I’ve been living in southern California for about a year, and I find it striking how few real female bodies I see.
Real female bodies showing their flaws and their flesh.
My gym recently reopened and there are no naked bodies in the locker room, except mine.
During Covid lockdown I continued to go to one of the few gyms that remained open, a sort of speakeasy for the fitness-obsessed. The locker room was always busy, but I was still the only naked body ever found.
The beaches are adorned with the young and fit. That isn’t the whole population, so where is everyone else hiding?
My Instagram feed shows plenty, in all states of undress. And not a single one is real. Posed and professionally lit to hide wrinkles and cellulite. Edited to give unnatural curves.
And I think, no wonder women are hiding their real bodies, they don’t ever see that it’s okay to exist in them.
So much of it seems regional, I felt culture-shock when I first got here.
I had grown used to the Naked-Lady Day Spa of Seattle. Gym locker rooms where real women were comfortable in their skin and weren’t limited to getting dressed, still wet, behind the shower curtain of the gym. Annual nude bicycle rides and other expressions of liberal au naturale freedom.
Normal bodies at every beach, existing as though they are just as valuable because they are.
What happened in southern California?
Everywhere I look it’s too much plastic surgery or steroids, or both.
Originally written April 7, 2021
CE,
Pretty good question, I’m a bit older and the locker room question is a great one.
My perspective is filters, social media and press. All peer pressures to be perfect, get the most likes and followers.
Yet we all know what’s under the spandex, latex and Gortex.. wrinkly, cellulose, stretch marks, kid prints etc.
The current sub culture of NOT knowing how to love one’s self, truly embrace and know our bodies and take them for what they are. The significant lack of human one on one interaction backed up with so much social media has given oxygen to this thought that they can never be enough.
I’m speaking from a place of dating many younger women. (Late 20’s to mid 30’s) the self consciousnesses, the constant need for self validation and to my surprise covering up, hiding behind clothes is quite surprising.