Someone stole my body from me. The whole thing, all of my pieces. I think I’m locked up somewhere dark now.

I know, because when I look down at myself, I don’t see me. I see all of the things I should be instead of being myself.

I’ve been stealthily, expertly, completely replaced.

Aliens?

I noticed it the other day, smoothing cream over my legs. Well, these legs, anyway. The ones that attach there, at the base of the torso. I was rubbing the moisturizer into them and I had this image of my head of other women smoothing other, probably more expensive, moisturizer into probably more expensive legs. Better legs. Legs that are longer and lither and tanner and sleeker. Legs that get described in books, lovingly, sometimes almost flippantly, like, of course. Of course, if she’s here, important enough to get a mention; she has these long, fabulous legs.

“I love your short legs,” said Bear, randomly, and I was insulted. “Short” was an insulting word for a second, and then I realized that he was being sweet, and he was serious, somehow, and he had, after all, started off with the word “love.” But “love” and “short” and “legs” do not work together in my mind, because I’ve memorized instinctively all the right proportions and measurements (even though I suck at numbers) and I know what is worth loving.

But I don’t know what is worth loving. Because I am worth loving.

I feel like I have an expert eye for beauty. It’s because I’m an artist, I’ve told myself. I have always painted. But really, it’s because I’m a girl.

In the mirror, over my face, hang hundreds of other, more successful faces. They have hung there for a long time now. Many years. It doesn’t even really bother me most of the time, because I’m so used to it. But I have this memory of being a kid, and holding a silver hand mirror that looked like an antique but really it wasn’t and just staring at my own beautiful face from different angles. I adjusted the light. I pouted, I smiled, I widened my eyes and played with my hair, and wow, I was splendid. I was perfection. I was fantastically complete. I was almost mythically original. I was in love with myself. Just the way you’re not supposed to be. It’s so conceited.

Is it conceited, when you’re a little girl? How quickly is it important that you learn how wrong you were, to think you were so right?

Being in love with myself was the best. I miss it sometimes, even now. I want it for my unborn daughter.

She is a wild one, I think, as she kicks hard inside my belly. She is a strong one. And I realize that I am most afraid that she will forget that wildness one day. That she will accept and want more than anything to be acceptable. My wish for her, my desperate desire, is that she will be able to laugh loudly and roll her eyes and crush judgment under her boot and say, “Fuck this noise. I’m awesome.”

I am learning, slowly, slowly, to say that. But I’m still whispering, and I’m still uncertain, and I’m still nervous that someone will call me out on it, and go, “You don’t count! You’re just bitter because you’re not sexy enough!”

That is what they say to so many women, who speak up. As though beauty is a pacifier, and some of us are born with it in our mouths and we’re too happy to ever spit it out and learn how to eat real food.

And then they say about women who are doing big things, “She doesn’t look good.” And they think it’s funny. I hear them saying this, and I shrink a little, afraid that if I ever do anything big, they will say the same narrowing, slicing, dissecting things about me and it will make me somehow smaller. I will be reduced to my parts, like the cow in my freezer, which I think of in terms of which cuts are most desirable, easiest to cook.

It’s ridiculous, amazing, how afraid I am that someone will just shout out, “You are ugly!”

As though that, alone, is enough to crush me into nothingness. As though that, as a summary, is the most succinctly cruel thing someone can say.

You are ugly= you are meaningless

It would be easier, always, to be more beautiful, I think. But how badass would it be to be ugly and powerful and not give a shit? Are we there yet? Can a woman do that yet?

I take a step, and I am pulling all these trailing, featherlight carcasses. These faint overlays of other women, imaginary, perfected women. Like plastic bag litter in oily water, filmy, clinging. Their limbs coat my limbs, drift back, wrap around me. Their hair is tangled in my hair. Their breasts, translucent, hover over mine, fuller, showing my breasts the failure of their lines, emphasizing the emptiness in the air where there should be flesh and fullness.

I know, intimately, casually, everything that my body has gotten wrong. The sloppiness where I spill over, outside of the trim, clean lines that beauty stays neatly inside, like an obedient child with a steady hand who is preternaturally expert with the crayons. Even pregnant, which I have never been until now, I already know how to evaluate my new shortcomings. The belly should be higher, rounder, smaller. I am growing large so quickly, unstoppable, out of control. My ankles thicken defensively. Even my pregnant body has been sneakily coopted, labeled, taken away from me. The version that is handed blankly back has all the usual notes scribbled across its surface. “Not quite right,” “Bulky,” “Could be better executed—we’re looking for something a little bit more…fluid.” “Missing a certain natural beauty.”

I am missing a certain natural beauty, even though this is what I naturally am.

I am missing myself.

When did the theft occur? The investigation falters almost immediately—it was done gradually, bit by bit, over many years, starting very young. So quiet, so persistent, impossible to accurately track, no one exactly to blame.

I reach up, rub my neck, sitting for a long time in the audience at a concert. I feel a certain softness that isn’t right. It doesn’t feel like the right kind of neck. Not that I have touched so many women’s necks. How would I know? But I do, somehow. It should be longer, more taut, thinner, more graceful. It should be, it should be, it should be.

I should be…

I am touching myself through the world’s fingers. I feel this body like a foreign territory. My brain has been swapped for a critic’s brain, so that I can’t stop evaluating, measuring, sizing myself up.

But at the same time, I remember my face in that heavy silver handmirror. The one that came in a silly set, with a brush too decorative to ever use on my opinionated hair. But the mirror was a portal, and my face was the magical place on the other side. I loved my own green eyes. I loved the way I aligned. The whole thing was so beautifully mine.

And I think that face—the warmth of the memory—is a clue. It’s a breadcrumb on the long trail back to where I’m hidden in the murky dark. To the place where my stolen body waits.

I haven’t lost it completely after all.

I focus, swatting away the other faces that settle, suffocating, over my features. Underneath all these layers, all these miniscule rules that all add up to not ever being good enough, my green eyes look back at me as though across an enormous distance—are they pleading?

I am coming! I sometimes want to tell them. I am coming to save you!

I am coming to save me, on these thickened ankles, belly first, carrying the weight of my daughter. So that she will someday have a mother who knows how to fight. Who can crush doubt under her boot and look up and wink and just go, “Fuck this noise.”

*  *  *

Unroast: Today I love the way I look from the side

It seems like one Harvard professor or another in exceedingly blue, alarmingly stiff jeans is always coming out with a pop psych book about happiness and how misunderstood it is.

(source)

Apparently, people make a lot of the same mistakes about happiness over and over. We keep thinking that we have to work really hard to get to it, and do certain tricky things to capture it, sort of like that scene in Avatar, where they have to bond with the giant flying dinosaur things, and they’re just as likely to get killed, because you have to really earn that bond—not just any Na’vi can fly! But man, when you stick your hair tentacle into your bird dinosaur’s tendril thing and make that platonic, yet soulmate-y connection—there is NOTHING else like that shit. So worth it.

My point is, we expect happiness to be hard. But (apparently) it isn’t really. And instead of fighting and waiting for it, we should probably just work on recognizing where it’s already sneaking around in the shadows of our current lives, like a little smiley cat burglar.

I think it’s like that with beauty and self-acceptance, too.

Lady mags are always telling us what easy steps we can take to get our bodies beach-ready by the summer, and fitness program ads shout encouraging things about reaching your goals and hauling your fat ass up that mountain of old habits and deliciously high carb food to the other side, where a smirking, hotter you is waiting, sipping a wheatgrass infused carrot protein drink. If we work harder at pilates, if we buy more age-defying makeup with science-y looking commercials that show cells bouncing around being healthier and shinier, if we finally manage to calculate that precise mathematical formula of facial shape + length of neck + relation of space between the eyes to width of chin to dimension of nostrils that will result in us at long last establishing what exactly the right haircut is, THEN, and only then, will we look great. And we will feel great, too, because we look great. And who doesn’t feel better when they look better?

