Eat the Damn Cake

Sometimes when we talk about beauty and body image, we end up talking almost exclusively about weight. It makes a lot of sense: the people who are touted as the most beautiful are almost always very thin. We’re bombarded by headlines and images that fixate on famous people’s waistlines and diets. Is Christina Aguilera too fat now? Is Kate Middleton too thin? Which actress looks best or worst in a bikini? Even pregnant, Kim Kardashian can’t escape the press’s disgust at her weight gain. (If not when pregnant, one wonders, when the hell is a good time to gain some weight?)

Meanwhile, the War on Obesity rages ceaselessly, often confusing ideas about health with ideas about physical attractiveness. Weight is always in the news, and the message is loud and clear: It is NOT OK to be heavy. Lose weight! Gain self-respect! Look better!

(I don’t even know what this means, but it looks ridiculous.)

So I get it. I get that beauty and weight are wrapped around each other in our heads. I get why so many people find themselves convinced that if they can only get thinner they will be better in every way. But there is a lot more to our cultural story about beauty, and when we talk about weight without talking about the rest of it, we aren’t being thorough. And more than that, we’re forgetting people. People who agonize over their acne or suffer from hair loss or are an unusual height. People with physical disabilities or differences. People who look “normal” to others but find themselves worrying about the characteristics that seem to prevent them from being more attractive. People like me, who have turned to cosmetic surgery when they couldn’t face their own faces in the mirror anymore. Who are we forgetting when we say “body image” but mean “weight”? Everyone who doesn’t fit the very recognizable beauty standard in a million different ways that they are sometimes acutely, painfully aware of, even when weight isn’t an issue for them.

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People think body image is only about girls and women.

When I say I write about body image, sometimes people say, “Oh, women’s issues.”

And they are right. And they are wrong.

We have imagined these big immigration fences around so many issues, as though no women can get out and no men can get in. A friend of mine who works for a domestic violence prevention organization, discussing Steubenville, pointed out that so often we talk about saving women but we don’t talk about educating men. We talk about ourselves as though we are born into separate camps and then stay there, sometimes harmed for practically inexplicable reasons by the people in the other camp, sometimes simply dealing with issues that don’t affect them, that they can’t really comprehend.

I don’t think we should ever turn a conversation about rape survivors into one that focuses exclusively on boys and men (unless we’re talking exclusively about boys and men who have been raped), and it’s perfectly clear to me that beauty rules are stricter and beauty expectations higher for girls and women. But the story definitely doesn’t stop there, and when we act like it does we perpetuate that notion of separate, fenced-off camps. I’ve always liked to climb, though.

Girls and women are able to talk about body image concerns in louder voices, in more public spaces, and guys are often just not supposed to care, so they keep quiet. Girls and women are actually not supposed to care, too, but when we do, it seems to be more forgivable. But boys and men are also struggling with the way beauty works in our world. Especially, I’ve noticed, with the way fat is demonized. But also with the other specific requirements of physical attractiveness that so many of us learn to believe in as fiercely and automatically as we believe in God or scientific fact. In the Captain America story, we fairly cheer when the slender, delicate hero is transformed into a strapping, muscle-bound fighting machine. He can save the world now, because he’s jacked. Before, there was no chance. He had to switch bodies to succeed.

(before, women just felt sorry for him…now look! source)

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We were walking in Central Park. We followed the music to the outdoor skating rink, where a figure skating competition was about to begin. We paused to watch, bundled up and runny-nosed, as little girls in bright pink leotards with miniature, flowy skirts twirled on the ice below, practicing for one more minute.

A tiny girl in pink took her place at the center of the huge, empty rink, quivering, poised. The music boomed to life, and she lifted her arms, fingers intentional, every inch exact. She launched into her choreographed dance across the shining ice, posing as she went, one hip cocked, her body language stylized, coordinatedly flirtatious. She was so small and spindly out there in the cold, a flash of color, her legs working. And for some reason it made me start to cry.  I pretended not to be crying, because, COME ON. Can we just let a kid be a friggin’ kid for a second and not a kid-shaped funnel for all of the meaning in the world?

Nope. Too many pregnancy hormones.

I felt like I was being slammed in the heart with this: one girl, purposeful and nervous, alone in the middle of the towering city, her face intent, fragile.

This is being a girl, said my brain. Not in a particularly dramatic, artistic way. Not as though I am so profound. Just, yes, this is a part of girlhood. Of growing up female. Part of it is you, alone with your body, performing for the crowd. You’ve memorized the poses, the smiles, the little feminine twirls and the teasing hand on the hip. Even if you don’t do them, you know all about them. And this performance of femininity, it’s a little dangerous—your skin is bare in the middle of the winter, and you are told to smile and to keep smiling, but you are also always a fraction of an inch from slipping and hitting the hard ice.

I am scared of having a girl. Maybe that’s why I have convinced myself I’m having a boy. 

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Pregnancy is so interesting. Immediately and constantly, people keep telling me that everything is all about the baby. I think that means I’m supposed to stop asking questions.

They said that when I was really sick for months, and I got a little depressed about not being able to get out of bed. “Just think of the baby!”

