Everybody's talking about it. A few weeks ago, I had never even heard of the Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory bod, but now, I can't turn on CNN without seeing a story about it. It all started a few weeks ago when a girl with a Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring bod walked up at a party and complemented me on my hands. "They look so melted!" she said, taking off her sunglasses and placing them in the compost bucket. I have NOT stopped smiling since that encounter. Recently, I've eavesdropped on girls' conversations in order to figure out exactly why this sexy and surreal body type makes them ramble on and sip wine like an art critic from the Upper East Side.
One reason is that it's a great body for cuddling. "Nobody wants to cuddle with the sharp lines and cubes of a Picasso bod," said one girl who was talking outside of my dorm window. "I enjoy Picasso's art but he was a member of the French Communist Party and I can't look at boys with body types resembling his artwork without thinking of dangerous communist governments," said her friend. Girl's don't want to cuddle with the cold hard muscles of Michelangelo's sculpture of David, they want to cuddle with a boy who will start melting after experiencing the slightest warmth. They want to melt with their boyfriend so that the two of them can become one amorphous blob that can ooze down the aisle at their wedding: two souls united as one.
Another reason girls love this body type is that they can know how their partners will look in twenty years. Guys who look like Adonis are going to look a lot different when they're older, but guys who resemble pocket watches are going to look relatively the same in their 40s. Their hands will be in different positions, though Dali aimed to depict the relativity of temporality anyway.
Yesterday, I heard an employee in the Olive Garden kitchen talking about an aspect of this body type that I had never even thought of. "It's so cute when a boy looks like that strange creature lying on the ground in that Salvador Dali painting," she whispered over the breadstick basket. And after putting myself in the mind of a woman, I completely agree. So many husbands just sit around and watch football when they're at home and it would be such a relief to have a life partner who instead chooses to lie on the ground resembling a strange, plaintive creature. Move over Zac Efron.
I'm so glad that more body types are accepted in society than 90 years ago. The Al Capone body is such a difficult and unrealistic standard to attain and I was really starting to get tired of that societal obsession.
