Because I Said So (47 page)

In the 1840s, a “well-turned ankle” was the glimpse of a woman’s body that excited men, the lovely bone showing like a tiny face, I imagine, when the foot moved out from under the voluminous skirt. In the 1940s, the foci of sexual presence were shapely calves that showed off the stocking seam, à la Betty Grable. The 1950s were about sweater girls, which required a full bust, but as I recall from movies and family stories, tissue paper and padded bras, not permanent surgery, did the trick. And in the 1960s, with hot pants and hip-huggers, a flat butt and thin frame were sexy to most Americans. Think Twiggy. The androgynous look was difficult to achieve for most American women, who stuck with capris and camp shirts while their daughters worked hard with the shag haircuts and hot pants. Though it may have seemed that it was the hot pants that were on display, it was the exposed thighs that signified sex, teasing with their never-before-displayed access.

I grew up in the 1970s, and my own daughters love to tease me after watching
That ’70s Show
. Okay—we had Farrah Fawcett wings, a tough hairstyle to pull off given gravity and the unnatural position of the curls, and Afros, which required blow-ing out and a lot of combing. I may have shown my stomach in the seventies. I got out my junior high and high school yearbooks to check. I saw hot pants and hip-huggers (what my daughters call flares and low-rise) and I saw baby-doll smocked shirts and spaghetti-strap tanks. But what showed, even, I discovered, on me, was only a part of our abdomens. The navel sometimes, but
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more often the skin above it, at the ribcage, which was definitely not ripped abs. We didn’t do ripped abs. Think Goldie Hawn in
Laugh-In
, saying “Sock it to me.” Maybe a circle of her abdomen waist showed in a mini dress. Think Chaka Khan on the album cover of
Rufus
, her strong hips and thighs in tight bell-bottoms, her navel showing in a slice of brown skin, and maybe her two bottom ribs.

Our jeans, though short-zippered, seemed somehow more forgiving. Let’s put it this way: we didn’t have butt cleavage.

I got married in the 1980s, the disco years, when sexy was all about the total look, the makeup and hair and leg warmers and scarves,
Flashdance
body parts exposed between the manufactured tears of the Jennifer Beals sweatshirt.

In the 1990s, the bosom became the undeniable sexual focus of our culture, and then big American breasts were marketed globally, through our magazines and movies and television and commercial dominance. In fact, the 1990s transformed natural sexual allure into the marketing of products as never before. You could buy breasts. In earlier decades, women couldn’t purchase slimmer ankles, lovely collarbones and shoulders (the height of feminine appeal in the 1820s), or Twiggy’s thinness. But now cleavage was required, and it was within reach for everyone.

Push-up bras and water-filled enhancers were ubiquitous, and then even that wasn’t enough: plastic surgery was suddenly necessary. Breasts grew everywhere, and were displayed in all their planetary inconsistency with the rest of the body; the hard, sculpted spheres rose like Tupperware bowls attached to perfectly ordinary chests. It wasn’t sufficient that American culture improved American women: suddenly women in other countries, such as Brazil, where they’d been happy with average breasts, great buttocks, and overall sex appeal, thought they needed
Baywatch
breasts.

I had three babies by then. I remember watching my average breasts turn into stripper breasts, to do their assigned tasks of feeding my daughters for a year each, and then return to their previous size. I remember wondering how, if the nipple was moved during
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augmentation, breasts could still feed. And I remember looking at women’s bodies differently by then, as mine had morphed so many times from 100 pounds to 150, from 34-24-34 to manatee-shaped to what I am now: average. I studied women’s breasts in advertise-ments and in celebrity magazines. Nature is balanced: large breasts usually go along with large hips and medium waists. Hourglass figures. Now boy hips, man abs, Bardot breasts, and that concave under-navel belly are required to be an ideal woman. This is, for most women, a physical impossibility.

Maybe in 2000, big breasts became so ordinary, so easily attained, that allure went south to the belly. The navel rings, the tattoos, the Christina Aguilera/Britney Spears low, low, low-rise pants.

It’s awfully hard to buy a concave belly.

