Tags
Before we start I have to make a declaration of interest here: I’m a heterosexual man.
This is relevant because it explains why not only had I not even heard of the so-called ‘thigh gap’ before I read about it in an article today but it also explains why I have great difficulty understanding what the fuss is all about now that I have heard of it.
For all those other people like me who haven’t got the faintest idea what I’m going on about when I say ‘thigh gap‘ – apparently for some reason it’s not OK these days for women’s thighs to touch each other.
This absolute nonsense is obviously an invention of the fashion industry – an industry run mainly by gay men and heterosexual women, who perhaps because they prefer men’s shapes don’t seem to have the faintest idea about what actually constitutes attractive physical attributes in a woman.
As an illustration of this, I was greatly confused by a video I saw recently about how a model is photo-shopped as I actually preferred the ‘before’ picture much, much more than the final photo-shopped finished picture.
Surely women are meant to have some curves? They’re meant to have rounded thighs, stomachs, bottoms. Women are meant be like that because that’s how they were made. And I’m quite sure most heterosexual men would agree with me when I say that’s exactly what we find attractive and like about women’s shapes.
I can’t speak for lesbians but I suspect many of them would agree with me about that too.
Perhaps it’s about time the fashion industry started listening to heterosexual men more. And lesbians too.
.
Don’t agree with me? Please feel free to comment. You don’t need to register and I’m extremely minimal with the moderating.
.
If you click on any of these buttons below, you can share this with other people. Thanks.
Pride's Purge 
Just think if the fashion industry did listen, pay attention and act on it…
Young folk wouldn’t have pressure to impersonate stick insects.
I realise anorexia etc have many causes, but the rag trade has a helluva lot of troubled folk to answer for.
LikeLike
And bisexuals, too. Us bisexual people want an opinion on this. (Personally, I don’t find thigh gaps sexy – I find them a bit weird.)
Seriously, sexuality politics aside, this thigh gap thing really upsets me.
As a young woman, I know from personal experience how expecting all women to conform to one body type damages women physically and psychologically and can kill them.
This thigh gap BS is just one more thing to make women feel inferior – I have already seen enough teens posting about “waaaaaa why can’t I have a thigh gap I’ll be ugly and no boy will want me ever so I’ll starve myself” (which is wrong on so many levels).
The best/worst part of it is that unless you’re naturally born with the fat distribution and slightly splayed pelvis needed for a thigh gap, you can’t get one. This is because the main thing that causes the thighs to be bigger isn’t fat, it’s muscle, particularly the adductor muscles. Literally the only way to get rid of these muscles is catabolysis – the last stage of malnutrition. This is where the muscles are broken down for their nutrients; to make this picture less abstract, your body literally eats itself to survive.
So yeah, holding this up as a beauty ideal is several different kinds of fucked. My thighs touch. Does this mean I’m a terrible human being? No, it’s a combination of genetics and the fact that my thighs are bulked out from doing a lot of cardio.
While I do believe this is an invention of the fashion industry, I don’t think it’s anything to do with sexuality. The justification the fashion industry uses for it is that using skinny women to model clothes gives you a better idea of how the fabric will hang. This makes no sense to me because if you’re designing for cis women, who generally have a curvy sort-of-hourglass figure, it would make more sense to use curvy women to model those clothes…but eh, whatever. I pay no attention to fashion and wear what I like.
What I would really like to see is a fashion industry that caters to and represents all women, rather than holding up one specific body type – a body type that for many women is impossible to achieve – as the ultimate standard of beauty and worth.
LikeLike
Whatever the reason, if there is one, for the Guardian ramping up this non-issue, I have to say that I, personally, really couldn’t care less about the “thigh gap”, and I suspect I’m on pretty safe ground saying that most guys (a) haven’t heard of it, and (b), really couldn’t care less either if they have (or now they have).
Let’s just treat this article with the contempt it deserves as nothing more than click-bait and a Sunday space-filler.
