Correct me if I’m wrong, but women are supposed to look like…women…right? Not…say…coat racks? And exactly why is it that an otherwise smart, funny, and attractive (?) woman can be made to feel like a steaming dung heap at a relatively harmless comment that relates to hip size? Because, quite honestly, this really bothers me…

I’ve heard many a man get rather worked up discussing women’s obsession with unattainable images of femininity portrayed by the “media,” resulting in dangerous and life-threatening eating disorders, but these same men will pick one woman out of a room, one stick figure of a bobble-headed looking girl, and rant and rave about how beautiful she is. What’s even more annoying, in my case, is that this unequivocally bugs the shit out of me.

Take, for example, me. I mean, I’m not all that difficult to look at. Not that I’m about to go and post a picture of myself on www.hotornot.com (call me too enlightened to engage in such a heinous act of superficiality), but, really, I can be pretty cool (…sometimes). I have a brain (though my Torts professor might disagree). I listen to great music, I read great books, I can be relatively entertaining to be around, I have cute beagles…and…yes, I have an ass.

It’s no surprise that most of my relationships have been with unabashed ass-men. I mean, it’s there. There’s no getting around it (not that it has its own zip code or anything, but it’s there). And guess what else? I have hips. I’m starting to sound like a circus freak, yes? And guess what else? I, like many foolishly insecure women, am *not* happy about it. This is not to say that I want to be some sort of assless, legless creature whose abdomen strangely gives way to kneecaps, but I too want to look like…my mother’s hat rack.

I can argue until I’m blue in the face that I don’t. “Women are SUPPOSED to have hips!” I’ll say, “They’re supposed to have round, soft, supple, feminine bodies! It’s a thing of beauty!” Do I sound convincing? In all honesty, I get quite disgusted with myself when I let these stick-figure loving men shake my comforting illusion and have me wanting to jump onto the nearest piece of gym equipment.

So, I’m in a relationship, right? I’m happy and I love him and he’s great. Why, exactly, do I care? Cause I do, alright? This isn’t about bemoaning my lack of male companionship or feeling left out when I don’t get as many men leering at me on Friday nights as some stick-figure girl might, it’s about the fact that I can be reduced to my seventh-grade, insecure self any time someone I love does any of the following: rave about that ninety-pound girl sitting at the next table, mention *anything* related to the not-so-narrowness of my hips, or, god help him, mention anything about (how in the hell do I put this in a way that doesn’t just…shame me?) I’m so much different than the teeny-tiny girls of his past (ya know…girls that are his *type*)? Girls that are 100 pounds, “soaking wet.”

(That fucking expression just enrages me, by the way. “Soaking wet.” Is this a new way we have of measuring girls? Is it like the metric system? Does anyone have a conversion chart that I might use to translate my weight from boring old pounds to “soaking wet” pounds? It’s ignorant.)

Maybe I am a bit…hypersensitive about this whole topic. I’m not happy about this state of mind, either. I wish I could be one of those girls that walked around with that YeahI’mHotGetOverIt attitude. And no, I’m not twenty years old anymore, I’m not going to run off to the nearest toilet to throw my dinner up into. If I know myself, at all, I can predict the coming months. I will blow off studying to work out, for about a month, until I throw my hands up in the air and say something to the tune of, “Fuck it! I have better things to do with my time,” before things go back to normal. There you have it…the essence of me.

And maybe I’m just as bad as those stick-figure lovers. At a recent sojourn to the hated gym I did notice myself spending an inordinately large amount of time checking out the rear ends of the girls on the treadmills (they were pretty nice…it must be said). I mean, look at the girls at this website (http://www.whatkatiedid.com/index.php). Who wouldn’t want to be (or sleep with) these girls? (oh…and by the way…if you’re a guy reading this and have a cool girlfriend than do the both of you a favor and buy her some cool stuff from this site…you’ll thank me)

It appears that I’ve run out of steam. There’s no real solution to this, in my mind. So, since a beagle just delivered my coat to me in the most anxious of states, outside I will go. And Contracts…there’s always Contracts…