The other night, I got together with some friends to workshop my friend Lilia’s poem. It was a good poem, which is to say, it was written with attention to the experience of language. I love sitting around and talking through a piece of writing like this, because it’s a rate opportunity to immerse yourself in something. Of course you’re doing this with some rigor and distance—cut a line here, add a comma there—and of course you can step back and make judgments, privately or out loud—this is your best work, this is not very good—but this is all secondary to the task of letting yourself live for a little inside the piece of writing, and learning to breathe in it, to move inside it, to float along at the pace of the sentences without passing judgment or trying to categorize.
After some time, we put the poem away and we all had a lot of wine. During this part of the evening, me and Lilia began explaining the phenomenon of Kibbe Body typing to the rest of the group, who sat there looking sort of amused and horrified. “We know it’s basically race science,” we kept saying, before demanding to see everyone’s hands so that we could comment on the length of their fingers, or squinting at their facial features to determine whether they were “blunt” or not.
The Kibbe Body typing system is a taxonomy of human bodies—theoretically useful for men and women alike, though you can guess who uses it more—in which an individual can be sorted into one of five “families”: dramatic, natural, classic, gamine, and romantic. These five families can then be broken down further into various subfamilies. The categories are based on the dichotomy of yin and yang, in which yin represents softness and curviness, and yang represents length and angularity. Invented in 1987 by a guy named David Kibbe, the system typing is enjoying an absolute surge of renewed popularity on the internet right now. In fact, so are a whole array of taxonomies promising to sort your body into discrete categories, if only you can get through the labyrinthine process of actually determining which category you belong to.
According to its devotees, the Kibbe system is an improvement over other many popular body-typing methods, because it:
Celebrates and brings out your natural features rather than trying to hide them, and
Approaches the body with more nuance and detail than less-advanced equivalents.
Both of these things may both be true. But as far as I can tell these factors are not, in fact, what actually distinguishes Kibbe. What makes Kibbe special is actually the fact that you are not actually supposed to find your type. Seek it, sure. Find it, not really, except in a kind of incidental way.
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