Someone to blame

[mrissa]

I've seen lots of people link to this entry, the one about the Size 6 Harem. It frustrates me immensely, because the person who reposted it says in a comment that she believes the story literally, that the writer went to a large department store and was told they didn't sell skirts as large as a 14 or a 16 and focused 4s and 6s. And I call bullshit. Show me the "large American department store" that doesn't stock skirts in 14s or 16s, and I will show you the empty building with the tumbleweed blowing through it. Every large American department store I've ever seen has had a "plus sizes" section that went larger than a 16 -- and no, I'm not claiming that the larger sizes are stocked well or even adequately, but I am claiming that it's absolutely ridiculous to claim they're not there at all, if you're talking about a 14 or a 16 as a "larger size." (Which it isn't: I forget whether the average American woman wears a 12 or a 14, but it's one of the two. I think it's high time to recenter the norm and add on a "small women's department" in addition to the "large women's department," because they're calling things large that are average. But they're stocking at least some of them, is the point, and this essay claims they just aren't.)

Show me the "large American department store" that stocks mostly 4s and 6s, and I will get my size-4 ass over there right now. I will not stop to shower and change out of my pajamas and comb my hair. I will only put shoes on because it's legally required. If they're focused on 4s and 6s, maybe there will be something in there that fits me. Maybe if they vanity-size the 4s into what should really be 6s or 8s, there's some chance they'll carry a 2 that'll fit me -- and a 2, not a 1, not a straight-line teenager-shaped garment.

Generally they don't. Those claims in that essay were just not true, and I don't think they were harmlessly untrue, either.

Most women I know have a hard time buying clothing, because women's clothes are supposed to be more fitted than men's. I'm pretty sure many, maybe most, of us have thought, "It can't be like this for everybody." Actually, it can. When you take a really wide range of body shapes and sizes and try to standardize them into a simple numerical system, it is possible for the average to work well for no one. We shouldn't mistake the problem of averaging across a sample that isn't bell-curve shaped on more than one axis for the problem of thinking everybody ought to be a certain size. We have both problems, but not manifested as they're described in the linked essay.

People who listen to this kind of essay uncritically end up thinking that the system is skewed in favor of me and people like me. I'm average height, I'm on the thin side, I'm fairly curvy. It must be all my fault. Clothes must be made for me. Guess what? They're not. They just plain aren't. Some designs are ideal for skinny girls with boobs. They're flattering. They're pretty. And they're usually actually constructed for stocky girls with significantly less chest. Many of the styles that most flatter a thin, curvy figure are cut to give the illusion of that figure rather than actually fitting on it. Some of my women friends have claimed that I "can wear anything [I] want and it'll all look good on [me]." That's very sweet, but also very wrong. A wrap dress cut for my body type would indeed probably look fine, but a wrap dress intended to make someone else's body type look like mine is going to look ridiculous on me, and that's mostly what the stores sell, because they believe they'll be able to sell more of them. They may be right; they're in this business and I'm not. But it's destructive to blame each other for clothing problems, and it's destructive to assume the system is geared to cater to someone it's utterly failing.

Once in high school, I was having a particularly bad day, even by high school standards, and my locker jammed, and I kicked it and shouted, "I HATE THIS PLACE!" And the stoner guy with the locker next to me, the kid in the tatty metal band T-shirts who smelled as though he hadn't gone as many as 5 minutes without a joint in the last 4 years, blinked at me in shock. "You hate this place?" he said. "I hate this damn place so much!" I said.

He pried the locker open for me, shaking his head. "Even the brains hate it here. Hey!" And he called this amazing situation to the attention of a passing friend. "Hey, guess what? Even the brains hate it here." His friend stared at me incredulously. I reaffirmed my feelings about Ralston High School: "I can't stand it. Why do you think I'm trying so hard to get out of here early?" They hadn't thought about it that way. And from then on, we weren't friends exactly, but we were certainly friendly. We were fellow sufferers. We talked from time to time. He had thought that the system that was making him miserable was designed for my benefit and my enjoyment. He had thought that the whole institution was about making things good for "the brains." Once he figured out that it wasn't actually about that at all, I was no longer the enemy. And we actually were people to each other.

