My Big Belly Should Be Seen As Just As Attractive As Another Woman's Big Butt
Why is a big butt considered attractive — but not a big belly?
courtesy of the author I am not proud of my stomach. I am not confident about the way it looks.
It's got stretch marks. It's big. It wobbles.
My belly button is a dangerous cavern not unlike something you might see in the horror film The Descent, minus the subterranean cannibals (at least, there aren't any in there that I know of...).
I love my body and I make an effort to thank it daily for everything it does for me.
That said, there are only so many times one can solemnly stroke their big ol' belly, look at it and say stuff like, "Thank you for being a part of me," before starting to feel like you're the star of some SNL sketch nobody but your boyfriend's dad would ever think is remotely funny.
My belly isn't just fat, it's also got a little path made of hair that leads the way sweetly up from my pubis to my belly button.
I called it my pleasure path once when I was fourteen and had my mother been drinking any sort of beverage at the time, the spit-take she would've done could have drowned several cities and/or saved California from its devastating drought conditions.
The hair is an easy fix, of course. I get that business ripped right out on the regular by a waxer or by some monster of a woman wielding melted sugar who swears this method is less painful (spoiler alert: it very much is not).
Doing anything about the fatness of my belly, though, is pretty difficult.
I exercise, I diet, and yeah, when I lose weight my belly gets smaller, but it's never what you'd call a cute little tummy. It always remains a big ol' bulge.
When some women expose their midriffs they look adorable, even when they have a little belly. You know, the kind they get from eating say, three or four raisins.
Me? Well given that a woman recently thought I was pregnant, it should suffice to say there is nothing tiny and cute about my stomach.
I can be loving and proud of other parts of my body. I have a great butt. My legs are great. Boobs are on point, sure. But when confronted with my belly... nope. I feel nothing other than embarrassment at worst and hatred at most.
But what if we considered big bellies sexy the way we think big butts are?
Why can't they be? A big belly isn't really that different from a butt. It's round. It wiggles appealing. It's soft and inviting.
I don't know about you, but I would much rather a guy loved stroking my belly rather than squeezing my butt when he and I both know that I am perpetually three or four minutes away from issuing the most rank of gases from it.
I find what we decide as a culture to be the measures of a woman's sexual attractiveness to be both arbitrary and weird.
We sit on our butts. They help us to walk and make falling down slightly less painful than it could be.
Our stomachs digest food. They sit prominently in front of us between our breasts and our vaginas.
Surely if it would be far more logical to favor big bellies over big butts on any given day of the week.
So that's it. I'm done hiding my belly and I'm done hating it.
I'm wearing crop tops now. I'm tying my t-shirts into knots and showcasing my belly.
Heck, maybe I'll even adorn that monstrous cave that is my belly button with some jewelry to show off how sexy my belly bulge really is.
I decide what I think is sexy about myself, and the toot machine I'm sitting on right now needs to take a step back and make way for the new sexpot in town: my pot belly.
Rebecca Jane Stokes is an editor, freelance writer, former Senior Staff Writer for YourTango, and the former Senior Editor of Pop Culture at Newsweek. Her bylines have appeared in Fatherly, Gizmodo, Yahoo Life, Jezebel, Apartment Therapy, Bustle, Cosmopolitan, SheKnows, and many others.