Dress: Hell Bunny
"No single word reminds me of being a self-loathing fatty as much as 'bolero' does."
- Margitte Leah.
When I read this on
Riots Not Diets, it was this total "moment" for me. My eyes widened, my breath quickened. I reread it over and over. Something changed in me. Seriously.
For me, (and I know for a lot of other fat girls) there is no other body part that causes more stress than my upper arms.
About three years ago, I was teaching out at Willunga and it was a really hot day. I was wearing a sleeveless City Chic tie dyed top with a black bolero. Everyone was outside by the canteen for a parent/teacher/student sausage sizzle. I was talking to another teacher about how hot I was, and she tugged at my bolero and said, with total logic, "Why don't you take this off?" I shook my head and replied, "No, I don't like to show my arms."
So I sweated my way through it.
Recently, the City Chic Facebook page had a Q&A with the designer, Lucy. The idea was that CC customers could suggest styles they wanted to see in the future, and ask any questions. What unfolded was a tribe of women crying out for "more sleeves!". These comments consistently attracted the most 'likes'.
800 comments were made during this Q&A, so I've gone through and copied and pasted only some (there was a lot!) of the comments regarding sleeves in an attempt to get a better understanding of the issue. You can skim through the dot pointed comments through to my summary at the end if you can't be bothered reading them all.
Dress: City Chic // Shoes: Doc Martens
At this point, she probably should have dropped the "fake tan" suggestion and just argued for embracing your body. In saying this, she came under even more attack, which led her to her final say on the issue, "
""
I love this comment so much, because it reflects the anger I've had lately about having to cover my arms.
BURN THE CARDIGANS I SAY. What an astounding, wonderful, FIERCE thing to say!
Golda Poretsky of Body Love Wellness wrote a post about this called "Exercise Your Right To Bare Arms!" - bloody fantastic title! She begins by writing,
"I think nearly everyone knows that feeling, that feeling of being
uncomfortable in your body and wearing too much clothing to cover it up.
How many of you have worn a sweater over a sleeveless dress in
sweltering heat to cover up areas of your body that you wanted to hide?
How many of you have worn a t-shirt in the pool for the same reason?
How many of you have worn all black on a hot summer’s day?"
I just nodded my head as I read this.
When I was in primary school, there was an excursion to the Adelaide Aquatic Centre. As a chubby youngster who was keenly ashamed of my weight, I wore a white t-shirt in the water to cover up. At one point in the day, two other kids swam by me. One of them looked me up and down, puffed up his cheeks at me to imitate my fatness, looked at his friend and they proceeded to laugh at me before swimming off. I was mortified and just sat there in the baby pool, red faced. My ploy to cover up and hide my body had not worked.
The white t-shirt DID NOT DISGUISE THAT I WAS FAT!
Newsflash: people know that under your sleeves, your arms are fat.
Throughout highschool, I sweltered my way through summer by wearing my school jumper over my dress uniform to cover the lumps and bumps.
Newsflash: wearing that jumper through summer did not disprove that I was fat. It just made me look like an idiot.
Golda finishes up her blog post by writing:
"Why does this matter? Because hiding your body sends a message to
others and to yourself. It sends a message that you are uncomfortable
with how you look and that your body is unacceptable. It sends the
message that making yourself acceptable to other people is more
important than your own needs. And I can tell you that the more you try
to be acceptable to other people by ignoring what you need, the more
you will feel unfulfilled, angry, self-hateful, uncomfortable, and, at
least in the summer, sweaty."
My need to be cool in summer is more important than being acceptable to others. I'm sorry I may not be someone else's walking porn, but too bad.
In the comments on the CC Facebook page, women wrote "I don't like my arms; I hate showing my arms; I want to hide my arms; I'm self-conscious of my arms; It looks disgusting."
Do you know what?
FAT WOMEN NEED TO RECLAIM THEIR ARMS.
Plus size women seem to think that their upper arms are too fat for public viewing. But the truth is that you are probably more concerned about it than anyone else!
A personal story in FAT!SO? (Marilyn Wann) read like this,
"I asked my acquaintance whether my arms looked too awful, whether I shouldn't have covered them up. She was simply surprised at my question, and said, 'No, of course not. They're lovely and round.' That was all it took - a flat statement from a disinterested party. It was all I needed to reclaim a body part that I'd been hiding in shame for decades. And you know what? My arms are lovely and round. In fact, all of me is. What's more, it feels good to wear sleeveless things and feel the air on your skin."
That teacher (who was in her 60s and had an amazing figure) who asked me why I couldn't just take off my bolero, was so matter-of-fact - as though it was pure logic to take it off, and I could tell by the look on her face that she was baffled by my response of "I don't like showing my arms." And it makes sense - my arms were going to be fat whether I had a bolero on or not. The difference was, I would be cool and comfortable on a hot, Australian summers day. Isn't that my right, just as it's the right of every other Australian? Why was I torturing myself?
I think more importantly, I am learning to love my upper arms. The skin there, where it's flabbiest, is so soft and supple and perfectly lovely to touch and squeeze! I often joke about this roll of fat that is just above my inner elbow, but only on my right arm! It's this weird little pocket of fat that isn't mirror imaged on the other arm! But my boyfriend, sister and close friends love it! They think it's adorable. I've learned to love that little roll!
Fat women need to shed shame, not pounds, and stop apologising for their bodies. We spend too much time trying to keep people from figuring out we are fat. Somewhere along the line, we have gotten the message that there is a wrong way to have a body.
Boleros, to me, are starting to become a reminder of why I must fight against the shame and resist the urge to hide. I want to try, from now on, to go sleeveless more often.
I'm going to wrap this up with a quote by Christa Trueman (Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion, edited by Virgie Tovar). She begins this story by writing of a memory from her childhood, when her mother couldn't turn over on her beach towel to play a game with her because her "belly fat rolls" would show.
"I love the beach now. I love running into the water, my entire body jiggling, all that fat showing, no way to hide it. I love shrieking and laughing and having splash fights and lifting and tossing my girl into the waves as she shrieks and laughs right back at me. I love sitting up on my towel, my hair dripping, my belly resting on my lap, as we share our picnic basket and futilely try to wipe sand off our potato chips. I love that my daughter sees me this way: fat and happy, fat and swimming, fat and lying on my side on my towel next to her, reading her a passage out of my book or flipping over a card in a game of Crazy Eights. I can't guarantee that she is going to get through her teen years unscathed by our body-shaming society, but I can guarantee that she's going to have me in her life as the counterpoint to all of that. And any time I get those twinges of shame - because they do linger, and they do still inhibit me - I recount that day on the beach as a small girl with my mother. Only now it's not a reminder of how my belly fat rolls are not okay. It is a reminder that my belly fat rolls are a battle cry."
Your fat upper arms are a battle cry, too.
