When I was a little girl I had all these grand plans for when I was skinny. I would get a boyfriend, wear designer clothes, etc. Of course as I got older I realized that those things can happen at any size. So my skinny goals have changed. Instead of fantasizing about living life to the fullest (I can do that as a Plus Size Princess), I fantasize about the little things in life.
Example: If I were skinny, I would be able to wrap myself in a towel at the gym.
The towels that they provide at the gym could probably wrap around… my thigh. They’re slightly smaller than hotel room towels (which I also despise). So the only place I can use them is on my head after I’ve washed my hair.
Last night as I headed to the steam room I observed all the women with little white towels neatly wrapped around their little white bodies and I have to admit, I was jealous. Every girl had a different style. Some had towels around their waist like a skirt with their breasts out. Some draped the towels around their shoulders like a cape. And then there was the woman in the steam room wearing full towel garb with a towel skirt, a towel blouse wrapped under her armpits, a towel head dress holding her hair up and a towel covering her face.
I, on the other hand, wore a white cover-up (white, so that I don’t stand out too much in the sea of white terrycloth). While these ladies casually discard their used towels in a bin for the locker room attendant to handle. I have to take my sopping wet cover-up home every night so that I can launder it for the next visit.
Oh how I long to wrap myself in a single towel! How fun would it be to cover myself in one swoop! I would tuck the two corners underneath each other so while I stepped on the scale in the gym locker room. Or maybe I would duck in and out of the steam room with care free abandon and casually drop my used towel in the used bin like the other girls….
I tried wrapping myself in a towel once and I think I covered one boob with it. One time I even took two towels and attempted to tie them together, but it just looked like a strange loin-cloth/diaper contraption so I gave up.
To be honest, I don’t ever see myself getting that skinny. I don’t think my body is designed to be small enough for that sort of thing.
But a girl can dream, right?
I feel you on this Cece. I think all big girls dream of being covered by the white towel. I know I do.
I can so relate to this. I lamented being big for years because of the towel issue. I hated seeing how the towel didn’t meet around my hip/butt area. The only towels that fight around my entire body & met together were the extra-large ones.
I’ve been losing weight pretty steadily over the past year & the day that I knew my body was really changing was when a regular-sized towel fit completely around my body with no gap. Yay!
Here’s to you getting to use those gym towels.
Cece,
I love your blog, but there are times when I am irritated by some of your posts. For someone who is sharing her life about being plus size with her readers in hopes of inspiring or empowering them, at times it comes off more like you are enabling insecurities.
I don’t know if you are aware of the fat acceptance movement or whether you have even visited sites like fatshionista(now known as two whole cakes), the rotund, fierce free thinking fatties and etc… What bothers me about this post and your thinking is that somehow you wish your body was a smaller size in order to fit a towel. Do you not see the problem here? Rather than you going to the gym and requesting that they order towels to fit your shape and the shapes of the other larger gym members, instead you are wishing that you could alter your body to fit a freaking towel. You prefer to buy white coverups in order to blend in and feel like one of the smaller women you long to be one of.
Why not buy a towel in a color or print you prefer? Rock it to the point that the other ladies will start asking you where you buy you great looking towels. You are complaining about having to take home towels to launder instead of having the option to leave them behind at the gym. For me personally from a sanitary perspective, I prefer my own towels. Because I would rather have a towel that has only been used by me than a towel that has wiped the asses of several people. I don’t trust that the laundry at the gym is really getting the towels clean. Also, I don’t know what they are washing the towels with and that whatever detergent it is won’t irritate my skin.
But seriously if you are that pressed about the fact that you can’t use some grungy gym towel that everybody else has wiped their personal areas with then ask the gym to order larger towels so you can share in the “fun” too.
I don’t long to be able to wrap myself in a white towel. I long for gyms to actually stock bigger towels so people of all sizes can enjoy the convenience.
I’m with Justina on this one…sorry.
@ Justina & Crystal: The fat acceptance movement has helped a lot of people embrace who they are and I LOVE that!
