I have a big butt and I cannot lie. But goodness knows, for most of my life, I tried to deny it.
While some women dream of having kicking curves, for me there was a special horror having a big, round butt. Kids, thanks to other children, often loathe standing out, and my large posterior made me different. I was a stick skinny little kid and before starting school I simply thought my round booty was funny. I can remember looking at myself in the mirror around age 6, thinking I was shaped like a backward lower case “p.” But that bemusement gave way to embarrassment by the time I was in the fourth grade. I suddenly took to pulling all my sweatshirts, T-shirts, and sweaters down as much as I could to cover my rear.
But I think I might have gotten over it – maybe – if having a big butt hadn’t gone from goofy playground taunts to men three times my age licking their lips and shouting vulgarities at me when I was only 12 years old.
At 12, s*x (or being s*xy) was the furthest thing from my mind. I still played with stuffed animals. I didn’t like boys. And even though my mother sat me down and explained s*x and puberty to me three years prior, none of it really clicked. Learning about human s*xuality wasn’t all that different from learning frog anatomy as far as I was concerned. It was just information. I hadn’t processed it in any real way other than I understood that I now had to wear a training bra and suddenly deodorant was necessary.
So the first time someone started screaming about what they wanted to do with me s*xually while I was in the food court of the old Northwest Plaza Mall in St. Louis County, I was frightened and confused. I looked to my mother – who was standing next to me – perplexed as to why this man and his friends were lewdly gesturing toward me and knowing it was terrifying, but she quickly told me to turn around and ignore it.
“They’re ignorant,” she said.
But she offered little explanation for what seemed dangerous and threatening. And it was around that age I started having nightmares about being physically assaulted by strangers or raped.
In junior high, boys and the grown men they idolized (and who should have known better) were prone to shout just about anything at me. I think for them it was amusing, as I can only imagine what the success rate is for shouting at women and girls on the street, but when you’re 12 or a teenager (or even now, to be honest) it’s scary to have someone just announce that “you’re so fine, if you were my daughter I’d have to rape you.” The first boy to ever say this to me (we were both about 14) thought this was a “compliment.” Even though I did my best to make it clear how messed up that sounded, he insisted it was a funny joke he’d heard his uncle say to a girl and that I was way too uptight.
But it never seemed to stop. The vulgarities. The “friendly” stalking that ended with them cursing me out when I didn’t want to give someone my number. This is pretty much why approaching a woman on the street if you’re a halfway normal guy is almost pointless. By the time a woman is an adult, she’s endured this kind of garbage for more than a decade and she just assumes you’re a creep/potential rapist until you don’t rape her. You honestly can’t be mad at the woman for being traumatized. Be mad at the 40-year-old pervert who hit on her when she was 13.
As a woman you’re told to just ignore or “deal” with street harassment (and all s*xual harassment, honestly), so it is pretty easy to internalize it and think it’s all your fault. For years I rued the day I hit puberty, seeing it as some horrible thing that made people suddenly go crazy on me. I wanted to stop whatever was causing this unwanted attention, meaning I often wore clothes two sizes too big for me.
This meant for years I didn’t wear or even own a pair of shorts out of fear of showing my “big legs,” which were obviously too provocative, even in Bermuda shorts or pedal pushers. My dream for the longest was to be thin, really, really thin, size 0, smaller than small, thin. If I was just skinny enough that I had the body of a 10-year-old boy, I’d look more child-like and I wouldn’t get so much unwanted s*xual attention from men. The only problem was even if I got down to a size 4 or smaller in a shirt, I still wore pants that were a size 9/10 or larger.
So wearing my coat all day in the winter and blue jeans in the summer with long, loose fitting shirts was pretty much my look as I hated the body I was stuck with for a very long time.
If I’m honest, I didn’t fight through this physical self-loathing until I was 65 pounds heavier than I’d been in high school and 33 years old.
Yes. Thirty-three. As in the age I was last year.
The road to physical self-acceptance was a long one, starting with realizing that part of the reason why I’d stopped doing my hair, gained so much weight and wore ever more baggy and unattractive clothes was because I didn’t want anyone to bother me – ever. But as my depression lifted and I got back out into the world after losing most of my 20s to bipolar disorder, I went about learning how to dress (and accept) my body – giant butt and all.
Step one was taking pride in my skin and hair again and spending the time, and sometimes money, necessary to maintain it.
Step two was getting properly fitted for a bra at a department store’s lingerie department. (I looked instantly thinner once I had the right bra on. It was magical.)
Step three was figuring out my measurements and finding clothes – often by shopping online using my measurements – that fit and flattered my bottom-heavy shape.
Step four standing in front of a camera and just taking pictures over and over and over until I relearned how to hit the right marks to consistently take a photo I liked. I also needed to get comfortable with seeing my face and body again so I didn’t go into “OMG, is that what I look like?” when I’d see an errant shot. It seems vain or silly, but doing this – particularly with the web cam on my laptop – helped a lot in rebuilding lost confidence by reminding me what I liked about my face.
Step five was realizing that I looked fatter if I pulled a shirt over my butt (and other fashion faux pas). It was better just to accept that my butt was there and work with it than against it. I discovered anything that made my waist look small (even if it made my butt look bigger) was ultimately my friend. After all, only I cared about my butt and not wanting it to be seen.
Step six was acceptance. Realizing I had no control over what people do or say and letting that go was the biggest step of all. If men shout things, so what? They’re the ones with the problem. They’re the ones who are gross and rude. If anything, they make it easier to determine who I say hi to and who I cross the street to get away from. My giant butt doesn’t make anyone do anything. Women trying to control their bodies in hopes of controlling a man’s response is futile. After all, it wasn’t like I was trying to entice or lead anyone on when I was 12 and wearing sack dresses and safari print short sets. Why punish myself and dress in a way that made me feel fat and frumpy and unfashionable to avoid some obnoxious, gross cat calls? Besides, like everyone in the history of the world, one day I’d grow old and would want to see pictures of me living my life and I’d think how great looked, wondering why I didn’t just enjoy myself and my youth instead of endlessly punishing myself for not being “perfect.” I already do this with pictures from high school, questioning why I ever thought I was fat.
Surprisingly, the minute I accepted and, in turn, learned to love my body, I got over my phobia of exercise. I had given up on being in shape or exercise because I tied exercise to that dream of being prepubescent boy thin — something I could never be. So exercise filled me with hatred and self-loathing. But once I realized I liked my body and I liked the way I looked, it as super easy to go to the gym, be gross and sweaty, keep a diet, and keep off the weight. I’ve already lost 25 pounds and several inches. Instead of feeling anxiety about walking three miles or doing squats, I actually find myself looking forward to it and marveling at how strong I’ve become.
For the first time in my life, I don’t feel any shame or fear about how I look. I feel good. And I feel positive. And my goals are realistic. I wish it hadn’t taken so long, but the 12-year-old in me says it’s better late than never.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Friday, June 29th 2012 at 11:46PM
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