POST #147: MEAT ON MY BONES

I was having Sunday brunch at Curley’s Diner with two menfriends when the subject got around to optimal ratios for women’s bodies. One of them had previously sent us an e-mail with a chart. Apparently, the determining factor, both for health and attractiveness, is not a huge bosom or how much you weigh, but the ratio of waist to hips.  From a childbearing point of view, that makes a lot of sense and if you look at “ideal” women from Ancient Greece to modern times, it’s the hip to waist ratio that counts.  Anyhow, I got around to telling them the story of a lunch date I had a while back with a former (thankfully former) male friend. As we were leaving the restaurant, he whispered in my ear that he liked me much better now that I had “meat on my bones.” We won’t get into what I thought about the meat on his bones!

Growing up, I always wanted to be well endowed, have long lines of lusting adolescent boys outside my door. It was hard to be slender in an era where the reigning goddesses (Marilyn Monroe, Anita Ekberg, Jane Russell) all wore DD bras. During my late teens and until I started having babies in my mid twenties, I was 5’6” and never weighed more than 114 pounds, great for slinking around or modeling clothes, but not for being a “goddess,” my ultimate goal. And that may explain why I love to paint ample women, the kind that hang out at Curley’s Diner and struggle to get their weight down from 180 to a meager 150 pounds.

Artists have always liked models with “meat on their bones”; skinny doesn’t translate very well onto canvas. What would Titian or Rubens ever see in the hipless, belly-less “clothes hangers” (with surgically augmented breasts) in fashion today?  Would Renoir ever look twice at a woman in a Size 6 dress? In past eras, thinness meant famine, an insufficient supply of food. Today, the reverse is true; the upper classes strive to be as waiflike as possible, eat as little as possible while the Working Poor (most of the country) verges on obesity and the serious medical issues that go with it.

I like myself a little on the “ample” side; it gives me what my late husband, a Clinical Psychologist, used to call “Body Armor.” It was a term psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich used to describe people (like Donald Trump) who bulk up to appear invincible but are actually quite fragile. They acquire thick bodies as a protective layer of defense. You see it a lot in men who radically alter their physiques by lifting weights. As for myself, I don’t miss being 114 pounds with a 24”waist. Just as I enjoy painting “ample” women, I personally like the comfort I get from having some “meat on my bones.”  When my voluptuous sister-in-law who was built like one of those goddesses on an Indian temple would try to lose weight, her husband would whine: “You’re taking the joy out of my life!” I don’t plan to take the joy out of anyone’s life, especially my own.