That's what I want here. I want to recognize that yes, being smart in high school made some things much easier for me, and yes, being thin makes some things easier for me, too. I just don't want there to be mistakes about what those things are. Some people try to go the other way and pity the skinny girls: "Oh, you poor dear, you must starve yourself for society's notions of beauty." No. I have a fairly small appetite, I get moderate exercise, I got decent genes, and for heaven's sake, I'm 26. I haven't had a kid. I haven't hit any of the major metabolic bumps people's bodies throw at them. I am not a starving waif under the thumb of the patriarchy, and I'm not an arrogant entitlement-mentality shopper, buying from an abundance of 4s and laughing at the lack of 14s. I have a hard time buying decent jeans. Just like most of the rest of you.

The essayist also blames men, which I think is destructive and untrue: other women are much stricter and snarkier about enforcing standards of appearance than men are. And the essayist doesn't seem to understand subtle gender dimorphism. Women are, on the average, smaller than men, so it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why most married women have husbands larger than themselves. seagrit is shorter than all three of her brothers, and it's not because her parents starved her and kept her from getting healthy activity. If my parents had had a son, odds are extremely good that he'd be taller than 5'6". This is not a subtle social plot. This is biology.

So we read stuff like this, and we link to stuff like this, and it frustrates me, because the essayist clearly had some good points and some good images, but she veered off into counterfactual claims, and very few people seem to have a big problem with that. Almost everyone I read who linked to it said they thought it was "interesting" or that they found some of the images striking, not that they thought it was right through and through. That's a good thing. What's not a good thing is that the essayist felt she needed to make her points that way in the first place.

Comments

[baronlaw.livejournal.com]

Bravo for critical thinking! I found the story implausible too, but thought of it as more a parable to illustrate a point then a factual story. Also do not think men have clothing all that much easier then woman. Although it may not be as fitted it is still suited to some imaginary "average" guy. Maybe I should say mythical average guy size.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

I have some sympathy with what you say, as someone who does not fit mythical average guy sizes (I have to buy dress shirts from special places because I have a sleeve length and a collar size which are not often seen in conjunction with one another) ... but the fact remains, I now buy those dress shirts ONLINE most of the time because they are cheaper; I buy my jeans online because no one else carries them anymore (NON-preshrunk 501's) ... and I can buy these things and more with reasonable confidence because I know that, in men's pants, a 36 waist and a 36 inseam means the same thing no matter where I get them. Don't underestimate that. Many women have told me they envy men that ability to walk in and know that a pair of pants or a dress shirt will fit just because of the numbers. Meanwhile a size 14 dress is not the same size dress from one store to the next. Sometimes not even vaguely the same size. It's a true mess.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I agree with C.: men may not be shaped the way clothing companies expect them to be, but you at least have some hope that a number means something that maps to an external reality.

I buy clothes for markgritter and timprov from time to time, and no, not everything fits them perfectly off the rack, but most of the "correct" size will appear to be within social standards of acceptable fits of men's trousers. Not GQ standards, sure, but men don't seem to have talked each other into taking GQ standards all that seriously.

And really, I think it's easy for men to underestimate the difficulty of fitting female hips and waist in combination. Some of my male college friends were trying to tell me that I could just buy boys' jeans and "put a belt on." Ummmmmm...no. When you can store the latest Neal Stephenson novel in the waistband of your pants, turned sideways, and still have room for a couple of magazines, that is not what we call "fitting."

[columbina.livejournal.com]

Well, when I linked it (I don't speak for others) I said specifically that parts of it are best taken as a parable/metaphor and not the literal truth. I didn't believe the store with only 4s and 6s either unless she's in one of those teen-beat stores, whose sizes are truly sometimes ridiculous. But I also think you are taking this as "Oh, the women's clothing world is a lot easier if you are a size 4," and I didn't get that from the essay. As far as I can tell American women's clothing sucks equally for all women. The primary points *I* wanted people to take away from the essay were, "Here is an alien, essentially, a stranger to the system, pointing out that the Empress has no clothes. Listen to her because she may be right, and wonder how we got into a system that allows this ridiculousness in the first place."

