Dale Favier from Portland Home Massage has written a spectacular piece about the reality of the human body as seen from the point of view of a massage therapist who sees a lot of naked people. The tl;dr takeaways:
* Men have silly buttocks.
* Woman have cellulite. All of them. It’s dimply and cute.
* Adults sag.
* Everybody on a massage table is beautiful. There are really no exceptions to this rule.
Lean people have a kind of rawboned, unfinished look about them that is very appealing. But they don’t have plump round breasts and plump round asses. You have plump round breasts and a plump round ass, you have a plump round belly and plump round thighs as well. That’s how it works. (And that’s very appealing too.)
Woman have cellulite. All of them. It’s dimply and cute. It’s not a defect. It’s not a health problem. It’s the natural consequence of not consisting of photoshopped pixels, and not having emerged from an airbrush.
Men have silly buttocks. Well, if most of your clients are women, anyway. You come to male buttocks and you say — what, this is it? They’re kind of scrawny and the tissue is jumpy because it’s unpadded; you have to dial back the pressure, or they’ll yelp.
Adults sag. It doesn’t matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more. All of the tissue hangs a little looser. They wrinkle, too. I don’t know who put about the rumor that just old people wrinkle. You start wrinkling when you start sagging, as soon as you’re all grown up, and the process goes its merry way as long as you live. Which is hopefully a long, long time, right?
(via Wil Wheaton)
(Image: body shots 002, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from susan402’s photostream)