Ode to Womanhood

There is a billion dollar a year cosmetic industry designed to convince women that their natural beauty is flawed and inadequate. That they are unattractive without the addition of various cremes, lotions, blushes, and rouges. There is a multi-million dollar fashion industry that perpetuates the idea that women with curves are not as desirable as anemic fashion models with the bodies of adolescent boys and a multi million dollar weight loss industry that happily feeds on this myth leeching away women's self-esteem right along with their income. Now, the plastic surgeon has been added to this ego depreciating media madhouse. Shows like The Swan and Extreme Makeover have now made it a sin to grow older or gain weight or to not have D-cup breasts that don't sag or bounce or giggle or feel anything like breasts are supposed to feel. The changes your body undergoes during motherhood are now flaws to be corrected by the surgeon's knife as soon after leaving the delivery room as possible. Remember the good old days when breasts were made of mammary glands and fat cells and felt like heaven on earth? Now we are told that it is every man's goal to have a woman with breasts that feel like a man's shoulder. Yes, there are some that feel quite natural and yes, there are women who undergo surgery for perfectly legitimate reasons that have nothing to do with the ridiculous standards society has placed on them. But how many women like that do you honestly know?

Still, the most heinous of all are the men who agree with all of this nonsense. Worse are the ones who pressure the women they profess to love to succumb to these unnatural anti-womanhood standards. The ones pressuring their women to have implants because her breasts have sagged with age or because they are big and that's what large breasts do once you get out of highschool or just because he thinks they are too small. The ones badgering their woman to go on a diet (unless she is obese and it is a serious health issue) so that she will be a better trophy for him. The ones badgering their women to gain weight (unless she is too skinny and it is a serious health risk) because they want her ass bigger or her breasts fuller. The ones who won't be seen with their women without her hair perfectly styled and her make-up perfectly maintained at all times. The ones who subscribe to the warped standards of the fashion industry that believes that a woman with no hips, thighs no wider than her calves, an ass that melds into her back and doesn't even stick out as far as her coccyx bone, breasts that are no bigger than a b-cup unless they come from a plastic surgeon, the bones in her shoulders, chest, and ribs sticking out like she is less than a pound away from organ failure, that is six-feet tall and barely one hundred and twenty pounds, is the standard of beauty for all women. They all make me sick.

Did you know that between 21% and 31% body fat is normal for a healthy adult woman? That means that if you are 170lbs and 52lbs of your total body weight is fat as opposed to lean muscle, organs and bone, you would not be considered fat. Not by anyone accept the people trying to sell you plastic surgery or weight loss gimmicks or the man who secretly hates women and wants them all to look like young boys. Every time I hear a guy say he's looking for a "hard body" I think to my self that if I wanted to sleep with a hard body I'd be gay. Then I wonder if he is.

I have an acquaintance at the gym who was raving about his new girlfriend who looked like a model and was in fact starting a modeling career and how perfect her body was and so on and so on. When I finally met her she was as thin as a rail. Her body was stripped of everything that distinguishes a woman from a man without removing her clothing. No ass, no hips, no thighs, no breasts, no curves at all. I thought he had to be kidding. I'm not saying that I hate skinny women. If it's natural that's fine. I was pretty skinny myself when I was younger. If it is the result of starving yourself in order to comply with some anti-feminine standard of beauty than it's just sick and that's what this was. Just sick. Another friend of mine at the gym had a wife with the most voluptuous ass I'd seen in recent memory. I complimented him on his wife's ass everytime she walked into the gym. Perhaps that's why he encouraged her to excercise and diet the thing away. She is now so skinny that the bones in her face look like they are about to cut through her skin. That remarkable ass is just a fond memory. Her breasts are completely gone as well as her once sumptuous hips and thighs. She looks like if she fell down she'd break in two. Everyone at the gym is worried about her except her husband who likes her better this way. What the fuck is wrong with these guys? Why do women put up with this bullshit? Don't you know what a gift you are to men? Don't you know how empty our lives would be without you? Don't you know that you should be worshipped and adored? I don't fucking get it.

I once dated a woman who was clinically depressed because she didn't feel her breasts were big enough and because she had large thighs and a magnificently large ass. Trust me, I made her come to love and appreciate that remarkable ass, but she could never get over the breast thing. She wound up on anti-depressants because of it. Whenever I would point out how ridiculous it was that she was so obsessed with losing weight and the size of her breasts she would point out all the images that women are bombarded with day in and day out of women with twenty-four inch waists and double-D breasts. I would then point out that men are also bombarded with images of buff steroid freaks with six-pack abs and perfect hair in TV and print but most men feel like if they can still get women with a gut than they must look good enough already. This woman had never had a problem getting men so I couldn't understand what the hang up was about. I mean, I loved her and thought she was sexy and desirable and I ain't so bad looking. But I get it now. The media is a catty hyper-critical bitch with its sites on every woman in the free world and idiotic superficial men only make it worse.

Men don't have an entire health and beauty industry directed exclusively at them, designed to make them feel as if they are not pretty enough or sexy enough or youthful enough or skinny enough without the products they sell. And unfortuantely there are not enough supportive men around to counteract this message. But since I am one I will try to do the job for all of you myself. Now pay attention because I'm only going to say this once.

You are beautiful. Every one of you. You are sexy. You are sensuous. You are desirable. You are gorgeous. You are flawless. You are perfect just as you are. There is no more beautiful creature on earth than a woman. You are lovely in every shape, size, age and color in which you exist.

The older woman, seasoned and experienced. Your smile lines, the wrinkles at the corners of your eyes, accentuate the beauty of a long life and all the years and memories that have shaped you. Every wrinkle and ripple is a trophy of your many accomplishments. You are beautiful.

The full figured woman with all the gifts of womanhood in voluptuous abundance, pornographically exaggerated, the thickness of your hips and thighs, the ripeness of your breasts, the roundness of your ass are nature's icons of femininity. You are beautiful.

The slender woman of more subtle endowments, slight understated curves. You need no silicone to complete you. Nature has gifted you with a sleek and graceful form, delicate and lovely. You are beautiful.

You are the friends and partners who counsil and console us, who laugh and celebrate with us, who understand and commiserate and cry with us, who cry for us and fight for us, who support us and stand by us through adversity. You are the lovers who excite, tantilize, electrify, and obsess us, who occupy our every fantasy and fill our nights with passion. You are the wives and girlfriends who love us, and grow old with us, and accept us with all our flaws and imperfections. You are the mothers who give us sons and daughters and the mothers who bore us and raised us and made us into men. You are the grandmothers who spoiled us and who spoil our children. You are beautiful. Every one of you. In every shape, size, age and color in which you exist.

-Wrath