I have shopped for women's clothes a lot - for myself, for others, alone, and with others - far more than I have shopped for men's clothes. And every time I go, I say, "Why do the women tolerate this? Why don't they revolt? Why have women not conspired to take back their own system?" I agree that it may be a tad simplistic to just Blame the Patriarchy and have done, but that certainly strikes me as a good place to start looking for the problem, and if the essay makes people wonder about these issues - and the social ramifications of them - for even a second, then it's done something worthwhile.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Why don't women revolt? I'll tell you why women don't revolt. Because revolting means we have to sew our own damn clothes again, and we just don't have the time. Because as frustrating and as time-consuming as it is to go shopping, women can buy crappy clothes in less time and effort than we think it will take us to learn to sew well enough to tailor, shop for patterns, shop for fabric, and actually sew the stupid things. Never mind finding decent patterns and colors in fabric stores, either. We don't revolt because as sucky as this is, it is an improvement to making all girls spend most of their childhoods learning the skills the essayist takes for granted in her own neighborhood tailor, at the expense of other skills like calculus and French.

In my own family the choice of how to spend time is particularly clear: my mom learned to tailor clothes with her "extra" periods in high school. I took the senior math seminar as a sophomore and learned to solve integral equations. I have Samuel L. Jackson's character in "Long Kiss Goodnight" yelling in my head here: "And I'm NOT -- GOING -- BACK!"

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

But her punchline was "this is as oppressive as harems and purdah" which is nonsense. For heaven's sake, I can leave the house in a brown paper bag if I want; I can go to work in slacks and a sweater; I have a whole mailorder industry. The bottom line of her essay was harmful nonsense.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think so, too. One of the flaws in American culture just now is that we're eager to bend over backwards and agree that really nothing we do is any better than anywhere else. In fact, some things are better and others are worse, and sorting out which is which is a valuable thing to do.

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

If this is a true story, I think she probably went in the sort of very upscale, snotty, New York department store where the sales help has the attitude that you are lucky they are letting you spend outrageous amounts of money on their shit. I don't know of any large store that wouldn't have 14 and 16 a-plenty.

And clothing sizes in this country are BS. They don't fit anyone. I've spent a lot of my life in jeans and a t-shirt because t-shirts always fit, and you can always find a few pairs of jeans that fit, somehow.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I wonder if women of our general social group are just more willing to scour the racks by any means necessary to find jeans that fit. I know I am. If I had in mind, say, dark brown cotton slacks, I would give up after three or four stores. But jeans? Gotta have jeans! When I found jeans that fit me in Boston for WorldCon, I bought four pairs and ordered two more from the store's website when I got home. I mean, jeans.

This may be a chicken-and-egg question.

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

That story has to be made up, especially if it was really a large department store rather than a boutique.

I'm a size 12/14, used to be an 18, and I have never wandered into a department store that did not stock my size. Plenty of smaller stores (like Casual Corner or Ann Taylor) don't have much if anything above a 12 (and when I was an 18 I could only shop at the department stores), but they usually have *something*, and they aren't "large department stores" anyway.

Or maybe the woman in the story got to the department store too late. The sizes 10-14 are always the first ones to disappear, based on my digging through racks full of 4, 6, 8, and 16s. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

They'll usually ship far fewer of the sizes on the ends of the bell-curve. So on the one hand, many, many more women wear 10s to 14s and will buy the clothing and take it home right away; on the other hand, if even one or two other women buy the 4, I am SOL, because one or two is all they ever got, and they can't check back stock, because it just won't be there.

This is why the XS sections of the clearance racks are always the largest, and why they're often only composed of the really ugly stuff.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

One thing she's talking about is externalized vs. internalized oppression, and in that respect, I thought the essay was very interesting--although possibly not entirely in the way she meant it to be. Because she seems to want to take the polemical stance that Men Oppress Women, and her own evidence refutes her argument. The people we see oppressing women in this essay are, hey, other women. The salesclerk in New York and Mernissi's own mother.

That's why patriarchy is pernicious and pervasive. Not because men are stepping on women to get to the top, but because women are stepping on other women. The special gift of Western phallocentric, misogynistic culture is to make us hurt ourselves. Externalized oppression is simpler: the Taliban, for example, are oppressing women, deliberately and with malice aforethought. But that also takes a lot of work. Internalized oppression ... wind us up and watch us go.

