I love women. I love the way they move through the world, the quiet confidence in a laugh, the arch of a sculpted eyebrow that can stop a room. But most of all, I love the plumper form, the generous, unapologetic softness that curves and folds and invites admiration.
As a child, I needed little persuasion to go to Indian weddings with my parents. It was absolute mayhem to my senses as the sari-clad beauties of every variety came tripping down the aisle. I was especially drawn to those rolls of fat on the exposed midriff. Not the flat, gym-sculpted six-packs the fashion magazines worship, but the real, living layers that shift when she breathes. Layers that spill softly over a waistband and surely somewhere feel warm and yielding to a lover's touch. Those are the signature of a woman who carries abundance in her body the way the earth carries harvest.
As I grew older, there was something profoundly erotic and reassuring about that midriff. The way the skin dimples and creases, the gentle overhang that rests against her thighs when she sits. I love the way those rolls quiver with laughter or tighten with pleasure. They speak of fertility, of sustenance, of a body that has known life and chosen comfort over denial.
As I recently gazed at the sensual temple sculptures in South India, it dawned on me that evolution wired us this way. Soft hips and a padded belly signal health, stored energy and the capacity to nurture. To pretend otherwise is to deny biology itself. I remain convinced that the plumper form offers a tapestry of sensation. The give of flesh, the warmth trapped in every fold, the quiet intimacy of skin meeting skin without the barrier of bone. That is not fragility. It is strength wrapped in velvet.
Yet in this woke age, body shaming is very much in vogue. We are lectured endlessly about 'body positivity', about how every shape is beautiful, while the same voices sneer at the men among us who dare admit they prefer a woman with rolls on her belly and fullness in her thighs. Call a soft midriff alluring and one is accused of fetishising 'unhealthy' bodies, of reinforcing patriarchal standards, of being somehow backward. The irony is brutal. The very movements that claim to liberate women from shame have erected new taboos. Thin women are quietly mocked as 'privileged' while fuller women who embrace their rolls are celebrated only if they frame it as political defiance. The result is a culture where honest attraction of the sort I readily confess is policed more harshly than ever.
History never had such hang-ups. Artists and writers across the centuries looked at plump women and saw goddesses. Other than the temple sculptors of my beloved India, fuller figured women were celebrated everywhere from Europe to Latin America and Polynesia. During the Baroque era, Peter Paul Rubens painted women whose bodies spilled luxuriantly across the canvas. I sought out similar paintings to decorate the walls of my homes to the sheer horror and frequent delight of my voyeuristic guests. Heavy breasts, rounded bellies, thick rolls at the waist that caught light and shadow like living marble. Works like Rubens' Three Graces are celebrations of abundance. Those midriffs are not hidden but highlighted, soft and luminous, the very core of erotic power. The term “Rubenesque” was distinctly coined in admiration.
A century later, Renoir filled his canvases with women whose flesh dimpled at the hips and folded gently at the stomach. There were women bathing, lounging, eating, their bodies heavy with life and unashamed.
Go further back and the pattern deepens. The prehistoric Venus of Willendorf, carved some 30,000 years ago around modern day Austria, is nothing but rolls at the back and the front. It was the sensation of enormous breasts, a belly that cascades into generous hips, every curve exaggerated into soft, fertile promise. The Venus across the continents was an object of reverence. My voluptuous ancestors at Khajuraho, Ellora and Madurai were women carved with wide hips and prominent bellies, their midriffs creased in stone as they dance and seduce. Hindu and Buddhist art alike treated the plump female form as sacred, a living embodiment of abundance and pleasure.
Literature sang the same song. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is large-hipped and radiantly carnal. Her body was a force of nature, not a problem to be solved by gym work. Shakespeare’s lustful Falstaff praised 'round' women and 'goodly' flesh. Queen Cleopatra is described with a fullness that makes her irresistible. Her very opulence is part of her power. Even the Brontës and Hardy, for all their Victorian restraint, lingered on heroines whose bodies were soft and womanly rather than brittle.
The preference for plumpness was the default position until the 20th century decided that hunger looked better on camera. The rolls on a woman’s midriff are the place where her body tells her truth. They tell that she has lived, she has eaten, she has loved and that she might have borne fruit. The plumper form is more attractive, the softer belly more sensual, and those rolls of fat on the midriff are among the loveliest things a woman can wear.
Catch Kiru Naidoo at the Saris and Sweetmeats Book Fair at the Umhlanga Apart-Hotel on Meridian Drive this Sunday. Entry is free.