During some magical, thrilling time in the future, every one of us has the potential to feel truly good about ourselves, because we will be a lot sexier than we are right now.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much we’re taught to think about our potential future sexy selves. Pregnancy is really a wild transformation, like one of those nature videos with the leaves going through their life stages on fast forward, so you can see them bud and grow and green and brown to death and drop off all in the span of like a minute. I feel like I am one of those sped-up sequences, with my body changing practically every day. And as this is happening, I keep reading stuff geared at pregnant women that urges us to think about our post-birth bodies already. To make sure we’re setting ourselves up to bounce right back and reclaim our tight, lithe, pre-mom selves. And honestly, I’m kind of offended. I’m like, give me a friggin’ second to just be huge and pregnant over here! I get all defensive: “Maybe I like my enormous belly, OKAY? Is it going to be alright with everyone if I think it’s pretty cool that there is an entire HUMAN BEING in my abdomen right now?”

And then I think that maybe we should get indignant about this stuff even when we’re not carting around entire tiny humans in our bellies. Because maybe we look really good already, but we’re just so used to expecting to find something wrong with our hair that we don’t even notice.

  (source)

It is entirely possible, I think, that we have learned so thoroughly that true beauty is something just outside of our grasp and self-acceptance is waiting alongside true beauty that we are missing out on how cool we are right now.

And even if we don’t happen to look gloriously lovely but are just failing to pick up on it, it seems a little ridiculous to spend so much energy working to get more gloriously lovely all the time while neglecting to work on feeling better about how we already are.

Because, really, there is no magical moment when you find the fantastically science-y concealer that perfectly balances the complicated pH of your mysterious skin and then you look and feel obviously better forever. Because even when people do get a fabulous haircut, they find themselves nitpicking and criticizing soon thereafter.

We have learned too well to keep searching and waiting and hoping. Appreciating your appearance isn’t a frivolous or impossible fantasy—it should be a basic exercise in emotional well-being. If we care enough to keep buying crazy cosmetics and feeling guilty over eating dessert and stressing out over that startlingly unforgiving three-sided reflection in the department store fitting room, then this stuff matters. It affects our quality of life. It affects our happiness.

It’s time to stop waiting to change and improve and get sexy and get your beach bod. It’s time to stop expecting a long, cold fight. It doesn’t have to be that hard. Instead, look in the mirror and think about what you really like about what you see. Because this is you, right now, with the only body you can have in this moment.

After I have my baby, I don’t intend to try frantically to rush back to my slimmer, tighter body. Instead, I want to appreciate the fact that my body just did some seriously impressive stuff. Having a baby is a big deal. But just having a functioning body is a big deal, too, when you think about it. Being appreciative of it shouldn’t be a ridiculous, improbable undertaking—it just makes good, solid sense.

So please, please, when you catch yourself thinking about the things you need to improve about the way you look and how long it might be before you can chip away at the block of your not-sexy-enoughness until something better is finally revealed—stop yourself. Think of those very earnest Harvard professors in their very blue jeans. They are wearing those jeans for you, because they’ve spent so much time researching the way you think that they didn’t notice the fashions gradually changing, over the years. It’s honorable, really. It’s self-sacrificing.

We have learned that beauty is about pursuit and inadequacy. We have learned that we can’t have it yet, or maybe ever, but we’re supposed to keep trying anyway. Let’s get smart and look at the data and look at ourselves in a way that makes us happy.

You might be surprised by what is already there. You might be surprised by how much you like yourself, right now. Maybe, secretly, defiantly, you even like some of the things that you’re not supposed to. I have always loved my squishy thighs, for example, it just took me a while to admit it.

But why not love the way we are, as much as we possibly can? Really, it seems lame not to. If your non-sexual soulmate winged dinosaur was already here, just placidly waiting for you to jump on and fly, would you say no? Well, you shouldn’t! And maybe it already is. So get on that rainbow-colored reptilian joy machine and don’t look back!

You know what I’m saying.

(source)

A version of this piece appeared originally in my Mirror Mirror column

* * *

What do you like about yourself that you didn’t expect to?

Unroast: Today I love the graceful way I sometimes imagine I am moving, as I walk.

I was thinking about therapy the other day. My therapist and I have drifted apart over the past six months or so. We had been doing phone sessions, which was great because it allowed me to eat while talking to her, and also load the dishwasher. But eventually, even those became complicated, with her new job schedule and my relentless morning sickness. And, without any formal farewell, we became unhooked and slipped apart.

The dishes have suffered. I’ve been trying to decide if I should make an effort. If I should reach out to her, or find a new therapist.

It’s often hard to explain to myself exactly why I maybe should, because therapy is often vague like that. I used to get annoyed at listening to my own problems. And then I’d have to talk about that. Which is awkward. The whole thing is awkward. Once my therapist said to me, laughing, “Kate, you overthink everything!” I liked her for that.

But when I think about therapy now, the part that frustrates me is really more about storytelling than anything else. Actually, a friend of mine who is a successful storyteller, like, as a thing, not just as an expression, said something about how in therapy she feels aware of the things she has to leave out to tell a certain story about her life. There are all of these contradictory, complicating details. There are all these details that are really the beginning of a totally different story or interpretation.

(source)

The truth is, we all need to tell ourselves stories about our lives all the time. It keeps things manageable. We get this sense that we have some idea of who we are. We sort out characteristics and assemble something that comfortingly resembles a personality. People, like dogs and chimps and probably caterpillars, too, like the reassurance of identifiable patterns. We pat ourselves on the back for being a person who consistently hates the taste of licorice—it’s a clue! Have you ever notice how proud people sometimes seem of their little weirdnesses? Oh, I NEVER wear periwinkle! It makes me nervous about buying people gifts, because what if I am forgetting one of their major quirks? What if I get them something in periwinkle by accident?

One of the things that’s so frustrating about trying to explain Bear, or anyone I really love, to other people, is that I always have to leave so much out. And as I describe him, I feel myself narrowing his character into something simpler, more consistent. But I love him for a million other tiny details, a million more quirks and other, bigger things, that might render his character confusing in the telling. He is deliciously bashful/he is quietly cocky—these realities blur and blend and twist each other into different shapes all the time. I love him in this indescribably big way, like water sloshing over the top and seeping into everything. My love is sloppy and undiscerning an all-encompassing. Sometimes I am horribly afraid that he will die and I won’t be able to preserve even the imprint of him—of my love for him—because I won’t be able to ever recreate the infinite complexity of the particulars—he’ll just be a faint fossil outline. I am not smart enough or observant enough or a good enough writer to preserve his wholeness, or even close.

And I think that all of this is why I don’t feel like analyzing my childhood, or my parents, sometimes. Even now, as I approach parenthood myself. I feel a little gross when I do it, like I’m always getting something obviously wrong. Like all I can remember about Louie C.K.’s show was this one joke and a loud farting sound. I’m translating poorly into a language I don’t speak with enough fluency for nuance. Thank god for fart humor, I guess. Really, I’m thankful. But there needs to be more.

(classic! source)

Especially growing up so unusually, like I did, outside of school, I sometimes don’t know how to make sense of myself.

I had a wildly free childhood, bursting with innocence, where I spent hours in the woods, following the stream, pretending to be the heroine in an epic tale. There was something untouched, holy, fantastical about it.

I was sheltered, but that’s OK.

Or should I be a little resentful at how unprepared I was, to face the other girls my age in college? How bowled over I was, by their different definitions of friendship, by their lightning-quick once-overs, their unspoken rules, the awful, intimidating ways they had fun, the foreign ways they were cool, the effort they made for beauty that I didn’t understand but soon understood painfully well—all the more painful for not having known it before.

My innocence was complicated, growing up. I was sexually confident. People don’t associate that with innocence. I was proud of my mind, and I operated in the adult world without too much trouble. There was something badass, unapologetic about me, then, I think. Something helpless and fragile and embarrassing, too. Something brittle about my aggressive self-confidence. Something charming about my bluster. Something frighteningly earnest or refreshingly upfront. I don’t know.

