While there’s no other person in the world exactly like you, I have spent much of my career talking to teens and women who, perhaps like you, are dissatisfied with the size and shape of their bodies. For some, it’s about being curvy or “thick,” for others it’s about having what they feel is the wrong-sized bust, or hips, or thighs…or nose, or eyebrows, or lips, or….anything. I have had conversations with conventionally beautiful women who had stunning blue eyes, but so wished they could’ve been born with green eyes; and girls with beautiful curly hair, who would have given nearly anything to have been born with straight hair. As females, it seems there’s no limit to the number of things that we can hate on about ourselves.

The younger me used to think that this was all caused by men and the “patriarchy” controlling women through propagating unattainable beauty ideals….. and I’m not saying that there isn’t some (or a lot) of truth to this. The younger me wrote papers about this in school and spent a lot of time reading, researching, and thinking about it. In graduate school for clinical psychology, I was a women’s studies minor, and my doctoral dissertation was on eating disorders, so I thought a lot about women and body image.

But like a lot of ideas that we hold when we are newly minted professionals, mine started to change with the passage of time and with more clinical and life experience. As I listened to teen girls and women and the things that they were concerned about, I started to realize that the fixation that so many females have about their bodies is rooted not just in a desire to impress and compete for mates (usually male within the heteronormative framework I’m writing from here), but also in a desire to socially compete with other females, not just for male attention, but for status in the female pecking order. People are primates; just like apes, chimpanzees, and monkeys are primates, and primates live within hierarchical social networks. All of us know this intuitively. Remember the popular mean girls in school? That’s a social pecking order, or in social psychology terms, a social hierarchy.

What the behavioral research tells us is that women and girls can be ruthlessly competitive with one another. We know that females use a lot of interpersonal rather than physical aggression to try to maximize and keep their positions in the female social hierarchy. Part of the competitive process that I see in society and hear about in work is how often girls and women are using their physical appearance to compete with and dominate other women in the hierarchy. This can include everything from a relentless pursuit of thinness, to a hyper-focus on fashion, to cosmetic procedures such as lip fillers, lash extensions, and BBL’s. Women are often competing for the social attention of other women more fiercely than they’re competing for the attention of men. This is particularly apparent in young tween or teen girls who at 11, 12, 13, or 14 become focused on changing their bodies through weight loss in order to hold a position of higher social status in their peer groups. These girls are often oblivious to male attention and do not care about boys at all at that point in their development, but they want to have their bodies look a certain way to gain and maintain position in friendship groups with other girls.

So what do you do if you are that teen girl or woman who does not want to play this game? You don’t want to be in a social circle of competing frenemies, you don’t want to be constantly thinking about your weight and shape, and you want to be confident walking into a room at any number on the scale. If that sounds like you, then here are some ideas:

1. Choose your friends carefully and remember that it is better to have one or two really good friends than a lot of friends who are in competition with you. As a female, think about how your friends make you feel. When you are around them, do you feel insecure? Do they take subtle jabs at you or make you the butt of jokes? Do they draw you in sometimes and exclude you at others? A good friend should root for your success and comfort you in times of trouble. If it feels like there is unspoken competition and quiet put-downs, trust your intuition. If your peer group is making you insecure about your body, your fashion, your make-up, etc., it probably means something about the quality of those friendships.
2. Next, understand that men and teen boys find a broad range of physical characteristics attractive. Attraction is very individual, and there is definitely not a one-size-fits all! Men’s interests and attractions do not follow the latest trends in fashion or body image. Generally speaking, men do not care if you have cut abs and a huge butt, lip filler, and big lash extensions. Men are evolutionarily wired at a brain level to look for women who are healthy and capable of reproducing. Research shows that modern-day Western world men prefer women of an average body size. This means women with curves, with tummies, with cellulite. What the research also shows is that, despite the fashion runway world, the majority of men do not prefer an extremely thin, underweight woman.
3. Whatever your features, if you lead with confidence and good interpersonal skills, you will find dating partners who are into your look. Are you big busted? There will be partners who are into you. More of an A-cup kind of gal? There are many men who are drawn toward a small bust line. Tall? Petite? Redhead? Raven-haired? Glasses with freckles? Yes, yes, and yes! If we ever had any doubt that human beings find a wide range of features sexually alluring, all we need to do is sign onto the Internet to understand that the world is a very diverse place in terms of attractions. When real men are interviewed by researchers, it becomes clear that they have a wide range of attractions and preferences, and that they are not all pursuing a highly specific “type.”

Sooo….

Dear Curvy Girl,

Wear your curves with pride. A little wiggle and jiggle is alluring to a lot of people. You do not need bigger more defined quads, a smaller waist, more pouty lips, or a different jean size to get traction in the world of friendships and dating. Embrace who you are. Wear clothes that make you feel confident. Make direct eye contact with people, and let your smile light up a room. If you’re feeling insecure in a group, practice becoming a good listener and ask questions of other people to get them talking. Do not let yourself be put down by women who claim to be your friends, or used by men who treat you with disrespect. If you don’t feel confident, pretend you do and act accordingly. Walk like you feel sexy and magical. Enjoy your life and your body. Apologize to no one. You’ve got this!