And we have reconnection

With my seemingly increasing waist-line, I have been finding solace solely with my students:

Student 1: "Oooh, Ms. Gauthier, you be getting big."
Me: "Um, is that a good thing or a bad thing?"
Student 1: "It's a good thing. You're too skinny!"
Student 2: "Yeah, you look good."

I know I haven't posted in a while, and this may seem like a strange post to reconnect, but I've been rolling this around in my head all day. I was wondering why my students don't think my moderatly skinny look is good, or mores-, why a more round shape is better.

I have two theories:

1) It's a cultural thing. Black women may just be more naturally curvy, therefore it's a more attractive feature to have a belly. See, Venus of Willendorf:


She was a symbol of fertility and beauty to her culture because that's just what women looked like.

It makes sense. Big or small, my students seem to overwhelmingly like who they are, and loudly profess they would not change an inch of their body for anyone (re-asserting my belief that Read 180 was not designed for my demographic; we just did a unit on peer pressure, and one of the articles was about self-esteem and how a lot of girls go on extreme diets because they don't like how they look. It went RIGHT OVER their heads. None of them could believe anyone would actually do that).

OR

2) This body type is not necessarily inherent to the culture, but attraction to this body type has grown out of the recent diet of low-income families. I see what my students eat - it's no wonder why they think my naturally skinny physique is something to be gawked at. If a whole group of people ate what they ate (they actually remarked this morning, in a dicussion on healthy foods to eat before the Leap test, that a snickers bar was a high-protein food) all the women would be curvey with a carb/sugar/fat-induced belly. Not saying it's their fault in any way, no one has taught them (or their parents, probably) what is healthy. Heck no one has really taught children, low-income or high-income what a healthy meal looks like. However, a high-income community may be over-eating and poorly eating, they still ashere to the notion that skinny is beautiful. No exceptions. Whereas my students love and accept their bodies the way they are, fat or naturally skinny. And that leads me to the question: which is better - adhereance to some false idea that supermodel skinny is the only "right" way to be, or loving your body, unhealthy or not? Both are unhealthy, in their own ways.

Alas, I have digressed from my point, and I apologize. However, I have been reading Octavio Paz's "Labryinth of Solitude." Pure philosophy. I can't help this.