Eat the Damn Cake

It must be nice to be a “natural beauty.” To be gorgeous without effort or even interest. This type of beauty is perhaps the most impressive. It’s like being a piano prodigy, except that you don’t even have to touch the keys*. You can just stand around. You can sit. You should probably not eat too much, but otherwise, you’re good, because of God and genes and accident.

(don’t even worry about it… source)

It’s hard to escape the concept of natural beauty. Once in college I was in a religion seminar, and the guest lecturer, a world-traveling, leathery-tan man with an impressive literary biography described in detail the beauty of the pious Muslim girls he’d encountered on his wild desert journeys. One girl was maybe fifteen, but she radiated a kind of primal loveliness. A dewy, untouched sex appeal. Holy shit, did he actually use the words “sex appeal” in describing her? He might as well have. Rapturously, he recalled how even her thorough hijab could not conceal her bursting beauty. Unlike Western girls, and here he glanced around the table at our tired, effortful faces, this pure blossom didn’t even have to try. She simply embodied beauty. She had, somehow, regardless of politics and oppression and discrimination and whatever else, won.

I was disturbed. Why were we talking so much about this girl’s appearance in the first place? Why was this man so comfortable objectifying, exotifying, and eroticizing her, especially in an academic setting?

But we are always talking about girls’ appearances, actually.  And, in practically every context, “natural” beauty is praised.

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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.

(source)

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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I couldn’t write anything yesterday except for poems about Sandy Hook. I couldn’t stop reading the articles. And today, instead of writing about that, because I don’t feel able, I’m writing about something else entirely. 

I finally read “Marry Him,” by Lori Gottlieb. She’d written that big Atlantic piece a while back, and then the book, which is an argument in favor of settling for a good-enough man (if you’re straight and want to get married, otherwise she’s not writing for you), because you’re probably not going to find a perfect one.

(source)

I don’t know what made me want to read the book. No, I’m lying—I’m remembering now. It was a comment under her recent piece in the Times Magazine about therapy branding. Someone said something like “EYEROLL! Like I’m going to believe anything from the woman who single-handedly convinced women that they were nothing without a man and should marry the first lame guy who came along so that they didn’t have to die alone. Thanks A LOT, Lori.” Or something to that effect.

And I was curious, because single-handedly convincing women that they are nothing without a man sounded sort of impressive for one book. And I’m sick. So my brain sucks right now.

So I read it.

And I’m still not exactly sure what I think, which is why I’m writing about it.

Basically, Gottlieb argues that when women are in their twenties, they reject everyone, all the time, because they’ve learned that a better guy will come along and they will eventually settle down with him. But even when great people come along, these women continue to reject them, because there might be someone better out there. And then, all too soon because time is so fickle, the women are almost forty, and the good men are taken, and now the women have to either learn to make compromises, or they can just up and die alone, forty-five or so years later.

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I am lying in bed, sick, watching Hulu because the inspiration has drained out of me. And the holiday commercial for Victoria’s Secret replays and replays. I can’t look away.

Supermodels with breasts like plastic fruit, so round, move in slow, calculated adjustments, their skinny flanks decorated with proud ribs- a precise school of dolphins, surfacing suggestively.

“Love me,” they murmur. “Desire me.” They say it as though they already know that we do. Sometimes a voice whispers, but their mouths don’t open, as though it’s the lingerie talking. They smile wickedly, sweetly, smugly– whichever way they’re supposed to.

(source)

After all these years of living in this country, in this city, in this culture, I am still faintly surprised for some reason, that they are almost naked. I don’t know why. It’s a reaction that comes up from childhood, maybe, from somewhere deep and certain. I am indignant at their nakedness, because I can’t seem to avoid it. I don’t have a choice except to keep shutting my eyes and turning away.

“It doesn’t matter,” I tell myself. “Why should it matter?”