This was something I found very frustrating when I was taking classes as an undergraduate (Women's Studies minor); over and over again, my classmates (including women who should have been old enough to know better) persisted in conflating "patriarchy" with "men." And, no, that's not how it works. Patriarchy may benefit men, but that doesn't mean they control it or practice it deliberately. Many men--most men in the circles I frequent--don't even like it.

Patriarchy isn't monolithic, and it isn't a conspiracy of men against women. And so, while her core insight was quite valid--although, I might add, not new, and not surprising (Naomi Wolf said it equally simplistically but with great fervor in The Beauty Myth in 1991)--the reductive nature of her argument and her persistent reification of ideology made the essay ultimately unsatisfying and intellectually weak.

[roane.livejournal.com]

I didn't link to this, although I thought about it. I wonder if part of the general wild acceptance of this piece doesn't have to do with a general backlash against and bitterness towards the "fat=immoral" spin that just seems to be flooding the airwaves. Sort of a pendulum effect--swinging too far to the other extreme, like reverse discrimination. When you feel like you're on the outside, it's far too easy to bash the people you perceive as being on the inside, or to assume that their lives are so much easier than your own. Unfortunately that sort of thinking only increases the distance between people, and does nothing to resolve the original problem.

For example, I hadn't considered the fact that everyone might be in the same boat, re: a universal sizing system. I guess I've gotten so used to clothes that are either too big or too small or both that it never occurred to me that other people had the same problem as well.

Speaking as someone on the opposite end of the spectrum from you physically, I had a similar reaction to the contention that stores don't carry size 14--once I got past my own initial bitter exultation and realized there were flaws in her argument. I snorted, because Lane Bryant doesn't even carry my size anymore, so nobody size 14 better complain to ME about not finding clothes. ;) (I *heart* mail order, oh yes I do.)

While I'd argue that emotional arguments such as hers might help in terms of consciousness-raising, they're about as useful as the old "Marilyn Monroe was a size 16!" chestnut in terms of logical discussions.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Nobody size 14 better complain to ME about not finding clothes.

When I got sick several years back and was clinically underweight, I ran into a more virulent form of this idea. Basically it was, "Oh, you poor baby, don't you dare expect me to feel sorry for you." Women who were slightly overweight or even on the high end of perfectly medically normal would get annoyed with me for struggling with it. Even after I was over the initial illness, I was cold all the time, I never had any energy, and it hurt and made me nauseous to eat because my stomach had shrunk. But what they saw is that my problems didn't win me scorn from the larger society, and their problems or even "problems" did. What I saw is that all too many people wanted me to stay sick and feeling crappy and not even looking good, because they couldn't possibly conceive of it as a problem. Some would caution me not, under any circumstances, to gain weight, because gaining weight was always bad, and it was so hard to take it off again later. (Um, hello? I didn't want to take it off again later, and my doctor certainly didn't want me to.) Others thought it was a problem like having too much money or too much love. "You're too thin? Oh darn. Gosh, that must suck," they'd chirp sarcastically. Because a perfectly healthy size 12 trumped an unhealthy size 2 for feeling crappy. Automatically. Because she was bigger. Not even big. Just bigger.

And as you say, that doesn't solve anything. It just pushes people further apart.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

The episode seems to be told in a stylized story-telling fashion, so I assume it's not meant to be literal. (Because yeah, show me the store that carries lots of size 4 and I'm there. Many places start with a size 6.)

What bothers me is that it seems to almost condone one form of oppression by exaggerating another - "Look, the Taliban's not so bad because they don't make women diet! Really it's the West that is more oppressive because they don't sell larger sizes." Yeah, because you know all those women are being held back from studying for PhDs because they can't find the right clothing. It's a far lesser restriction to begin with. Further, the really nice thing about repression that's internalized and self-inflicted is that if it's all in your mind, you can change your mind. Of course that's not easy - first of all you have to even realize that you *can* change your mind - but no one else has power over your mind, whereas with an external system there are always other people to deal with.

