From the comments section regarding an earlier post on our new favorite look, which is mini-skirts and tights and loose tops:

I hate my thighs.

Booo! to mini skirts.

Now this is something we feel quite strongly about. We have what we believe to be the rather unique status of having been informed, in the national media, that we must never wear mini-skirts, and must, instead, wear palazzo pants. We have mentioned this previously, and it is obviously one of those things we are just never going to get over: We remember when our good friend at the New York Post offered us a chance to get made-over by the What Not to Wear girls, and we were like, fuck yeah! Partly we wanted the free clothes, but mostly we wanted to be restyled. We did not get restyled. (We didn’t get any free clothes, either, but that bitterness we can live with.) We were shoved into a pair of palazzo pants, and then they patted the tops of our thighs and were all, like, “You’re big through here.” “But,” we said, if not aloud. “We’re recovering from a knee injury! We can’t run! These are not our usual thighs!” There was no room for discussion: There was only the fact that we must never, again, horrify the world with our thighs.

We cried, right there in Bloomingdales. Not because we’d just heard we were too fat for skirts—well, partly that, but mostly because there seemed to be no room for improvement. We found the whole thing anti-American, “American” in the sense of anything-being-possible, of working hard and making the grade. (Which is separate, we would like to point out, from puking up your lunch.) For the next few years, we, in fact, did not wear many skirts. And then our knee healed, and we started training for our next marathon, and we found ourselves wearing our favorite American Apparel shorts everywhere we went, and we found that small children and puppies did not combust immediately upon seeing our knees. Eventually, we shared this philosophy with skirts. And while we occasionally get a little PTSD about it and call someone we are related to asking if it is okay if we wear skirts, we are mostly over it.

So here is where this whole thing loops around: We are currently in the body-form we like to call “winter layering”—fatter than usual, all the better for warding off Arctic cold and similar. (Which you can imagine we get a lot of in California. But anyway.) We are not, in any case, at our summer weight, though by the grace of ashtanga yoga classes we hope to be soon. Anyway, we were walking down the street, in our shorts, thinking: Are we too fat to wear these? And we were calculating the amount of time it will take us to get to our summer weight (summer), and we were thinking that this was sort of a shame, because summer is quite a while from now. And then we just happened to look in some random mirror, and we were like: What if we were just like, Who cares? Surely we’re just fine. Fine! And then we were like: What if we decided that however we are now, rather than in the summer, or whenever, is completely fine? And skirt-permitting?

Weight has just got to be one of the most fucked-up cultural issues in this country, we’re sure. Not fucked up like the state of education, we’re thinking, but fucked up all the same, and we’re thinking that it’s one of those things where the more you freaking think about it, the more it fucks you up. We believe in mini-skirts, and shorts, and upper-arm-baring-tank tops, in all sorts of bodies. This is not to say we endorse bingeing on nasty, bad-for-us foods, and don’t get us started on these negative-sized starlets and the fucked, pathetic, limiting, idiotic view of the ideal female shape as suggested by much of our culture—entertainment-wise, advertising-wise, fashion-runway-wise, etc. This has got to be one of those things that are so hard to find a happy medium. But we’re convinced that people are happiest when they’re not covering themselves up in unflattering clothing. We still remember the day when we bought our first fitted t-shirt, which is sort of like saying we remember the day we first used the Internet. (Which we do.) And we know that when we go outside in our mini-dress, maybe we are heavier than, say, Lindsay Lohan. We have the trouble of not doing coke. And you know what, we just don’t care. Because we love them, and we think everyone should love what they wear, and not shame themselves into khakis (even their “boyfriend’s trousers” etc) because they haven’t dropped those last five pounds yet. This is the secret: When you wear what you love, and you don’t give it a shit, you generally look excellent. (Best example: Beth Ditto.) We’re not exactly outing ourselves as fans of otherwise-normal women in half-shirts and pleated minis; we’re certainly not saying to embrace the inner tart. We’re thinking the bigger problem—precisely because it is so invisible—is when we sort of give up, and say: We’re fat, so we will wear baggy jeans, and men’s t-shirts, and we will feel badly about ourselves, all because we don’t do so many drugs that we actually have an appetite. Fuck that, and fuck them.

We are totally buying this skirt. At top: Chip & Pepper mini, $132

And that is a fucking lot of dress for $150. Karen Zambos Vintage Couture mini dress, $150

Addendum, from the comments section:

i think its funny how most of you all agree with this post when most of you are probably size 4s or something and have only ever been called fat once or twice in your life. Do any of you know what its like to be called fat like almost everyday of your life? even by your family (who say their joking, but you know theyre not)yeah, you know what, you all go through that, and then tell me to have fucking confidence in myself!

This is clearly important enough for us to discuss outside of the comments area, and up here, in first class, such as it is. We happen to know first-hand what it was like to be the second-fattest girl in the class, seeing as how we didn’t begin to shed the baby fat til well after we were done being babies. We will say this: What happened, to be very boring and pedantic about it, was that we joined the rowing team our freshman year in college, and we spent all of our time not bundled up in big, cover-up-type clothes as would have been our preference, but in running shorts. And we realized our thighs were not quite as horrible as we had been led to believe. And we spent more time outside, unashamed of ourselves. And we exercised more, and we were less miserable \ anxious, so we ate less crap. That is what we are saying: We have absolutely no control over what other people think of us, if they think our boobs are a reasonable size or not, etc. Not to be too self-help-y about it, but we do have control over what we think of ourselves, and as soon as we found ourselves in a position where we weren’t constantly covering up our body, we stopped hating it—and just as importantly, we were happier outdoors, we were happier running around, and we were happier not bingeing on nachos and ice cream. We’re hardly going to suggest that anyone else out there in a similar position would experience anything similar—all we can report is what worked for us. For us, the running shorts and mini-skirts came first. We are just not going to live that life where you’re constantly waiting until we get to some mythical weight before we can wear clothes we like—because we will spend all that time in the endless interim obsessing over our food. A: Because it’s a waste of time. B: Because it would only make us eat more, and more crap.

And anyone who’s telling you you’re fat? Fuck them. We swear to freaking God, just look them in the eye and say: “Motherfucker, fuck off.”

Er, that’s what we’d say.