When I was a kid, standing in line at the grocery store with my mom, I felt like I couldn’t look away from the women on the covers of the magazines, with their glossy skin and upthrust breasts and pouting lips and sultry, shadowed cheekbones. They were always women, and they were always sexy. Occasionally, a man is on the cover of something, but often he is wearing a sharp suit that covers everything. Often, a woman is completely naked, with strategically placed hands, or flowers, or something ironic and playful that references a recent role she’s been cast in. Money, puppies, whatever.

But women who speak of the pressure they feel to look a certain way, who agonize, who fixate, who buckle under the pressure, who get cosmetic surgery, who complain, who mention our insecurity—we are considered vain.

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The truth is, my face has let me down. I thought it would turn out prettier, with better bone structure. As a kid, I thought that because I was good at stuff, I was pretty too, or at least should be. Good and pretty should go together.

My belly has let me down. It refuses to be sucked in.

My proportions are not neat, tight, sexy. I see a friend in something glamorous, and I know it won’t work on me. I might wear it anyway, but it won’t look the same.

And I am disappointed, sometimes, in how I turned out, physically.

I think that’s fair.

I used to think I should swallow the disappointment or ball it up and stuff it into a corner, plug the hole where uneasiness seeped in. I should smile more, put my shoulders back and face the world and be thankful and look myself in the mirror and say, “Damn it, you’re beautiful, woman! You’re beautiful because you look like yourself!”

But I have all of these other images of what beauty looks like stuck in my eyes, so that they waver, floating, translucent, over my face. All of these other faces taunt my own. And they’re the pretty ones. They are how I should have looked, might have looked, if I were luckier.

(source)

And I think it’s fair to think that way, because it’s true, there are so many images of beauty that we’ve all memorized. And there is so much certainty about them. And there is so much belief in beauty as something critical for girls and women. And when people don’t like the women who write things on the internet, they call us ugly.

“UGLYUGLYUGLYUGLY” yelled a man from the comments under this blog. A scream of rage. How can such ugly an woman be allowed a voice? Ugly women are worthless! Women who say things that people don’t like are ugly! Being ugly is the worst thing a woman can be! 

But it isn’t the disappointment in my appearance that I want to address, now. Because I think that’s fair and to be expected.

Instead, I want to remind myself of the ways I have surprised myself by being better than I expected.

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I used to think that if I could change something about myself it’d be my nose. I’d give myself this straight, fine, elfin nose that authors are always ascribing to the faces of graceful women characters. The kind of women who look good even when they’re really tired.

And then I thought that it would be my neck. To be a graceful woman, you need a long, slender neck, according to so many movies. I have watched too many movies, probably. I probably care too much about grace.

And then, later, I thought, no, I need my legs to be different—longer, leaner, more coltish. Coltish because we women are always basing our beauty on very young things.

But right now, I don’t really care about any of that. If I could change something, it would be inside my head. I would change this strange fragility. This dangling blown glass orb of my mind that catches the light and spills tiny rainbows everywhere, but that is always waiting for the fall. That shudders at being brushed against, spinning, bobbing, set into frantic motion.

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Of course I’m a writer, I think sometimes, when I’m angry at my mind. Writers are classically depressed, stereotypically anxious. Writers dance along the thin line of sanity, slipping eloquently over sometimes, describing it in all the right adjectives.

Writers are often a little unhinged.

Or maybe they just tell us about it.

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You know that moment, where you’re gripping some of your side fat in the bath, and you just ate all of the leftover spaghetti at once, with pesto and tomato sauce and grated cheese and, weirdly, liverwurst, and you’re thinking, “Tomorrow I will go to the gym. And then I’ll go every day after that, for the rest of my life. And I will lose weight. It’ll be easier than I expect it to. And then my hair will grow out and it’ll be thicker than last time. And then I’ll be prettier. And then I’ll wear sleeveless dresses all the time and I’ll be happy”?

(like this! source)

That moment is lying to you.

I don’t know when I learned it, but somewhere along the way to twenty-six, I had very deeply, very seriously internalized the idea that after I got prettier, things would be better.

You have to think that way, to get cosmetic surgery.

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