I think the comparison itself is harmful, also, because it implies that somehow a lesser evil isn't so evil after all. It's as if beating a child were condoned because another parent killed a child. A lesser evil is still an evil. I disagree with the article's implication that purdah is the lesser evil, but that doesn't mean I don't think that the Western system shouldn't be fixed. It's fairly clear that obesity is a bad thing because it's a health and mobility issue. (Maybe not moderate plumpness, but true obesity observably makes it harder to get around.) The same applies to a broken leg. No one says a broken leg is desirable but there are accomodations made and no one judges character by the lack of leg fractures. Large people should be able to get what they need, in this case reasonably priced-attractive clothing - and judging by the statistics on increasing size of Americans, I can't believe it wouldn't be profitable to sell it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I can't believe it wouldn't be profitable to sell it.

Certainly many retailers seem to agree with you; every other season we're getting articles in the "Living" section of the paper about new larger-size stores or about stores adding new lines for "plus-size" teens etc.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I think it's high time to recenter the norm and add on a "small women's department" in addition to the "large women's department," because they're calling things large that are average.

Hee. Like those places that sell medium sodas, but it's the tiniest size that they offer. These words, they do not mean what you think they do!

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

I hear you.

Between serious illness, back injury, unusual stress, and problematic medication (think twice before trying Depo, kids), I've had a wide range of body shapes and sizes over the last several years. I went from being a muscular, moderately curvy size 6-8 to a skinny stick-insect to a fatter cylinder to a ridiculously curvy size 4 to my current curvy 12-14. (I'm using The Gap's sizing as my standard here; women's sizing is dopey, but you get what I mean.)

With each morph, I thought, "Hurray, surely there will be lots of things for me to wear now!" and I've been consistently wrong. (In particular, finding a 32DD bra was not so easy.) It seems silly to find a tailor to fix my cheap cotton play-clothes, but for crying out loud, I'm about ready to do that. One would think that at some point in all that I would have hit the fashion sweet spot, but if I did, if it even exists, I wasn't shopping that day.

Now, I have been in a trendy little club-kid boutique (http://www.nwsource.com/ae/scr/edb_vd.cfm?c=s&ven=7026&s=nws) where there I found nothing over a size 6, and not a particularly generous size 6. But that was hardly a department store.

As for the "size 6 harem" post itself, well, I find emotional thought experiments more persuasive if the details on which they rest are convincing or at least not obviously unlikely. I'm reminded of a poem I once read that had the line, "Like a river flowing to its source." Of course, water cycle (http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycle.html) aside, rivers don't flow to their sources any more than large department stores stock nothing larger than size 6. That stupid line blew the poem for me; I entered a mindset of "you've got to be freakin' kidding me."

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

I'm suddenly reminded of a day I had a few years ago. My goals were (a) to buy a decent pair of pants, and (b) to understand transfinite numbers. I didn't quite succeed at either of them, but I did learn that understanding transfinite numbers is much easier than buying a well-fitting pair of pants off the rack.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have that "you've got to be freakin' kidding me" mindset. I have it often.

[palinade.livejournal.com]

I found the essay to be rather fanciful. By comparing the western fashion industry to an eastern harem seemed a spurious conection, for one thing. I can't equate the very limitations of being escorted, veiled, and policed in a culture that doesn't view women as a human being with American clothing trends. It just seemed over-the-top as a metaphor.

I also think her example of the snooty salesperson was definitely assumed rather than experienced. The saleslady's brush off of another customer to explain to the author that they didn't carry anything in her size seemed contradictory. Even at Saks or Bloomingdales (or other brand department stores), most salespeople who can smell a sale will show a little effort to close that sale. I can see the salesperson saying something like, "I'm not sure that's the right size for you. Let me get a few other things." I mean, even the Gap employees who dislike their jobs will get someone another size.

The idea that there's a "conspiracy" of clothing designers from high-end to low-end is simply ridiculous. All clothing makers have a basic pattern usually fit to a model. They extrapolate up and down the size range focusing on the median. Whether that pattern model falls into the belly of the bellcurve size-wise is anyone's guess and subject to whomever is in charge of those kinds of things per clothing line. There's no heavy discussion of trying to outwit the consumer. The consumer's reality is simply absent from the discussion.

