What lph said. I could've written a lot of that, except not nearly so eloquently! (And except for the fact that I loved my muscles when I was 18, too.)

I would expand a little by saying that there's a huge difference between "looks don't matter" vs. "the type of looks that matter to me are maybe a little different from what I perceive as mattering to the mainstream media." An enormous difference.

Like a lot of you, maybe most women, much of my self-image comes from cruel, ugly things my parents and peers told me when I was a pre-adolescent. So in that way, you could say that looks don't define my self image - I feel just as fat at 122 lbs as I did at 150.

I never learned to put on makeup, and there are times (pretty infrequent) when I feel "naked" without it, but in general I don't miss it. I'm not enormously concerned about my hair, and I'm not terribly motivated to cover my grey; but six months of stupendously awful haircuts (two winters in a row) really added up to make me feel unattractive.

When I look at my chest in the mirror, I don't care that I don't see large firm b00bs. But I do care that I can make my pecs dance. The scars on my legs, well, I'd be happier not to have them, but if I catch a glimpse of defined muscles in the mirror when I'm putting on pantyhose, that does give me an ego boost. I'm okay with my cyclist's tan (white shoulders, white upper thighs, raccoon eyes), but I do feel pasty and pudgy when I have no tan at all (and I will cop to putting sunblock on my nose in a pretty futile attempt to keep it close to the same color as my cheeks at least ). I'm not shy about walking into stores in my cycling shorts. But I'd change before I went to the opera.


I read something a few years back that I just now remembered and I may not be describing this exactly right, but I know I have the gist of it. Some researchers put male and female subjects through exercise programs. All of the participants lost weight and got stronger. But if the women's self-image improved, they were more likely to say it was because they were stronger and more muscular; if the men's self-image improved, they were more likely to say it was because they'd lost weight. The researchers interpreted this as indicating that the non-stereotypical values mattered more to each gender; but I thought it was something else.

For me, and for most women, my self-image about my weight is immutable. I know in my heart that I am fat (and yah, I know, I'm sure years of therapy could help me with that, but honestly I have more important things to deal with in therapy ). No amount of weight loss will make me feel not-fat. Being strong and muscular, on the other hand - because it's something I received no messages about as a child - I can see the changes in my body honestly, without all the filters and "tapes." I can own the results of the work I've done and be happy about it. My guess is that it's the same for men - their idea of whether they're strong or weak is instilled as a value judgment in childhood and difficult to change, whereas they can see themselves more objectively as fat or thin.