Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:OP here. I think what triggered me, was seeing a social media post and an article about how Pink posted a picture of herself waterskiing. She called it "thunder thighs." And she wrote about how she had kids, and she was proud of the way she looked and how strong she was in her early 40s.
Well, okay. I don't think thunder thighs have ever been out of style, especially not in 2023.
Not every woman can achieve that muscular look in her thighs. It doesn't mean we're under-eating or skinny fat. I don't care how much pasta I eat and how many squats I do, I will never have thunder thighs.
Being skinny has never been out of style, not even in 2023. But here you are blathering.
While I agree with this I think, in recent years, a very specific body type of body has been touted as the “ideal”. Large butt, muscular legs, tiny waist, large perky chest. This is a look a lot of “fitness” influencers will fake with plastic surgery and/or photo editing.
We, as women, are so much better than this! We are all blessed with unique bodies and we can focus on our health and appearance without comparing ourselves to random ever changing trends. Your body doesn’t need to be “on trend”, we are all better than that. OP, rock what you’ve got and stop looking for reason to feel bad about the way you look. Your body deserves more respect than that.
This. I think disordered thinking around women's bodies is just so deeply engrained that even when we think we're breaking out of it, we get sucked back in.
It used to be that being small and weak was desirable, because it was "feminine". Even in the era of Marilyn Monroe, who was very curvy, women were supposed to look soft and feminine, which meant having a narrow waist and no visible muscles. Being physically strong as a woman was associated with being butch, pushy, unfeminine. Women were supposed to be dominated by men.
This got doubled down on during the feminism of the 70s and 80s because women were demanding equality in the workforce, embracing birth control so they could decide when and how to have kids, and demanding equality in their relationships. That recent Brooke Shield documentary talks about how the embrace of very young, waifish models and actresses was partly a response to this -- if adult women were going to demand equality, then society would set the standard for beauty and attraction at young girls, who could still be relied upon to be weak and subservient.
Thankfully we've seen a huge backlash against these attitudes in the last 20-30 years, but a lot of it has just been another form of misogyny. Stuff like "real women have curves" is obviously just another form of putting women down or trying to narrowly define what it means to be sexy (and continues to make the primary metric for evaluating women their appeal to men). A focus on fitness has led to a fixation on women being physically strong, but that too can be perverted and turned into an excuse to put down women who aren't overtly muscular or "fit" in a very narrowly defined way (that usually also emphasizes having a narrow waist and big boobs, oh by the way).
Like we've just gotten to the point where we can now criticize every single woman's body. What a win! Like how to you successfully navigate never being too fat, too skinny, too muscular, insufficiently toned, etc.? What even is the ideal we are working towards? It feels like there isn't one, and we just weaponize judgments about body types to keep women feeling like crap. We accuse larger women of overeating and being lazy, but we accuse smaller women of having eating disorders and not "lifting heavy" or whatever.
It's exhausting and it should surprise no one that it results in women feeling bad about themselves no matter what their bodies look like. As a woman, there is a 99.9% chance that your body is considered to have something "wrong" with it according to the media, the fashion industry, the fitness industry, men, or other women. And even the women who somehow manage to win this contest? Live in constant fear of aging or getting pregnant or gaining a little weight or losing a little volume or whatever, and that keeps the plastic surgeon and fitness studios and fashion and beauty industry in business.
You cannot win.