I Was Born in the Wrong Century and My Body Type Agrees

I was putting lotion on after a shower and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, which is always a jarring experience because the mirror is positioned at the exact angle where you get the full unedited director’s cut of your own body, no filter, no strategic arm placement, no “let me just turn to the side a little.” Full frontal reality. And I stood there for a second, holding a bottle of cocoa butter like a confused gladiator, and thought, you know what, in another era, I would have been a masterpiece.

Not in this era. In this era I am a woman who gets targeted ads for GLP-1 and metabolism gummies. In this era my thighs are a problem to be solved, my stomach is a project to be managed, and my relationship with bread is considered concerning. But hundreds of years ago, I would have been the standard. THE standard. Painters would have fought over who got to capture my soft arms and round face and the pale skin I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to bronze since high school.

I started falling down this thought-spiral (a productive one, for once) and looked up Renaissance portraits online. And every single woman in every single painting looked like she had just eaten an entire wheel of cheese and felt fantastic about it. Not a single one of them looked like they’d done a HIIT workout or counted a macro in their life. They were lounging on velvet, draped in silk, surrounded by fruit they had no intention of eating because they’d already had four courses of roasted pheasant and weren’t done yet.

These women were celebrated. Portraits of them hung in palaces. Kings started wars over them. And they looked like me after a long holiday weekend. Soft. Rested. Carb-loaded. Luminous with the glow of someone who has never jogged.

Meanwhile I’m in this century wearing a fitness tracker that dings me for taking the elevator. I have an app on my phone that tells me how many steps I didn’t take. My doctor asks me about my “activity level” like it’s a credit score. The whole system is rigged against women whose natural body type is “Renaissance painting come to life” and I’m starting to think that’s a societal flaw.

Because the pale part. I cannot get tan. I have tried. I have laid in the sun like a rotisserie chicken, rotating every fifteen minutes with the precision of an actual rotating rotisserie chicken, and my skin went from white to pink to a peeling sunburned disaster and then back to white. My body rejects melanin the way my laptop rejects software updates. It is not interested. It has chosen its aesthetic and that aesthetic is “Victorian ghost” and there is nothing I can do about it.

And hundreds of years ago this would have been CURRENCY. Pale skin meant you were wealthy enough to stay indoors. It meant you had people to do outdoor labor for you. It meant status. Power. A cushioned bench and someone to fan you while you ate grapes. Now it means people ask me if I’m feeling okay at barbecues and suggest I try a spray tan, which is just paying someone to airbrush you into a sad orange for two weeks.

The body standards thing is what gets me. Because every single era in history has picked a body type and decided that one was correct and all others were a moral failing. For centuries, soft bellies and wide hips meant fertility, abundance, wealth. Artists painted women with rolls and dimples and round faces and the paintings were considered the highest form of beauty. Rubens built an entire career on women who looked like they had never refused a pastry, and he was considered a genius for it. Museums charge admission for people to stare at those bodies and call them art.

And then someone decided thin was in. And then someone decided muscular was in. And now someone has decided that the ideal body is both thin AND thick in locations that are anatomically contradictory, like the beauty standard was designed by someone who failed anatomy.

I think about the women in those portraits and I wonder if they worried about any of this. I wonder if they stood in front of their equivalent of a bathroom mirror, which was probably a slightly polished piece of metal held by a servant, and thought “I should cut back on the roasted duck.” I wonder if they pinched their stomachs and felt bad. I bet they didn’t. I bet they looked at their reflection and thought “yes, good, I look expensive” and then went back to eating.

That’s the part I want. Not the corsets or the lead makeup or the dying at thirty-two from a tooth infection. I want the part where your body was proof that you were thriving. Where softness was a flex. Where no one had invented a burpee yet and everyone was better off for it.

I put my lotion away and looked at the mirror one more time. Pale. Soft. A body that has never voluntarily sprinted. And I thought, you know what, wrong century. But right body. Rubens would have loved me. He would have painted me holding a pomegranate next to a curtain, looking unbothered, glowing, fed.

And I would have let him.