are you staring at my feet?

everyone has different things they love and hate about themselves — and typically enough the inverse of what the outside world appreciates.

personally, one of my favorite features is my feet. beyond their blindness, i like my eyes when theyre not tired and bloodshot; with a good bra sometimes i can get behind my tits, forgiving their affection for gravity; and given a bit of expressed outside interest, i can forget my own knowledge of the cellulite that lies beneath and feel good enough about my ass. but the things that top my list are the fine bones of my wrists, the capability of my hands, and the perfection of my feet.

when i was fourteen there was a small inside joke about guys staring at my “feet” when i talked to them that derived from a striped hang-ten brand shirt i used to wear that had an embroidered set of footprints (the brand logo) that perched just on the peak of my left tit when i wore the shirt. (i wonder what ever happened to that one? shea, did you inherit it in one of the spring cleanings?). and that brand logo was a simple silohette of what an ideal foot print in the sand should look like – a wide curve from the arch and five dots for toes, each a little smaller and lower than the one before. most people don’t get this foot print – they dont have high enough arches to create the negative space, or perhaps a toe or two is a bit longer than the ones before, or all squished together instead of making a nice even print. but my feet are perfectly proportional, with high arches, and make this exact archtypical print when i walk on wet sand.

honestly, it wasnt until a friend once told me how much she hated her feet that it even occurred to me as something a person would think about. and on the whole i still dont really deem it worth worrying yourself over. this particular friend had lovely long thin feet that she hated, and perfect skin which i envy, so… there you have it.

but as i get older, and i notice from time to time other women’s feet and then look at my own, i find that i love my feet – for their natural perfection. not perfect because of their exact form, but rather for their unmodified, unmutilated form, and what that says about my priorities in life. you see, when i look down and see other women’s feet, in their stylish shoes, i see toes that no longer spread in a healthy frond to carry the weight of the body, but instead bones that no longer grow properly, that have been cramped and deformed by years of being crammed into uncomfortable shoes deemed stylish by society. and i find this sad. it’s one thing to dress up now and then, to put up with an uncomfortable dress and some fuck-me-pumps for a special night out, but the habitual mutilation of the body in the name of ‘fashion’?  it’s not really so  different than the old fashions of binding feet or chopping toes, corsets the size of a softball that we find so abhorent today.

and so i love my feet most because their healthy, natural shape is a testament to my long-term value of self over superfically imposed ideals, of my strength in the face of cultural pressure to conform and deform. like all intelligent women, i still struggle daily to remind myself that these beauty magazine ideals are bullshit, that i AM beautiful the way i AM, without needing to starve myself or buy a hundred and one different products, and though i still hate my skin, my lovehandles, my belly paunch, my thighs, and occaissionally my tits and ass, my feet are living proof that the battle can be won.

~ by velvetmonkeywrench on 13 October, 2007.