LikeLike
Eh, tbh, my inclination is that any argument that is rooted in what other people find attractive – and particularly what straight dudes find attractive – can fuck right off. And particularlyparticularly ones which then imply specific other shapes aren’t okay: while I don’t think implying that one has to be “curvy” or have no thigh gap or whatever is equivalent to the opposite (which is massively dominant and tied to all sorts of other fuckery, including stuff around race and class), and even though intent counts for something, it still functions as a form of body policing.
Maybe my relationship to my body is about what *I* think about it. Maybe it’s fucked up, but not to do with whether people find me attractive or not. Maybe I’m asexual&aromantic or for other reasons – of which there are plenty in a society in which gendered violence is so interconnected with sexuality – do not straightforwardly want people to find me attractive. Maybe I want my existence to say something else entirely.
This kinda line of thinking is, for example, something I see deployed plenty against people with eating disorders – “but men *like* curves!” – and is generally both patronising and clueless as fuck. And tbh, coming from straight dudes, I also find it a bit… creepy and entitled?
LikeLike
The fashion industry should listen to what WOMEN want. Orientation is irrelevant. So is the opinion of men, of all orientations, with respect to women’s fashion.
LikeLike
Tom, i get where you are coming from.
The rarified atmosphere of fashion, media and selling to the human animal tendency to follow a biological imperative, too mate and procreation, is layered in cultural significance.
I know where I stand in the “attractive scale”, same as most people do.
Weather we see ourselves as a 4/10 or a polished 8/10 in the office, wine bar or nightclub cattle market, how we calibrate and perceive our mating potential may well be influenced by Hello magazine or the university of personal growth and self awareness (or denial).
As Oscar Wilde said of fashion, a thing so grotesque it must change its appearance every season to avoid offending people.
I’m more of a Nigella Lawson than women’s marathon runner kind of guy. But i don’t suppose I’m on Nigella’s “to do list” either.
What does trouble me far more, is the judgement placed upon a woman’s appearance? I see woman as people first. Weather i find a woman attractive or not, i choose to keep on the right side of discretion, for fear of rejection or embarrassment. So i figure getting to know a person as a personality is more important. Judging someone by appearances isn’t going to get you off to a good start?
The media & fashion industry, throw in music too, makes it ok to have this one way judgment thing going on?
That’s a harsh environment for anyone to grow up in, let alone women, judged against the airbrushed clothes horses in the media tapestry.
I love women all of them, particularly those with a sense of humour who like me too.
So lets keep it real, if a man judges a woman by the daylight between her thighs, he’s equally guilty of of having too much air between his ears….
As for gay men and fashion? I present to you, Gok Wan, a gay man who knows what real woman look like, but more importantly, how women feel. He gets this through listening and empathy.
Not a lot of call for that in the “rag trade” I’m afraid……
LikeLike
Hi – please could you write for us at http://www.dorseteye.com – we are a citizen reporting online magazine – you can contact us at dorseteye@btinternet.com Thanks 🙂
LikeLike
Thank you Tom….lots of sense here. Women are being forced by fashion to consider their bodies unattractive because they are not shaped like mens but surely that’s the plan….we are soup posed to be different and vive la difference! As a rounded woman I am chuffed to bits to read your vies and agree!
LikeLike
Angelica….far be it for me t understand men, but i tend t believe Tom may have merely stated his preference. I don’t believe he intended patronising or being condescending to anyone.
My understanding of his post….whatever your gender, whatever your sexual persuasion, LOVE your OWN body, respect yourself first-and respect others’ bodies, appearance and opinions….without allowing them to dictate what you should look like. Especially the fashion trade. It’s time they accepted the fact that a human being cannot emulate a fashion drawing. Ever.
LikeLike
I would have thought that simple knowledge of evolution was all that was needed here. It is obvious that the shapes of women that are not attractive will no longer occur on account of them not having offspring. What continues to exist is the kind of men that women prefer and vice versa.
