In Appreciation

by Elizabeth Hall

"Perfectly beautiful bodies are not composed of angular parts."
--Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

It all started around puberty. Until then, I viewed my body strictly in terms of what it could do. It could do backbends on gymnastics mats, flips on trampolines, and cannonballs off diving boards. It ran tan-lined and naked through backyard sprinklers with my younger sister and cousins. Then I turned eleven and started thinking that running through the sprinkler naked might not be such a good idea....

This was also the time that I began accumulating more fat around my hips and waist. My mother had said this was normal when we had "The Talk." But Teen and Seventeen and YM and every other girl in the sixth grade didn't think it was normal. Fat was an excess and a nuisance, boys didn't like it, and we had to do everything in our power to get rid of it. So we did. Some of us were more successful than others, but, by golly, we tried. And so began fifteen years of tortuous yo-yo dieting....

Finally, about a year ago, I was in the dressing room at a department store and discovered that I had gone up a size. My first impulse was to crumple up into a ball and sob. Here we go again, I thought. Here comes another diet. So long, chocolate! So long, cheese! But, suddenly, a little voice popped into my head. I would like to think it was the voice of the true goddess that dwells within every woman. She said, "This is crazy! Stop seeing what they want you to see. See yourself as I see you: a Wonder of Creation."

Reluctantly, I took another look. Much to my surprise I saw, not the superimposed "flaws" of a fucked-up society, but a radiant, opulent, curvaceous body that was healthy and fit and oozing with sensuality. I saw my body. And I fell in love with it.

Fast-forward to the present. I am fresh on the heels of quite possibly the most intensely pleasurable sexual encounter of my life. Incredible sex, incredible because I can barely believe I could let myself go that fully....

First published in Western North Carolina Woman

My Rights as a Woman at ANY Size

From Fatima Parker, President, with credit to Laurie Richards
International Size Acceptance Association
Middle East and North Africa

I have the right to love and be loved.
I have the right to move freely and express myself in my own ways.
I have the right to feel sexy.
I have the right to feel beautiful.
I have the right to move with dignity and grace.
I have the right to take up all the space my body needs.
I have the right to be treated with respect.
I have the right to love myself as I am NOW--not as I wish I was, or as I was at another time in my life, or as others want me to be.
I have the right to feel successful and fulfilled in all aspects of my life.
I have the right to live joyfully and fully.
I have the right to be a diva, a Beauty Queen in body heart and soul.