So, like, since I’ve dropped ¾ of a size recently, can we talk about my ass?
Like every girl, I’ve struggled with my backside for a while. It’s just difficult to accommodate. Once a year, some magazine will promise to offer me the perfect pair of jeans for my body type. I consistently fall for it, only to find that no brand has yet to design a pair of jeans that will make my stumpy, short-legged, pear-shaped, flat-chested Asian body look like Angelina Jolie’s. But with the army of jeans designers out there, I’m still holding out hope, combing through the generic to the obscure in my search for that matchless pair of denim.
Too bad when I’m stripping off my jeans to climb onto something else, the options aren’t nearly as bountiful.
I know I’ve talked about this before but I’ve only just come around to the fact that women’s specific saddles, much like women’s specific bikes, are only available in different shades of ugly and ill-fitting. Being limited to choosing between four or five saddles while the boys get somewhere from twenty to fifty options is like being kicked when you’re already down. Having those four to five saddles come in shades of aqua and lavender with flowers festooned around them is like being spit on by a car full of teenaged kids just as your male friends drop you faster than an unpinned grenade.
And it’s not just the stinging disappointment of salt being rubbed into your wounds. It’s like the bike industry wanted this to be the most humiliating experience for anyone vain enough to care about the size of her ass. Because once you locate the eyesore that is the only available women’s race saddle from X brand, the tape measure has to come out and the guy – because it’s never a girl – wielding it has no idea why you’re visibly cringing and backing away.
That tape measure only got applied to the indents wearing into my Brooks, of course, but the comments that followed [“wow, yeah, that is wide,” and “really? You really want something over 150mm? That’s pretty big. You know that, right?”] were the auditory equivalent of jumping up and down, naked, in front of a full length mirror.
In case you were wondering, that image is far from pretty. And the smile I had bravely plastered onto my face as Mike suggested we look around for that perfect saddle had quickly melted into a strained grimace. My enthusiasm visibly reaching the level of depressed where I end up weighing how badly Two Buck Chuck, Gran Marnier, and sugar free Red Bulls might taste together, he did that thing that all guys – bless their ignorant, stubbornly naive, infuriatingly oblivious hearts – do. He gave me that irritating yet genuine look of cluelessness.
“What?”
“…Nothing,” was all I could manage as some rational part of me fought the vain diva within. And then, as the diva bitch-slapped the rational side, “…I wish I had a narrower ass…”
“Oh please, you know I don’t care, right?” came the response.
I sighed before sinking my face into my Americano. I didn’t know whether to feel disappointed or neutral; thankful that my ass was not a subject of discussion or chagrined at my Dude status. Feeling a tad self-conscious regardless, the search for a new saddle simmered away and the discussion moved to t-shirts and things that didn’t involve the globes attached to my lower back.
We rolled out a few minutes later, with me lining up with Mike just enough to keep my ass out of sight. Sure, he might not care, but I certainly do. And until I have something incredible worth showing off – either underneath me or attached to me – I’m totally okay with my line of vision being obscured by those with finer posteriors.
