I stopped trying to shrink myself and tried to rock my fierce queer femme lqqks: carefully selected clothes which skimmed over the lumpy bits with hemlines and sleeves that stopped at just the right places.
#Lumin dough full
I was now a size 16, had a wardrobe of clothes I mostly liked, and was full of feminist and fat body politics. I was horny as hell and determined to live the promiscuous period usually experienced during youth, but which I had instead spent depressed and in chronic pain while wearing dowdy clothes. More Radical Reads: Are My Stretch Marks Worthy?įast forward to four years ago, age 38, when I left my ten-year relationship and decided to slut around for a while. I shopped in Evans, my only option in 1994, and felt dowdy and non-sexual to others. Undiagnosed PCOS meant I put on around 40lb/18kg over one summer when I was 18, and my body turned into that of a 40 year-old woman who’d been through five pregnancies (as I perceived it). A few years later they emerged on my hourglass hips, and before my teens ended, on my stomach. I first discovered stretch marks on my thighs aged 12 – big sharp angry red things, like fault lines along my flesh after an earthquake.
Yes, I am 42, but age has not exacerbated this. My thighs are entirely rippled with fat, and parcels of cellulite. My stomach can be grabbed in two handfuls and played with like dough.
#Lumin dough skin
So the surface of my skin is rippled and marked in a variety of whites and pinks. She is kneeling on a cheetah print blanket. A photo of the author wearing black panties. In addition, my fat isn’t firm and squishy it’s more like rice pudding, which moves around under the skin. When I lose weight, instead of springing back, my skin instead remains stretched out and hangs. What this means in practice is that when I put on or lose any weight, my skin only stretches to a degree before it splits somewhat, leaving stretch marks. This causes a long list of issues, but from a looks point of view the result is that my skin structure is different, causing it to have reduced strength and stiffness. I have a condition called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome type 3, a disorder which causes the connective tissues in my body to be defective (such as collagen). What’s different about my body, though, is my skin and fat texture, and the smoothness of my flesh. They are wearing glasses, a grey bralette, and grey and black panties. photo of the author laying on a cheetah print blanket. It has meant SO much to me seeing these women confidently rocking shorts and crop tops whilst looking a bit like me. As such, I do see some representation of my size, such as Graham, Nadia Aboulhosn, and Isabel Hendrix. I’m size 16/18 pear shape and 5’11”, meaning I am generally regarded as a “small fat”. I’ve yet to see a body like mine reflected back to me. The bodies most represented are still disproportionately white, flawless, smooth, young, and able-bodied, like Ashley Graham, and Audrey Ritchie, who is a woman of colour - thick and juicy but taut smooth skin no ripples or marks.
However, it’s not all groundbreaking stuff.
Whereas twenty years ago, when I was 22 years old and a size 24, the only place you saw fat women was in the Evans catalogue, you can now find lots of accounts and pages on social media that are dedicated to non-skinny bodies. It seems like culture and capitalism have finally accepted that we’re getting bigger, and that there’s a lot of fat and thick babes out there demanding better clothes and more representation. The number of more positive articles on fat bodies is finally starting to increase, in the wake of the popularity of “plus size” (I hate that term) models like Ashley Graham, Audrey Ritchie, and Tess Holliday.
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