Its true though. For many people as they age if they are underweight their faces look gaunt. What’s misogynistic about that? Why is that worse than saying size 14 is obese? My bottom half is size 14 I am certainly not obese.
It's not even a little bit true. I'm in my 40s and a muscular, athletic size UK6 and I don't look gaunt or aged. At a size 14, I'd be heading squarely towards the morbidly obese category. What the actual fuck makes you think that the OP's husband is out of line for telling her he isn't as attracted to her anymore but that it's ok for you to be a complete and total nasty arse to women your age who are fit and healthy?
TBH the idea that female bodies have more body fat than male might need to be a thing he hasn't even thought about.
WTF kind of pseudo-science is this? He doesn't need to consider it because we naturally have more body fat and that suits our bodies. A woman with 25% body fat will look quite slim and athletic. A man with 25% body fat will look reasonably overweight. Having more body fat doesn't mean that women look overweight compared to men, it just means that we have different body composition.
When he’s the one that’s given birth to kids and has to deal with fluctuating hormones and a changing metabolism, he can have a moan. Otherwise he needs to shut the hell up. You are not fat. You are not unhealthy.
Can we please, please, please stop infantilising mothers like this. Pregnancy, breastfeeding, etc can cause visible, sometimes irreparable damage to our bodies. But it's not inevitable that we're some sort of slave to our hormones now and can't make choices about how our bodies look and function. It's not helpful and takes our power and autonomy away from us. My stomach was destroyed following a series of surgeries, followed by a monster pregnancy that stretched out the unhealed scars and a c-section. Right from the moment my son was born, I looked at the absolute wreck of my stomach and told myself that was that. It was how it was and only surgery that I'd never have would fix it, so I had to get on with accepting it. I spent years 'being alright' with my stomach, which involved joking about it and actually thinking being over-weight was better for it, as I filled the stretch marks a bit. As it turns out, most of the loose skin was actually fat and being a healthy weight makes my stomach look significantly better. My abs do a pretty fantastic job of filling in excesses skin and my whole c-section pooch is almost completely gone and doesn't overhang at all anymore. All of that time I spent making myself accept my stomach could have been spent having a stomach I was actually, genuinely happy with. I wouldn't now be on the road to have a stomach that doesn't make me wince to look at, I'd have had it for years. Telling women that having damaged unhealthy bodies is inevitable hurts women far, far, far more than it helps. Be honest. Tell us that while pregnancy can leave it's mark in the majority of cases that mark is actually quite minimal and there are lots and lots of very real ways to keep that damage minimal. Stop making out that it's some sort of inevitability that we are a bit broken now and should just lean into it. And that men are mean if they won't go along with this collective delusion.