Not all young women can be stick thin like fashion models. But this doesn't mean that they can't be beautiful.
This is a realization that alternative fashion and lolita lifestyle blogger Aly Buttons (aka Miss Lumpy) happily arrived at following a period during which, like many girls, she hated and starved her body in an attempt to conform to an ideal shape.
The post in which she writes about this - about how her self-loathing gave way to self-acceptance - is open and honest, even if it's not entirely convincing (one suspects, for example, that she'd still like to drop a dress size if possible) and even if there are some things that one might find troubling as a feminist (her obvious need for male validation and boyfriend approval).
Still, I don't want to be harsh or judgemental here; particularly with reference to this latter point. Perhaps we all need to see ourselves reflected in the adoring eyes of a lover and not just in our bedroom mirrors or as selfies on the screens of our i-Phones before we can truly feel beautiful and desirable.
Maybe the fact that we're never absolutely self-contained or completely independent - that we need one another - is what makes us human. And this includes needing others to compliment us on our looks (our faces, our hair, our smiles, our make-up, our bodies, our clothes, our shoes, etc).
And so, Miss Lumpy, let me reassure you that there is no form of beauty more poignant than that which you model so wonderfully. The complex sweetness of your features - including the lily-white complexion and well-defined contours of your mouth - eclipse the most perfectly assembled of conventional faces. You have transformed your life into a work of art and a miracle of heroic survival.
Yours is a beauty born of resistance to "so many physical and mental corsets, so many constraints, crushing denials, absurd restrictions, dogmas, heartbreaks, such sadism and asphyxiation, such conspiracies of silence and humiliation", that it signals a daring revolt into style. And for this, I admire you hugely - lumps and all.
Note: quotation from Amélie Nothomb, Fear and Trembling, trans. Adriana Hunter (Faber and Faber, 2004), p. 66.
