up for another session with the pottery dude and brought June along. Of course, she’s cranking out amazing sculptures and giving the rest of the novices in the class inferiority complexes. Hell, if I didn’t know better, she’d be giving me one too, but I already know that you do NOT mess with June when it comes to art because she will show you up without breaking a sweat, so just give up now and spare yourself the pain.
June, unlike me, is a friendly person around strangers. She talks to people. She engages conversations. And because I’ve taken the class already, sometimes when the pottery dude is busy, she’ll ask me questions. And because she’s so friendly, her new pottery friends assume that her daughter-in-law must likewise be friendly. Oh, silly silly pottery class. However, they’ve started asking me questions too, since I apparently know the drill, and they like to watch me work on (and fail upon) the wheel. One day, while we were working on our clay, a lady who is probably around June’s age and also wears plus-size, was telling everyone about someone who was tall and thin and she looked at me conspiratorially and said “And that’s why we have to hate her, right?”
Normally I would just say something like “uh-huh” or let the comment breeze past, but I managed to say, completely without judgment in my voice. “Nope, I don’t have to hate her at all. Not one bit.” The lady looked at me quizzically and I then realized that I was stepping into sanctimonious size acceptance speech territory but I risked it anyway and continued, “I figure that I don’t want anyone hating on me for MY body, so why would I hate on her for her body?” I watched her without seeming to watch her, trying to not make it a big deal, but she stopped and looked at me and said, “Wow, that’s a goooood point. Huh.”
I hate reading blog entries like that, blog entries where the writer comes off as some kind of sage-like presence in the world, so I hesitated to relay that anecdote, but what I’m most struck by is that I wasn’t just saying a line. I honestly and truly have lost my malice for the beautiful people. I don’t know why that is: maybe it’s because I know that they can be just as fucked up as the rest of us, or maybe because I can appreciate the sacrifices some of them have to make to keep flying so close to physical perfection (and more deeply, understand that I am not willing to sacrifice time with my friends and family in order to work out…. probably not a good decision on my part, but one that I have made with or without saying it out loud) or maybe it’s because I am now understanding that our society has done a grievous misdeed somewhere or the other when it comes to body image and we’re raising a society of people for whom thoughts and actions no longer matter but rather whether or not you can measure up to some impossible beauty ideal.
It might be the decreased cortisol levels from my lack of job stress, but I think I’m done with apologizing to myself and to others about the size of my ass. I know that scientists have measured that body satisfaction can be decreased simply by looking at images of skinny models, but I wonder if the scientists have looked at different age groups for their study. At what point do we stop carrying what anyone thinks? And if it hits me in my late 30s, can we bottle this paradigm and start serving it at middle school cafeterias?
Can you imagine where the world would be had Madame Curie wasted a ton of energy worrying about the circumference of her thighs?
