Body Talk

Grab your mat - we're going to yoga. There's a nice, quiet little studio in my new neighborhood. The majority of the yogis and yoginis are over 40, and the classes are pleasant, if not overly challenging. On the mat behind me is an attractive, chatty 50 year-old blonde, obviously well-exercised and at most a size six. We are all sitting on floor trying to lower our torsos as close to the ground as possible, and the move is hurting her lower back. Even with our instructor's help, Blondie still can't get her chest to the floor.
"Oh!" she says, looking up at our teacher." It must be my fat stomach getting in the way, ha ha!"
Now, Miss Botox doesn't have a fat stomach, but the yoga instructor does. She's an earth mother type, big boned with a bit of a menopot. I'm sure she's long past caring, as she's well on her way to enlightenment of the Buddhist kind, but she knows a prompt when she hears one.
"Of course not!" Our teacher coos reassuringly. " What fat stomach?"

Years ago, I worked with a dramatic and self-absorbed female art director, a slender, attractive woman. She was maybe 36 at the time. Some of the women in our office took occasional smoke breaks, I, just to socialize, the other ladies because they were hooked. We had barely gotten off the elevator before GLBAD (not a new sexual orientation, an acronym for Good Looking Blonde Art Director) started complaining. She's gained weight. She's hovering around a size four instead of her customary two. Her clothes are a little snug. It's a tragedy. GLBAD is ranting now.
"Look at me! I'm fat! I'm a heifer! I'm a fat f*@king pig!"
Cue the rest of us girls.
"Of course not! You look great! You're so skinny!"
Meanwhile, several of the women in GLBAD's instant support group are overweight, one of them morbidly obese. As we head back towards the elevator, the big lady turns to me and whispers, "If she thinks she's so fat, how am I supposed to feel?" So I have a little chat with GLBAD. I explain why her behavior was insensitive. And she does not get it. It seems we haven't come such a long way, baby, because my twenty-something daughter has friends who pull the exact same number.

Female fishing for complements is nothing new. No woman asks "How do you like my new dress?" because she really wants your opinion. If she wanted it, she would have asked BEFORE making the purchase. A woman who asks this wants affirmation, not honesty. Ditto the dreaded question that makes men feign temporary hearing loss, "Does my butt look big?" This kind of insecurity is probably hard-wired in heterosexual females. (Lesbians seem to have a more relaxed relationship with their bodies). But bitching about putting on five pounds to a woman who needs to lose fifty is just plain mean.

Why do women do this? Is it:
a). Blatant narcissism, like Snow White's Wicked Queen.
b). A subtle form of sadism
c). Vision issues.
d). Pure stupidity
e). Congenital insensitivity (That would be my guess).
Why can't these chicks just take a bathroom break to monitor their own cuteness and leave the rest of us alone? And isn't fifty a little old to be playing this game?

I have my own body issues. It gets really hard to be objective about your appearance in your middle years, especially if, as my husband recently said of me, your mental age is 17. (He has since taken it back and adjusted the figure to 26). As a middle-aged female in a class full of fellow AARPies, I find myself dividing the other yoginis into two groups: the ones that make me worry that I don't look as good as them, and the ones that make me wonder whether I look as fat/old/droopy as they do. At least I am self-aware enough to get that this is wrong in multiple ways. From a yogic perspective, it's the kind of thinking that will get me reincarnated as a gerbil. Hopefully, a svelte one.