Getting to the Bottom of Some Very Weighty Issues
The anxiety slowly bubbles inside her. She fights it but can’t for long. She needs an answer. Now.
“Does my butt look big?”
Cathy Hamilton is not venturing out on a first date. Or trying on her wedding gown. Or slipping into a thong bikini.
She’s just living life: preparing her Lawrence, Kan., cable television show, lunching with girlfriends, raising her kids--all the while suffering from “Does My Butt Look Big Syndrome.”
“I live with that one on a daily basis,” jokes Hamilton, author of the self-help parody “Our Syndromes, Ourselves” (Andrews McMeel, 2000).”But there are so many others. I am my own lab rat.”
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Hamilton has no medical training but has been a female for all of her life, which has to count for something. (And she knows a thing or two about the novelty market, having created Boyfriend-in-a-Box, the prepackaged imaginary man who helps women across the country feel special. Since 1997, about 175,000 of the mythical $13 boyfriend kits, with bios, phony phone messages and photos, have been sold.)
As Hamilton writes in “Our Syndromes,” only Twiggy and Calista Flockhart “have actually succeeded in making their rears vanish completely” and “the remaining female population has become obsessed by the width, breadth and girth of their heinies.”
“There’s no escaping it,” says Hamilton, 43, adding that she can’t bear to watch her own home and garden show “because television makes your butt look even bigger.”
She could go on about butt size forever, but then you’d miss the 15 other crippling syndromes she tackles--mainstream and made-up maladies she began to notice right about the time she became pregnant with her son, who is now 18.
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Like so many new mothers, Hamilton was plagued by postpartum depression. But Hamilton’s woes weren’t sparked by raging hormones. Hers evolved from the realization that she would “never be able to sit down again without wincing” and “she would smell like sour milk and poo-poo for the next two years.”
“That’s when I began to notice that my conversations with my girlfriends used to be about events and big ideas and the politics of the day,” she said during a telephone interview from her home in Lawrence. “And suddenly I found that my conversations were about bloating and puffy feet. It just seemed to escalate from there.”
For research, Hamilton turned to the pros: her mother, three sisters and high school friends. She perused dozens of women’s health books she’d stockpiled over the years. Then she concluded she was her own best expert.
“I’m just trying to put a funny spin on my own foibles,” she says. “I’m a news junkie, I watch a lot of TV, and when they come up with a new disorder, I just run to my books, look it up, diagnose myself and obsess over it. I started noticing at social events that there’s a lot of women who do this too.”
She insists she is not picking on the prototypal and ever-popular self-help book, “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”
“I am only making fun of myself,” she says. “If laughter is the best medicine, and you can laugh at your own neuroses and foibles, then you’ll probably be healthier in the long run.”
Bad perms, bikini waxes, blind dates from hell, mammograms, Beanie Baby promotions, road trips with the kids, and shopping with mom are all the sorts of life experiences that can lead to definable ailments. Hamilton devotes a chapter to each disorder (newly minted ones include Dr. Lauranoia and VADD, or Vehicular Attention Deficit Disorder), providing symptom checklists, quizzes and suggestions for treatments, which her publicist promises “are bogus at best!”
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Currently, Hamilton says, she suffers most from a syndrome that strikes women after 40, rendering them incapable of doing two things at once. When a woman’s mind is young and intact, writes Hamilton, she is a consummate multi-tasker, handling the following challenges with ease:
* Critical decision-making: Paper or plastic?
* Complex algebraic calculations: If one truffle has 130 calories and one aerobics class burns 600 calories per hour, how many trips to the gym will it take to work off a dozen amaretto cremes?
* Intricate hand-eye coordination: French-braiding.
Eventually, “the mind just goes,” says Hamilton, who calls this apparently contagious disorder, “Can’t Remember Squat” syndrome. “Everyone I know seems to be getting this.”
This book, which costs $9.95, may be about women, but Hamilton has men in her sights again. She’s planning a companion volume on men’s syndromes, which will include Emotional Lock Jaw, Acute Fashion Sense Deficiency and Manopause.
“In the past 10 years, there’s been a proliferation of syndromes in our culture,” Hamilton says. “Everybody’s got ‘em. And everybody needs help.”