Jiggle:
to move up and down or to and fro with short, quick jerks.
Today I found myself contemplating jiggling. Such a strange word, a word that holds within it many contradictions. Is it good, bad or ugly. Is it sexy? Is it unhealthy? Does it cause permenant self loathing or pride? When do you admire a jiggle, and when do you shun it?
As a young woman, I struggle with the ‘jiggle matrix’ almost daily. It impacts on my choice of clothing, my ideas of womanliness, of attraction and sex appeal; my body image in gereral.
I was the stick kid through most of school. I was skinny all over, even in places you wouldn’t think could be skinny, like your underarms. Later on, I got some little curves, a few bumps, but nothing really all that spectacular. I had no concept of jiggling as it pertained to me.
I thought my body had settled into its shape, but I was wrong. I got a second go of it in my final year of highschool. I went up two cup sizes, my thighs got to know eachother- too well for my liking- both my hips and ass were “upsized” and my arms became soft and rounded, rather than straight and lean. I became aware of jiggling.
I got anxious when running in P.E was required, embarrassed by my body’s excess movement. I liked that I looked more womanly, and I wasn’t unhealthy, but I didn’t like the jiggle. I was worried, because I was taught that fat jiggles, and that people thought jiggling was ugly, and that you should cover jiggly bits because no one want to see them. That’s what I thought, I believed that for quite a while.
I generally have a positive attitude towards my body. I like my face and my hair, my skin tone and my proportions. I usually consider myself relatively attractive. And yet the jiggle was that thing, the thing I was worried about people seeing, I thought that they wouldn’t be able to see past it; I was right, and I was wrong, and this is where the contradictions begin.
The truth is that people will see what they want to see (I really want to say haters gonna hate, do people still say that?) A person who wants to think of you as ugly, fat, unhealthy or unworthy will see your jiggling thighs and arms and stomach, and let that image taint everything about you; they probably don’t realise it half the time. If you have no jiggling, these people will find something else to use to validate their hatred and bias.
A person who wants to think of you sexually will generally focus on the ass and breasts, and they will love the jiggling, and it will taint their view of you too. Then there’s you, yourself, in this case me too. I choose to think that I like some jiggle, I dislike some jiggle, but my jiggle is not me, despite what my haters, or my objectfiers might think.
Hopefully, you have people outside of yourself who see any jiggles as a tiny faction of who you are. Friends, family and partners shouldn’t love you inspite of your jiggle or for your jiggle; they should just love you as a whole!
