Have you ever shopped at Lane Bryant?

As a child, I waited around beside my mother as she shopped rather often; I busied myself with some random Star Trek: The Next Generation novel or whatever while my mother gazed intently at racks of clothing I never understood or cared about. Never fashion conscious, never clothes savvy, I remember Mom inspecting row upon row of flowing formal dresses and boxy 1980's super shoulder working wear, all to display the proper synergy of omniscience and benevolence to poor rural fifth graders in Isle of Wight County, VA who still remember her as the first person in their lives who made education important, who made learning matter. My mother, is a teacher. Looking back, I don't remember my mother shopping for herself very often; most of her elementary school teacher's paycheck evaporated in order to feed and clothe and care for me and my niece, and to pay bills with my father. I wish my mother would have treated herself more.

At any rate, when she looked for a new dress or blouse, among other places my mother shopped at Lane Bryant. So I remember walking around the nearby store in Greenbrier Mall, Chesapeake, Virginia, at ages five and eight and ten, after time spent in Sears or electronic boutique. In case you've never heard of it, Lane Bryant is a store for 'plus size' women. The franchise's website describes the company as "the fashion leader in women's plus-size clothing, sizes 14-28". As memory serves, my mother spent her hard-earned paycheck in Lane Bryant because she always felt that along with attractive fashion and decent prices, Lane Bryant exuded respect for larger women as the overall tone and philosophy of their stores. In recent years, celebrities like Queen Latifah and Camryn Manheim have appeared in Lane Bryant advertisements; they promote healthy, beautiful women with style and glamour in the public sphere who don't need to squeeze into size 2 denim to feel human. I've always found Lane Bryant to be a respectable company.

A few weeks back, Angel (happy birthday, sweetie!) and I walked through an unbelievably large mall in New Jersey that had a Lane Bryant store. I wouldn't have noticed the shop at all because of my childish rush to locate the LEGO store, but in the Lane Bryant window was this picture:



Her name is Kimberley Locke, and she is fine. Obviously. Just look: the picture screams confidence, style, and warmth, not to mention extreme beauty. An open, graceful smile, a generally cheery attitude, and an all-killer-no-filler body left me dumbstruck, craning my neck as we passed by the store. (Mind you - I was walking with Angel, arm-in-arm; and I never notice other women, on the street, in advertisements, anywhere. No one pays me enough to commit suicide. ) Ms. Locke, a longtime singer and former American Idol contestant, is the new national spokeswoman for Lane Bryant's Seven7 Jeans, and currently tours to promote the clothing line. What I admire most about the pictures I've seen from her tour is how respectable the clothing frames her shape. It's never sluttish, always classy. She looks good.

I've never found beauty in a 'plus size' woman odd. The Black suburban community where I was raised was saturated with big, beautiful, Black women, who synthesized style and grace and class with inhuman ease. Street level Black culture has always respected larger women, in my opinion, out of necessity, to a greater degree that mainstream America. Of course, everyone is exposed to the dismaying pages of Cosmopolitan and People magazines, and Black women do accrue layered and complex body image concerns because of mainstream media input and internal Black male misogyny. Black men's stereotypical preference for lighter, Whiter women congeals a color complex our greatest minds have never quite excised from the darker nation's Y chromosomes. Still, growing up, larger women were always presented as healthy - to reasonable degrees; anyone who eats healthy foods and exercises regularly is generally healthy there, whether weighing in at 110, 150, or 180 pounds or fitting size five, seven, nine, or fourteen clothing. Please note, when I speak of the 'larger' Black woman, I refer to women who are of more mass than the mainstream White female beauty ideal marketed by American fashion and movie and print and medical industry media, nothing more. Examples? Lisa Nicole Carson instead of Calista Flockhart. Serena Williams instead of Anna Kournikova. Raven-Symone instead of Hilary Duff. It's not hard to figure out.

Hell, even all of the patently anti-woman audiovisual dogma hip hop produces daily reflects in some respects these communal African American origins. Your average rap video on the disgrace-to-the-race Black Entertainment Television from Ludacris or Snoop Dogg or Lil' Jon features women too voluptuous to shop in Abercrombie & Fitch or The Gap or American Eagle. The trendy SoHo boutique I pass by every day to travel to work features clothing that would be lost on video vixens like Ki Toy Johnson or Buffie the Body. Sure, Kanye West and David Banner will feature shapely Black women bobbing and weaving and bouncing and shaking their softer parts on camera to please men, without concern for sexist implications of the softcore corporate pornography they produce to sell rap records; this is as undeniable as it is unhealthy. However, all the 'bitch and ho' rhetoric notwithstanding, hip hop as a musical culture patently rejects the hillbilly heroin chic the rest of America injects daily.

