I am tall
and flat-chested, and when I was younger I was always too thin. I didn't mind how it looked, but as a feminist
I have always had an issue with the way so many strangers and people I knew were
always signaling to me this sense of proprietary approval of my
skinniness. Especially when I finally
started dating, I thought it was irritating when someone who liked me
complemented my skinniness. I remember
someone saying that he thought huge breasts look disgusting, which I disagree
with, but I also didn't like to know that my look of undernourishment was so
appealing or that anyone would assume I'd be flattered to have a big-breasted
woman maligned on my behalf. Now I am
chubby. It started when I moved to
Philly where people are less conscious of their weight than in L.A. (and where
there were so many good restaurants within walking distance). Then when I got pregnant, obviously, I gained
more weight and now, voila, chubbiness.
It feels more natural for me to be a chubby woman, and somehow more in
line with my sense of aesthetics and my dislike for normals; there are so many
times (A DAY) where the conversation around me at work or wherever turns to
long discussions about dieting, and I'd so much rather be talking about Edith Wharton
or yarn or Boardwalk Empire. When I was
skinny I feel like I was a sort of success story whenever I was unlucky enough
to be included in a dieting conversation but now that I'm chubby it's like a
wordless way to say "This is a boring topic to me." The downsides are
that I don't really like how it looks and that it's a little unhealthy. Maybe those downsides sound monumental, they didn't
feel like a big deal to me until I just reread them right now. At the same time, I always feel like a
visitor to Earth, and so it's been kind of neat to know how it feels both to be
a skinny woman and then a chubby woman, like from a detective-y point of view,
like "so this is what this experience feels like." I would like to be healthier to live a long time, but other than that, I can't really decide if it's better to be to skinny or too chubby, and I never do things in between.
