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Women’s bodies come in all shapes
Walk through the world and tell me what a woman is. I mean really is. Without falling back on stereotypes or cultural norms. She is tall, short, thin, plump, chubby, cute, beautiful, striking, dowdy, frumpy, ugly, messy hair, perfect hair, make-up trowelled on, no make-up at all, bushy eyebrows, thin or none, bald, luxurious locks, and all the other hundreds of descriptives you choose to apply to her. None of those define how she sees herself, yet we still ascribe meaning to her based on our personal assumptions of womanhood. Sometimes stating the obvious is necessary, and in this case stating that women’s bodies come in all the varieties under the sun is necessary.
Feminism is more than simply about smashing patriarchy, it is conceptualising bodies as they are rather than what we think they should be. That we can claim to know what a woman is simply by looking at her belies how we ourselves actually move through the world. None of us are walking stereotypes. We each put on a costume daily, one gleaned from available fashions and purveyors of potions, styling our hair to personal taste, choosing the mask we present to the world. All of it is artifice, and none of it is wrong, just someone else’s personal judgement of our taste ascribing wrong to our look. Womanhood is not about meaning making, it is about living, and being free to live as we see fit.
