MY Lovely Lady Lumps, OK?

            It has often been the recourse of COSMOPOLITAN and its associates to counter ‘Beach Body Now! Step 1: Stop Eating’ type features with articles on how much men love ‘real women’ (also, sorry, what is the antithesis? Are there life-sized female Morphs wandering around out there?). Big thighs? Men love them! Spare tyres? Men love them! Feeling invalidated? GET A MAN. Now, where my initial objection lies with the suggestion that if you are seriously refusing to go on a diet then you better hurry the hell up and get a boyfriend because you sure don’t deserve to love yourself, I will save that argument for another day. Allowing your self-worth to be dependent on some else’s opinion of you is deeply unhealthy; but so is this pervasive idea that men should be allowed to judge us, for better or worse. Basically, men might love ‘real women’, but kindly stop loving me if I haven’t invited you to.

I don’t know how naturally thin girls feel about this, having only been skinny pre-puberty and thus blissfully unaware, and I went to Uni where every man was either gay or posh. But in the Real World I have increasingly come to notice that men sparsely furnished in the cranial department assume that a woman possessed of breasts/ass/hips/thighs is naturally inviting stares/comments/gropes, the coy tart. Men: the bits sticking out are not invading your personal space, though you are most certainly invading mine when you ‘accidentally’ brush past. This degrading presumption that ‘if I can see it, I can touch it’ was quite abruptly presented to me a few weeks ago in a club. Whilst waiting at the bar, someone grabbed my ass. Unused to this sort of behaviour, I couldn’t actually believe anyone would be a) that much of a pig, or b) delusional enough to think it was a winning seduction technique. And yet, next time I made my way to the bar, he appeared again, hand at the ready for some alluring pinching action. Even more gallingly, he took my ‘Don’t do that, it’s not cute and I don’t appreciate it’ as a challenge, and just left his hand on my backside. As if it had squatters’ rights. The pint over the head, slap in the face and decidedly less diplomatic ‘F*** OFF’ eventually encouraged him to slope off and wash Tennants out of his hair. Hooray, it only took mild assault to decisively explain an ass is not for grabbing just because it’s there.  HOWEVER. Next day he had tracked me down on facebook and sent me a message explaining that he wouldn’t apologise for the ‘gratuitous ass-grabbing’ because it was a ‘fine derriere’. Now, I was feeling tender from the previous night, and I’m sure you won’t mind me telling you that message overcame my strenuous attempts to not throw up.

I am still astounded. He felt no compulsion to apologise for being a disgusting chauvinist pig, because any girl with the temerity to have curvy bits is asking for a groping. In what world is this ok? I’m pretty sure tall-drink-of-water girls don’t get this treatment. Statuesque beauties are given a wide berth by the walking results of contraceptive failure. I reckon it’s because those Neanderthal men who see breasts and immediately salivate think curvy girls are homely – we look evolutionarily sound, childbirth won’t kill us, and our mammary glands…sorry, I lost my train of thought, something about breasts? I like to think of myself as a great proponent of women’s rights. But as a male friend said to me recently ‘If you want to be treated the same as men, don’t expect me to give up my seat for you’. Well, I don’t want to be treated the same as men, I just don’t want to be treated like I’m inferior because I’m not one. So don’t grope me; don’t leer down my shirt; and most certainly don’t make comments about me. Not being skinny doesn’t make me fair game; it just means there’s a lot more weight behind my right hook.