Why did I grow to hate my face enough to cut it open? How did I let myself slide into perpetual self-criticism? I remember telling myself a very hard-lined story about the way I looked: bad. And I needed to be proactive and try to fix it, and then life would be better in so many ways. I would probably just start winning things, because people would want me to win, because they’d be rooting for me, because I’d be prettier. See? Logic!

Later, I told myself a story about my childhood, and how all that naïve, dorky self-acceptance had left me naked and vulnerable to the eventual onslaught of beauty rules and subtly ruthless social ideas about femininity that left me shredded, bloody-faced, shivering in the cold of my own sudden, fundamental failure. I mean, I am literally writing a memoir about this. It’s definitely a story I’m telling.

But it’s not a totally simple story, either.

And when I let it be un-simple, I don’t know what to blame or thank my parents for.

I’ve tried, for a while, to figure it out. My parents are, after all, fascinatingly, dramatically flawed. You know, like people are. They might make easy targets, if I were to start firing angrily. And I can get angry, thinking about the stupid things they did or didn’t do. The ways they missed some important point.

But right now, as I waddle towards the beginning of parenthood myself, I find I am less interested in solving them. I look around, and it seems like everyone is weird in one way or another, and plenty of people had strange upbringings that set them apart in certain ways. And ultimately, most of us just don’t know why we are exactly the way we are. It’s too intricate and our lives are too sprawling and we are too influenced by too many things to keep track of.

As time shrinks, and I am swept nearer to the edge of parenthood, I don’t want to waste another moment trying to figure myself and everything else out. It’s never right enough to justify the angst. Instead, I feel almost lavishly forgiving. I forgive my parents. I forgive myself. I forgive the world for being extravagantly confusing and big.

It’s kinda all I can do, I think.

I want to start motherhood open-hearted and nonprescriptive and wide-minded. I will, of course, tell myself plenty of stories along the way, but I want to also remember that every time you tell a story, you don’t tell a lot of other ones. And those stories are often just as true, just as real. Maybe, at least, I can pick one where I look good in all the colors I like. Where I have a cool face. Where I am open-ended, unsolved, still fresh and learning. I figure we’re all always like that, anyway, the whole time, until we die.

(a periwinkle dress. source)

*  *  *

I don’t even know what to ask. This was such a meandering post. Do you feel you get something out of therapy, if you go? Do you like to analyze your parents?

Unroast: Today I love the way I can really appreciate other women’s beauty, sometimes, without being jealous. Or, maybe I’m a little jealous, but I’m mostly appreciative. Sometimes. It’s nice.

Giveaway results from the baking giveaway: The winner is Jodelle Brohard, commenter #53 under the post about sexy back hair. That’s just fun to write. Congrats, Jodelle!! I’ll send your email address to the giveaway sponsor and get you hooked up with some baking swag

And here’s a cake pic! From reader Ashley (she blogs here), who says: Here is a pic of me, no make-up, hair not done, and probably wearing the clothes I slept in, going at my son’s birthday cake! I just turned 29, have been married 9 years and given birth to 6 kids in the last 6 1/2 years, no twins.  I figure I am more than entitled to make my cake and eat it too.

I LOVE it!!! Send me your own cake pic — kate@eatthedamncake.com.

What’s Happening To My Body Book For Girls was very clear about the stages of breast development. There are five, and the last one, in the illustrations, is very complete-looking. I was pretty excited about getting there. When I read the book, I was twelve, and my body was full of secret promise. I might grow up to be a supermodel! I sometimes sketched myself as the adult I imagined I’d be. In these sketches, I had long, straight pale hair, even though my current hair was tangled and dark. It just seemed like things would be really different then.

But after I went through puberty, things…weren’t. Where were my breasts? I had been promised some breasts! God clearly owed me a couple, in exchange for the raging period that menaced my favorite white pants and the horrifyingly uncool world of extra-thick sanitary pads. Instead, God, or perhaps it was the boob fairy, passed me by and awarded a magnificently extravagant pair to my best friend, who had until then resembled a delicate blond pixie herself. Now she was alluring and irresistible to boys.

(is this the boob fairy? source)

“So,” said a boy I had a crush on at camp, after we’d escaped together into the night to sit by the moonlit river and share our teenaged souls, “are your boobs, like, really little? They look kinda little.”

Well, then.

The indignities didn’t stop there. Some of you may remember my bridal boob stories. For example, the one about me trying on my wedding gown: As I twirled in romantic slow-motion in front of the fitting mirror in my billowing wedding gown, the saleswoman remarked, “We’re going to need to do something about the chest…” She stopped me mid-twirl and gave it a poke. “Are you actually wearing a bra right now?” she said, in disbelief. I was.

(better chicken cutlets. source)

One bra, as it turned out, was not nearly enough. Two sets of cloth chicken cutlets were inserted into the bodice, and by the time the seamstress was done, my dress, when I stepped out of it, had a truly impressive figure. Sort of a Marilyn Monroe va-va-voom! We looked nothing alike, actually, my gown and I, and I felt a little self-conscious in its presence, as though it might be eying me skeptically, as I shivered in my underwear, and feeling that it deserved better.

“What should happen,” said the saleswoman, making a little joke and looking at my maid-of-honor (that same best friend from childhood), “is she should give you some of her breasts! Right?! She doesn’t need all of that, and you sure do!”

It is maybe interesting (if you’re interested in stories about other people’s boobs, or lack thereof) that I didn’t develop some sort of complex, based on all of this. I attribute the fact that I didn’t almost entirely to my big nose, and how much of my body image energy I had to expend worrying about that. I didn’t agonize over the size of my breasts, but I always had a vaguely disappointed feeling about them. Like, well, this didn’t work out optimally. Maybe we should get a consultant in here and see if we can work up a strategy to improve performance. I always sort of hoped that things would improve. I gained some weight, and my breasts made a valiant effort to fill a B cup, without success.

And then I got pregnant. And of course, I wasn’t thinking about my breasts, I was thinking about the fact that my entire life was going to change, and holy shit, how do you even begin to prepare for that?? But then, in the midst of all the existential inquiry, as I started reading about the changes my body would experience, my heart soared. I was slated to gain two whole pounds of boob weight!! This was going to be epic!

(epic! source)

On the pregnancy messageboards, women were already complaining, midway into the first trimester, about how huge their breasts were getting. “Ugghhh…I had to buy ANOTHER bra!! They are SO GIANT now. My cleavage is out of control!!”

I had never been fortunate enough to experience cleavage of any kind, let alone the kind that had gone wild. I couldn’t wait.

“Your breasts are definitely bigger,” said Bear, who knew this was how pregnancy worked and was dutifully watching my body change, with maybe a hint of gentle eagerness when it came to the breast situation. But his comment had that tone people use when they say to each other, “It looks like you’ve lost weight!” when they just feel they should say something and the other person doesn’t actually look like they have.

I barfed my way through the first trimester and emerged into the second full of hope. Onward! The months flew by, as I hurried to assemble something resembling a nursery and get my career in shape (still trying!). My belly expanded enormously, and suddenly, I desperately needed maternity clothing. I needed pants with those extremely high secret waist-bands that reminded me of old Jewish grandfathers who have moved to Florida and now belt their sporty white pants just below their nipples. What I didn’t need was maternity bras. Nope. My old, ratty, padded ones fit just fine. Well, not just fine. There was still a gap there, where my boobs could not fill the whole cup. My cup STILL did not exactly runneth over. It ranneth significantly under.

(but maybe it’s half full? source)

I’m in the third trimester now. My belly is bold and proud and round. Inside it is a little girl who will possibly experience some disappointment when she hits puberty one day. The women on the pregnancy messageboards are very upset about how colossal their boobs have become. And I am thinking that it’s probably about time for me to get over these little boobs of mine. They seem to like being the way they are, and honestly, I have to give them some credit for that. There are many advantages of course, to having small breasts. I know, I know, I’ve written before about the perks, shall we say, to remind myself and everyone else.

