I have always been short, pale, and unhealthily thin. This was not due to an eating disorder or a desire to make myself fit a defined ideal body type. These genetics were assigned to me at conception, and they just so happen to not be the ideal in this day and age. Though I’m still on the short side and my skin is resilient to holding a tan, one thing about me did change when second puberty hit me like a truck and my metabolism slowed down: I gained weight and the top half of my body now resembles the hour glass body type.
My bottom half, however, has never quite rounded out to look like the signature “curvy” body type despite the weight that had seemingly gone literally everywhere else all over my body. But I’m never going to have a “curvy” body type because I have “hip dips.”
What are hip dips, you ask? Honestly, I didn’t know there was a term for my lack of rounded curves either. I thought I wasn’t eating the right foods or working out the right parts of my body as if changing my routine would suddenly fill in the “dips.” Nope, that’s just how I was made. No matter how much weight I gain, my body will never be perfectly rounded-out to be the hourglass shape that is currently “trending.”
Literally, it’s trending. People are working out parts of their body for the sole purpose of getting curves. #RealMenLikeCurves #OnlyDogsGoForBones is still lurking around the more judgmental parts of the internet.
Alright, so I learned that I’m never going to have a Kim Kardashian body. What’s the big deal, then?
The big deal is that the only reason I even know that my hip dips are totally normal is that I stumbled across an article labeling my body type as a “trend.” The curvy body type, as we all know, has been “on trend” these past few years, with many women doing all they can either naturally or unnaturally to have that body type. Now that hip dips are slowly coming out of the shadows, I can’t help but wonder if they’re doomed to be the next “trend.”
To be honest, it’s hard for me to actually picture hip dips becoming a trend. After all, I and many others have been conditioned to see them as ugly because they aren’t curves. But then again, being curvy was considered ugly once, and now everyone wants that body type.
People also considered being very thin to be the ideal, and now it’s generally considered unhealthy except in certain circumstances. With this in mind, there’s nothing that rules out the possibility of hip dips, along with any other female body type that hasn’t been trending yet, becoming the next big thing.
I’ll admit, I wouldn’t mind if my body type was praised for once. After being labeled “too thin” and feeling ugly for having no curves all my life, it would be awesome to have my body type in the spotlight as an ideal. But isn’t that such a screwed up way to think?
Society has pitted women against each other for everything under the sun from career choice (or lack thereof) to personal life decisions, and body types are no exception. No matter how you change your workout or your diet routine, your body type is something you can’t change drastically without plastic surgery. And is the plastic surgery really worth it if the fascination with a certain body type is merely a trend?
You can gain and lose weight, but if it’s in your genetics to have hip dips, or an hourglass body, or to be pear-shaped, or to be thin, that’s ultimately what you’re going to get.
At the end of the day, I don’t want to be considered top tier pretty just because I happened to be born with something that people find aesthetically pleasing. I want to be accepted as beautiful and normal without feeling bound to a constantly changing definition of “pretty.”
We are living, breathing people, each of us with different physical traits. No body type should be hailed as better than the other. They are all normal. We need to stop trying to turn women’s bodies into “trends” when what we should really be doing is accepting them as normal.