I’m sorry I “irritated” you girls 🙁 I was just being silly. This was more of a lighthearted, tongue in cheek post, but perhaps that didn’t come across.
Thanks for your thought provoking comments, I may revisit this later!
xoxo
No lie, my husband’s uncle gave us towels for Christmas, and when I pulled one out after a shower, and it wrapped all the way around my body without any gaping, I was SO happy! I texted my husband to tell him about it. I didn’t take the towel off for probably 3 hours. I just lounged in it.
Agreed with justina. It saddens me when I see you post about stuff like this. I know that everyone has their weak days but I hope that you seriously don’t want to mold your body to fit the gym towels….
You know, you can buy a bath sheet – it has ample room to wrap yourself in and I suspect that it’s much better quality than the towels at the gym. That’s what I have at home (I refuse to shower at the gym, I just drive home sweaty LOL) and I always feel quite luxurious when I’m wrapped in my Egyptian cotton, bright red bath sheet.
Yes shame that some of your readers didn’t see the tongue in cheek tone in this post.
I personnally found it very amusing, and to me, it didn’t relate at all to the way your relate to yourself.
I hope you continue posting light hearted stuff and show your girly/silly side that we could all relate to!
It’s interesting how some people completely ignored the beginning of your post when you talked about body acceptance and realizing that you can live a full and fun-filled life, without being skinny. I got the humor in your post and never once thought your life goal was to fit into gym towels.
I hope you never feel discouraged from writing your personal and unique views on YOUR site because of the fat acceptance movement. There is enough space for everyone on the net and this site is far from promoting body hatred….
Wow, there’s a lot of negativity happening in these comments! I wasn’t put-off by this post at all…I had to giggle at it because I know just what you mean. I, too, have tried the tying-two-towels-together thing, and I, too, find that I can only use the white towel for my hair… I mean you said in your first paragraph that this was one of the little things in life, not a goal to work towards – and you’re right! It’s just one of those things that nags at you… like… when I ride the subway, and it’s packed, and I’m sitting on the end, by the door…if I’m reading, I like to slip my elbow through the bars and rest the arm holding the book there…but sometimes it’s so packed that people are standing right up against the bars, shoving my arm back through them… if I were a skinny girl maybe I would sit differently, read differently… I think about that…but I don’t write to the MTA and tell them to make bigger trains or run more often to diffuse the crowds, and i don’t obsess over it because it’s not something that rules my life… I don’t have a good or bad day based on this. It’s just one of the little things. 🙂
I agree with Lauren; I really like Cece’s honesty. One of the things that often puts me off about so many fat acceptance blogs is that they sometimes present a very stoic, almost militaristic drive to present a perfect and perpetually confident picture of what it means to move throughout the world with a body that isn’t a size 2. I’ve found that there is very little room for insecurity in the FA movement; there’s little room to admit that we’ve just had a bad day and having a body that doesn’t fit the problematic “norm” can be a struggle. But insecurity is part of the human condition, no matter what our bodies look like. I totally relate to the gym towel conundrum. Somedays, I just hate having to wear multiple sports bras when I go for a run. Hate it. Perhaps I can rage at nike, perhaps I can rage at the fact that generations of Irish farm-girl genes are working against me, but sometimes I just want to be able to say “this sucks, and running would be much easier if I had Kara Goucher’s body” and then move on with my day. I applaud Cece for having the courage to talk about complicated issues with a sense of humor.
Hmm…I don’t think Justina or I were being negative at all. The Fat Acceptance movement isn’t just about accepting fat bodies, it’s about every single body being accepted. It’s about never feeling like it’s your right to police other people’s bodies. It’s about resisting the socially constructed, culturally dependent North American beauty standards and not feeling like you’re worth less as a human because you don’t look like the majority of women who are presented to us in the media.