LikeLike
I’m not sure many people who are being patronising intend to be. But yeah – Tom stated his preference, but in the context of the idea that his preference should be dictates what the fashion industry does, what women should think about their bodies, and what we should be. And yeah, men assuming that their preferences should be the overarching thing that determines how we should relate to our own bodies feels entitled, and actually really creeps me out.
And obvs the fashion industry is totally fucked, but that’s not because it’s insufficiently listening to men’s libidos.
LikeLike
I was VERY young when the “thigh gap” was mentioned to me. We are talking 30 years ago! Young naive female – to this day it still sticks in my head. Worked hard at the gym to achieve the “thigh gap”! As life took its toll I turned to amphetamines – 12 years on had a heart attack aged 42. Fuck the “thigh gap”
LikeLike
Angelica,
calling men “creepy” for stating an argument that you do not like on an emotional level is a cliché and a non-argument. Soon enough that word will have no weight nor merit.
Actually, you are the one who came across as “creepy” with your name-calling and arrogant ignorance of not analysing how much of what your “I” likes is socially conditioned. News flash: ignorance is really creepy. Courage to discuss, delightful.
Tom was merely doing us the courtesy of expecting the audience to be educated enough not to have such an emotional approach. That is the only thing he did wrong.
What is your argument again? From where I stand, goodness, where over a century of cultural analysis and scientific study of fashion bias stand is what you like is based on what advertising and the fashion industry tells you what you should wear for “drum-roll please” your potential partners find you attractive and trustworthy.
Why don’t you educate yourself and read upon the, now, age-old theoretical works of Barthes or the newest scientific research and popular science? What is stopping you?
LikeLike
… I started writing a reply to this that relied on science, hard argument and so forth. And then I looked over yr shite about ppl being “educated enough not to have such an emotional approach” and realised a much better response is: fuck off, you misogynist prick.
LikeLike
Don’t you feel a bit odd for stating that while orientation is irrelevant both sex and gender are defining on who is allowed to have an opinion? So the logical conclusion is that women should not speak of men’s fashion in return?
Don’t you feel a bit odd that while homosexual men from Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford to the creators of “Sex and the City” have defined women’s fashion and opinions of style for decades stating that “the opinion of men, of all orientations” is “irrelevant” to “women’s fashion”? Why make purposefully unreal statements like that?
Quite frankly, I find your attitude patronising towards women. For in your opinion women are small children playing with their clothes like dolls, just for the fun of it, while really, they are using clothes and style to communicate both attraction and trust.
There’s been a century of literary consideration from the likes of Emile Zola, cultural analysis from the likes of Roland Barthes and actual scientific research and testing in terms of preferences of fashion and the naive pseudo-argument of “I wear it because I like it” is the first one to be thrown out in any serious treatment of fashion.
Why this fake naivety? Why make anyone explain to you what you already know but can not care to admit? Why waste everyone’s time posturing like a 5 year old over trivialities?
LikeLike
Even Gok is squeezing his overweight models into corsets to make them look thinner and more appealing.
LikeLike
Agree with you on the ‘Photoshopping’ aspect. That woman in the photoshoot video ended up lookling more like a Barbie doll than a person. That’s OK if it’s supposed to be a caricature, not so OK if it’s supposed to be an actual person. The good news is that there has been some movement in that area, if only because a lot more people are spotting when it goes comically wrong. Google ‘photoshop disasters’ and see for yourself.
Regarding body shape, I used to be in the ‘real women have curves’ camp, until it was pointed out to me by female friends that women don’t all naturally come into the world in one shape. Some are naturally thin, some very rounded, most somewhere in-between. Same for men. There’s no more to be gained by scolding those who are skinny than there from shaming those who are at the other end. Sadly, it’s not just the fashion industry that persists in viewing a select few body shapes as ‘ideal’ and pressuring people to change themselves – this is an issue for society at large. Things are starting to improve, albeit slowly, and it make take another generation or two before the old habits finally go away.
LikeLike
While it’s perfectly ok to say that you find the curved and “feminine” female more appealing, you are nearly doing the same thing as those fashion and popular culture idea-makers when you say that women “should” look a certain way.
LikeLike