Sunday, October 21, 2007

A perfect size ten

Poor Lucy.

Until vanity sizing came to ready-to-wear women's apparel, Lucy wore the perfect size ten. Oh, you could always be two sizes lower than your regular size in an expensive designer dress, tell yourself and everyone else you're a six ( how many of your friends have bought nothing but designer stuff?). Most of us were perfect size tens (nowadays they're perfect size sixes) which was a common term that came to be popular after Jimmy Stewart said it when he described his beloved, recently missing wife in one of his hero movies. Average women in height, such as I, looked for an exemplar. In the late fifties, early sixties the perfect size ten was Doris Day, or Kim Novak. That was a safe size for a wife and mother.

I know. I was surprised too.

Compared to what?
Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD): one's self perception that she is a fat person, regardless of her weight, usually either at a "good" weight or slightly over. I know I have it but didn't know I had it until it was way too late to change a lot of things. After Doris Day imprinted us with her size ten, those of us who matured in the sixties began seeing people like Gidget--not too big, not too small. Breasts were as large as they needed to be, naturally, and if you did have 'em, no one really knew. It was a time when women didn't put out the way they do now (I believe modern terminology for the act is "hooking up"). In those days, having gigantic mammaries didn't make or break a relationship...that I know of. Not every guy is a "breast man," after all.

Now, of course, everyone knows if you're endowed or not, and God help you if you aren't. No longer are men forced to look at women as people because that's all they could see.

Skinny bitches
BDD is an inherited disorder; you get it from your sisters and your mothers, television, magazines, bitch peers, ex-lovers and husbands, anyone who doesn't like you. Much of BDD comes from ourselves when we try to compare our bodies to oh, pick anyone who's too rich and too thin...there's even a name for them: skinny bitches.

When I was a kid, I was very athletic and probably in pretty good shape. But there was never a time when I considered myself skinny. When I was at my smallest, a size four in my late 30s, I wanted to eat my typewriter. It was truly wonderful when I gave myself permission to gain a little weight, although I was running sixteen miles a week then to support my eating habit.

My biggest dream when I was a college kid, in fact, was to be able to shop regularly at The House of Nine. I was always a ten, not a nine. Dang. Today the House of Nine provides the training racks for Elizabeth Pluses (14 and up). The sizes my beautiful grown daughters wear (zero, two, four) can be found in their own personal Tiny Persons section. Of course, their idea of a Tiny Persons Plus customer would be someone like Pamela Anderson, for whom the manufacturer would build a huge top and a tiny bottom.

How cute.

Nevermind them
Does this vanity resizing mean instead of my current rotating dress sizes of 12-14, I would've been a 20 back in the day? Or when my mother was a perfect size ten, she was actually a six? She was always very thin. Or did the manufacturers get together at their last convention to take a look at the average woman and figure there'd be a new "baseline" for the perfect size ten, like a perfect size four? Like those girls they took to their rooms were average?

Well. That just sucks.

Thanks for the read.