And when it comes down to it, even light-hearted joking about not “fitting” into a towel contributes to the discourse surrounding fatness that permeates our culture. Of course there’s insecurity within the FA movement – find me ANY woman on this Earth, fat, thin, athletic, whatever, who is completely and totally confident…a hard task, indeed! FA is less about being mega no-room-for-insecurity confident, and more about just being aware that there’s nothing wrong with you and you should never let anyone convince you otherwise. And it is also, as I said before, about realizing you have no right to judge and draw conclusions about other people based on their body composition.
The only way we can move forward from the oppressive beauty standards Western society has constructed is to take the first step and little by little change our own lives and ways of thinking so that perhaps we can influence others. Not only do I take every chance I have to learn more about how I fit into the FA movement, but I also eventually talk to everyone I meet about fatness and body acceptance – it can empower anyone! 🙂 Lastly, I hope to one day play a pivotal role in developing curriculum within the yet-to-be-formally-created Fat Studies realm of academia. It’s my goal in life to ensure that as many women and men as possible are informed about why they need not get down on themselves for having love handles, or un-perky boobs, or “muffin top,” and any other physical thing with which people struggle.
I better get to work! haha
CeCe I do love your blog. Please, after all of THIS ^^ do realize that many of your posts make me laugh, think, and generally love that I’m fat.
I think it is just a fun post and that’s just how it should be taken.
It’s nice to have a laugh at ourselves sometimes.
Life is a journey better taken with a smile on our faces.
Crystal,
At its core, I really agree with many of the principles the FA movement stands for — I just disagree with many of the tactics it uses to carry out its message. Commenting negatively on someone’s personal blog that they shouldn’t think one thing about their body or that they shouldn’t have certain desires or wishes for their body is just as much a form of body-policing as Calvin Klein telling me I need to whittle down my frame for this season’s fashion, or Sara Rue telling me that I need to shed before I wed.
What would Cece need to do in order to alter this post so it fits properly into the FA discourse? Say “eff-this, I don’t need a towel, Internet, everything is fine here!” Should she do that even if it’s not how she honestly feels? It seems like the FA movement is constantly expecting women to edit how they really think, how they really and truly experience body discrimination; most utopias are built on fantasies and I would prefer a pro-body movement that allows women to strive to love their bodies without having to constantly beat up themselves if they have a bad day, or if they have a “if I were skinny” moment. In the words of the immortal Kanye West, “we’re all self-conscious, I’m just the first to admit it.”
I’m with CeCe on this one. Hotel and gym towels annoy me to no end not only because they’re hideously small, but SCRATCHY! I love the hotel bathrobes though and wish they’d start making their towels in the same terry cloth.
CeCe, I’m with you. I’d love to fit into, under, whatever a gym/hotel towel, just as long as it’s not scratchy. And in the meantime, I make do with wrapping myself up in Ralph Lauren’s Addison Bath Towels, which are 3′ x 6′. 🙂
Clara,
Okay, I concede, asking CeCe not to think of her body that way IS a way of policing her thoughts about her body. But I must say I’d rather be told to be okay with myself than told I should try to change my body to fit something else.
“It seems like the FA movement is constantly expecting women to edit how they really think, how they really and truly experience body discrimination;”
The response I’d like to make to this is that we need to recognize WHY we think the things we do, and WHY we experience body discrimination. If we weren’t constantly being told through the media that being fat is bad, and being skinny is good; if we saw the same number of stores carrying plus size clothing as do “normal” sizes; if we saw positive images of fatness in magazines, on television, and online…we wouldn’t “really think” bad things about ourselves, and we very likely wouldn’t experience body discrimination. If the media was inclusive of and positively portrayed all body types, races and sexualities, we might live in a less screwed up society.
Can you agree with any of that?
I always used to fantasize about my skinny life. I still do, kind of… but as for objects, yeah, I couldn’t wait to be “normal” so I could wear short shorts and be light enough to climb onto a floatie. Now that I’m actually there… well, short shorts still make me feel uncomfortable and I just don’t have the natural ability to pull my butt onto a floatie.
And all along I was blaming it on my fat 🙁
As for the body size acceptance issue, I do agree that beating down the fat can have negative consequences but I also think that since this is a personal blog, Cece should be able to express her feelings about the matter.