But I’m not going to sit here and give myself a stern lecture about gratitude and the subtle joys of small-breastedness. Instead, I’m going to hand in the towel and simply acknowledge that my boobs have won. Their will is stronger than mine. Not even pregnancy can shake their persistent commitment to being exactly who they are. And come on, that’s pretty impressive.

So I’m willing to call it quits, on the condition that I can feed my daughter, which, I hear, is an important part of the point of having breasts in the first place, anyway.

Still, I hear that when the milk comes in they get suddenly very large…

No. I’m not going to think about it. It’s about time I stopped.

This piece is adapted from the version it appeared in originally on Daily Life. I know I’ve mentioned the whole little breasts during pregnancy thing on this blog a couple times, but as usual, I felt compelled to then write a whole piece about it. You know, get it off my chest for good :p

*  *  *

Anyone else got a pregnancy boobs story? Are you one of the people whose breasts get enormous? Of course, non-pregnant boob stories are welcome as well.

Unroast: Today I love the way I look in soft gray, soft fabric. I just want to be comfortable right now!

Here’s a short hair pic from a reader (I keep dropping the ball on reader pics, but remember that you’re always welcome to send me one of you eating cake or you with your new short hair cut, and I will publish it, because I love to share these)!

Patricia told me: My hair has been many lengths in my life. Like you I have a love/hate relationship with it. Although I have had short hair before I had never buzzed it. One of the reasons was the idea in the back of my mind, that I might have a funny shaped head. As it turns out I don’t ! My 9 year managed to share the headlice he picked up at school with me, and as I  was basically to lazy too do the whole nit pick thing with both of us, I shaved us both down.

I, of course, love it! Thank you for sharing these, Patricia!!

OK, maybe not incredibly epic. But still. (This is adapted from my Mirror Mirror column, because I couldn’t just leave it to an unroast. I had to tell the whole damn story)

A little over a month ago, I stopped using shampoo. And, speaking as someone who has clearly never been in serious bodily danger, it felt like I was being very brave. Just a couple days, I told myself reassuringly. And then, when you look like a horrifying ball of dripping grease, you can do the rational thing and return to the sweet comfort of purifying chemicals and delectable fragrances. Because that is totally how I think of shampoo, when pondering its many virtues alone in the shower.

Honestly, I’m not sure what motivated me to attempt this reckless experiment. An article about the mountaineers who have scaled Everest’s ferocious flanks? That documentary on Netflix about the dude who illegally, triumphantly walked the high wire between the former World Trade Center buildings? Maybe just a quiet, deep-rooted sense of “now or never.”

A quick summary of my relationship with my hair (and please know that I am intensely aware of the fact that I recently wrote a piece critiquing the phrase “first world problems” and that this whole piece might fit into that phrase very neatly):

I did not ever want to be someone who cared about her hair. I picture myself as a kind of fiery, absentminded librarian-to-the-dragon-king type. You know, a Cimorene from Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Cimorene didn’t care about her hair, she was too busy running away from home to have awesome adventures, while her silly sisters fussed in front of the mirror, prettying themselves for visiting princes. The thing is, Cimorene had naturally fantastic hair. Those fantasy heroine’s, no matter how adorably tom-boyish, always do.

It also turns out that I might be, disappointingly, nicer than I am fiery. But that’s another thing.

My hair and I have a long and tangled history. Literally. When I was a little kid, I sometimes cried as my mom combed the vicious knots out of it. It took forever. I grew it down to my waist as a teenager, and later walked into a barber shop and asked for a buzz cut. My hair and I tend not to get along—you could say we have a kind of persistent, bitter rivalry going.

(I think I grew it down to my waist so that I could occasionally dress up like this, alone, in my room)

Part of the reason is that it can never make up its mind. It doesn’t fit any of the familiar categories. It’s not straight and not curly. It’s sort of wavy, but sometimes with distinct curls and also with very straight sections. It gets creative with cowlicks. It was very thick for a long time until one day it thinned dramatically (it turned out that I was very anemic at the time, but even after my iron levels were back to normal, my hair stayed fine and soft). It is even an indeterminate color—a shade of brown that sometimes looks dark and sometimes light. It’s obnoxious. It’s unpredictable. I never know what to do with it, and it makes me nervous. After all these years of living with my hair, I still feel suspicious, wary, unsure of what will happen next. I am still a novice. Which is why, I think, I get sort of superstitious sometimes. I get dependent on hair products when one of them seems to for just one blessed day coax my hair into looking nice. I start to believe that this exact kind of shampoo followed by that precise amount and type of conditioner is the only thing between me and the devastating certainty that I have the worst hair a woman has ever had.

I have been known to pour just enough of my special shampoo into a little bottle, like some sort of magical elixir of good fortune and youth, and take it along with me on a trip, in case the hotel shampoo is too unfamiliar-smelling and unhelpfully composed. It felt like a risk, gingerly applying the guest shampoo in my mother-in-law’s guest bathroom. My mind was whirring, trying frantically to calculate the humidity and conducting cost/benefit analysis concerning the different settings on the blow dryer. Or no dryer at all?

And then my mother-in-law’s shampoo seemed to work wonders—or maybe it was the humidity? And I rushed out and bought a bottle for myself, for home, and I used it for a year, as a precaution, even though it was no longer clear that it was doing what it did that one, glorious day. Just in case another brand would make things that much worse.

The day after I stopped using shampoo, I thought that I was the butt of some cosmic joke. The cosmos, having a slower day, fewer exploding stars and stuff, must be sitting around laughing to itself about my hair. Because it looked really good. Sort of wild and springy, the way I like it best, because it looks most like fantasy heroine hair when it does that. This couldn’t be right.

Days went by. My hair was hydrated, full, and, if I do say so myself, quite adorable. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I went through several reactionary stages. Disbelief, joy, apprehension, and then a pure, burning indignation. Psychologists, take notes. How could this be? I thought. How could I have spent so much money on shampoo over the years? How could I have believed myself to be so dependent on it? How could we all be led to believe that we desperately need these products to make us clean and presentable and fit to participate in civilized society, when, in fact, they might be nothing more than a coconut-scented illusion?!

A primal scream erupted from my lips as I knelt there, naked, on the floor of the shower, water streaming down my face, my arms raised in sinewy defiance (in this image, my arms have to be sinewy-it’s important).

No. No. I didn’t get down on my knees in the shower. But I stood there, brow probably furrowed, scowling as I rinsed out my hair with some regular old water until it didn’t feel very greasy anymore. I felt as though I’d been deceived. I felt lame for not trying something like this until now.

And now, a little over a month since I last used shampoo, I am still sort of surprised that this is a secret. My hair hasn’t actually become fantastic, dragon-taming, royal-library-cataloguing hair. It honestly doesn’t look incredibly different from before. It’s just a little healthier and fuller, and a little better moisturized. It feels nicer to touch, in my opinion, and it doesn’t smell perfumed. It doesn’t really smell like anything.

(yes, this happened. i got that dagger at a flea market, for like $7, and i treasured it. it looked amazing with all of my elfyn warrior girl outfits. and i had a lot of those. god, this is embarrassing. why am i even sharing this?)

I can’t go so far as to say that my hair and I have become friends. We’re on decent terms, and that’s fine for now. But my new no-shampoo lifestyle has definitely raised some questions for me about the products that I grew up thinking were absolutely, critically necessary, and the ways that we all become almost superstitious about our beauty and personal-care routines. I don’t know if everyone else’s hair would respond as favorably as mine to forgoing shampoo—maybe not. But it definitely seems worth giving it a shot, based on my experience. It definitely seems like there’s a chance we’ve all been taken for some kind of cruel, sudsy, coconut-smelling ride.

And just like a rebel princess who faces down dragons without blinking, I am willing to be the one to step into the wilderness of the unknown, wild-haired, brave-hearted, without even a single 3 oz. travel-sized bottle of comfort shampoo tucked into my gown.

