Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(5)

I watched my friends become slender and beautiful, I watched them get picked and wear J.Crew and step into small boats without fear, but I also watched them starve and harm themselves, get lost and sink. They were picked by bad people, people who hurt them on purpose, eroded their confidence, and kept them trapped in an endless chase. The real scam is that being bones isn’t enough either. The game is rigged. There is no perfection.

I listened to Howard Stern every morning in college. I loved Howard. I still do, though I had to achingly bow out as my feminism solidified. (In a certain light, feminism is just the long, slow realization that the stuff you love hates you.) When I say I used to listen to Stern, a lot of people look at me like I said I used to eat cat meat, but what they don’t understand is that The Howard Stern Show is on the air for hours and hours every day. Yes, there is gleeful, persistent misogyny, but the bulk of it, back when I was a daily obsessive, at least, was Howard seeking validation for his neuroses; Robin cackling about her runner’s diarrhea; Artie detailing the leviathan sandwich he’d eaten yesterday in a heroin stupor, then weeping over his debasement; Howard wheedling truth out of cagey celebrities like a surgeon; Howard buoying the news with supernatural comic timing; a Sagrada Familia of inside jokes and references and memories and love and people’s lives willingly gutted and splayed open and dissected every day for the sake of good radio. It was magnificent entertainment. It felt like a family.

Except, for female listeners, membership in that family came at a price. Howard would do this thing (the thing, I think, that most non-listeners associate with the show) where hot chicks could turn up at the studio and he would look them over like a fucking horse vet—running his hands over their withers and flanks, inspecting their bite and the sway of their back, honking their massive horse jugs—and tell them, in intricate detail, what was wrong with their bodies. There was literally always something. If they were 110 pounds, they could stand to be 100. If they were 90, gross. (“Why’d you do that to your body, sweetie?”) If they were a C cup, they’d be hotter as a DD. They should stop working out so much—those legs are too muscular. Their 29-inch waist was subpar—come back when it’s a 26.

Then there was me: 225, 40-inch waist, no idea what bra size because I’d never bothered to buy a nice one because who would see it? Frumpy, miserable, cylindrical. The distance between my failure of a body and perfection stretched away beyond the horizon. According to Howard, even girls who were there weren’t there.

If you want to be a part of this community that you love, I realized—this family that keeps you sane in a shitty, boring world, this million-dollar enterprise that you fund with your consumer clout, just as much as male listeners do—you have to participate, with a smile, in your own disintegration. You have to swallow, every day, that you are a secondary being whose worth is measured by an arbitrary, impossible standard, administered by men.

When I was twenty-two, and all I wanted was to blend in, that rejection was crushing and hopeless and lonely. Years later, when I was finally ready to stand out, the realization that the mainstream didn’t want me was freeing and galvanizing. It gave me something to fight for. It taught me that women are an army.

When I look at photographs of my twenty-two-year-old self, so convinced of her own defectiveness, I see a perfectly normal girl and I think about aliens. If an alien came to earth—a gaseous orb or a polyamorous cat person or whatever—it wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference between me and Angelina Jolie, let alone rank us by hotness. It’d be like, “Uh, yeah, so those ones have the under-the-face fat sacks, and the other kind has that dangly pants nose. Fuck, these things are gross. I can’t wait to get back to the omnidirectional orgy gardens of Vlaxnoid 7.”*

The “perfect body” is a lie. I believed in it for a long time, and I let it shape my life, and shrink it—my real life, populated by my real body. Don’t let fiction tell you what to do.

In the omnidirectional orgy gardens of Vlaxnoid 7, no one cares about your arm flab.





Are You There, Margaret? It’s Me, a Person Who Is Not a Complete Freak


The first time I was informed that my natural body was gross and bad I was at a friend’s house. We were eight or nine, still young enough to call it “playing” instead of “hanging out,” and my friend looked down at my shins shining with long, iridescent blond hairs. “Oh,” she said with recently learned disgust, “you don’t shave your legs?” I went home and told my mom I needed a razor. I can still see her face.

“You know,” she said, equal parts pleading and guilt-tripping, “your grandmother never shaved her legs, and I always wished I hadn’t either. Her leg hair was so soft. You can’t get that back.”

“Mom, it’s fine,” I groaned. I’m sure I was short with her. I didn’t want to be doing this either.

I was never one of those kids who couldn’t wait to grow up. Childhood was a solid scam! I had these people who bought and cooked my food, washed and folded all my clothes, gave me Christmas presents, took me on trips, kept the house clean, read out loud to me until I fell asleep, found me fascinating, and spent pretty much all their time constructing a warm, loving, safe bubble around me that gave order and character to life. Now that I’m a grown-up, what do I have to show for it? Audiobooks, taxes, dirty hardwood floors, a messed-up foot, and negative a hundred dollars? A realistic ad campaign for adulthood would never sell: Do you like candy for dinner? And plantar fasciitis?