Growing up, I was extremely thin. It's not that I was starving myself; in fact I loved to eat. But no matter how much food I consumed, I never was able to budge from a size zero.

For much of my adolescence, my peers ridiculed me because of my size. As a teen, when everyone my age was starting to fill out and develop curves, I remained considerably thin. It took a toll on my confidence.

The issue of my weight reached a boiling point one summer day when I decided to wear shorts, which I'd never dared before; I was too self-conscious. Two men yelled at me from across the street, "Take those shorts off; you’re too skinny for that!" I was humiliated. Sure, I tried to laugh it off, but nothing was remotely funny about how I had been made to feel. After that day, I made it a point to never don a pair of shorts or a short skirt again.

Being "too thin" may sound like a problem most women would give anything to have, but my reality was different. As a woman of mixed heritage, my culture places a greater emphasis on being curvy. I've never held myself to the mainstream standard of beauty: being skinny. But I am. Back then, even more so — and it was a liability. . .




. . . It slowly dawned on me what a strong influence a person's culture can have on her perception of beauty — and how, if I had been born into a different culture, I would never have experienced all of those body insecurities growing up.

As you might have guessed, those guys who ridiculed me for looking too skinny in my shorts were men of color, like me. If it were a group of caucasian men on the corner that day, odds are I would be telling a whole different story. That's not to say every single person is a prisoner to the culture he or she grew up in, but it’s hard to argue the idea that heritage heavily influences what we what we find attractive. It's funny how I could feel so out of place all those years just because I was someone else's idea of beautiful instead of my own.

I want a man
who loves me how I am as should all women.

The website "Your Tango" has published a commentary titled "I Had The 'Perfect' Body ... And I Hated It", written by a woman named Latoya Bidding.

Here is an excerpt from the commentary:



I'll leave it to you to read the rest of the commentary if you want.

What I want to know is this: Why would anyone encourage a woman to gain more weight/body fat than she needs in order to be healthy?

She's right... it's a culture thing! Not everyone in this culture feels this way obviously..... but alot of black women are curvy.
Alot of white women are not curvy.
So, when you have the opposite happen a very thin black woman or a very curvy white woman... It usually affects how they are viewed in their own community.
I don't think it's a matter of encouraging unhealthy eating habits to " get fat" its just what one is " use to" as far as culture.

If Latoya Bidding was healthy while she was slender, then weren't her critics encouraging her to adopt unhealthy eating habits in order for her to gain more body fat than she needed? If she was under that kind of pressure from her "community", then wasn't there something wrong within her "community"?

In her commentary, Bidding doesn't say that she was underweight. She simply says that she was slender. She gives no evidence that her slenderness was a health problem. So, wasn't it wrong for people to criticize her for her slenderness?

Amazing! A woman is harassed for not having more body fat than she needed, and women on this site are defending the harassment. Go figure.

Didn't read the whole thread, but I'll share what I know. Traditionally, in just about every culture, curvy women were considered attractive. Skinny women used to be very common because poverty was the norm, so curviness indicated that a woman was at least somewhat well-to-do and healthy. It wasn't until people were able to cultivate food on a large scale for the masses that people could afford to be both skinny and healthy.

I did a little research after I started this thread. Apparently, there is a segment of the U.S. male population in which the men want women to have fat rumps. I just think that it is wrong to insist that women gain more weight than they need. Am I the only one who thinks this way?