Recently I walked around Disneyland with my three daughters and a friend with her kids. We could have been anywhere in the United States; a male friend had mentioned preteens showing navel rings and tattoos in Los Angeles and Detroit at sport arenas, and another friend mentioned six-year-olds showing their underwear elastic with pushed-low skirts at an elementary school in San Francisco.

We saw bellies at Disneyland. The archetypes—the Paris Hilton/Christina/Britney/Olsen Twins wannabe girls—were all present, blonde and preternaturally thin. Girls of every other size and shape were also on display. And what I couldn’t help but notice was how different all of these bodies were from those of my youth. We had waists and then hips. These girls had long, long waists, with interesting pads of muscle/fat above the back pelvis, pads that made me think of my favorite chicken part: the back. Those soft tender pads of meat beside the vertebrae, the ones my mother-in-law taught me to savor because that unwanted piece was usually what we women were left with after the platter was passed around.

Yes. The place where fat is stored after we have children, and now that we are an increasingly overweight society, often before we have children.

The girls and women who were not Paris Hilton still wore
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ultra-low-rise jeans and skirts the size of manila envelopes. I saw shining rims of skin, marked with the delicate silvery filigree of stretch marks, with the angry red of sunburn, with tattoos and elastic marks from where the shorts rode up. I saw striving and desire and the shrugs of defiance: I don’t care if my tender girl-fat trembles when I walk. I’m still sexy.

I saw women my age whose stomachs hung over their belts the way men’s beer bellies do, when their shirts ride up unexpectedly. I saw women my age who had obviously done Pilates and yoga and Yogilates and thousands of sit-ups, who wore low-rise sweat pants with JUICY stenciled on their butts, just below the pads of skin showing with downy fur along the arrowhead-shaped end of their vertebrae.

The chicken back ends with that—do you remember? The vertebrae end in that soft triangle of the butt. I stared at all the daughters and mothers walking with friends; pushing strollers; bent over, working hard; strolling, sexy and nonchalant; waiting in line. All races and sizes and ages. Some pulling their shirts down again and again, letting them ride up again and again, as if shy but not really, as if feeling the brush of illicit air between their hipbones.

What were we wearing, my daughters and I? They wore basketball jerseys and shorts, their everyday attire, and they glared scornfully at the other girls. But their friends wear low-rise, and now and then, so does my fifteen-year-old, though she is shaped like Beyoncé and therefore has a hard time with buttless jeans.

Me? I wore capris and a T-shirt, and if I reached up to grab a bar in a ride, some of my stomach showed. When that happened, my middle daughter, extremely judgmental at twelve, would pinch the hem of my shirt like a curtain and yank it down.

I suddenly thought of how all these teenage girls must feel watching their mothers try to adopt the public belly—the one body part you’d think would be off-limits to women whose stomachs had stretched from giving birth.

Standing in line for Pirates of the Caribbean, watching a woman my age with a deep, bought tan and her lower back exposed, a faint trail of hair like a second spine, images of my mother’s magazines
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came to me. The seventies wasn’t the most tasteful decade, and those moms must have shown off bad fashion, too, in their ponchos and no bras and paper dresses and Earth shoes. But regular moms in my neighborhood, of all races and sizes, wore mom clothes or work uniforms. I never saw a mother’s cleavage or belly or the soft lower back. I’m sure women of my mother’s generation wanted men to notice them. But magazine covers showed Jackie Kennedy and Coretta Scott King and Lena Horne and Audrey Hepburn, Janice Dickinson and Lauren Hutton. My mother and her contemporaries admired these women’s eyes or brows or hairstyle, their coats or jewelry or regal bearing or volunteer work. My mother and her friends didn’t expect to be confronted with the buttocks or abs of Jackie Kennedy, or to be expected to show off their own.

Quirky, generous beauty seemed a realistic expectation for mothers only a few years ago. Our impossible, celebrity-charged standards now: Cindy Crawford, Sarah Jessica Parker, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Madonna. Belly-baring as soon as possible after giving birth; no alteration in the body—and for most of the rest of us, guilt or disbelief at the amount of flawless skin exposed for our instruction
.
Those abs, those below-navel planes of flesh with no stretch marks or after-baby pooch, require hours of gym time and personal trainers, which requires nannies, which would require entirely different lives for most mothers, not just different postpartum bellies.

