Sunday 19 January 2014

And For My Next Trick...



Now I’m no Houdini, but I’d like you to know that I am able to perform a little magic. In fact, I’m getting ready to do one of my most amazing tricks in March. I’m currently preparing to make what I dearly hope is my last trip to visit my darling husband in Jamaica. Not that I don’t love him or Jamaica. I do, most emphatically. It’s just that I’d far prefer it if he lived here in Canada with me, rather than thousands of miles away in the sunny Caribbean. That’s not the trick, though.

You want to know how I can do magic? Just watch as I transform myself from a pale, flabby slab of middle-aged mom to a voluptuous sex-bomb with legs a mile long and milky white skin to die for. My figure will miraculously metamorphose (with no smoke or mirrors) from fat to fabulous, from extra-large to extra luscious. Men will whistle, call me beautiful, smile at me with a glint in their eyes. I will literally be able to stop traffic with just a smile. And how will I perform this bit of witchery? Well, it’s simple really. I just have to transport myself (via Westjet) several thousand clicks due south of here to a little slice of paradise called Jamaica. I’ll walk off the airplane into Sangster International and POOF…I will instantaneously become sex on a stick. The Canadian Marilyn Monroe. No lie.

You think I’m kidding, don’t you? It’s impossible to believe. I know. Here at home, I am ignored, dissed and dismissed by Canadian men as a woman of a certain age, generally nothing special. I don’t fit the anemic Western ideal of beauty as personified by busty young stick insects such as Gisele Bundchen and Scarlett Johansson. (Side note: Just so you know, fellas, God is very fair. S/He didn’t lump (hah!) fat gals with flat chests. Nor did S/He gift skinny chicks with (naturally) huge tatas. You see girls with tiny bums and huge boobs? One word for you: implants. Either that, or eating disorder. Dat’s da fac’, Jack.) Here, the idea of men doing a double-take as I walk by is laughable. In Jamaica, it’s a regular occurrence. And you wonder why I love being there?

Frankly, this transformation from blah to bodacious was wholly unexpected. The first time I went to Jamaica, I was already accustomed to the idea that being pale and built like I currently am would guarantee my invisibility to the opposite sex. Truthfully, the first time I had a handsome Jamaican man smile at me with “that look”, I wondered if he was legally blind. I actually turned around to see who was behind me. It was unnerving. I kept expecting a film crew to show up and tell me I was being punked. Then my Jamaican friends and I went to Negril for the day, stopped at a roadside bar for a drink on the way, and I discovered something wonderful.

As with most bars in Jamaica and elsewhere around the world, there were posters with half-naked women plastered all over the place. The thing I noticed about these women was that they were kind of like…me. Size-wise, anyway. Not one of them was tiny. Not one of them looked she had even a remote desire to be tiny. These were curvy, voluptuous, drop-dead gorgeous women who didn’t look like they spent one single second worrying if their butts were too big. And there were definitely a lot of butts on display.

I told the Jamaicans I was with that those women would be considered fat back home in Canada. At first they laughed, thinking I was kidding them, the crazy white lady in their midst. As they began to understand that I wasn’t joking, they were dumbfounded. They wanted to know what the models back home looked like in comparison. When I described the typical size zero to them, what I think resembles a twelve-year-old boy with double D breasts, they couldn’t understand. “Women are supposed to have hips and breasts and thighs!” they cried. They found it creepy that any man would want a woman that was built like a boy. They looked at the posters again and said that women were supposed to be curvy. As for me, I didn’t really know what to think. I’d spent so many years immersed in Western culture, bombarded with images of super-skinny models and actresses (Nicole Kidman, anyone?), that the Jamaican models looked odd to me.

Before I go any further, I want you to know that I know what some of you are thinking. You’re thinking that this is all pretty damned convenient for an (ahem) larger female such as myself. How nice would it be to just forget the whole struggle to lose weight and declare myself perfect just as I am and damn the consequences? I’ll admit, it is horribly tempting. However, I do have a brain, and that brain is more concerned with my health than how I’m perceived by the opposite sex. Just as I’m not going to starve myself to make myself more desirable to Canadian men, I’m not going to ignore my health to look sexy to Jamaican ones. All I’m saying is that it was refreshing to see another interpretation of beauty; one that wasn’t focused solely on being thin. It was nice to think I didn’t have to be a size four to feel good about myself. Funny how that realization allowed me to just relax and enjoy myself for the rest of my trip, rather than worry about whether or not I looked fat in my bathing suit.

