The Girl With The Yellow Hair

I was about 10 years old when Sir Mix-A-lot won a Grammy for his song “Baby Got Back.”  This was around the age when I full-on hit puberty and I started to get my own substantial amount of “back” and lots of “front,” for that matter.  It was also the time I learned that body types have “race” attached to them in ways I never realized.  Mr. Mix-A-Lot summarized it perfectly in his song:

I’m tired of magazines
Sayin’ flat butts are the thing
Take the average black man and ask him that
She gotta pack much back

..Even white boys got to shout
Baby got back!

Curves were not ok for me, as blond and alabaster as I was.  But there the sinews were, sucking in my middle, puffing out my top and rounding out my bottom.  I remember a black girl in middle school said to me,”Whoa. Where’d you get that ass from? White girls aren’t supposed to have big asses.” They aren’t, I thought.  One of my mom’s friends said the most horrible thing around this same time.  She said that maybe I had some slave blood in my family and that’s where my ass came from. There was so much “race” in that comment that I still don’t know what to make of it.

I tried everything to escape my curves.  I played competitive soccer, I ran, I dieted.  I considered throwing up my food.  Friends all around me had their own methods. One stopped eating altogether. One was downing laxatives while running track.

Then I left for college to the University of Florida. All the universities in the north part of the state might as well be considered part of the deep south. Whole neighborhoods are lined with gigantic plantation-sized white-washed sorority and fraternity mansions filled with young and bouncy southern girls, drawl and all.  They flutter around campus in shorts with words like sexy written on the ass, tiny tank tops and flip flops. Multiple times I remember walking behind girls ascending stairs and seeing their ass cheeks flaunting a neon thong because their mini jean skirt couldn’t struggle enough to keep them under wraps.  There was no way I was going to fit in there.  Flip flops were as far as I could go.

art by Robert Crumb www.crumbproducts.com

Then I moved to New York city, the home of human variety. I was still as body conscious as ever but I had a revelation almost as big as the book in the bible: there were people who found my body attractive.  As much as I despise trying to look for validation outside of oneself, I found an extreme comfort in being around a variety of men I never knew existed.  There was a whole world of men who (gasp!) fetishized the ass as much or more as Sir Mix-A-lot.  And they told me so, everywhere I went.  I was recently describing this experience to a friend when she asked me “don’t you think there are men like that everywhere, even in Florida?”  Of course there are, I thought.  But there is something about this magical place known as NYC where inhibitions are constantly eroded away and people are just more comfortable being who they are.  Men and women are more at peace with their true likes and dislikes. Of course, there is more than a little irony making this claim about the Fashion Capital of the world, thus also the anorexic-size-zero-model-gym on every corner-calories next to every food-capital of the universe.  But it’s true. New York is the home of the freaks which also makes it one of the most normal places on Earth.

Of course, most of the time now, I find most of these men, the ones I encounter on the streets making comments about my body, utterly vile.  The feminist in me is quite aware that their comments represent a hyper- masculine Alpha-male showing of their dominance.  Their comments also serve to reinforce the “public” nature of women’s bodies. Women’s bodies are there to be scrutinized, judged and oftentimes violated.  It’s a tenuous tight rope I walk, between my feminist self and the uncomfortable gratitude I feel for these comments.  I wish I could have learned to find the beauty in my body some way else, perhaps by looking more inward, taking the more difficult path.  But for now, I have to find the good in the bad and openly admit my gratitude for learning that everyone is beautiful to someone, even if I learned this in the not-so-ideal way.