Conversely, you're much more likely to find the Ying Yang Twins or Ice Cube or Twista fantasizing in rhyming couplets on the divine nature of round, brown posteriors and thick, rich sepia thighs. BET's Uncut shows practically nothing but booty videos of all budgetary proportions where Black women shake, rattle, and roll their asses as if their lives and your libido depended on it. Your average Black male rap fan probably has a mental list of favorite hip hop ass videos he can recite at will. If you care, the top of my list was once a tossup between Tupac's "I Get Around" and Dr. Dre's "Nuthin' But a G Thing", but then I saw Nelly's "E.I. (Tip Drill Remix)", produced by David Banner. Ass and breasts and thongs, oh my! I was twelve again - hormonal and horny and home alone. Without warning, MTV's favorite St. Lunatic ran an African American Express through a Black woman's bootycheeks, which she shook with capitalistic glee before unblinking 3 AM voyeurs nationwide. Ghetto Approved!

I know its wrong to like that video; I know that six minute celluloid oppresses women with it's very existence. But damn! Did you see that ass? Hey, I'll go to hell long before I reach Spelman, so I can understand Spelman's female protests of his presence. Nelly's "E.I. (Tip Drill Remix)" is unclean Black hedonism, degrading our race's morality every time its played. The visceral pleasure one derives from such a display devolves the African American woman - regal, intellectual, invulnerable - to your local automatic teller machine. And I'm beyond caring. Think about it: on some level, hip hop realizes it oppresses and dehumanizes women for corporate music's profit, and has already moved beyond therapy for those continued transgressions. Hip hop is anti-woman, yet its most feminist contributions still include a healthy support of and love for female forms of multiple sizes. Remember, the one plus size actress mainstream America cares about today - Queen Latifah - is a hip hop original.

Therein lies the paradox of hip hop misogyny - more than any other form of popular modern music, hip hop earns derision and disrespect for its infantile Neanderthal behavior toward women. In word and deed and mind, from every casual 'bitch' epithet to every scantily-clad half-naked video vixen to Dr. Dre slapping Dee Barnes to Tupac's conviction for sexual battery to Eminem's audio Abu Gharib of every one of his important female family members older than age ten to Lil' Kim's hypersexual clitoris rap to Kimberly Jones' plastic surgery to XXL's requisite Eye Candy photo pages to King magazine's presence as a low-budget rip-off Black man's Maxim to all hip hop pimp/player/mack references to the absence of any lyrically respected and commercially successful Black female emcees to hip hop's unneeded machismo homophobia, declaring any woman unwilling to wear dental floss and translucent gauze from Baby Phat on 106 & Park to promote her new album a butch lesbian - hip hop hates women. Yet the healthiest body imagery pop culture displays in reference to female size and weight can be found in hip hop. Men are more likely to appreciate larger, more realistic female physical shapes if they are exposed to hip hop influences and celebrities. Hell, Jennifer Lopez taught all of White America in the late Nineties that having a plump posterior was sexy and desirable- an obvious fact hip hop helped her market. Props to Sir Mix a Lot as well; mainstream Ivy League fraternity brothers still base 1991's "Baby Got Back" at their parties. They dance, drunkenly and off beat, with the skinniest, palest, flattest bottle blonds you can imagine, but they're with the brothers in spirit.

Fashion runways from New York to Paris promote the underfed and Teutonic as Nature's highest specimens of beauty and culture while reality television and pop music style Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson into America's beloved idiot princesses, mindless prodigies in wealth and glamour who laugh and sing and prance and fuck for public enjoyment and private mirth, beloved and adored by all as perfectly manicured humanoid mannequins, lithe and lifelike, posable and disposable, present-day permutations of a Victorian ideal outdated and repressive in it's own era. Meanwhile, you need a hip hop video to find a woman over one hundred fifty pounds displayed as attractive or desirable or sexy -- and not 'fat person sexy', but just sexy. Jill Scott. Floetry. Deborah Cox. Faith Evans. Kelly Price. Missy Elliott. True, the last two did lose a lot of weight publicly, but I recall brothers from my hometown of Portsmouth, VA commenting on how good Missy's thighs looked in more recent videos. When's the last time a red-blooded American White boy wanted to fuck Renee Zellweger?

Maybe it's a Southern thang, a cultural holdover and modern phenomenon resultant from slavery's fatty impact on soul food, or the modern impact of ever-worsening New South obesity trends, that explains African America's easygoing support for and love of larger women. The bulk of Black America still lives in the Southern states and composes, in part, the poorest, fattest American populations; those more likely to eat fast food three or more times a week, shop at big-box stores like Wal-Mart or Sam's Club or Costco, consume large portions of fried, fatty, greasy food at buffet style restaurants like Golden Corral, and barbeque more red meat than a Colorado rancher's convention are Southern Blacks. A leading risk factor for hypertension, high blood pressure, and heart disease, obesity, in the Black community, is older than our Negro spirituals, but the often unsung corollary is that positive body image among us is just as ancient. Again, I believe this occurs from necessity - the matriarchal Black community possessed voluminous examples of assertive, aggressive, intelligent, efficient Black women, who get things done and don't take no stuff, just like their mothers and their mother's mothers. Being put down over size is not, on the macro level, an option for these women. They are too busy working.

Apple pie Americana could use a double helping of fried chicken feminism.


(Shout outs to Crunk & Disorderly and Solitare Redux for Lil' Kim and Raven-Symone links.)