Another glaring issue: how much of this admiration is based on me and how much on how poor a lot of these men are? Are they just smiling at me because they see what they think is a rich white tourist who might be their meal ticket out of the country? No doubt. I’m not so naïve to think that I’m the bomb dot com at the tender age of forty-five. Stupid, I’m not.

All I’m saying is that it was a breath of fresh air for this forty-five-year-old who had spent the past fifteen years beating myself up for not looking like I did when I was fifteen. To accept that at this point in my life, this is what I am: a grown woman who has borne three (count ’em) beautiful sons, laughed and smiled and cried and weathered all sorts of storms (literal and figurative) with the attendant sagging and stretch marks and wrinkles and scars. Yes, I do need to lose weight. There’s no doubt of that. In the meantime, there is a distinct relief in knowing that there is a place I can go and feel beautiful JUST AS I AM, with no apologies to anyone.  

There’s another magic trick I can perform. Besides transforming from Harried Hausfrau to Va-Va-Voom Veronica, I can also disappear. Yup, I can completely disappear. All I have to do is come back to Canada. Faster than you can say “liposuction” I become invisible to the male population. Not that that it is my prime motivator. But humans are wired to notice if they attract attention, positive or negative. It would be ridiculous to say they aren’t. If no one cared about how they were perceived in the world, why would any of us look in a mirror? We all know that we are judged by our outward appearance every day. So when you look around every day and see how middle-aged women are regarded by our culture as just so many overripe bananas in the bottom of the fruit bowl, it doesn’t really set you up to feel particularly valued or confident. Frankly, you feel like you need to apologize for yourself, which is ridiculous.

In Jamaica, I feel powerful, confident and sexy. I feel unique. Yet when I’m in Canada, I feel like I’m largely ignored. (Except by my kids, for my talents of talking on the phone while making PB&J’s and sorting laundry with my feet, of course.) I resent this on many levels, but mainly because I finally feel like I have something to offer the world other than youth and beauty, yet because I’m “old” and fat, the only people who notice me are those flogging wrinkle creams and Depends. What I’d like is to see acceptance for diversity in our culture’s concept of beauty. I want people (read: Canadian men and the fashion industry) to realize that women do not have to look like Victoria’s Secret models to be worth noticing and valuing. I want Canadian women to realize that. Forget that: I want to remember to value myself just as I am, even when I’m not in Jamaica.

That would probably be the best trick of all.

5 comments:

  1. Excellent post. You are an interesting writer. I often wonder what makes physical beauty a lot. Sometimes during my life I was considered attractive and other times disgusting. Weird how these decisions are made.

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  2. There is no possible way for ANY woman to look like the so-called ideal that is perpetuated in the media. If you have the long slim limbs that are desired in a model, then stuff like this happens to you (see attached link, warning, some nudity):

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2208900/Numero-magazine-airbrushes-Karlie-Klosss-ribs-Vogue-shoot-sparked-eating-disorder-controversy.html

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  3. Thanks Wendy. It is pretty arbitrary, isn't it? That's what I find so frustrating. Orianne: You are right, of course. It's an impossible ideal. One of the things that drives me crazy is hearing young women in their twenties bemoaning how "fat" they are, when they most definitely are NOT. It's crazy-making. Thanks for your comments. I'll check out the link asap.

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  4. I am very concerned about my 11-year-old. She appears to feel that she is fat. Isn't that horrible? How do we change this? Life is so unfair sometimes. Why do we let this body image stuff hurt us so much?

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    1. Good question, my dear. I never thought of that when I was eleven. I think airbrushing should be illegal for magazine covers, really. Or they should all come with disclaimers: "This photograph was radically altered using airbrushing."

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