Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(2)

That Sexual Tree from The Last Unicorn


This fine lady was just minding her biz, being a big purple tree, when Schmendrick the garbage sorcerer came along and accidentally witchy-pooed her into a libidinous granny. Then he’s all mad when she nearly smothers him twixt her massive oaken cans! Hey, man, if you didn’t want to get motorboated to death by a fat tree, you should have picked something thinner and hotter to transform into your girlfriend. Like a spaghetti noodle, or clarinet.

The sex-tree that launched a thousand confusing fetishes taught me that fat women’s sexuality isn’t just ludicrous, it’s also suffocating, disgusting, and squelchy.





Miss Piggy


I am deeply torn on Piggy. For a lot of fat women, Piggy is it. She is powerful and uncompromising, assertive in her sexuality, and wholly self-possessed, with an ostentatious glamour usually denied anyone over a size 4. Her being a literal pig affords fat fans the opportunity to reclaim that barb with defiant irony—she invented glorifying obesity.

But also, you guys, Miss Piggy is kind of a rapist? Maybe if you love Kermie so much you should respect his bodily autonomy. The dude is physically running away from you.





Marla Hooch


A League of Their Own is a classic family comedy that mines the age-old question: What if women… could do things? Specifically, the women of A League of Their Own are doing baseball, and Marla Hooch is the most baseball-doingest woman of them all! She can hit homies and run bases and throw the ball far, all while maintaining a positive attitude and dodging jets of Tom Hanks’s hot urine! The only problem is that she is not max bangable like the other baseball women—she has a jukebox-like body and makes turtle-face any time she is addressed—which, if you think about it, makes her not that good at baseball after all. Fortunately, at the end, she meets a man who is ALSO a jukebox turtle-face, and they get married in a condescending-ass ceremony that’s like “Awwwww, look, the uglies thinks it’s people!” (Presumably they also like each other’s personali—What? Doesn’t matter? Quarantine the less attractive? ’K!!!) The thing about Marla Hooch is that the actress who plays her is just a totally nice-looking regular woman. I always think of this thing Rachel Dratch said in her memoir: “I am offered solely the parts that I like to refer to as The Unfuckables. In reality, if you saw me walking down the street, you wouldn’t point at me and recoil and throw up and hide behind a shrub.” Hollywood’s beauty standards are so wacko that they trick you into thinking anyone who isn’t Geena Davis is literally a toilet.





The Neighbor with the Arm Flab from The Adventures of Pete & Pete


Big Pete and Little Pete spent an entire episode fixated on the jiggling of an elderly neighbor’s arm fat. Next, I didn’t wear a tank top for twenty years.





Ursula the Sea Witch


The whole thing with Ariel’s voice and Prince Ambien Overdose is just an act of civil disobedience. What Ursula really wants is to bring down the regime of King Triton* so she and her eel bros don’t have to live in a dank hole tending their garden of misery slime for the rest of their lives. It’s the same thing with The Lion King—why should the hyenas have a shitty life? History is written by the victors, so forgive me if I don’t trust some P90X sea king’s smear campaign against the radical fatty in the next grotto.





Morla the Aged One from The NeverEnding Story


A depressed turtle who’s so fat and dirty, people literally get her confused with a mountain.





Auntie Shrew


I guess it’s forgivable that one of the secondary antagonists of The Secret of NIMH is a shrieking shrew of a woman who is also a literal shrew named Auntie Shrew, because the hero of the movie is also a lady and she is strong and brave. But, like, seriously? Auntie Shrew? Thanks for giving her a pinwheel of snaggle-fangs to go with the cornucopia of misogynist stereotypes she calls a personality.





Mrs. Potts


Question: How come, when they turn back into humans at the end of Beauty and the Beast, Chip is a four-year-old boy, but his mother, Mrs. Potts, is like 107? Perhaps you’re thinking, “Lindy, you are remembering it wrong. That kindly, white-haired, snowman-shaped Mrs. Doubtfire situation must be Chip’s grandmother.” Not so, champ! She’s his mom. Look it up. She gave birth to him four years ago. Also, where the hell is Chip’s dad? Could you imagine being a 103-year-old single mom?

As soon you become a mother, apparently, you are instantly interchangeable with the oldest woman in the world, and/or sixteen ounces of boiling brown water with a hat on it. Take a sec and contrast Mrs. Potts’s literally spherical body with the cut-diamond abs of King Triton, father of seven.





The Trunchbull from Matilda


Sure, the Trunchbull is a bitter, intractable, sadistic she-monster who doesn’t even feel a shred of fat solidarity with Bruce Bogtrotter (seriously, Trunch?), but can you imagine being the Trunchbull? And growing up with Miss Effing Honey? The world is not kind to big, ugly women. Sometimes bitterness is the only defense.


That’s it.

Taken in aggregate, here is what I learned in my childhood about my personal and professional potential: