Milkshake

I played a super fun game with my kid last week called Am I Too Fat for This?, which entailed me pulling out every single item of clothing in my closet and trying it on to see what did not survive the Covid 20 (pounds, that is). I was pleasantly surprised. With the exception of a few, notable and sad losses, I actually did much better than anticipated.

I don’t love trying on clothes and I am not a big fan of mirrors. It is really, really easy to fall into old patterns and start to compare this body of forty seven with that body of twenty eight. That way be monsters, so I try to avoid the triggers. Which is probably why I don’t own a lot of clothes and will keep pieces for years and years (and years), sometimes beyond all fit, functionality or trend.

So now you know the level of suck-it-up I was employing as I brought out every piece I had stashed in my closet over the last decade and with great reluctance put it on (or not) and paraded through the house to the big mirror and my teenager. Good times. But the good news is that it turns out my Covid 20 was really more like the Covid 7 and only the Lululemon didn’t fit at all. The irony.

But that isn’t why I bring this up. I bring it up because about halfway through my Worst Nightmare Fashion Show the kid turns to me and says, “Mom, stop it. Your body type is very fashionable right now.” I’ll tell you, that threw me for a loop and shut me the hell up. It’s hard to keep up with fashion, and to be honest I have never been all that good at it. I like what I like, and I hate it when a fashion trend comes a long that I just can’t wear.

If I’m honest that’s been most of them, so I have spent almost all of my days wishing to be shaped more fashionably. I’m a big girl with an hourglass shape and plenty o’ junk in trunk. In my natural state, I am thick. Always have been. I came through puberty to maturity from 1986 to the mid aughts. There has never been a fashion trend through those years that involved big girls. Not really. As a consequence I think I’ve been on a diet for almost all of my days.

Just to be able to buy a pair of fucking jeans.

But again, that isn’t why I bring this up. I gave up on fashion years ago. (This makes my mother nuts, but keeps me sane, so we have come to an impasse about it.) And if I’m honest, I didn’t diet just to buy clothes. I dieted to be seen, and through being seen to be accepted. Through all of those years, women’s beauty and sexuality was dictated by the gaze of men. We were more sexually liberated than our parents and grandparents for sure, and we enjoyed more social freedoms and opportunities as well. I am not suggesting that we were subjugated or relegated—that thought is another discourse.

What I am suggesting here is that all of the body imaging of the times was filtered through a hetero-normative male filter. It was all about how to be beautiful and therefore desirable (to men). Do these jeans make my ass look sexy (to men)? Does this crop top make my belly look pretty (to men)? We never really thought about being comfortable. Shit, I used to know girls who wore control top pantyhose beneath jeans that they had to lay down to zip all in an effort to show off their shape (to men). Do you know how hot that is? Do you know how uncomfortable? Do you know how much work? You didn’t do that for yourself. You did that to be seen and desired.

By men.

And, unfortunately, I think all men had to go on was the imaging that was presented to them on a larger social scene. I’m not sure. I’m not a man. But it feels now like there was this really bizarre type of feedback loop that had us all holding these super odd role positions. Men do the looking. Women receive the looking. If you look a certain way, you are perceived. It didn’t really matter if you were happy, comfortable, or if you had to sweat, starve or suffer in order to at least approximate the correct visual offering. Once that offering was met, you were validated as a desirable woman and could go on about your business. Also unfortunately, sometimes not.

Existing inside the male gaze is exhausting. In my experience and in my time, you had to participate or you would be coached into it at best and mocked at worst. Makeover anyone? What Not to Wear? Sound familiar?

But also in my experience, if you did participate even nominally, you found that the perception often over-ruled the individual. The gaze makes all sorts of presumptions which run the gamut from mostly harmless to downright horrifying. She was asking for it? We’ve all heard that one, right?

If I’m honest with myself, I’m wholesale ashamed that I didn’t catch on to the bullshit of the whole thing much earlier. I’m forty seven. My milkshake no longer brings the boys to the yard and I gotta say, thank gods. I don’t get stared at in the store. I don’t get beeped at on the road. I don’t get hustled at the bar. The male gaze has gone on to fresher pastures and I never imagined the level of relief that brings. The reality that we conflated beauty with desirability is truly...gross.

I don’t need anyone to see me in order to really be seen. I am wholly capable of seeing myself. I don’t need anyone to validate my beauty for it to be a worthy expression. And I sure as shit don’t need every gaze to be weighted on the scales of desire. We thought we were being unfettered from the strict sexual mores of generations past. Yes? Or did it just take on a different face?

I am finding that the more I investigate this, this whole younger generation may have finally gotten their hands around what we thought we were doing. We were liberated in many ways from the culture of our parents. They are liberated in many ways from the culture of us. There is a vein of behaviour that I am seeing in the young women who come through my house and through my child’s life. They do not give a fuck about being seen as sexual creatures. Some of the younger women I am finding on current media show up as sexual creatures fully—and only--on their terms.

They eat what they want. They dress how they like. Fashion is about what helps them express who they are for themselves. I’m sure they have tons of other issues, but living a life under the strict terms of a fascist fashion system that promotes a lose-lose misogynistic sexuality isn’t one of them. It is fascinating to behold.

So what I heard and what my child told me that day were both the same thing, and two different things entirely. Yes, my body type is very fashionable right now. Big is in. But also, every body type is fashionable right now. Every body type is beautiful because the being inside the body is fashionable right now. You are in. Whoever you are, however you are, whatever you are—you are in.

And you don’t need anybody’s gaze to affirm it. That, my lovelies, is the beginning of real liberation. I, for one, can’t wait to see what happens next….