(I know, you’ve totally seen this photo before in another post, but apparently I have no other close ups of myself since I stopped using shampoo. Full disclosure, my hair is actually greasier in this pic than normal– I think maybe I hadn’t water-washed it yet that day. But I like it anyway)

(oh, wait! here’s another, clearly about the pregnancy, but you can still see the hair, in case anyone was really hoping for another chance at that. i know, my hair is riveting…)

*  *  *

Other no shampoo stories?

Unroast: Today I love the faint ridges on my fingernails. I know, really weird and specific, but it’s sort of fun to run my fingertips over the ones on my thumbnails. I don’t know why. It just feels nice.

P.S. If anyone else wants to enter the giveaway to win some cake baking swag, do it at the bottom of the last post, just by commenting that you’re in.

You know what’s a funny joke about a guy? That he has back hair. It’s hilarious! It’s funny because back hair is just inherently funny. It’s inherently gross. Because—because it’s HAIR! On someone’s BACK! EW! Hair is not supposed to be on a back, right? It’s supposed to be on a head! Obvi. Which is actually why it’s also funny when a guy doesn’t have enough hair to cover the top of his head. Because that is where the hair is supposed to be! And it looks ridiculous when it isn’t!

I think that’s how the logic goes, anyway. I’m trying to figure it out, because I definitely notice a lot of smirking, humorous references to men who are balding or men who have back hair, without any explanation for why these things are supposed to be so unappealing and ridiculous as to be amusing.

There are gleefully explicit scenes in movies where guys need to get their back hair waxed before they can even approach a woman. Because what self-respecting woman would ever even consider a man with hair growing on the wrong side of his body?

(hold up! you just crossed over to the wrong side of the tracks! source)

I admit it, I have giggled agreeably along with these observations about unfortunate, socially unpresentable men. You know, when one of my friends is relating a story about a guy she ended up deciding against, and she adds, lowering her voice secretively, but with a note of righteousness, “And…he had back hair!” Or, “He was totally going bald…” So that we can all understand exactly how bad it was. This was the sort of thing she was dealing with, so, you know, she did what had to be done.

Just like the nice guy I wrote about who made all those not-so-nice comments about women, I don’t think that making these comments about men necessarily makes women mean. I think when we do this, we’re often just employing the jargon. Like a tired comedian wrapping up her set, we’re just making the jokes we know will get a laugh. And when we do end up dating/loving/appreciating a guy with back hair, we simply don’t mention it. Why would we? We don’t want anyone to think poorly of him, or be grossed out by his body. No need to even get into it.

I remember the first time I ever saw Bear without his shirt. And there is a reason I call him Bear. He’s fantastically furry. And I didn’t know until then that I would like that sort of thing, but instead, I loved it.

(source)

Bashful, he said, “I know, I’m really hairy.”

I said, “It’s amazing!”

That was my reaction. I don’t exactly know why. Maybe because it’s hot and primal. Maybe because I was already a little in love with him. Maybe because he rocks the hairiness. Maybe because I knew that one day it would be winter, and the winters in NYC are long and depressing and they drain you and leave you a shivering, uninspired husk. I wanted a bear to snuggle with, to keep me warm. I wanted to curl up against his chest and hibernate.

I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter why.

I would’ve been surprised if Bear had all that hair on his front and none on his back. And when I was happily watching him sleep the next morning, I loved how furry his shoulders were. He looked sort of fantastical; a sweet, muscular, mythical being who had stepped through a silvery portal in the misty woods of Central Park and emerged, slightly bewildered, gently refraining from killing tourists with his massive strength, to find and love me.

I have been crazy about this man’s body from the beginning. I am crazy about it now. Not in spite of things, either, is my point. Because of everything. It is my favorite body in the world, and the hair, all of the hair, is an important component of that.

But allow me to continue to be shocking:

Bear is starting to go bald.

While the hair on his back is going strong, the hair on his head is thinning in the front a little, and I suspect it won’t hold out long. You have only to look at his father to know his fate. He has a big, handsome father with a big, white beard. His father was called “Hulk” in college, and still is by some. But unlike the smooth, green, amphibian skin of the comic book Hulk, Bear’s dad is unsurprising in pigmentation and fabulously hairy—he is a polar bear. And the top of his head is bold, bare and quite regal looking, I think.

(source)

Sometimes I notice that Bear is going bald, and often I am not really paying attention to that particular detail on that particular section of his head. It doesn’t seem incredibly relevant. Occasionally, I hope that he is OK with it, because sometimes he looks in the mirror and makes a rueful sound and says, “Pretty bald today!” Sometimes I know he is worried about it. And I don’t want him to feel badly about the way he looks. I want to somehow protect him from that, even though I know I can’t. After all, I know how it feels to look a way that other people poke fun at, that doesn’t fit inside the crushingly narrow parameters of Best, Most Acceptable, Most Successful Beauty. And I know the havoc that that knowledge can quietly, persistently wreak inside your head, even when, as we all tell ourselves, this stuff doesn’t really matter. 

Finding people you know in real life gorgeous is always an interesting lesson in a world with so many beauty restrictions. It doesn’t really solve anything, I guess, but it certainly points out how random and inaccurate a lot of the beauty rules are. If back hair isn’t really gross, then what is?

Maybe it depends on individual taste. Maybe it always did. If a balding man with back hair can be the most perfect-looking man I know, then what other possibilities are flung open?

People can explain this phenomenon. They say, “When you love someone, you perceive them as beautiful.”

They say this as though this explains how these people who we love are not actually, truly beautiful. As though there is some objective, impenetrable thing out there called true beauty.

But this is bullshit. There is no lockbox where absolute, unadulterated beauty is kept. People are beautiful on slippery, ever-changing spectrums, according to millions of points of reference, from every conceivable angle, according to the varying specifications of different cultures, according to the reactions of others around them, according to a moment in time, according to who is making the judgment. No one can ever really agree completely on beauty. It always depends on who you ask. It’s a reflective, transparent, changeable thing, even as we convince ourselves of its immutable permanence. Even as we figure that if we just lose ten lbs or get some botox we will finally, finally own it.

And in the end, and always, I have to be reasonable. I have to simplify. I’m busy! I have things to check off the endless to-do list on my phone. I don’t have time for this crap! If someone looks great to me, then there’s no need to figure out where they fit into some complicated equation of beauty. Instead, I’ll just let them be beautiful.

We could stand to do that more for ourselves, too, I think, when we look in the mirror. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, “I look good” and then I catch myself quickly correcting that assumption. “No, no. I can’t really look good. See the distance between my nose and mouth? It’s all wrong. The proportions are off, and the neck—please. Would that neck ever appear in a magazine? Of course not! So clearly, I am mistaken. I look bad. ‘Bad’ was the word I was looking for. I said ‘good,’ because I was getting all mixed up and opposites-day about the whole thing. My god, I’m losing my mind. It’s this weather! I didn’t get enough sleep last night. Bad. Yes. There. Now that’s settled.”

In the end, though, rebelliously and empoweringly, whatever else gets mixed into it, beauty is always about whatever we—you know, you, and me, and this girl over here– find beautiful.

In my case, that sometimes involves myself. And it certainly always involves some back hair on a particular man who is starting to go bald. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Especially because, you know, winter is always coming…

*  *  *

Anyone else not have a problem with back hair?

Unroast: Today I love the way I look in hot pink. I figure, why not? Which is what I figure about everything I wear these days, since I am now hugely pregnant.

“She was always a natural mother, even when she was a girl,” said a relative, describing one of Bear’s cousins. Everyone agreed. I agreed, too, knowing her a little. I could see it.

Some people are natural mothers. They get down on the floor with other people’s kids, and they know just what to say. They like kids, naturally. They have a certain ease, an automatic knowledge, a comfort with their own bodies that allows them to be silly in all the right ways, at the right moments.

