I’d followed this ‘rule’ all my life. Finally, I decided to reject it

I’m sitting on a bus on my way to the city when a group of teenage girls get on. I guess they’re 13 or 14, full of joy and exuberance, with their messy braids and handmade bracelets. They take the back section of the bus, a couple of rows behind me. I’m not paying much attention to them until one of the girls asks another a question that hits me like a blow: “Do you think I could pull off a bikini?”

It’s a question I have asked myself too many times. I know the insecurity festering within it. I also know how much life I and so many other women have missed out on because the answer to that question was too often no. I think of all the times we’ve sat on the edges of pools, the shores of beaches and the sidelines of life because we felt our bodies were too gross to reveal to the world.

This girl is essentially asking if she is allowed to wear a bikini. Already she’s learnt to believe that someone else gets to decide if her body is acceptable and if she’s qualified to wear a certain item of clothing.

Many of us carry scars from the “rules” we are taught to follow in our youth.Credit: Getty Images

It’s madness, but we accept this – I have heard grown women having the same conversation. It’s as if we think there is some merciless fashion dictator who decides who is allowed to wear a bikini and who is not. And we all fear the punishment that might be meted out should we be so foolish as to defy them.

When I was in high school, a teacher took all the girls in my grade aside for the very important lesson of working out which fruit or time-keeping device our bodies were. While the boys were off playing on the oval, the girls were assigned a body type: apple, pear or hourglass.

Long before we understood issues like compound interest and climate change, my peers and I were being schooled in the crucial matter of our body’s flaws and how to disguise them. And yes, this was during school hours, as if it were just another part of the curriculum, like learning quadratic equations or verb conjugations.

While the boys were off playing on the oval, the girls were assigned a body type: apple, pear or hourglass.

Me? Apparently I’m a pear. This was devastating news for someone who was already wearing a DD cup bra. If my boobs were that big, I thought, then my hips must be massive.

As a result of my genetic misfortune, the teacher told me that I must never, ever, wear horizontal stripes. The message was delivered with the same seriousness and gravity as “don’t do drugs”. So, of course, I listened. I seriously believed that minimising my curves was an essential life skill. I might not remember how to do long division any more, but for more than two decades I did not allow a horizontal stripe to emblazon my person.

To make this story even more pathetic, I really like stripes. For more than a quarter of a century, I looked longingly at clothes with horizontal stripes and never bought them because I believed I did not deserve to wear them, all because some teacher whose name I don’t remember told me I shouldn’t.

I glance back at the teenager on the bus and think about how she gave away her budding power to a faceless fashion dictator, and then gave away the remaining scraps of her power to her friends by letting them decide if she was qualified to wear a bikini.

Every time we start a sentence with “Can I get away with…” we are disempowering ourselves. Despite the multibillion-dollar fashion, advertising and social media industries trying to convince us otherwise, there is no damn rule book. There is only one rule: If you want to wear a bikini, wear a bikini and be fabulous. If the bikini fits your body, you have a bikini body. You do not need to pass a test, meet external criteria or get anyone else’s approval.

By the time I get off the bus, I’m fuming. I’m so sick of being told there is something wrong with me. I’m so over being ashamed of my body in its natural state, of feeling like I have to hide it, pluck it, conceal it, starve it, shrink it. By adhering to these pressures, I’m essentially letting other people control me.

I’m so frustrated. Why do I give my power to industries, and society in general, to decide if I’m enough? As long as I allow this to happen, I will never be able to like my body. Or myself.

I pop into my favourite clothes shop and buy myself a T-shirt with, wait for it, horizontal stripes. I ask the shop assistant to cut the tags off. I walk out of the shop wearing it and it feels like one of the most rebellious things I’ve done in my entire life.

Edited extract from Goodbye Good Girl, Hello Me (Penguin Random House) by Kasey Edwards, out now.

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