While browsing through Instagram, watching endless hours of YouTube workout videos (that you’ll know you’ll never actually attempt), or even scrolling through your Tumblr, it’s almost impossible to miss the latest body fascination: hip dips. What are hip dips, you ask? Hip dips are simply the space between the pelvis and the thigh bone. When regarding society’s coveted hourglass figure, such a space does not exist. Instead of a slim-thick, perfectly shaped hourglass silhouette, the hip dip creates a more violin-like figure.
Hip dips, scientifically called the ‘trochanteric depression’ exist simply because of bone structure. The two important bones to consider when discussing hip dips are the femur (thigh bone) and the pelvis. As Abby Pollock, YouTube fitness personality, explains, “The parts of your lower body that tend to stick out or be wider than the rest are the ilium and the point where your femur connects into your hips… understanding that these two areas stick out, the greater the distance between the top of your ilium and the point where your femur connects in, the more pronounced these dips or stick out points are going to be.” Just taking into account the nature of the pelvis and how much it protrudes on the human skeleton, it is safe to say that “hip dips” are completely normal and are nothing to be ashamed of. When we live in a culture that is so hyper-focused on the “ideal” outward appearance, many more diverse body types are often underrepresented or even ignored by mainstream media.
The figure that women are encouraged to strive for is a figure with full hips. However, which figure is actually more common among women? Contrary to popular belief, the figure with the hip dip, is vastly more common. In fact, only about nine percent of ladies have dip-less hips. Regardless, the images women see everyday through social media, magazines, and the like don’t contain hip dips. Countless models, celebrities, Instagram models, and other figures in the public eye have fuller hips without a indent in sight. The lack of diversity when it comes to body types portrayed in the media perpetuates that idea that merely having dips in your hips isn’t acceptable and is something that needs to be changed. As we reach the acme of the summer, the amount of workouts, diet plans, and even surgeries that advertise “fixing your hip dips” is only increasing.
Truth be told, a lot of women didn’t even know their hips were a “problem” that needed “fixing” until the media told them it was.
Clearly, without positive rhetoric regarding body image and body type existing in the mainstream media, it’s easy to feel the need to change your body to please others. The height of summer is here, and with it comes promises of happiness if only you buy a diet plan, or buy this fitness schedule, or get cosmetic surgery to “fix” your hips. While there is nothing wrong with healthy dieting, working out, and cosmetic surgery, feeling pressured into these kinds of things is dangerous. Dieting, working out, surgery, and the like, should be a choice you make for yourself and not for anyone else. Luckily, people have already started working towards a culture that promotes body positivity and self-love. Body positivity blogs and social media accounts like mariedenee (@thecurvyfashionista) promote self-love and not self loathing. Fitness YouTubers like Abby Pollock focus on ways to work out and improve your health and physique while striving to improve the way that you feel about yourself. So instead of idealizing one specific body type over another, it’s imperative that we as a community highlight the beauty of each individual; culturing a society based on self-love, and not self-deprecation.
love thiss