I Prefer Skinny Girls
Whitney’s recent post titled “This Woman Is Supposed To Disgust You” really got me thinking. She referenced a Brazillian ad campaign described in detail here. The precis is that the ad recreated various famous glamour shots with fatter women, along with the tagline “Forget about it. Men’s preferences will never change.” They were selling light yogurt.
First of all, let me say that I agree that this ad is culturally unhealthy. It’s playing on and expanding a phobia in order to sell yogurt. ‘Nuff said.
But it was the response and blog discussion surrounding this ad that really caught my interest. I could understand the responses saying “hey, she’s really hot! wtf?” Yet there were also a huge number of responses that generalized the discussion, statements of support for the position that “bodies of all sizes are beautiful.”
Well, yes, they are. It’s pretty twisted to have a cultural attitude that says that big girls are uniformly ugly. However, I prefer skinny girls. Is there space in this discourse to say that? I hope so, because there’s something I worry about here.
It took me years to accept this fact about myself. The thing is, according to some systems of thought regarding female body image, I’m really not supposed to like skinny women. By admitting this preference, I am part of the problem. Yet I really do like slimness, in the same way that I have a very real physical response to other external markers (nice skin, symmetric face, graceful body language, modulated voice, creative fashion sense.) I get turned on by angular limbs and small breasts. I like the shape of hipbones though the skin. I have a huge crush on sharp-limbed Kristen Scott Thomas. Narrow waists look so elegant, so delightful, so very… yummy to me.
And yes, I understand — do I ever understand! — that sexiness involves so much in the mind. (See: “Werd To The Smart Bitches”.) However, all other things being equal, I want the hot body too, and for me that very often means thin. Although I have been known to pounce on women of all descriptions, the most commonly applicable adjective for my crushes might be “gangly.”
This is a taste which manifests as a real physical response to other people’s bodies. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out where this preference originated. I used to think that my tastes for female body type were all entirely maleable; that I had learned societally what “hot” was, that I could re-learn to eroticize any-body. Many years and many relationships later, I have some serious doubts about this. In my experience, my gut reaction to someone’s physical presence changes very little from the first impression, even over years, even as I fall in and out of love with them. I’m left with the suspicion that there is a biological, “hardware” basis to my desires. Either that, or my physical reactions to body types are now very deeply embedded in my emotional programming. In other words, it’s possible that I could change my preferences, but then again perhaps not. The research on the biological or evolutionary basis of attraction is very much ongoing — see the Wikipedia article on Physical Attractiveness for an overview — but it would be foolish to ignore, just as it would be ridiculous for me to pretend I was attracted to someone when I was not.
Yet millions of women hate their bodies because they feel fat. Something is clearly wrong. Again, let me state my position that making money by exploiting and encouraging this type of self-loathing is despicable. This is what I find repugnant about the yogurt ad. However, there really is a problem here regardless of advertising. Is the solution for all these women to lose weight? Is the solution to attempt to train a majority of men to prefer larger women?
Neither, of course.
To me, a major underlying problem in the current discourse surrounding body image is that no one wants to admit that physical attractiveness really does exist. We all know it does, yet a huge amount of the discussion around weight and other body factors exhorts us to believe that all people are equally physically attractive. This simply isn’t true; we all know it isn’t. Yes, there are many other factors in attraction, but let’s admit that, all other things being equal, we all want a hod bod. Is this a societal sickness, is it a culturally-relative myth, or is it at least partly based on biological reality?
If not everyone has an equally sexy body, how do we deal with this fact in a fashion both healthy and realistic? This is the question I want answered.
