Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(18)

I was hooked. Late at night, I started furtively clicking through fat-positive tags on Tumblr like a Mormon teen looking at Internet porn. Studies have shown that visual exposure to certain body types actually changes people’s perception of those bodies—in other words, looking at pictures of fat people makes you like fat people more. (Eternal reminder: Representation matters.)

I discovered a photo blog called “Hey, Fat Chick” (now, crushingly, defunct) run by an effervescent Australian angel named Frances Lockie, and pored over it nightly like a jeweler or a surgeon or a codebreaker. It was pure, unburdened joy, and so simple: Just fat women—some bigger than me, some smaller—wearing outfits and doing things and smiling. Having lives. That’s it. They were like medicine. One by one they loosened my knots.

First, I stopped reacting with knee-jerk embarrassment at the brazenness of their bodies, the way I’d been trained. I stopped feeling obscene, exposed, like someone had ripped the veil off my worst secrets.

Next, they became ordinary. Mundane. Neutral. Their thick thighs and sagging bellies were just bodies, like any other. Their lives were just lives, like any other. Like mine.

Then, one day, they were beautiful. I wanted to look and be like them—I wanted to spill out of a crop top; plant a flag in a mountain of lingerie; alienate small, bitter men who dared to presume that women exist for their consumption; lay bare the cowardice in recoiling at something as literally fundamental as a woman’s real body. I wasn’t unnatural after all; the cultural attitude that taught me so was the real abomination. My body, I realized, was an opportunity. It was political. It moved the world just by existing. What a gift.





The Red Tent


In August of 2010, the Stranger got an e-mail from an organization called “Vashon Red Tent,” advertising that “A Red Tent Temple Sisterhood Is Coming to Vashon.” Vashon is an island, accessible by ferry from Seattle, mainly populated by NIMBY-ish hippies, NIMBY-ish yuppies, boutique farmers, and wizards riding recumbent bicycles. A full quarter of the children in Vashon schools are unvaccinated. The “Red Tent Temple Movement,” the press release read, “envisions a gathering honoring our stories and promoting healing in every town across the country where women of all ages meet regularly to support one another and monthly menstrual cycles.”

The only thing I knew about Anita Diamant’s novel The Red Tent, which inspired the movement, was that one time my college roommate read it and then announced to the rest of us that she wanted to go “bleed into the forest.” It didn’t feel like a good sign. This event, clearly, was my worst nightmare. The paper, clearly, RSVPed for me immediately.

I dragged my friend Jenny along with me, and we barely made the ferry. On the bench next to us there was a woman with long frizzy hair and high-waisted jeans. She was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of cats in sunglasses playing saxophones, and above the picture it said, “JAZZ CATS.” “There are a lot of different ways to be a woman,” I wrote in my notebook. Jenny and I were running late for menses tent, but we stopped by the grocery store anyway to buy some boxed wine and anxiety jelly beans. We sat in the parking lot and wolfed beans and got as tipsy as we could in the time allotted.

My sister is into this sort of thing. She loves ritual. She’s forever collecting shells for her Venus altar, or tying a piece of ribbon to a twig in a secret grove, or scooping magic waters up into very small vials to make potions. Being around my sister feels magical. When we traveled through Europe together (following the path of Mary Magdalene, doyeeeee), we didn’t miss a stone circle or a magic well—tromping over stiles and up tors and always leaving little offerings for the fairies. Once, in Cornwall, we looked down into an aquamarine cove and she said, “Do you see the mermaids? They’re sitting on that rock.” I said no, and she looked at me with pity. On the way to the Vashon Red Tent Temple, I texted my sister for advice. “I’m on my way to a new moon celebration at a menses temple,” I said. “Liar,” she said. “It’s true! Any tips?” “Stay open to a new flow and wave good-bye to the blood of old that nurtured you well.” I knew she’d know what to do.

I almost didn’t go in. It was too intimate and foreign, and I am clinical like my mom. I like magic as escapism—I barely tolerate fantasy books set in our universe (the first time I cracked a Harry Potter novel I was like, “Yo, is this a documentary?”)—pretending that the supernatural is real just drives home how much it’s not. But we did, we walked in, removed our shoes, and joined the circle of women seated on pillows beneath the homemade canopy of red scarves. It wasn’t really a “tent” so much as a pillow fort inside a community center, but it did the job.

The women were talking about chocolate, which was such an adorable cliché that I fell in love with them instantly. “There is definitely a goddess of chocolate.” “I read somewhere that the molecular makeup of chocolate is so unique that it was probably brought here from another planet.” One woman passed a Hershey’s bar around the circle. “This chocolate is even better now that it’s passed through the hands of so many goddesses,” said the woman next to me, appreciatively.

There was chanting.

Isla, the leader of the circle, said that right now there is an astrological configuration—the Cardinal Cross—that has not occurred since Jesus was alive, and that she and the other local angel healers are very busy “holding that energy.” She explained that the media tells us that things are terrible and violent, but that this is actually one of the most peaceful times in history. We should not focus on the negative. Later, I asked my sister what an “angel healer” is, and she said, “Well, you know, angels are just the same thing as aliens. They’re probably the ones who brought the chocolate.” I asked about the Cardinal Cross, and she told me, “If you’re going to have a baby, have it like tomorrow. It’ll be a superbaby. Dude, remind me to send you a picture of the cosmos right now. It’s fucking out of control.”