THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607110026
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K5 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: REAL MOMENTS
SOURCE: BY WENDY GROSSMAN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 66 lines
FOUR YEARS AGO I ripped a page out of YM magazine. A sheet filled with ``Belly Busters'' to get my tummy totally in shape for bikini beach weather. I still have it.
Unfortunately, I still have my stomach, too.
Mom says it's genetic. Look at her. Look at Grandma. ``I'm sorry, sweetie,'' she says.
Almost every girlie magazine from Seventeen to Glamour has ``get your stomach in shape'' articles. I keep some of them. They might be a good idea. Maybe I'll actually do them.
But I just read an article in some magazine that blasted all the others away. It said you should keep your belly. It's the only thing uniquely feminine. Women have body fat there for childbearing. It's healthy and prevents disease. The article said that girls like my friend Frannie, who's 5-foot-10 and 120 pounds, are kinda unhealthy.
Heh heh.
It said that it was OK that my exercise clippings have just been sitting in the bottom drawer. I don't have to feel bad that I don't go with Jen and Kirsten to work my abs an hour a day to get them perfectly flat.
I'm fine.
Yeah, well, welcome to reality. This is America. This is Virginia Beach. Women my grandmother's age are strolling around with perfect stomachs. My friends don't eat. My roommate wouldn't go swimming at her boyfriend's house yesterday because she said she felt too conscious of her stomach. I offered her my sarong. She still wouldn't go.
My friend Susan was once the proud owner of tummy tamers (my grandma calls them girdles, but Victoria's Secret calls them Miracle Body Enhancers). Anyhow, my friend Susan starved herself all last summer. She ate a lot of rice, and dropped weight as she prepared for her trip to Australia.
She looked great. She busted that belly.
But then she got to Australia and absolutely no one gave a damn. They handed her a beer. OK, they handed her 18 beers - not Bud Light, but heavy beers - and told her to drink up. All of the girls over there wore baggy clothing.
They wore long flowered skirts with huge T-shirts hanging loosely over the top - unlike girls here in the States, (like Jenny McCarthy on MTV who wears red rubber hipster jeans revealing her perfectly flat tummy.)
``Every day in Australia I watched my belly grow,'' Susan told me in January. ``And I was so proud of it.''
``What? You sound like you were pregnant.''
It was just cool to her. No one cared about her stomach. No one cared at all. And Susan liked it.
She'd always felt good about herself walking around campus. She knew she was attractive. She told me not to give her any of my feminist crap. She was fine.
But, this spring, when Susan came back up to campus she started noticing all the little girls in tight clothes tottering to class in four-inch heels. She drank Diet Mountain Dew and went back to eating bagels.
And she hated it.
The cover for that magazine article I read on bellies being in showed a line-up of four women's silhouettes with paunches bigger than mine.
I didn't keep the article. Just like I didn't keep the great one I found proclaiming that women should indulge their chocolate cravings. Maybe I don't believe them. I don't know, really.
A friend of mine says he's looking for a plump, fecund little woman to settle down with in the Midwest. Maybe I'll toss away my exercise clipping and grab another Hershey bar.
Maybe not. by CNB