Item: 1 green butterfly skirt, Size 0 Petite
I love this skirt, but I completely and utterly loathe the word "petite." This comes, I think, from the hideous looks that generally populate petite sections of department stores. If you don't believe me, here are some examples: check out this or this. That's part of it. It's also the tone of voice people use when they use this word to describe you - like they're choosing it instead of a different word which would be impolite. Cute might sometimes be a compliment, but petite never is.
I guess I can sort of understand why designers don't want to do a lot for smaller women, actually. Clothes look better on really leggy people, people who are tall and who are models.
Being small is not an entirely bad thing, either. Only at certain times, the word "too" seems to creep in front of it, and fuels the suspicion that I am not nor ever have been within the realm of normal, and often these times happen to be when I'm looking for clothes.
When Size 0 ends up being alarmingly big on me, I know I'm in trouble. Size 0 in itself is an interesting phenomenon, given that the value of 0 is nothing. When you drop lower than that, it just about conveys the message You don't exist.
A solution, sometimes, is to shop in the children's department, which sometimes works really well and sometimes doesn't. It doesn't, usually, for an event where I kind of want to come off as an adult, and to know that I'm wearing the same size as a 10-year old girl does not increase my sense of womanly desirability. These are minor things, maybe, but they are, in their own way, humiliating.
It's not good form to complain about being too small to fit into clothes, is it. Just about everything I've found on the topic of clothes sizes speaks to the pervasive problem of American women feeling large and undesirable even when they aren't, due to unattainable standards set by the media, Barbie, and so forth. Everyone is well-educated to be sensitive to this, but unfortunately I don't really see anything changing in that direction.
It's against this backdrop that I try to say what it's like to be too small rather than too big. It's at this point that I keep getting into trouble, and where the bitterness keeps edging into my tone, because the whole time I've been writing this I've known that I'm going to end with some sort of apologetic postscript about how my body-image issues, if that's what we're talking about, of course aren't nearly as important or tragic as those on the other end of the spectrum. And this is just another version of what I've already gotten used to picking up on, as a smaller person: You matter less than everyone else.
The truth is, I do think the a lot of the attitudes toward larger women are terrible. It seems to me it's a situation in which everyone loses. I've been so tempted to abandon this whole subject, be willing to swallow it rather than cause bad feelings in somebody else for bringing it up at all.
I'm told to consider myself lucky, and end it there. I'm not supposed to say anything about what psychological struggles are involved in being too small. And I definitely can't write anything about all the things I like about being small. So where does that leave me? Ready to scrap the whole thing, pretty much.
I guess I can sort of understand why designers don't want to do a lot for smaller women, actually. Clothes look better on really leggy people, people who are tall and who are models.
Being small is not an entirely bad thing, either. Only at certain times, the word "too" seems to creep in front of it, and fuels the suspicion that I am not nor ever have been within the realm of normal, and often these times happen to be when I'm looking for clothes.
When Size 0 ends up being alarmingly big on me, I know I'm in trouble. Size 0 in itself is an interesting phenomenon, given that the value of 0 is nothing. When you drop lower than that, it just about conveys the message You don't exist.
A solution, sometimes, is to shop in the children's department, which sometimes works really well and sometimes doesn't. It doesn't, usually, for an event where I kind of want to come off as an adult, and to know that I'm wearing the same size as a 10-year old girl does not increase my sense of womanly desirability. These are minor things, maybe, but they are, in their own way, humiliating.
It's not good form to complain about being too small to fit into clothes, is it. Just about everything I've found on the topic of clothes sizes speaks to the pervasive problem of American women feeling large and undesirable even when they aren't, due to unattainable standards set by the media, Barbie, and so forth. Everyone is well-educated to be sensitive to this, but unfortunately I don't really see anything changing in that direction.
It's against this backdrop that I try to say what it's like to be too small rather than too big. It's at this point that I keep getting into trouble, and where the bitterness keeps edging into my tone, because the whole time I've been writing this I've known that I'm going to end with some sort of apologetic postscript about how my body-image issues, if that's what we're talking about, of course aren't nearly as important or tragic as those on the other end of the spectrum. And this is just another version of what I've already gotten used to picking up on, as a smaller person: You matter less than everyone else.
The truth is, I do think the a lot of the attitudes toward larger women are terrible. It seems to me it's a situation in which everyone loses. I've been so tempted to abandon this whole subject, be willing to swallow it rather than cause bad feelings in somebody else for bringing it up at all.
I'm told to consider myself lucky, and end it there. I'm not supposed to say anything about what psychological struggles are involved in being too small. And I definitely can't write anything about all the things I like about being small. So where does that leave me? Ready to scrap the whole thing, pretty much.
posted by Karen at 7:27 PM
1 Comments:
Hi K,
I think the topic of being "too small" is just as worthy of conversation as anything else. Certainly, there are people in the world who are too tall or too large or too anything else and that poses problems as well. But, if you want to talk about the world's one-size-fits all approach, and how it leaves out the people at the extremes, you certainly are in a good position to write about the small end of the spectrum.
I find it interesting. And, besides, you've already educated me on important subjects like dish placement. :)
C
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