curves as currency in size acceptance

[OriginalCyn]

Originally Posted by MissToodles

I'm sick of trying to defend my "lack of curves". I don't have the va va voom shape that everyone envies yet women are supposed to be "womanly" and have these things. Does that make me less of a woman or is that how womanhood, especially in size acceptance is defined?
Should we move away from defining ourselves by shape and size? It seems too entrenched with pleasing men, with giving them visual stimulation.

I am occasionally given unsolicited advice as to how to improve my looks so that I'll be more attractive to a man. (Most people are too smart--or at least know me too well to even DARE suggest such things to me, but then there are the dummies!)

One such FOOL is a fellow classmate who'd been kvetching about not getting laid for three months or so. The general idea was that he wouldn't mind getting it on if I didn't mind. Now, this is a guy who likes gals who have "junk in the trunk," and he'd told me that he'd encouraged some GFs in the past to gain weight--even if it meant that they'd get belly rolls [which he didn't especially like] just so that they would have more fat on their buttocks. And, as is typical with men, he likes to get an eyeful when he's getting it on. So he actually had the nerve to tell me that he just couldn't get past the hugeness of my butt, even though he was trying, desperately, to fantasize it as being way smaller...and that I really could stand to lose about 70 pounds. (Actually, I could stand to lose about 120 pounds, but he likes 'em plump.)

Now, if I were like most women, I'd be apologizing for not being his ideal, or maybe I wouldn't be apologizing, but I might be internalizing this unsolicited criticism. Or, at the very least, I'd feel a need to "defend" myself.

But I'm not "most women." I'm not the nice girl that every woman born in the 1950s was socialized to be. Actually, when I'm annoyed (and this man annoyed me), I can be one big bee-yatch. I pointed out to him that he was the one who'd been kvetching about a lack of sex, that I'd've been perfectly happy to have kept our relationship strictly Platonic. --And, furthermore, that his sloppy way of dressing and his uneducated manner of speaking were an embarrassment to me...but that I didn't expect him to try to change himself for me, because that's an unreasonable expectation, especially for someone who's our age and is set in our ways. And FURTHERMORE (he REALLY got a "blast" with this last bit), had he not listened to even one word, when I'd told him about my lifelong dieting travails, and how I'd given dieting up forever--and WHY I'd given it up--a good 15 years previously?

Thoroughly cowed, he said not one additional word to me on the subject of my size. He just had to be told what his "place" was in my life, and that was "friend," not "Lord and Master."