English speakers have this weird habit of using food metaphors to describe women. Sometimes this goes both ways, such as using “honey” or “pumpkin” or something similar as a term of endearment. But you've got to admit this is more common for women—“cupcake,” “cherry-red lips,” girls being made of “sugar and spice and everything nice,” etc. Frankly, it's kind of creepy—there's this connotation of an attitude of consumption there. (Widely used metaphors such as this attitude of “women=dessert” are an area of interest in linguistics: here's a scholarly article on it.)
If you ask most women their body type or body shape, they'll probably say some kind of fruit—often apple, pear, banana. And there's the outlier, the coveted hourglass shape.
Can we please agree these descriptions are ridiculous? Come on—no human being is shaped like a banana. Bananas are basically curved tubes. I've never seen a lady walking around while bent over into the shape of a banana.
And the whole hourglass thing—listen, does anyone really want to be shaped like an hourglass? Have you seen how skinny those things are in the middle? If anyone really had the proportions of an hourglass, she would snap in half, because she would have no ribs or abdominal muscles or anything to hold her top half up, much less any room for, you know, vital organs.
Why are we so obsessed with fitting our bodies into categories, anyway? Most of the time when I have heard women using these fruit/hourglass terms to describe themselves, it's to put themselves down (“I hate my hips. I'm so pear-shaped.”) or as part of a “how to best dress your body” sort of magazine article.
First of all, can we agree that the “hourglass shape” isn't the only way a woman can be beautiful? Girls with big hips or wide shoulders or no curves are drop-dead gorgeous, okay? If anyone says otherwise, punch 'em in the face. (Or maybe don't actually punch them in the face. A verbal clapback is just as good as a solid punch in the face, though. Or if you can't think of one, picture yourself punching them in the face in your imagination and remind yourself that you're beautiful. Thanks.)
Second, let's address those “how to best dress your fruit-shaped body” articles. Now, I'm all for women wearing clothes that make them feel confident. That's great. But in order to be confident, does it have to be through the route of “make sure not to make your hips look bigger because they're already big?" Can't we just wear clothes we think look good on us and be happy with them, without worrying whether we look too much like a blueberry or whatever?
Maybe I'm overreacting here. But when I searched “men's body types” on Google, all I found were sensible descriptions such as rectangle, oval, and triangle to describe men's general body proportions, or even more commonly the ectomorph, endomorph, and mesomorph body types I learned about in high school science class. Whereas the first result for a “women's body types” search was the fruit/hourglass nonsense.
What's the big deal? I don't think anyone is consciously trying to hurt or oppress women by using fruit to describe body types. But our attitudes and use of language shape each other, and we need to put thought into our assumptions and the things we say.
No one is an apple. Or a pear or a banana or an hourglass, or even a rectangle or square or inverted triangle. We're all human-shaped humans. And no matter how we dress, we look dang good.
