A couple of weekends ago, I was waiting on a sofa in a communal changing room, while my teenage daughter was trying on clothes, when the young woman who had been behind us in the queue for cubicles – I had noticed the yoga mat and hardback copy of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments sticking out of her fabric tote bag championing a charity for girls’ education – emerged barefoot in a short black dress. She stood sideways in front of the big mirror, wrinkled her nose at her reflection, sucked her tummy in hard and then, happier, smiled at me. “Just needs Spanx, right?” she said.
Correct answer to that, anyone? Because I was stumped. My first instinct was: of course you don’t need Spanx. You are a twentysomething peach, you are perfect exactly as you are and that’s enough of that nonsense. But then I thought: maybe it’s kind of great that you can talk openly about wearing whichever big, sturdy knickers work for you and not feel as if you have to pretend to be wearing lace lingerie all the time. Then I thought: hang on a minute. Why am I plotting this young woman on an imaginary feminism graph with “books read” on the X-axis and “knickers worn” on the Y-axis?
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