I was never too concerned about the anti-fat mentality in our society because I was always trying to lose the weight. It’s only when I lost it and realized how unfairly I’d been treated that I became extremely angry about it. At the same time, though, as human beings, we’ll always want things that we can’t have, whether that’s due to popular media or our own goals, and it’s important not to censor these things because it makes you feel as if you’re going through it alone. Cece expressing this in the post made me feel like I should support her. What’s important is that you guys came up and told her that she shouldn’t feel the need to fit into the towels (which is right). If she never shared these feelings, you never would have said anything about how we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking we should shrink our bodies to fit towels. All of us would be sitting there in our gyms being depressed about towels but instead, we can all go to the service counters and demand bigger towels.
I think that sort of discussion is what you need. When you see people being insecure about their weight, instead of telling them that they’re undermining the movement, point out the holes in their insecurities and encourage them to make positive changes in their lives and the lives of others by being proactive.
Keep doing what you’re doing, Cece. Even if your post was tongue-in-cheek, I think we all got a lot of it.
Hello!
If it makes you feel better I knew where you are coming from! your post made me smile! and don’t really think you deserve all the negativity you got for trying to put a bit of humour out there. It made me laugh. And to be honest the FA movement, you should be accepting of other people’s personal opinion and blog if you would like others to take your wishes and thoughts seriously and with courtesy!
I can’t believe the negative comments on this post! Cece is human and
we all have insecurities and we all long for silly little things we wish we could do.
Ladies,
It’s not negativity. It’s really the exact opposite! Please, do some research with respect to the topics some of us have brought up – I wouldn’t be reading this blog if I didn’t love it. And I might argue that I, too, am human, and the Internet is a vast space for leaving opinions on things that really matter to me. Letting women know they shouldn’t get down on themselves matters to me…and doesn’t seem all that negative.
I laughed while reading this article, I thought it was soooooooooooooo true. I have a heel fetish, but I experience exteme pain when I wear anything higher 2 inchs. Believe me, I have cried over the fact that I can not rock my 4.5 inch heels I bhought at Steve Madden or Bakers. I get jealous when I the skinny or think girls walking down the street with their sexy heels on. Heels lift the buttocks and help give you a great shape. I am stuck in the world of kitten heels, sandals, and flats. It can be depressing when I can’t wear my skinny jeans with a pair of sexy freakum heels. I can fit into a regular towel, but it’s still kinda tight. I now wear a very cute pink and brown rob when I get out of the shower. I bhought it at Lane Bryant. I was thin during my college years(a size 10 isn’t thin to all people, but was to me)I will say right now that I may have been healthier back then, but I wasn’t happy. I am now larger and happier. I own my own business and I’m steadly focusing on my dreams. Who cares if the towel can’t fit(It will someday). Girl, be proud that you have so much going on in your life. I love your blog, and I soooooooo feel you on so many subjects! express yourself!
I think it is nice to dream. I was 195lbs as a teenager.I thought I would never be skninny. I am currently 130lbs, and I realized something:pretty much everyone is hung up on their weight. Whether they are 95lbs or 295lbs. Skinny girls never really feel skinny, and I know I don’t. I am learning to accept my body now, with all its rolls, lumps, and stretch marks. At least I had nice boobs and booty when I was heavier….
wow! What a article about a girl’s thinking,dream and some experience about towel. That’s really funny,,,This sentence is so funny .”I tried wrapping myself in a towel once and I think I covered one boob with it.” Thanks for telling us frankly and honestly.. I like your approach..But it’s your thinking, not all the girl thinks like this way…i think rather girls like to wear athletic towels sometimes to show up their body and to attract boys into their beauty…
wow! What a article about a girl’s thinking,dream and some experience about towel. That’s really funny,,,This sentence is so funny .”I tried wrapping myself in a towel once and I think I covered one boob with it.” Thanks for telling us frankly and honestly.. I like your approach..But it’s your thinking, not all the girl thinks like this way…i think rather girls like to wear athletic towels sometimes to show up their body and to attract boys into their beauty…
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