(source)

My face still feels awkward to me, from just behind it, where I live, even though I’ve been wearing it for so long. I catch myself thinking, “Am I making the right expression?” I think this is what it means to be awkward—to think like that. Even if it doesn’t show. I know it doesn’t always show. I know plenty of people don’t think I’m awkward, actually, but it doesn’t even matter, because I am. Those girls and women who have quick, gigantic smiles and who touch everyone with friendly effortlessness have always seemed gifted and a little magical to me. I think I associate that with being a natural mother.

No one would describe me as a natural mother. (Except Bear, who is loyal like that.)

What bothers me a lot right now about being pregnant is that there’s a chance I’m not that interested in children. And it’s almost definitely true that I’m not good with them. Especially not really little ones. Often, I forget to even notice them.

Meanwhile, Bear is paying sharp attention. He is collecting observations about toddlers, and he regales me with elevator stories (“And then she just burst into song! It was the cutest thing!”) and sidewalk stories and subway stories about tiny, charming girls who the even tinier girl in my belly could potentially one day resemble. When we saw some babies with their parents, he talked about them for days. “Remember her little hat?” he kept saying. I didn’t.

(but this one is pretty! source)

He would like to make parent friends and hang out with them and their kids, to see what it is like.

But I am afraid to see what it is like, because I think I might not like it.

“Did you see her?” he asks, as we’re walking and I’m focusing on the promise of frozen yogurt. “That little girl carrying the red ball? With her dad?”

I glance guiltily around. No doubt she was doing something adorable.

I wonder if I think too much about food. Because, really, I’m always thinking about it. Like, it’s maybe psychotic, the way my days revolve around what I might get to eat next. The end of every meal is always a sort of sweet disappointment. On our babymoon in Hawaii (and I write that with the serious nonchalance of someone who has been using those words a lot recently), I was diverted by the sparkling expanse of the Pacific, kissing the feet of the towering green mountains, but I was consistently thrilled about Bubba’s Burgers (grassfed Kauai beef! A special relish with ketchup!). I am maybe focusing on the wrong things. My life is probably slipping away as I ask myself over and over, searchingly, “Quesadilla or meatball sub? Quesadilla or meatball sub?”

A natural mother would notice the cute toddling girl carrying the red ball instead. She would remember the hat.

Why would someone who doesn’t really care about kids that much even want to have them? I wonder. But for some reason, these feel like different things. My baby feels different to me, philosophically. She isn’t a regular baby. She’s fantastically unique. She is sort of messianic. It’s hard to explain.

But still- it would be better if I were good with kids. I used to tutor 12 and 13 year olds, and I still perform their bar and bat mitzvah services. I like them, and they are often clever and surprisingly fully formed. But they are still kids, and I still sometimes embarrass myself in front of them, because I am trying too hard to say something funny, or to say the kind of thing that a kid that age might appreciate and the truth is, I don’t even know and there’s a distinct possibility that kids are just people and they’re all totally different.

This past Shabbat, I was sitting on one of the plush burgundy chairs on the bima behind my podium with a bat mitzvah girl while the rabbi introduced the Torah service and we got a brief break. I leaned in (see that, Sheryl Sandberg?! I’m leaning in! Oy. I keep thinking that every time I use those words…It’s getting annoying even in my own head) and made a little joke, and she laughed obligingly, her eyes a little wary, but keeping it friendly. She was wearing a bright pink dress and her hair had been done in those long, fat, formal waves that morning. She’d admitted that she was nervous, beforehand, but she came off as poised, and she hadn’t missed even one word yet. I suddenly felt bad, because I had made that same joke to other b’nei mitzvah kids in the past, and I felt like someone’s old, out of touch uncle, who has one trick, like, “Gotcher nose!” with his thumb between his other fingers, and that’s it, and I felt like I probably shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce.

But here I am, defiantly reproducing all over the place. Obliviously reproducing. And I have this floating sense of watching myself from above, like my own terribly confused guardian angel. Maybe an angel who’s really new on the job, who has some serious impostor syndrome, who doesn’t feel particularly angelic ever. I remember when my one friend with kids was pregnant, and she seemed to me as though she’d moved into a new, mature phase of life, and she seemed so intimidatingly put-together and grown up because of it. Just her pregnant belly looked intimidatingly grown up to me. She really knows what she’s doing, I thought, taking a surreptitious glance at it.

I look down sometimes, and my big, taut, very pregnant belly looks fake, like a strap-on belly. Like I’m acting a pregnant woman on TV. I described it that way to people, for a while, until I realized it didn’t actually mean anything to them. “It’s like, you know, one of those fake bellies! You know how they look on TV? Yeah, it’s like that!”

“So…it looks like a pregnant belly?”

“Um, yeah. Basically.”

I didn’t even know what I was trying to say.

(source)

But I feel like someone strapped this belly on me sometimes, like I’m not a real pregnant lady. And maybe it’s because I am so bad at kids, and understand them so little. Maybe it’s because I am awkward all the time inside my own head. And maybe it’s because I don’t feel that grown up. I hope my daughter doesn’t mind. I promise that I will notice her hat. In fact, I will buy it for her, and it will be adorable. 

“I guess we’re grownups now, right?” said Bear last night, randomly.

“I guess so,” I said.

And we were silent for a while. And then we made microwave hotdogs for dinner without a vegetable, and ate turkey and American cheese out of the little deli bags.

*  *  *

Are you good with kids? Maybe if I had nieces or nephews I would be better…

Unroast: Today I am beginning to love the way I look in sporty stripes. Maternity wear offers a lot of them, and not a lot of other things.

If you’re interested, I wrote a piece about how my friendships have changed over the course of my twenties, and it’s over at Daily Life.

P.S. I hope I don’t ever come off as too complain-y in these pregnancy posts. I am really excited about having a baby, but there’s also a lot of complicated stuff that pops up along with it, and often that’s the stuff I want to write about, to make sense of it.

“My drive from work is too short for me to decide what to listen to on Spotify #firstworldproblems” was a recent tweet from the Twitter account First World Problems. The tweet reached over 50,000 people, and it was only one in a long list of mildly amusing little complaints about an easy, well-fed, upper-middle class life.

The idea of first world problems has recently become a meme, with inspired tweeters hashtagging the phrase on the back of every observation that doesn’t seem world-changing or ring out like a strangled scream from the depths of oppression. It’s kind of a fun trend. Maybe it serves to remind us all of what we already have. It offers a little dose of perspective. And when it first appeared, I was totally on board. But then I started seeing the hashtag cropping up a lot more when women were talking about all those things that get labeled “women’s issues.”

(she might be about to say something, not just display her red lipstick. source)

I started seeing it in the comments section under painfully honest essays about weight discrimination or reports about the billion dollar cosmetics industry. “First world problems” was being tacked on women’s conversations everywhere I looked, often by men who sounded like they wished these women would just shut up. Sometimes by women who went on to state that they themselves had much bigger, more serious problems. Before I knew it, “first world problems,” was looking a lot like “shut the hell up, no one cares,” in a lot of contexts.

“Women’s issues,” aren’t the same as “first world problems,” even when they occur in the relative comfort of the first world. The discrimination that women face everyday, whether in slyly subtle or in shockingly overt ways is the product of a history of misogyny that is still wrapped around the cultures that we live in today, squeezing them like a python. In some places, at some points, the python is suffocatingly obvious, and women don’t have basic legal rights. In other places, like here, in my world, women have many basic legal rights but still bear the brunt of poverty, still don’t earn as much as men, and often grow up under the quiet, crushing impression that unless we look a certain, very specific way, we are failing.

(source)

Conversations about beauty and body image often get relegated to the realm of “doesn’t really matter, no one is dying.” But this is the wrong way to look at these issues. Not just because people are actually dying (i.e. of eating disorders), but because whenever we tell people to shut up because their problems don’t matter, we shut down access to the whole story of what life is like right now. And we miss out on noticing how so many problems with our world are interconnected. Stringent beauty requirements may tell us a lot about what a society thinks of women’s value in general, for example.

