Body loving, body loathing

I saw a statistic yesterday that roughly sixty percent of thirteen year old girls in a specific study were worried about putting on weight, as opposed to a much lower percentage of similarly aged boys. And I started thinking about the phenomenon and did a little research and came across this Glamour survey titled, Shocking Body-Image News: 97% of Women Will Be Cruel to Their Bodies Today.

Our research found that, on average, women have 13 negative body thoughts daily—nearly one for every waking hour. And a disturbing number of women confess to having 35, 50 or even 100 hateful thoughts about their own shapes each day.

If these limited studies are accurate and women really hate their bodies to this degree, this sounds very unhealthy, not to mention awful and I have some questions. And the primary one is this, why don't men, by and large, give a shit what we look like, straight men anyway? And why are women presumably so hardwired to their body image? Why do you care so much? When we don't, the spare metrosexual notwithstanding?

I brought up the question to a few of the baristas, all young ladies, down at the coffee shop this afternoon. They blame men. Men want us to look perfect when we are naked. This may be so but I have had men tell me that women were far sexier with some clothing on. Sexy, after all, comes in all shapes.

And I know from experience with my wife and her shop, that women don't dress for men, they dress for each other. So is this about what men think or what women think and why is image and pretty apparently outrank all the wonderful womenly attributes? Why are women judged by shape, and men not to such a degree? And is this battle, largely self inflicted? Do we need to rewire our psyches on this one?

Are we still in a day and age when women need validation, sexual or other wise, from men in order to feel worthy and complete? Thought we were all a bit more liberated than that. Is it really fair to blame men for all this, why cede them that power? Screw men, sisters.

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I, of course, went to seed long ago. Will never have that Charlie Atlas physique again. Love me, love my fat. When they took my kidney out, the surgeon mistakenly cut a nerve on my left side that kept all my muscular insides in. Now I have a misshapen hump on the left side that would make quasimodo kvell. Sometimes I think maybe it shifts sides at night. What hump?