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life experience as in having walked in the shoes of every Black male on the planet? without any detail or understanding as to why different people in different spaces have a tendency towards certain aesthetic tastes?
I'll be the first to admit that I love Black communities for thinking I'm too thin, always trying to feed me molasses syrup to get my strength up when I ditch a meal I can't eat loaded with sugar, carbs and meat with a whoops, my track is on, gotta go dance. and yet I'm the high side of normal in NYC or Miami. Black, Brown, white, all of y'all because my BMI touches 18 from time to time. spacial reality
this stuff has historical roots, the ideal female shape always has been rooted in historic social constructs and in present ones
remember during my undergrad one of my fav profs put a book on the reading list (Race Space and the Law - such a good read) for us to analyze and write about, about spatially oriented bodies. meaning all of us. this prof was a good friend of my aunt and I had read it and talked about it at length a year before I got to her class. so I asked her if I could write a paper on normative body shapes in different communities over time and space. she was so cool, totally let me go at it
female form desirability has to do with conditions for males and conditions for females along time and space
just trace the recent past of the last century in NA, every time women got some gains in terms of work/$$$/autonomy thinness was in-for white folk. think flappers after everyone was in shock after WW1. when the wars were over and dudes came back home from 2 Monroe was ideal. she would be considered fat by 'ideal' NA standards today. hegemonic ideal weight for chicas in NA plunged dramatically in the 60's once birth control became readily available
female body size is linked to ideas of wealth (can you earn enough to feed your girl?), fecundity (super fat and super thin women tend to be infertile even without surgery), ideas of women nurturing house and home and male identity which I wasn't able to fully explore in the way I wished due to deadline constraints
in general both through reading and lived experience post-colonial/post Emancipation/post jim crow men no matter where situated prefer thicker chicas. as in not able to span hands around an upper thigh with fingers meeting
like it or not (I do not like) fat is inextricably linked to being female. think about it, tits and ass may have some underlying muscles to boost ish up but what we lust over is fat. in very complex patterns.
communities still grappling with a not so post colonial (neo-col) era tend to err on the side of fat as it relates to ideas about masculinity in cultures/places where the right to be a capital 'M' man has been heretofore denied. for now at least as ideals for women along all lines of intersectionality constantly change as we all do. bless them though in the here and now
just man, some posts here are trying to fit a world of Black men into a groove you have laid to prove some point, that is not how it goes
have left hip bone bruises on so many Black men and women who see past my body and fuck the real me
carry on
and this. blame optics
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