But even if this wasn’t the case, and body image had nothing to do with widespread sexism, the effort to dismiss “women’s issues” as frivolous and irrelevant feels a lot like sexism itself.

By pretending that only rich, white women have time to care about issues like body image and beauty, we not only misunderstand the experience of rich, white women as flawless and meaningless, but we also ignore the millions of other women who deal with similar issues, even if these issues are not the most pressing ones in their lives. Pressure surrounding beauty is not limited by class and race. Actually, as the documentary “Girl Model” points out so disturbingly, being beautiful can represent the only way out of a life of poverty for many girls growing up in rural, destitute villages.

Some things really are first world problems. Should you get a BMW or a Lexus crossover SUV? Ack! Decisions!! They each have so much to offer!! How many extra cup holders are we talking, though? That is a first world problem.

Right now, I’m agonizing a little in the back of my head over which bouncy seat to sign up for on my baby registry. There are so many of them! It’s seriously confusing. Some of them make five oceanic movements. Some of them have all these dangly things hanging over the top, to keep the baby distracted while you frantically call your mom and beg to be rescued, I guess. Some of them you have to bounce yourself, but they look prettier. And that is a first world problem.

But if I write about the way I learned that gaining weight might make me worth less as a person, so I was cruel to myself when my body naturally changed in that direction, then that should be part of a larger conversation about why so many women also experience that concern, and why our bodies are often the focal point of our self-loathing, and why the messages about weight gain are so widespread and toxic that we feel compelled to comment on our own weight incessantly, to one another, and to ourselves. These are not first world problems. They are problems that women have that may not be life-threatening but are always important, relevant, and informative about the way the world is set up.

So let’s keep talking. Let’s talk until we figure things out. #realworldproblems #dontstop #equalitynow.

This piece originally appeared in my Mirror Mirror column on the Frisky

*   *  *

Unroast: Today I love the way my breasts squish against the top of my belly when I lean over. It’s a new thing, and it happened so fast!

I began to feel dim, suppressed. The kind of feeling that sneaks up on you and you can’t trace it and it hangs around your neck for a while, staring up at you with glazed, bleary eyes until you have to excuse yourself to sit down and mope.

Everything has been good. And I am one of those frustrating people who isn’t particularly good at good, so this is more like awesome. I attribute it to my baby. I think she’s playing with my hormones, and the result is this creeping, stealthy peacefulness. I sometimes just stare into space and feel content. What the hell.

And then, abruptly, I was slipping, my arms windmilling in slow motion. I toppled into a dark pool of insecurity, and the first thing I hated was my stupid, stupid uncooperative hair. But that was only the beginning. Why haven’t my breasts gotten bigger? This is their ONE CHANCE, damnit. All of these pregnant women are being all delighted about their poofy, voluptuous new breasts, and mine are sulking against my ribs, just friggin’ determined to spite me. There is some ancient grudge here, I can sense it.

(source)

Anyway, I knew things were bad when I started thinking about my nose. It’s like a bright red, wildly waving flag now. This little thought comes up, all evil and subtle, like, “What’s one more surgery…” Yeah, like that. “You need it…The surgeon said you need it…” That’s bad. That means I’m already feeling bad. Something is going stale in my head. Something is fermenting.

I was sitting and moping and thinking about how I am unattractive in every way and also I have a shitty career that I should be embarrassed about and also I probably have a lame, unfixable personality. I am probably only rarely truly funny. It went like that. And then it kept going.

“What is going on?” said Bear, a little baffled, as I moped from one room to the next, turtling, tucking myself into my shell in the evenings and poking my head out only to watch some bad TV.

I started trying to explain. It might be this or this other thing or I’m just really tired right now or I need to take a long bath or something else. It’s the pregnancy. My back. Oy vey! My sciatica! And then I said something without thinking about it and I knew that’s what it was. It was this guy, and the way he talked about women.

No names. But there is this guy, and I had been around him a lot recently, and he is always talking about women. He is always talking about other things, too, but, like the sprinkles on top, he mentions women. Like the paprika on the deviled eggs. Come on, you don’t really need it. But it is always there. And when he does it, other guys do it, too, just to participate, I think. And sometimes I sort of do it, too, just to participate.

It is so classically uncool to get offended over the casual comments guys sometimes make, like sprinkles and paprika, about women.

“Oh, Tom’s girlfriend? Yeah, she’s hot! She’s, like, eighteen. He did good.” Every woman who gets mentioned gets mentioned based on her appearance.

“Wait, Lena Dunham’s the fat one, right?”

“Remember that cashier girl at the Shoprite? The one with the chest? How could anyone forget about her…”

The thing about this guy is that he’s really very nice. And I bet that’s usually the case. He’s really very nice and he’s kind of nerdy, and we’ve known each other for a very long time, and I think that he is always sort of trying to bond with other guys by talking about women, because he’s not sure how else to do it. And I don’t know if that’s really an excuse, but when I’m trying to let things go and be cool and be nice and I don’t want to be the one person objecting, I let myself believe that it’s excuse enough.

The thing is, I like this guy.

And I know he’s not trying to hurt anyone.

And he made me feel like crap.

And suddenly, I am telling Bear, really intensely, “You know our daughter will be judged by men like this, every day of her life. People will think the most relevant thing about her is the way she looks. And who knows what she’ll even look like! It’s totally arbitrary! And yet, it’ll determine whether she’s the butt of the joke or gets the chance to be someone’s fantasy. Like those are the options! Why are those the friggin’ options?”

Bear tells me that he hardly even notices when the guy is saying these things. People say a lot of stupid things in passing. Words/wind, that whole thing. I think about how we’re all supposed to always brush everything we don’t like off, and move immediately on, because that is how you stay focused and sane and acceptable. Getting mired in hurt feelings is poor tactical maneuvering.

And Bear is trying to talk about how there’s so much more to it– that even if there’s that split-second evaluation on a reptilian-brained, biological level, it is far from the whole story. It’s not even the part that matters. And look at his office, it doesn’t seem like the women are being evaluated constantly based on their looks at all. He can reel off a list of things that people are known for, after working together for a while, after getting to know each other.

(dragons are reptiles. sometimes those basic, fundamental interactions can have a dragon-sized impact. source)

“But it’s just so pervasive and huge and constant,” I am saying, possibly about to cry, feeling like one of those women people like to call crazy, “And it never matters enough to focus on it, and we’re all supposed to just get over it, but that stuff that doesn’t really matter? That’s the stuff that builds up until it’s what makes you feel worthless or worth something. And that’s what people do to girls. Everyone gets to comment on the way they look, even if it’s just for a second.”

I don’t know if I am making any sense, but I am furious. I am absolutely uncool about it.

“You’re right,” says Bear, gently, seeing how much I care. “This stuff matters a lot.”

“It’s not fair!” I say. “I don’t want her to have to deal with it.”

I don’t want me to have to deal with it.

I have been feeling good about myself, and when I feel good about myself, it’s the whole package. My writing seems to be going well. I like the projects I’m working on, I feel like I’m moving forward. I love my home, my husband, my family, my cat, my shaved ice machine that provides me with endless heaps of ice that I eat greedily without syrup because I am always craving ice these days. I like my unruly hair, which seems to express interesting things about my soul, and I like my unusual face, which is rebellious and recognizable. I want to show my daughter how striking I am. So why can this guy get to me? Why does he have that ability?

I think maybe it’s because his comments suggest something that scares me in a big, burrowing-to-the-bottom kind of way. His comments suggest that the first and only thing that needs to be said about a girl or a woman is something about the way she looks. I am terrified of that. I am afraid of the way I look being the only information that registers about me. It seems so helpless, so empty. It makes me feel flat as a piece of paper, like I can be torn up and then flutter away.

