My dad was friends with Bob Dorough, an old jazz guy who wrote all the songs for Multiplication Rock, Schoolhouse Rock’s math-themed sibling. He’s that breezy, froggy voice on “Three Is a Magic Number”—you’d recognize it. “A man and a woman had a little baby, yes, they did. They had three-ee-ee in the family…” Bob signed a vinyl copy of Multiplication Rock for me when I was two or three years old. “Dear Lindy,” it said, “get big!” I hid that record, as a teenager, afraid that people would see the inscription and think, “She took that a little too seriously.”
I dislike “big” as a euphemism, maybe because it’s the one chosen most often by people who mean well, who love me and are trying to be gentle with my feelings. I don’t want the people who love me to avoid the reality of my body. I don’t want them to feel uncomfortable with its size and shape, to tacitly endorse the idea that fat is shameful, to pretend I’m something I’m not out of deference to a system that hates me. I don’t want to be gentled, like I’m something wild and alarming. (If I’m going to be wild and alarming, I’ll do it on my terms.) I don’t want them to think that I need a euphemism at all.
“Big” is a word we use to cajole a child: “Be a big girl!” “Act like the big kids!” Having it applied to you as an adult is a cloaked reminder of what people really think, of the way we infantilize and desexualize fat people. (Desexualization is just another form of sexualization. Telling fat women they’re sexless is still putting women in their sexual place.) Fat people are helpless babies enslaved to their most capricious cravings. Fat people do not know what’s best for them. Fat people need to be guided and scolded like children. Having that awkward, babyish word dragging on you every day of your life, from childhood into maturity, well, maybe it’s no wonder that I prefer hot chocolate to whiskey and substitute Harry Potter audiobooks for therapy.
Every cell in my body would rather be “fat” than “big.” Grown-ups speak the truth.
Please don’t forget: I am my body. When my body gets smaller, it is still me. When my body gets bigger, it is still me. There is not a thin woman inside me, awaiting excavation. I am one piece. I am also not a uterus riding around in a meat incubator. There is no substantive difference between the repulsive campaign to separate women’s bodies from their reproductive systems—perpetuating the lie that abortion and birth control are not healthcare—and the repulsive campaign to convince women that they and their body size are separate, alienated entities. Both say, “Your body is not yours.” Both demand, “Beg for your humanity.” Both insist, “Your autonomy is conditional.” This is why fat is a feminist issue.
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.