I worked for a major conservative brand. I've sat in meetings where the sizes and the adjustment of those sizes was discussed. I've even been told that it would be beneficial if we wore pieces of the line. Nearly every woman in the department could not wear a line of the pants. The waist was too narrow, the hips too big, the size just didn't fit. There was a large range of sizes and ages to fill the "average" slots. Since I'm a petite 0-1, the brand I worked for didn't even consider me part of their demographic. They simply didn't make clothes in my size. They did, however, make clothes in my size for the Asian market--gee, I'm Asian-American, that sort of figures, eh?--which I could not buy. Strangely fascinating, huh? We all commented to the design/production department. Did they adjust the pattern? Nope. No one saw any need since the pants were selling just fine--"the metrics don't lie" was a common phrase. ::scratches head:: Weird.

Nearly everyone I know wears clothes that don't fit them properly or has a difficult time finding something that fits them "just right". There is no "same size" body. What can be done about it? I don't know... other than to take up sewing or tailoring and make/adjust my own clothes or find someone to do it for me.

All in all, the complaint that the author made in that essay about not fitting into a size 6 seemed ludicrous. So what if she didn't fit into a size 6? Millions of others in the world don't either--it's why there's such a thing as a size range! It's why there are soooo many different labels and brands and clothing makers! If we were all the same size, we'd all wear the same thing with no option whatsoever. And yes, I agree that buying clothes that fit well is a pain in the patootie. But geez, I still can't get over the "harem" compared to a western clothing size. Eh?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of the libertarian "taxation equals slavery" claim: sometimes making a strong, striking analogy leads your readers to see exactly how many ways that analogy strikes them as wrong.

Nothing fits anybody and it all stinks!

[cpolk.livejournal.com]

I saw that essay a few days back. I rolled my eyes and kept on going, because it's just more of the same "You should feel bad because you're skinny, Chelsea. You are oppressing the rest of us, because you are skinny and upholding the bullshit beauty myth of the patriarchy."

Gosh, thanks. Nobody ever stops to think that maybe I don't go to ridiculous lengths to preserve this automatically assumed to be artificial body type. No. I'm 5'8" and around 120 pounds and I wear a smaller size of jeans than I did in high school--due to vanity re-sizing, and not because I've actually gotten any skinnier, and the last bra I bought was size 34D (Which I think is ridiculous - there's no way these breasts are Ds, but that was the bra that fit.)

In fact, since I didn't put on weight in my 20's and didn't put on weight in my 30's it's been assumed by my doctors that I have an eating disorder, and I am obsessively weighed every time I go see the doctor. If I drop below 120, I've been told they'll stick me in rehab. (I was terrified last week because I had a doctors' appointment, and I'd just gotten over the flu and for sure dropped 5 pounds and I was really afraid that they wouldn't accept "yo, I was sick!" as an excuse. so I wore my steel toed boots. 122! Whoot!)

And that's nonsense. why the hell do I gotta put up with that? Why do I have to feel like a villain because I have the metabolism of a whippet? I can't find clothes that fit any more than anybody else can, and thank gawd I know how to sew!

I wear jeans. Why do I wear jeans? because Jeans come in different leg lengths, that's why. women's pants might have a 32" inseam, but usually it's less than that. I wear 33.5" long, so I generally buy 34" inseam jeans. There are stores I just don't even go into because there's no point - they don't have anything that fits me properly. I'd love to have a pair of khakis or dress pants or be able to buy a coordinated pants and jacket and skirt set. But if I want those things, I have to make them myself.

I don't have many button down shirts, and the ones I have I made myself, because off the rack shirts are too short in the sleeve and assume that I've got no breasts at all (well they're not Ds, but I've got breasts, and shirts ride up in front if they don't fit properly, and you end up with wrinkles radiating from your underarms. Boo.)

Skirts are okay for length, but store bought skirts don't seem to grasp the concept of these odd things called hips. I've got 'em. so I end up with too big in the waist, too small in the hip, and then I go to the fabric store.

if I buy it ready made, it's a knit. with lycra, most likely. or it's a sarong. or it's shoes. But they're not building clothes for me any more than they're building clothes for anybody else.

Re: Nothing fits anybody and it all stinks!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Lycra is our friend. And yes, I know what you mean. My mom gets annoyed when I won't go into some stores, but really, if you know it's a waste of time, why bother?