(I think this is the baby they’re referencing. source)

They said it when it looked like I might have gestational diabetes and I argued that I should monitor my blood sugar and take the accurate finger-prick A1C test instead of the standard fasting test with the 100 grams of pure sugar when I was throwing everything up anyway and it seemed to me that if there’s concern about diabetes you shouldn’t give someone a lot of sugar to drink on an empty stomach. “The point is just having a healthy baby! Just take the test and don’t worry about anything else.”

“Don’t provoke your doctor,” people told me. “Be agreeable. They know what to do, and your baby will be fine.”

They say it, I’ve noticed, about birth, in general. “Well, I had a TERRIBLE time, but they got the baby out and that’s all that matters!”

They will probably say it about motherhood, later.

But I find myself caring about the in-between moments, before the baby, surrounding the baby but not necessarily touching the baby, and yes, myself, my body, my experience of everything. Selfish.

That is selfish, I hear. Because I am now no longer one person. I am two people. And this other person, the tiny one who is poking me insistently from the inside as though trying to catch my attention, this is the one who matters most. That is being a mother, I guess.

But it can’t be. There must be more to the story. I find myself disagreeing automatically.

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This is expanded from a piece I wrote for my Mirror Mirror column. 

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People like to make things into battles, with two opposing sides. You know, like in the Mommy Wars where breastfeeding is sometimes misinterpreted as a battle cry and formula feeding is re-packaged as a ferocious counterattack. Oy vey.

I love how I automatically capitalize the “mommy wars” in my head, like it’s a real war, because it feels like I might be about to become a casualty.

Sometimes, in the world of conversations about body image, it seems like heavy women get pitted against thin women. There are a series of memes that have been endlessly cycling through Facebook with pictures of skinny, currently famous women alongside previous pinups with voluptuous breasts and hips. One caption reads “When did this … become hotter than THIS?” suggesting that our thin-obsessed culture has lost its way.

“EEWWW! She’s just skin and bones!” say the commenters.

Some guys proudly declare that they wouldn’t bang those scrawny girls.

“What the hell is wrong with people??” yell relieved women unthinkingly. “REAL WOMEN have curves!!”

And then thin women get understandably pissed. They are, after all, real women, too.

OK, timeout. While we’re talking about realness, let’s be real for a moment. The fat acceptance movement, though increasingly present and vocal, has a long way to go in terms of garnering mainstream support. We exist in a culture that fat-shames incessantly. We are told in millions of tiny and screamingly loud ways every day that fat is gross, horribly unhealthy, ugly, and unacceptable. Even thin girls and women often fight hard, and sometimes dangerously, to be thinner, because we have learned that thinner is always better.

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I read this book called Privilege about St. Paul’s, the elite prep school, and the part that really interested me was about the girls who go there and how they all have eating disorders. Well, you know, not ALL of them, but a shocking majority. They suffer from depression at a much higher rate than the boys. They also don’t get elected to leadership positions or win prizes for creativity, even though their test scores are just as high or higher than their male peers. Even though they are getting into the school at the same or higher rates.

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The girls at the elite boarding school want desperately to be thin. Thinner than they already are.

I have sometimes wanted desperately to be thinner, even though I know, and I knew then, that I am not heavy. I have felt too heavy despite this.

What is it about being thin? Why do we want that? Why do the prep school girls want it badly enough to harm themselves in pursuit of it? What is it about this intensely competitive environment that triggers so many eating disorders, so much body-hatred, so much appearance fixation?

I wanted to be thin the most when I hated my face the most. The thinness was supposed to make up for my other beauty failures. I felt that I always understood Sarah Jessica Parker’s extreme thinness because of this. Her face was a target for disdain, dismissal, mean humor, even loathing. It wasn’t the face of a model or a TV star, even though she was a TV star. So of course she was intensely thin. It made sense to me. I wanted to be thinner to distract people from the rest of me.

I was sometimes painfully different, I thought, and successful femininity seemed to be about looking enough like the girls and women other people had decided were beautiful. And looking more like them meant being less like me.

I wanted to be thinner as an apology.

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This piece appeared originally on The Frisky, for my Mirror Mirror column. 

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Valentine’s Day is supposed to be about love, right? Romance and pink things and flowers, too. It’s supposed to be about couples, but I want to selfishly celebrate by acknowledging a woman who made me love myself a little bit more. So often, I think we’re trying to make ourselves appealing and acceptable to other people. We’re worried about how we look to them, how we come across, if we’re pretty and likable. But once, when I was a kid, I saw a woman who made me think there might be another way to do things, and I’ve never forgotten her.

This is my love letter to a beauty queen.

I was nine. My dad, a Jazz pianist, was playing a gig at a beauty pageant. I don’t know why. But for some reason, he was playing in a little Jazz band at intermission at a local high school beauty pageant. I really wanted to go.

My mom, who wouldn’t let me have any Barbies because she was concerned about the insidious messages about beauty and femininity they were transmitting to all of us unsuspecting little girls, said I could go, because of the music. She wasn’t thrilled, but my dad swore that he was going to work the melody of the sh’ma, the simple, central Jewish prayer that we were so familiar with from synagogue, into his big solo. He thought that would be really funny. And my brothers and I couldn’t wait to see if we’d spot it. And I couldn’t wait to see the girls in the pageant. What would they be wearing? Would they be very beautiful?

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