It's the time of year where, in many and varied parts of the country, your legs get covered up unless you are the kind of lady who invites frostbite. If you are not, that means pants and jeans and cords and, if you cannot give up your dresses and skirts (who can?), thick tights. Thick tights means that I do not want to bother with shaving my legs. I hate shaving my legs. It takes too long and because I enjoy the kind of dexterity and physical aptitude that is actually nonexistent, it is also a fraught process, filled with pain and blood and weeping. I welcome the oncoming cold weather overlord! Except I realized that it's not good for me, to just stop shaving.

Photo via Splash

I do this thing, in photographs, where I am trying to be funny, but also I am secretly hoping that it is actually sexy, too. It is my Sexy Face. Sometimes it is pouty, with kissy lips and squinty eyes, my chin angled down and my cheeks hollowed out. Sometimes it is Very Intense, with my shoulders twisted at a dramatic angle, my chin thrust forward and my eyes bulging with the Intensity of my Intense Emotion (which is "Wanting to Totally Do You").

Both these looks, which I secretly hope are devastatingly attractive, are, pretty objectively, not devastatingly attractive, and not sexy. They are, in fact, very goofy and kind of hilarious. They're even more hilarious when you know that I wish in my heart that they weren't actually hilarious and instead, made you want me very badly, in your pants.

You don't need me to tell you that women feel like hell, when they compare themselves to scrawny models with BMIs in the toddler range and endless legs and impossible standards of grooming and beauty and boobage. We think we could never, ever compare, and we are right, because we don't have a team of experts to follow us around and touch us up.

It turns out, though, that in a tiny study, it was found that after men perused beautiful, sexualized women spread out and just asking for it in men's magazines, that they, too, experienced negative body issues and insecurity. They felt that they were not hot enough or sexy enough to possibly ever attract the attention of such a beautiful woman, and therefore that they were losers.

The takeaway is not that men have body image issues too, and we are all in this together. We knew that. It sucks for guys, too, to have to struggle with issues of attractiveness and sexiness. I empathize. But what sets my teeth on edge--and tell me if I am wrong--is confirmation that that's what men want. They want the skinny girl with the giant, improbable tits, the wild mane of hair for pulling, the legs that go on forever and ever, the icy-perfect Photoshopped expanses of wrinkle-free, pore-free skin. What this study seems to be saying is that men are thinking that not only is it okay for women to look like that, but it is, in fact, a man's ideal--the ideal that we so often say is damaging for everyone, the ideal that everyone says men don't really want, because what they really want is a real woman with meat on her bones, curves and softness and loveliness.

I spent most of Saturday at a meeting, eating a lot of oats. As it turns out, larger quantities of oats and my belly don't get along so well--to be fair, much of that oatmeal came in the form of cookies and bars, but still. I waddled out of the door feeling distended, and bloated (blOATed! ha!) and a little bit ill. When I got back to my hotel room, I took off my sweater, glanced at the mirror and kind of gasped--my entire belly was poofed out, as if I had just sat and eaten a whale, except it took me significantly under 89 years. I don't think I've ever noticed such a direct result of food on my body, ever, and it was strange to see.

I recounted the story to a friend of mine--"And I was so bloated and distended! I was huge! It was amazing! Biology is amazing!" Eventually talk turned to other things. Eventually, a few drinks in, we started to talk about body image, as we sometimes do because we are both fascinated by it. And she turned to me and said, I have to tell you: It sounded to me like you were complaining that you were fat and unattractive. She said that the first thing she thought was that if I thought I was fat and ugly with a big old gut, then what must I think of her, and the size of her stomach?