Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Guy legs

Pro tennis star Serena Williams
I'm genetically blessed (?) or cursed with very muscular legs.  I don't do squats with weights.  Heck, since I made the conscious decision to coax my body towards my mind's feminine idea of it, I rarely use any weights at all.  I still run around when coaching, and I work out on a rowing machine, but theoretically, that should just help keep me trim and not really build muscles a lot, especially given the T-blockers and the E.  So I'm kind of annoyed that my legs look so much like guy legs.  I mean, I look hard at women athletes' legs, particularly those whose sports involve lots of leg work, and while lots of them have much stronger looking or more muscular legs than me, I think only a very few have the typical knee area (especially just above the knee/ lower thigh) that guys have.  You know what I mean?  Maybe it's because of the different hip to knee angle of women vs men, but guys quads are different than girls quads.  I suppose I could attempt to smooth out the difference by gaining a bit more body fat.  Unfortunately, I tend to gain weight almost anywhere except my legs (even on estrogen).  I guess I just need to accept it and hope that the casual observer will just assume my funny knees/thighs  are just weird, and not necessarily male.  Or of course, I could and probably should just dress according to my body like any normal cis-gendered girl would, and favor longer skirts/dresses or pants/jeans.

2 comments:

  1. I was discussing skirts with a friend of mine the other day and she said that if your under 40 then skirts can be above the knee, over 40 and should be below the knee.
    I'm quite happily sticking to this suggestion after the last time I went out with a hemline above the knees and found myself drawing a lot of unwanted attention to myself. Admittedly the hemline was a good couple of inches above the knees.
    Of course it might just have been the horror of seeing such knobbly objects that drew the attention.

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    1. I think that age limitation on skirt length may be a bit outdated. Obviously, there will always be exceptional women who have awesome legs and can pull off a short skirt in their 60s (e.g. Tina Turner!) but even for the average woman, I think lots of 40-somethings these days are very comfortable wearing above-the-knee skirts. Maybe move that cutoff to 50 years old, and I think it holds better. And maybe the attention to your legs was admiration rather than critical!

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