Belly Dancing
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007(Feb 2, 2007)
My belly dancing class is a weird thing. I guess it’s not the class, it’s more how it causes me to think. It really points out my double standard.
It’s the one place in my week where I look at myself the way I WANT to look at myself. Where the back fat that sends me to the gym five or six days a week for an hour each time doesn’t bother me. Where I might look kinda funky trying to get my dance on, but I’m not thinking about it nearly as much as I am when I’m in a bar, with a drink, lookin’ my prissy best.
Don’t mis-hear me … I’m not gonna give up the gym (the back fat MUST **DIE**), and I still like a couple hours of over-excited primping before a good old fashioned girls night out. But belly dancing makes me feel really good about my body without me really doing anything but shakin’ what my momma gave me.
Also, it makes me look at other girls in a different way. There are some BIG girls in my class. And by big, I mean if I were completely honest with myself, the primped, prissy out-on-the town me would look at them and think they were fat and maybe even gross. I’m the girl (maybe the only one?) who thinks the “Dove campaign for real beauty” is kind of a turn-off. After all, there’s a reason models are paid an obscene amount of money and re-touched to hell – they’re supposed to make you want to buy the product, not turn away in disgust when you see the ad.
That’s a thought that has many layers. I know I’ve bought into the advertisers scheme that they define beauty. I know I’m contributing to the complexes of thousands of little girls (and not-so-little girls). I know I probably have some sort of complex. That doesn’t change the fact (I guess it probably explains the fact) that I just don’t want to be bombarded with “real-ness” or fatness in the real world.
So there it is, there’s my huge double standard. The beauty of my belly dance class is these women are ok with, and proud of, their bodies. They’ve learned how to move with it, dance with it, and it’s beautiful. I haven’t reconciled the two sides of my thinking. But that much I know to be true.