FBW: Aspiring To Be Average By Alison

FBW stands for Featured Blogger of the Week. Each week we will feature one of our calendar ladies or gentleman. Mondays will be a post written by the FBW and Wednesdays will be an interview of the FBW. If you want to know how you can be a part of the Blogger Body Calendar project, please click here.

I like to live in a state of denial, ignoring the blatantly obvious. It’s a ploy that works fairly well for most of the time, but I worry that some day I may be held accountable for it. The truth of the matter, despite me ignoring it, is that I am fat.

I always imagine myself as the svelte, slyph like child that I once was, but then something cruelly reminds me that I am a far road from that safe place. A photo, the random passing of a mirror, a comment from a child.

I’d do something about this, but I don’t want to. I want to buck the trend and take back my right to live as I please. Never mind the night, I want to take back my size.

I am sure you’ll never guess what size clothing I wear. You, reading this in the comfort of your own home – possibly also generously proportioned – you’re not the system. You’re not the ones who are telling me I’m fat, but in the media, your opinion isn’t counted.

I’m a size 10. For those of you in the good old U S of A, that means a size 6.

The truth is out now.

Of course I’m not fat. You know it, and I know it. But the fashion industry seems to have totally dropped the ball on this. They tell me that I am fat by showing me what women should look like. In comparison with other women, I am positively skinny. If I’m being told that I am too fat, how must they feel?

I’m 40 years old, and haven’t retreated to the comfort zone of a voluminous house dress and slippers. I buy and wear fashionable clothing (it has been said). I have a very strong opinion about what I like and don’t like, and exercise my power as a consumer to make fashion purchases that suit me.

And yet, should I flick through magazines to find out what the trends are suggesting I wear, I’ll see women so emancipated it looks like a bus from Belson was diverted to a catwalk.

Some models aren’t actually women at all, but 12 year old Russian girls.

Why should I compare my generous and imperfect frame to a child or skeletal woman with xylophone ribs and choose clothing on that basis? We only have one thing in common, other than being female, and that is that I don’t have any boobs either. The difference being that hers haven’t grown yet, and mine have long since been deflated.

My body shape has been athletic all my life. I don’t have a pinched in waist so I think my middle is a bit of barrel shape, and somewhere out there is a black woman who wants her booty back. My calves have been described as “dancer’s calves” but that’s just a kind way of saying that they are a bit too muscular. My thighs wobble, and I have bingo wings. My boobs can both hold pencils underneath, as can my butt cheeks. In fact, on one side I have a double butt cheek dimple. I have great arms, other than the bingo-ing part, and if I push all the skin on my stomach into the middle I have made a flabby moon crater.

And yet, I love my body. I love it more now that it’s old(er) and slowly sagging than I ever did when I was 20 and pretty darn fit. Or when I was 30 and still pretty darn fit.

I can take all my wobbly bits and tuck them into some well cut clothing and be happy with the result. I don’t see myself wearing cut off shirts or bum cheek shorts ever again, but I don’t really care. The main point is that I am not fat despite what they tell me.

Recently there has been a flurry of interest in plus size models. Which I think is great, but I think we’ve missed out on the most salient point. We shouldn’t be looking at extremes.

The average woman in the UK today is a size 16 (remember, I am using UK/Australian parlance here, just take away 4 to get the US equivalent). Personally, I think the ideal size for a healthy woman is between size 8 and 14 (4 and 10), depending on her height and build – with obvious exceptions for different people. So why don’t we use models that illustrate a healthy cross section of average women?

I don’t have a problem with models being slighter than me. In the era of Twiggy – who was shockingly thin at that time – the average model was 4% lighter than the average woman. In 1997, the average model was 20% lighter than the average woman. The weight of the average woman may have increased in recent years – certainly there is an increasing weight problem in many first world countries. But the extreme thinness of models can’t use that as a defence. I don’t know what the statistics are for today, but just looking at models who are about to drop dead from anarexia nervosa isn’t good for the pundits.

I don’t need educating on healthy weights and body image, but many people do. And among those many people are my daughters, who at 6 and 8 are starting to emerge into a world unlike the one I grew up in. They are not interested in fashion yet, but some of their friends are. Their peers say the word fat, and it affects them. My 8 year old is “diddy” that’s my word for her, but as a baby she dropped off the percentile graph, being below 0.4, and was “diagnosed” as failing to thrive. We had to see a pediatrician until she was 18 months old who mostly grilled me about what (if anything) I was feeding her.

She’s now a healthy child – by no means the smallest in her class – but she wears clothes marked for 6-7 year olds. She plays tennis twice a week and swims twice a week. She is an active child.

And she asked me if she was fat.

Taking part in this calendar is for me a way to communicate to people like you and me. We need to take back “average”. And the people who need to change are the media industries and fashionistas. We shouldn’t allow our children to be told that perfect is a size so thin that it could seriously damage their health. Conversely, children shouldn’t told it’s ok that they are fat either, since their peers are not going to back you up on that.

Models should look like something we’d be happy for our children to aspire to in terms of body image. Adult models should look healthy, fit and womanly. Child models should look healthy, fit and carefree. It doesn’t matter what size they are – in fact the sizing should cover that range that we call average – and is healthy. The more variation of sizes that the media covers, the less chance there is that people will fixate on what they think is the “one” perfect size to be.

We need to cut out the extremes and embrace the average. And then we can look forward to day when we look at fashion magazines and feel that they actually represent us. The day we look at the clothes instead of the models. And more importantly – our children are given a healthy message to grow up with so that they stop worrying about their weight, and just get on with growing up and enjoying their childhood.

Alison is Ms. February and the art director of the Blogger Body Calendar as well as the creative force behind the blog, Creative Spayce.