“… Do the boys who say they like girls who eat big dinners have an accurate idea of what a big-dinner-eating body looks like? The actresses who talk up their french-fry habits are purposely obscuring the connection between eating and the body. The result is a culture that demands women indulge every appetite with abandon … yet look like Cameron Diaz. It’s also a demand that Diaz et al. work hard to appear to satisfy.
Furthermore, “healthy appetite” rhetoric aside, the promotion of these eating habits and these body ideals places no importance or attention at all on what is healthy for the human body, and this is central to the problem it creates for ordinary women. The message is the same: Your health and your preferences are not the point — they never are. Your sexiness, your attractiveness, and your adherence to the cultural ideals of femininity are primary.” [emphasis mine]
Eat Wave: Hollywood’s New Gluttony Girls, by Ricki Wovsaniker, Bitch magazine, Winter 2004.
Ah, yes. How I loathe eating in front of other people. Just today it was remarked that the gang ought to order a second large pizza just for me — obviously a kind-hearted joke aimed at my relative size and their perception of my eating habits. “How do you stay so skinny? Oh wait, you don’t eat hardly anything, that’s how.” Good friends of mine, and good friends of mine in the past have made the same comment. I’m not hatin’. I’m just sayin’.
Nevermind that I’m not skinny. Never mind that I eat six [unhealthy] small meals a day, rather than three squares. Never mind that I smoke like a chimney and drink cola like it’s going out of style.
I wear a size 2 or a 4, depending on the day. Do you know what? It makes me uncomfortable to even write these figures down, so teeming are they with perceived value and connotation. The average woman in America is a size 14. Marilyn Monroe was at least a 12. But a size 0 is the pinnacle, the height, the greatest achievement, right? Who could ask for anything more? A size 0. Nothingness. Zero. Erased. Why’s that a good thing?
Why should I be envied for something I can’t be proud of? And why can’t I be proud of a body whose dimensions “fit” the ideal? So what if my breasts seem too small. So what if my stomach feels too round, my butt too strange. Even at the ideal, I’m not ideal. Never could be.
Why do I still feel a compulsion to order salad, when I hate salad? Why should I feel like a pig if I’m hungry for some chicken wings, and eat 12 of them? I dunno, but I do. And why is it such a constant, constant struggle between us? I’m thinner than you, but that doesn’t make you fat. Kate Moss is thinner than me. Somebody’s got to be thinner than her. It’s a game we can’t win, we shouldn’t want to win. How does being a zero mean you win? It means you’ve achieved weightlessness, invisibility.
A sticker on a lampost on the corner of Main and Court streets in Bowling Green made my day, and I still remember it. It was a drawing of a round, voluptuous woman with wild crazy hair and an ear-to-ear grin. “Take Up Space,” it read. “Don’t Be Afraid.”
Let’s face it, the drive to be thin isn’t all about being healthy. It isn’t all about doing it for yourself. It’s about other things, too, we know this, we’ve talked about this, we have therapists for this, but we forget it. It’s about wanting to disappear. Or being in control, having power over something.
I still watch others watching me eat, judging me, trying to figure me out. Ah, so that’s your secret, you eat so slowly! I’ve got you pegged. It’s the portion sizes, isn’t it. Or the combination.
It’s none of the above. It’s sheer fucking luck, if you can call it that, nothing more. But while you envy me my dress size, you forget that I envy you, too. The ability to fill out a blouse or a pair of boots. The sheen to your hair, the glow to your skin, the curve of your hip. You possess a womanliness I fear I’ll never know.
All my life I’ve been told how little I am, how cute, how lucky. Been asked my secrets. Been secretly hated, made fun of, belittled. “I’m not thin, I’m just short.” My only fallback, my only defense. How can you defend something you have so little control over? How can this still, still be a rift between us? You think I have something you want. I think you have something I want. Why do we want we can’t have? Why do we want to be thin, beautiful, curvy, sexy? Why do we want to turn guys on, leave them panting, lusting in our dust?
How far will that get us?
Especially when we have a curvier, shapelier part to our body: our brains. You’re so fucking smart, you are, you can prove it. I know it, and I’ve seen it in you. And I’m smart, too. I know this, though I’m not supposed to talk about that, either. Let’s put our bodies behind us, feed them when they’re hungry, clothe them when they’re cold. Let’s put our brains together, instead, and see what we can make.
I’ll root for you, and you can root for me, and the boys who like their girls eating like birds or eating like horses can fucking stuff it. They don’t have to feel the hunger pangs. They don’t have to look at their bellies, their thighs, and feel disgust — not when they’re looking at ours. Not when we strive to give them something good to look at.
So let’s give them something to think about, instead. Challenge them. Rile them up. Turn them upside down. Or ignore them altogether, should we feel like it. Our bodies are ours to carry us, support us, get us from A to B. Ours to feed.
Are you with me?