Even for young women who haven’t had children, the standards of beauty seem impossible. Jeans require no hips and flat buttocks, the better for butt cleavage. We are even over-accessorized below the knees, where requirements for feet are French pedicure, toenail decals, toe rings, ankle bracelets, tiny ankle tattoos, and, yes, toe cleavage. On the Jungle Cruise, while the wisecracking safari guide shot a cap gun into the mouth of a descending plastic hippo, I saw high-heeled flip flops, but at least I didn’t see any Manolo Blahniks.

There at Disneyland, though, I realized that I was wrong about one thing: Women can buy a belly. I’d forgotten the graphic scene on television where I saw the marker lines on a woman’s stomach for her tummy tuck.

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That night, so tired I couldn’t move from the couch after the girls had gone to bed, I made the mistake of watching for the first time, and last,
Extreme Makeover
.

A woman my age, with a husband who apparently loved her enough to take care of their four small children while she was gone for two months(!), remade her entire face and body. Face: nose job, eyelid tightening, lip contouring, liposuction on cheeks, teeth whitened, scars laser-removed, and new hair sewn to her existing hair. Body: tummy tuck, liposuction on thighs and buttocks, breast augmentation and lift, and two months’ worth of diet and rigorous workouts with a personal trainer.

I learned a new term: Brazilian butt lift.

Let’s not talk about the clothes or makeup.

Let’s just stick with this: after the four kids, she felt that her breasts had sagged, her stomach was disfigured with stretch marks and excess skin, and her face was haggard, her eyes swollen and bleary.

Well, yeah. Those are standard results of pregnancy and childbirth, not to mention the sleepless nights of strep throat, coughs and colds, and childhood illnesses. She hadn’t even gotten to the long nights of waiting up for those who are dating and driving.

I have.

We’re in our thirties, our forties. We have given birth to and are raising children. Who expects us to look like this? Our men? I don’t think so. Yes, there are trophy wives and second wives and third wives. There are men who leave their first wives for someone younger. But among my friends, in my middle-of-the-road existence, that has hardly ever happened. Men leave, but often for someone their age and often for no one at all. For solitude and no kids. And other men don’t leave. They might look at the billboards or the models in Victoria’s Secret catalogs, they might even fool around, but usually not with that kind of woman.

Women tend to say, “I do it for me. Not him.”

Mothers have fallen for the marketing—the marketing and advertising of our lives, advertising to other women, along with men, that we are perfect, we will always be perfect, even after
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having children. We will never have flaws on our bellies or faces or appearances or lives.

A friend recently passed on a clever advertisement in a catalog called “As We Change” (for “older” women, certainly, though no change at all would be the goal). “Don’t blame yourself if your tummy is suddenly out of proportion. Beginning in your early 20s, nature conspires to redistribute adipose (fat) tissue.” (I had no idea that women of twenty-two, say, are now considered to be gracefully aging, or that nature was actually sneaky, rather than merely matter-of-fact.) “Sovage Tummy Flattening Gel works by forcing stored fat out of abdominal fat cells and into the bloodstream to be burned as energy.” (Yeah, and I’ll just have one little square of chocolate.) A four-to-six–week supply was $119. But if you’re “changing,” and you’re only in your forties, that’s a lot of money over the estimated weeks you’ll live, still redistributing, making up for the life you’ve had, still with a life to come.

Why do so many women want to erase all evidence that they’ve had children, or eaten well, or gotten older? I often think of the question Ann Landers once posed to mothers: If you could go back and choose again, would you have kids? Readers were surprised by how many women said no. Somehow, this new obsession with tummy tucks that tighten an upper abdomen, leaving scars elsewhere, seems that kind of defiance, even denial.

Women want to look forever young, or to look like their daughters’ friends, rather than the mothers they are, inevitably older and therefore not desirable, not even visible.

What I couldn’t stop thinking about, when I saw women who had transformed themselves into females who apparently had never had children, who showed off their new bodies made unre-alistic and their new not-their-own hair: what did their children think? The smaller children of the
Extreme Makeover
woman looked frightened, as if a total stranger had appeared before them. And the face of one teenage daughter on another show was dubious, to say the least.