Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(4)

All my life people have told me that my body doesn’t belong to me.

As a teenager, I was walking down the street in Seattle’s International District, when an old woman rushed up to me and pushed a business card into my hand. The card was covered in characters I couldn’t read, but at the bottom it was translated: “WEIGHT LOSS/FAT BURN.” I tried to hand it back, “Oh, no thank you,” but the woman gestured up and down at my body, up and down. “Too fat,” she said. “You call.”

In my early twenties, I was working a summer job as a cashier at an “upscale general store and gift shop” (or, as it was known around my house, the Bourgeois Splendor Ceramic Bird Emporium & Money Fire), when a tan, wiry man in his sixties strode up to my register. I remember him looking like the infamous Silver Lake Walking Man, if anyone remembers him, or if Jack LaLanne fucked a tanning bed and a Benjamin Button came out.

“Do you want to lose some weight?” he asked, with no introduction.

I laughed uncomfortably, hoping he’d go away: “Ha ha, doesn’t everyone? Ha ha.”

He pushed a brochure for some smoothie cleanse pyramid scheme over the counter at me. I glanced at it and pushed it back. “Oh, no thank you.”

He pushed it toward me again, more aggressively. “Take it. Believe me, you need it.”

“I’m not interested,” I insisted.

He glared for a moment, then said, “So you’re fine looking like that and getting the cancer?”

My ears roared. “That’s rude,” was all I could manage. I was still small then, inside. He laughed and walked out.

Over time, the knowledge that I was too big made my life smaller and smaller. I insisted that shoes and accessories were just “my thing,” because my friends didn’t realize that I couldn’t shop for clothes at a regular store and I was too mortified to explain it to them. I backed out of dinner plans if I remembered the restaurant had particularly narrow aisles or rickety chairs. I ordered salad even if everyone else was having fish and chips. I pretended to hate skiing because my giant men’s ski pants made me look like a smokestack and I was terrified my bulk would tip me off the chairlift. I stayed home as my friends went hiking, biking, sailing, climbing, diving, exploring—I was sure I couldn’t keep up, and what if we got into a scrape? They couldn’t boost me up a cliff or lower me down an embankment or squeeze me through a tight fissure or hoist me from the hot jaws of a bear. I never revealed a single crush, convinced that the idea of my disgusting body as a sexual being would send people—even people who loved me—into fits of projectile vomiting (or worse, pity). I didn’t go swimming for a fucking decade.

As I imperceptibly rounded the corner into adulthood—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—I watched my friends elongate and arch into these effortless, exquisite things. I waited. I remained a stump. I wasn’t jealous, exactly; I loved them, but I felt cheated.

We each get just a few years to be perfect. That’s what I’d been sold. To be young and smooth and decorative and collectible. I was missing my window, I could feel it pulling at my navel (my obsessively hidden, hated navel), and I scrabbled, desperate and frantic. Deep down, in my honest places, I knew it was already gone—I had stretch marks and cellulite long before twenty—but they tell you that if you hate yourself hard enough, you can grab just a tail feather or two of perfection. Chasing perfection was your duty and your birthright, as a woman, and I would never know what it was like—this thing, this most important thing for girls.

I missed it. I failed. I wasn’t a woman. You only get one life. I missed it.

There is a certain kind of woman. She is graceful. She is slim. Yes, she would like to go kayaking with you. On her frame, angular but soft, a baggy T-shirt is coded as “low-maintenance,” not “sloppy”; a ponytail is “sleek,” not “tennis ball on top of a mini-fridge.” Not only can she pull off ugly clothes, like sports sandals, or “boyfriend jeans,” they somehow make her beauty thrum even more clearly. She is thrifted J.Crew. She can put her feet up on a chair and draw her knees to her chest. She can hold an ocean in her clavicle.

People go on and on about boobs and butts and teeny waists, but the clavicle is the true benchmark of female desirability. It is a fetish item. Without visible clavicles you might as well be a meatloaf in the sexual marketplace. And I don’t mean Meatloaf the person, who has probably gotten laid lotsa times despite the fact that his clavicle is buried so deep as to be mere urban legend, because our culture does not have a creepy sexual fixation on the bones of meaty men.

Only women. Show us your bones, they say. If only you were nothing but bones.

America’s monomaniacal fixation on female thinness isn’t a distant abstraction, something to be pulled apart by academics in women’s studies classrooms or leveraged for traffic in shallow “body-positive” listicles (“Check Out These Eleven Fat Chicks Who You Somehow Still Kind of Want to Bang—Number Seven Is Almost Like a Regular Woman!”)—it is a constant, pervasive taint that warps every single woman’s life. And, by extension, it is in the amniotic fluid of every major cultural shift.

Women matter. Women are half of us. When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time—that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women’s safety and humanity are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience.