#sixpacks

October 22 "I'm a BLUE sky thinker."

(2\12\22 my blue days)

Or eight-packs. Or the things that we are being conditioned to believe.

You know guys, I happened to grow up shielded from the knowledge of their existence. Yeah, I know how Ridonkulous it sounds, but bear with me for a while.

I was born in the merry year 1983. Haven’t had internet at home...like, ever. My family was poor and mostly uninterested in them newfangled technologies.

That was not at all the norm for my peers. There were computers all around in Poland during the nineties, just not for me. Anywhoo, the first time I‘ve had the whole World Wide Web at my fingertips - I was already 24 and living on my own.

Boys and men that surrounded me in my everyday life didn’t sport any weird ribbing on their guts. They’d have strong arms and legs and nicely shaped backs, but nothing of the kind.

I saw my first porn at the advanced age of 20 - a good two years after I started getting at it with another person. Wasn’t impressed with the movie. It seemed convoluted and nasty. The sex that I’ve known didn’t look anything like that.

My then-boyfriend didn’t look nothing like that either. He was angular and lanky, with narrow hands and feet, his neck long, his stomach a flat plane of taut pale skin. Which I was very much tantalized with.

It was the movies and the magazines that brought the news to me; that apparently men were supposed to have this weird ribbing in there, or else they were considered Not Buff Enough.

It was the video games and the anime. Not real life human beings that I would feel attracted to or sleep with.

And you know, as much as I adore - simply adore - Death’s impossibly teeny tiny waist, I could still do without him sporting the weird stomach ribbing. It is there and I’ve finally absorbed the message about how this body feature is supposed to be Sexy. I am a product of the society which surrounds me after all.

But still I wonder - how many people out there have been force fed some standards that belong in the land of highly stylized fiction? How many have been formatted before they even had a chance of exploring their preferences on their own?

Made to believe their bodies are Ugly or Worthless because they simply don’t have that?