curves

this week's musings

Apr 11, 2021

Like Khloe Kardashian, I too have had a picture of me in a bikini posted without my permission.

I was 18 years old and I was serving at a restaurant. I was one of the youngest servers there — most of the people that worked there were in their mid 20s, except for me and my friend Eliza, who were both freshly out of high school and stupid. The older guys liked us — eager, bright-eyed almost-children that were newly old enough to spend time with.

We got caught up with the two cutest servers — one was 24, one was 27. One day when the four of us all had off of work, they invited us to go sailing, an innocuous trip to the Boulder reservoir.

I wore a mint green bikini with a push-up bra built-in and low-rise straps that slung across my hip bones. Before we got on the water, someone suggested we take a photo, so we all posed together.

I can’t remember who put it on Facebook (it’s long since been deleted, or I might have just untagged myself). But it was there, and people saw me in my mint green bikini. A man I’d never met before, friends with one of the older servers, commented on the photo with a leering remark about my body.

I immediately felt uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be perceived like that.

Unlike a Kardashian, I couldn’t get lawyers involved. I simply watched the back and forth between the men in the comment section like a bettor at a baseball game — no power to change the outcome, but with everything to lose.

It isn’t lost on me that the Kardashians are a big chunk of what made bodies like mine even acceptable.

I was very young in the age of peak early 2000s models. I grew up ogling Gisele’s legs in magazines. That was what women were supposed to look like, right? It seems like anorexia was at its height when I was prepubescent — I remember seeing Mary-Kate Olsen wither away on the cover of People and reading Wintergirls under the covers. I never once saw anyone portrayed well in media that was above a size 2.

I’m not stupid. I know things changed when the Kardashians became a household name.

Soon enough, it was Kim’s ass breaking the Internet, and it wasn’t all Kim, but sometime in that time period it became okay to have curves — coveted, even. I still probably would have traded my soul for limbs like Miranda Kerr’s, but at least now I had concrete proof that women were allowed to look kind of like me. I didn’t like the Kardashians, but I still felt a strange sense of gratitude toward them — they shifted something in society.

Because they’re the Kardashians, they took it too far. Curves became slim-thick became BBLs became Instagram filters (or maybe they all just became more obvious). I unfollowed all of them a couple years ago, after I realized they were no longer recognizable.

But they were still causing a shift in society. I know people that got lip injections because Kylie did. Slowly but surely, people started downloading apps like Facetune and Perfect365. With an iPhone and basic editing skills, you too could be a Kardashian — you could stretch your hips with your thumbs, airbrush your blemishes with your pointer finger and cinch your waist with a pinch. Magic.

That became the norm. Now, it’s just part of being a woman. If I post a bikini photo on my own accord, I control the narrative. I’ve had app-savvy friends snatch my waist, draw shadows to make it seem like my abs are prominent, make my skin appear smooth and tanned. Of course I do — if everyone else is going to play the game, I would look insane if I benched myself.

Because of the Kardashian culture, we would all be upset if an unedited, unposed bikini photo was posted on Instagram.

Does Khloe realize that she’s what got us here?

Khloe wants to control her own narrative (something we all want). She doesn’t realize that not only does she control her own narrative, she and her sisters also have a hand in controlling every woman in America’s narrative. We are where we are — edited bikini photos, Instagram influencers, fitspo — in large part because of the shadow they cast on us.

Khloe “works hard for her body.” She also heavily edits her body and expects us to believe that she just looks like that, transformed within ten years from an average-looking, curvy woman to a real-life Barbie doll.

I find it hard to have sympathy for Khloe when a photo she doesn’t like gets posted online, when we’ve all shaped our lives around making photos look like hers. The damage she’s caused is irreparable, and she burns even more bridges by causing a public scene about which photos of her see the light of day.

Some of us didn’t grow up in the public eye but still find our bodies scrutinized, X-rayed from clavicle to kneecap by strangers both on the Internet and in person every day. Even with the filters, we’ve wished we could look more like a Kardashian (some people have probably even lost their lives over it) but it was all just smoke and mirrors.