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Self love is defiance

I was once completely repulsed by cellulite. Those horrific bumps never appeared on the impeccably beautiful girls on WeHeartIt.Photographs of celebrities with cellulite only appeared next to body-shaming captions in People and YOU magazines.

Conditioned by society to believe in the Myth of Smooth Thighs, I spent way too much of my time in high school attempting to reduce the appearance of my leg dimples to no avail.

But on one fateful day in Grade 11, my feelings towards cellulite would forever change. After swimming in Phys Ed, we all filed into the girls’ cloakroom. While most of us changed out of our swimming costumes behind towels (because God forbid one girl see another girl’s nipple, or worse, cellulite), a friend of mine unwittingly defied social conventions.

Nonchalantly and unapologetically, she got changed out in the open. She was a swimmer. Her skin had that tanned hue that only appeared after spending dozens of afternoons in the pool. Her body was strong and, with the combination of muscle and unapologetic curves, unconventionally beautiful. She also had cellulite – the most beautiful cellulite I have ever seen.

In hindsight, I suppose there was nothing fancy about her cellulite as such. I think the beauty was that she didn’t care that we saw it. There was no shame, no embarrassment, no bashfulness. It was evident – at least to me at that time – that she loved herself almost by default. It was as if she had never paged through People magazine, or had never seen an advertisement for ‘cellulite-busting’ lotions.

Her beauty was in the fact that she was not conditioned to hate her body – or, more probably, that she withstood society’s shitty norms and loved it anyway. As the old cliché goes, confidence is attractive.

I think the beauty I saw that day prompted what Elaine Scarry calls a ‘pressure towards the distributional’. In On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry argues that seeing beauty in something – the example she uses is a vase – results in a person experiencing a feeling of care that is then extended to similar things – other vases – even if they are not as beautiful as the first. After seeing beautiful cellulite, I gradually began to see the beauty in other peoples’ cellulite, even though their cellulite was not on tanned, strong thighs or presented with as much confidence.

What’s more is that smooth thighs began to look more vanilla to me. There is something special about cellulite. To wear short shorts when you have a thigh gap and mannequin-firm legs is conventionally attractive; to wear short shorts when you have cellulite is a form of protest.

In an ideal world, self-love should be personal and not a societal statement. But we live in a time where women’s bodies are considered public property for us all to ogle and criticise. In a time where mass-media perpetuates impossible beauty standards, self-love is defiance.

Although it took a while for me to find beauty in my own pallid, wobbly thighs, I’ve begun to realise that I do like my cellulite, because when I look backwards in the mirror it looks like my buttcheeks are smiling.

I’m not yet ready to wear super-short shorts in public, but until then, thank you to the girls who do.

To the women with cellulite, or natural hair, to the women too pale for Cosmo and too dark for Bollywood, to unshaven legs, to frowns, to flabby stomachs and silver stretch marks, to Make-Up-less Mondays and Braless Wednesdays, to those who have courage where the rest of us have shame – thank you for existing.

Whether you intended it or not, your beauty is unconventional; your beauty is protest.

Follow Sian on Twitter and visit her blog.

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