Here's the thing - as a pre-teen I would have done anything to look more like a woman (i.e. not scrawny). Succeeding at being sexy meant boobs and filling out, neither of which happened for me until I left for college at 18.
In junior high, the perceived popular girls were going through puberty while I was all bones and angles and stringy hair. And bad taste, apparently.
I remember I bought a size Medium sweater once and was so excited because it wasn't an X-Small. And while I understood that being skinny was a fashionable ideal, from a sexual attraction standpoint it felt useless. Boys didn't ask me out. I only had a vague sense of superiority from it since I wasn't trying for it, and it wasn't until I crossed over to the dark side that I understood skinny girls were idealized for their self control.
The punch line here is obvious, but I'll spell it out anyway. For so long all I wanted, more than anything in the world, was to look like a woman, and then when I finally did, all I wanted was to be a skinny little girl again. And that's what it is for women, and it's shitty beyond shitty. When we're girls we want to look older so we feel important and desired, then there are a couple years of being young and sexually attractive, but that's fraught with all its own issues, and then we start the awful march towards adulthood which we're taught to fight with all our might because we're only desirable when we're young.
In high-school, one of my teachers asked us if we would rather be a man or a woman. I responded emphatically that I prefer to be a woman because we can give birth, and that trumps anything a man could do, period. My friend said she would much rather be a man because "there's so much less to deal with and worry about." Though I saw her point, I didn't agree at the time. Ten years later, I'd reconsider.