(source)

I remind myself that even the guy who is saying these things, constantly, about women, doesn’t really believe that it is the whole story. After all, there are women he loves and cherishes. His mom, his sisters, his fiancée. He has just learned that this is some kind of convenient social shortcut. He isn’t thinking about it. He isn’t thinking about the pregnant woman who hated the way she looked enough to get a nose job, sitting right there, just a couple feet away. He isn’t thinking about the little girl baby inside her, who will be born into a world full of people who talk about women like there aren’t women in the room. Like women aren’t regular people. Who make women feel like being cool is about being one of the guys, and that being one of the guys is the same as not ever caring. Who make women feel like anything else is the same as being crazy.

I know, I know, I tell Bear, that we all exist on this level, regardless of whatever else is going on—the level of registering other people constantly based on basic visual information about their appearances. Their sex appeal. Their attractiveness. But it is not the only level, and we don’t have to limit ourselves to it, and what we say about other people, regularly, in public, can involve a little sensitivity. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. This is where the fine line between observation and prejudice resides. And I don’t want to have to play it cool. Maybe it’s better to admit that it hurts me, that is has an impact. Maybe it’s better to let myself be fully, inconveniently human. Maybe we’d all learn more if we all did that in front of each other.

“I’ll say this much about Hillary Clinton,” the guy says, “that woman needs to have some work done on her face.”

Someone laughs half-heartedly, the conversation begins to move on.

But I say, “Hold on. Is that really the point? Is that the relevant thing about Hillary Clinton?”

I say this awkwardly, in mixed company, being obviously affected, in honor of myself and my unborn daughter. I don’t want her to grow up in a world where people are always reminding her that the thing that matters most immediately and constantly about her is the way she looks. But if I can’t control that, I want at least for her to grow up in a world where her mother can speak up, and point out how stupid the whole thing is.

She’s going to grow up with a very uncool mother. It’s probably better that way.

He doesn’t respond. He is looking away. I think he knows it’s not the point. Or maybe he just isn’t listening. Maybe he’ll never listen. But maybe I’ll just keep saying something anyway.

*  *  *

Are you obviously affected by casual comments like these about girls and women? Sometimes I’m really not. I think part of the reason why I was with this guy is because there were so many negative ones and they came so frequently.

Unroast: Today I love the way I look in hot pink.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a sucker for the message “seriously, though, you’re beautiful.” And I agree with the viral clip, so many of us get distracted by all of our perceived flaws. We get caught up in criticizing our appearances and miss out on our own beauty. We are often more generous toward strangers than we are toward ourselves.

I like that the Dove Real Beauty Sketches campaign is pointing all of this out. I hope it starts a bunch of conversations. And I hope that my reaction is interpreted as a continuation of the conversation, rather than nitpicking criticism. Because I really don’t want to nitpick, I just want to point out some things I noticed as I was watching.

In the clip, some lovely, thin, mostly white women who are all pretty young describe their appearances to a forensic artist, who sketches them without looking at them. And then other people describe these women, and the artist starts all over again, based on the new description. At the end, the women are shown the two portraits of themselves, and they can see how differently the sketched faces turned out, based on the descriptions. They realize that they’ve been unnecessarily critical of their appearances.

Something felt a little off. And I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. I was getting slightly teary over the women getting slightly teary on camera as they realized that they had been too harsh, describing themselves.

Interestingly, even the sketches based on the self-descriptions weren’t actually particularly unattractive, and I was faintly annoyed with the idea that one sketch was supposed to represent unattractiveness and the other beauty, when the distinctions between the two seemed to lie in characteristics like a mole, shadows under the eyes, slight roundness in facial shape, or a few wrinkles.

Looking at the two portraits of herself, one woman described the one meant to be prettier as looking “much younger,” which seemed to be true of all of them. The more “beautiful” facial representations seemed to all be thinner and younger-looking. If that is the crux of beauty, then I guess we’re all pretty screwed by that obnoxiously inexorable bastard called time.

And there was the slight issue of the artist being a man. He got to be the one to gently suggest to the women, “Maybe you’re more beautiful than you thought.” He got to present their “true” beauty to them. That felt like it might be open to some discussion in an earnest gender studies class at a liberal arts college somewhere.

But leaving this aside, because, you know, there are always details, and we can always analyze them until everything falls apart in ruins, I think what made me uncomfortable watching the clip was that all of the blame was on the women.

In the tiny world that Dove created for the sake of this campaign, we women all feel bad about the way we look. We’re kind of crazy that way. We focus obsessively on the one mole on our cheek and ignore our stunning eyes and upswept cheekbones. We look in the mirror and get everything wrong. And if we can just be shown the truth, the reality, we can start to move on with our lives, hopefully.

It’s true, many (though definitely not all!) of us obsess over small details or feel perhaps disproportionately frustrated with aspects of our appearances other people barely notice (if they notice at all). It’s true that this is distracting and impedes our ability to see ourselves for how we look to other people. It’s true that it interferes with our lives. But we don’t do this for no reason. We don’t do this because this is just how women are. We do it because we have learned that doing this is a part of being a woman. We’ve learned that beauty is really relevant and also it’s strict and specific and cannot reside in a face with a pronounced mole, so we agonize over the mole.

And Dove implicitly agrees with us. The mole would be a problem if it were larger and darker. There it is, making the portrait on the left look ugly! But luckily it’s only larger and darker in our minds, and so what other people perceive doesn’t have much to do with a mole at all, and therefore, we are actually prettier than we thought we were.

(seriously, Anne Hathaway, you’re beautiful! we swear! source)

In Dove’s world, as in the real world of beauty standards, there is definitely a better and a worse way to look, it’s just that, according to Dove, women are often mistaken about which side they’re really on.

We are not mistaken, though, in believing that we should be anxious about the way we look, if we live in a context where beauty is important enough to constantly occupy our minds and specific enough to result in some shadowy eyes equaling a loss of attractiveness. In this context, we’re totally right to worry.

And here’s the thing about beauty in the real world that Dove seems to be forgetting: we are not actually supposed to think we’re beautiful. That would be weird and vain and arrogant. It would be wrong and presumptuous. People are charmed when gorgeous movie stars reassure us that, actually, they feel unattractive and weird, too! They also hate that mole on their face. They also think their boobs are a strange shape. People are not charmed when a movie star seems to think too highly of herself, by being into her appearance, and they are certainly not impressed when a regular, normal-looking woman has the gall to think the same of her ordinary looks.

(I have to say, I really like their soap. source)

I don’t think that Dove is ethically obligated to lead an in-depth examination concerning potential causes for the modern woman’s body dysmorphia. I don’t think the Real Beauty Sketches campaign needs to include an hour of commentary from gender studies professors after the clip concludes. The clip serves a purpose. It points out how wrong our negative impressions of ourselves can be. It points out that it’s common for women to feel bad about the way they look, and it makes it clear that that is a sad situation.

But I want to point out, while we’re pointing out things about beauty, that feeling better about the way we look depends not only on the positive opinion of strangers (which is definitely powerful and important, as I just wrote about here), but on our being able to own our own beauty, in all its complexity. Including aging. Including moles. Including everything that we already are. And, unfortunately, we really can’t get there completely on our own, by changing our thinking and our attitude. The world has to meet us halfway, by letting us stop putting ourselves down and by celebrating our diversity, rather than beating us over the head with the same tired depictions of taut, slinky, lithe, teenaged beauty.

The world has to meet us halfway, by convincing us that there’s a lot more to us than the way we look, and that those things are, believe it or not, even more important than the way we look.

And if we happen to think we actually look good, we have to be able to say, “I am beautiful,” the way we can say “Oh god, I look terrible!” without it being a big deal.

Why is it still such a big deal? Because, annoyingly, people really, really care about beauty, and there are still a lot of rules about it, and that’s why women are thinking about it at all and feeling like we have to put ourselves down, even when we look like the kind of pretty, thin, white women that Dove would choose for a polite, non-threatening campaign about how, seriously, we should all feel better about ourselves.

*  *  *

What did you think of the Dove campaign? I know a lot of people loved it, and I feel like I actually almost, almost loved it too!

Unroast: Today I love the way the lines on my face make it more complicated, in an interesting way.