It's OK To Have Big Thighs...For Now

by Sarah Menkedick · 2010-04-24 07:00:00 UTC
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This just in: this season, you can stop feeling body shame for just a minute (unless, um, you don't have big thighs, but we won't worry about that right now). The Daily Mail has announced that "fuller legs are in!" and therefore you can — temporarily — reveal them!  You might've been fretting about your bigger body size what with our thinness-obsessed culture and media, you might've felt discriminated against and pressured to slim down, but now that very same culture and media have decided it's okay! Go ahead! Thighs are hip! Thighs are in! Celebrate!

Just don't get too excited because surely, your body type will NOT be in next season, and then you'll have to pay attention to the next announcement from the fashion gurus about what you should or should not be, how you should or should not look. You'll have to go back to covering up and apologizing for not being Kate Moss-sized, and pray that sometime soon pop culture will smile on you again.

It constantly amazes me to see how these articles, which are supposedly embracing different and less culturally idolized body types, so completely and obsequiously toe the "do-what-the-fashion-industry-and-the-media-tell-you" party line. This Daily Mail piece is not about it being beautiful or socially acceptable or desirable to have a fuller figure; no, not at all. It's about how right now, the same people who made you feel like crap for having big thighs two months ago are saying that okay, fine, this summer you can be "in." And you with the skinny thighs, you who The Daily Mail now considers not to have the "the real thing," right now you are the ugly and unfortunate ones who need to cover up and shame yourselves. Too bad for you.

How many times will we go round on this one-note carousel before we say, "hey, I'm getting off?" I don't care whether my thighs are hip or in, whether big or small is the latest rage, I'm covering up or showing off depending on how I feel, dammit. The media and the fashion industries can hold their own circus of body fear and hatred and fawning, and I won't give a damn, because my thighs are always in, all the time, no matter what The Daily Mail gushes on about.

Photo Credit: Oneras

Sarah Menkedick is a freelance writer currently based in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has spent the last five years teaching, writing and traveling on five continents. She regularly writes about women's rights.
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