fat bottomed girls

fat bottomed girls, they make the rockin' world go 'round....

a bit of an op-ed on a micro-article from this month's issue of 'women's health' magazine:

CHUB LOVE
Got more to love? Worry not: Heavy women get as much action as their thinner sisters. Researchers divided almost 7,000 people into three groups based on their BMI: normal weight, over-weight, and obese. They found no difference in the number of sexual partners or frequency of nookie among the groups. "Studies have shown that normal-weight men have more partners than obese men," says principal investigator Bliss Kaneshiro, M.D., M.P.H. They may have difficulty attracting mates, but obese and overweight women evidently do not. We say work it.

facinating!

sort of. i mean, i'm not really interested in the 'multiple sexual partners' part of this finding. i'm just looking for ONE guy who would want to participate on many many occasions. if my potential for partners is not ACTUALLY contingent upon my thinness (which is pretty much what i have damaged myself into believing), then what is the problem here, huh?

i'm embarrassed to admit that this research finding rattles me. it chips away at one of my darkest and most dearly held self-hate/self-soothing beliefs: i am alone because i am not thin and beautiful. the corrallary schema is that IF i were thin and pretty, i would certainly attract the right man into my life and fall in love and get married immediately. AND that i COULD be thinner and prettier, if only i tried harder. much easier to resign myself to TRY HARDER, DAMMIT, than to trust that Jesus is working out His plan for my life, including my (oh please oh please) eventual marriage partner. that is soooooo much harder to believe day to day than the self flaggelation of blame and the cyclical self disciplines that i try and fail to enforce.

i don't like to admit to myself, let alone to other people, how judgemental and mentally viscious i can be about weight. my own and other people's. of course i want to pretend that i don't judge people for their extra weight (or their thinness) but i do! of course i do! i judge myself for it, for sobbing out loud. constant comparisons. the sinful prick of loathing and judgement when i see someone (particularly a woman) with a lot of excess weight, her personal pain and struggles on display for everyone to hen-peck and roll their smug eyes in disgust. i'm physically cringing now to admit that i do think that sometimes - am i the only one? i don't expect that all my friends (and/or readers) are as broken about this as i am, but here i am, admitting this little piece of my evil. there ya go. trying to keep it real on the blog.

what if i walked around with my pain and excesses written on a chalk board around my neck? what if everyone did? somehow, by the grace of God, the loathing and judge-mental stone throwing sometimes melt into empathy when i encounter someone with a serious weight problem. not often enough, in the split-second blur of snap judgements and indifference. and not good enough! pity and sympathy are still sinful in that they involve a judgement and still invoke a personal pedestal that puts me above someone else. so the best would likely be, simply, love without size perameters. a new specific thing to pray for for myself... (wow! revelation as i type. love this.)

anyway. all this is really just a rambling confession of my messed-upness about weight and fat and thin and pretty and ugly and the near-incessant war in my head about this stuff. which was stirred up by the rather surprising finding that a women's dress size says nothing about the partners she attracts or her physical/sexual attractiveness. again, some research to start chipping away at my broken brain.