Out From Under

There are as many types of ’sexy’ as their are women. We know that in theory, but we don’t all believe it. It’s too obvious what’s really sexy: she’s young, slim, she’s got big boobs. These days she’s also allowed to have a curvaceous ass — so long as it’s not too big. There are subclassifications of this kind of sexy: she can be of different ethnicities — black, white, Asian. The Asian variety is more often permitted small breasts — but no matter what he colour, she’s always going to be young and slim.

Because that’s what makes sexy, right?

Depends on who you ask. Go back a while, go back a long, long, long while. Go back, oh 25,000 years or so, and you get this:

Quite something, isn’t she? She’s called the “Venus of Willendorf“. (’Venus’ was ironic; Willendorf was where she was found.)

You can call her “curvaceous”, if you will — and she certainly is all that. But that’s a euphemism. This woman is FAT.

If some “curvy” women out there are pissed that I’ve dismissed the euphemism and used the F-word, stop for a second. Why are you pissed? Who says “fat” is an insult? And why do you buy into the definition?

It wasn’t an insult to whoever made this statue. Way back then, there were no grocery stores, dispensing food at the drop of a wallet. You had to find your food, hunt it down, maybe chase and kill it. Maybe you’d find your food growing here and there. Then you’d have to pick it. Time-consuming, to say the least. People wandered around a lot, miles and miles every day. They may or may not have eaten every day. They certainly never got “three squares”.

My point is: It wasn’t easy to be anything but skinny back then. People just didn’t have ready access to those extra calories. The fact that she obviously consumed a lot more calories than the bare essentials suggests that she was special in some way, special enough that people brought her food. This mama, she’s fat.

And someone thought that was special enough, someone thought that was beautiful enough, to take the time to carve this little gem. Carve her so that she fits perfectly into the palm of a hand. So that, maybe, she could be carried around and admired?

That curving belly, those enormous breasts, that giant and obvious vulva, the wide ass, the (unfortunate) lack of a face. Whether she’s an Earth Mother, a fertility symbol, or Paleolithic pornography, this woman is all about sex and fertility.

This woman is sexy.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 11:11 am and is filed under women on top. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.