Columns

I assume that when most of you walk round uni you appraise your peers at least vaguely holistically – “That chick has a great rack!”, “God I hope those errant lip hairs are for movember and not a perennial thing”, “Shit he smells eerily similar to Kapiti Kikorangi Blue!” – that kind of thing. Me? I observe the entire Otago campus only from the waist down. I wish that statement was a euphemism for bisexual nymphomania, but actually it’s several thousand times sadder and more banal. You see, my name is Simone, and I’m a leg-a-holic.

I despise my legs. I think them more aesthetically offensive than the bastard lovechild of People of Wal-mart and the Silver Porn section on Redtube. Looking at my legs in the mirror after ingesting so much as a kale frond brings on nausea and tachycardia like that normally experienced the morning after a hard night on the Lindauer Special Reserve, not least because the generous dimpling of the skin evokes the bubbles of a freshly poured glass of sparkling. My inner thighs cosy up to each other so closely a single proton would struggle to worm its way between them. Repulsive blobs of adipose tissue cling to the insides of my knees, ensuring that absolutely no skirt length will offer the illusion of normally shaped limbs. My calf muscles are simultaneously underdeveloped and freakishly long, offering a unique riff on the concept of cankles wherein the lower leg extends in an uninterrupted straight line from just above the posterior cruciate ligament to the Achilles tendon. To add aesthetic insult to structural injury, even freshly shaven and slathered with Brazil Nut Body Butter and Airbrush Legs my legs remain defiantly matte and, um, “textured”.

You know how supposedly men think about sex every 30 seconds? I think about legs approximately every ten. Nanoseconds, that is. I dread walking through Central lib because there are so many skinny legs there. So many perfectly skinny legs encased in perfectly skintight denim. So many inexplicably taut and shiny sets of pins protruding from short floaty skirts. I don’t understand how it’s possible for so many “triangles of hope” to exist in one 2km radius. How are all the girls at Otago blessed with legs so suited to the current fashion for baggy tops and skinny bottoms? Sure, some of them have fat stomachs, but at least then you can wear a louche Left Bank-ish open-knit sweater and skintight chinos and still look effortlessly thin. When I attempt the same I look like a pear perched atop two inverted parsnips. I don’t even want to talk about what happened the time I tried on a pair of beige high-waisted “Riding Pants” in Ruby.

At this point I feel I should insert the obligatory “first world problems” disclaimer. Yes, I know there are children dying of malnutrition in Mali. And of course I know that there are people out there with far fatter legs than mine, and everyone has something they hate about themselves, and as “real women” we all need to learn to love ourselves, “wobbly bits and all!” I know this, because I have read it in Cosmo and seen Gok proclaim it over several seasons of forcing the lumpen underclass of England into MILFy waist belts and platform slingbacks. I also know that such a trivial obsession is pathetic, narcissistic, and boring in the extreme. But none of this changes the fact that I fucking hate my legs. I hate them but I can’t escape them, even if I do sometimes wake up in a cold sweat at 2am clutching and scratching at my thigh fat like a madwoman. Maybe one day I’ll grow out of such pathetic fixations, or alternately finally get down to 52kg, because that is the weight at which I am convinced all my insecurities will finally vanish into thin air with that last stubborn blob of knee fat. But in the meantime, leg-ahol is my poison and the Link is its purveyor.

– By Simone de Moro-bar