Fat, Feminism, Phooey
In the beginning, I didn’t care that I weighed almost 200 pounds. One ninety-eight, to be exact, and 5-foot-5. I was happily pregnant with my first child, and fascinated to see how big I could get. I thought of Violet Beauregarde in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” who blows up into a giant blueberry and gets rolled off to the Juicing Room by Oompa-Loompas. I figured I’d roll into the delivery room and quickly return to my original shape. But almost a year after my son was born, people were still asking, “When are you due?” Stuck at 170, I felt miserably fat, 40 pounds fat.
Heavier than the weight itself, though, was the guilt. How dare I use the word fat to describe myself, much less after having a baby? I knew better, intellectually, because my beliefs were solid. I was well-versed in the debates about women’s body image, understood how corrosive the Culture of Thinness is to self-esteem. I was a feminist and glam rocker at heart who cheered hostile takeovers of conventional beauty. I viewed most diets as stupid and believed that if we just worked a little harder on accepting our bodies rather than trying to cram them into a size 4, Los Angeles would be a better place. I also knew that sexual chemistry has nothing to do with being thin, because I was once involved with a man who weighed 350 pounds and I found him very attractive.
But when the scales tipped in my direction, my higher self disappeared. It was OK for everyone else to be heavy, but not me. This new level of vanity was shocking. I imagined that once I had my baby, I’d be overflowing with awe and respect for my body. Instead, I found myself at the bathroom mirror jamming my jaw down to make the triple chin appear, torturing myself, crying, blindsided by the vicious critic inside my head.
My darkest hour: One morning I caught my reflection in a store window. I stopped. Who was that? Who was that person with the arm flab and huge belly wearing last season’s maternity pants? In my mind I had a picture of how I looked. This wasn’t it. I burst into tears, the human traffic zigzagging around me. I felt like grabbing somebody’s arm and unloading, “I got this way because I had a baby.” I felt at once invisible and an eyesore, and the power of my sexual attractiveness had evanesced.
Lugging around an extra 40 pounds was a first, but I began to realize that “feeling fat” was familiar. As a kid, I was Daddy’s “little chubso wubso,” and my mother fed me boxes of eclairs, then criticized me for being overweight. I learned that being fat is a sin because it shows lack of self-control, the ultimate moral failure. Eventually, I dropped my “baby fat” and was roundly congratulated. In college, my life changed when I discovered feminism and a critical awareness of my body. Whenever I felt my Am I Fat? paranoia coming on, I’d pull out my trusty new set of principles. They never failed me--until I weighed 170.
“You’re so beautiful,” friends said after the baby was born. “You’re a goddess.” And I did resemble the Venus of Willendorf, but that only made me cry harder. Just keep breastfeeding, others suggested, the weight will slide right off. Not exactly.
My husband, poor guy, couldn’t say anything right. If he told me I was the crazysexygorgeous mother of his child, I accused him of lying. Couldn’t he see how fat I was? If he ever-so-gently agreed with me that, yes, perhaps I might feel better if I lost weight, I wanted to slap him.
In the end, I did the Atkins diet and dropped to 128 pounds--my thinnest in years. Back on the world’s radar, the change in perceptions of me was subtle but real. More smiles, more doors held open (literal and metaphoric), better service at restaurants. Some people didn’t recognize me.
I felt great, but also a little guilty. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d aligned myself with the very idea my feminist beliefs so loudly rejected. Losing weight wasn’t the problem; the problem was shackling my self-worth to it. For the first time in my life, I became aware of just how deeply I still believe my value as a woman is tied to my physical attractiveness. Here I thought I was fighting the good fight against impossible standards of beauty for the past 20 years, but now I see it really wasn’t much of a struggle. Living the feminist dream of total body acceptance is a piece of cake when you’ve got a nice body. I had no idea how it would change when you don’t.
Body image is a stubborn and complex thing, created by every experience we’ve ever had. It can’t be reshaped quickly or easily by anything--not politics or therapy, or even the love in a child’s eyes.
I’d like to think that the next time I get fat--or wrinkled, which is just around the corner--I’ll be kinder to myself. But maybe not, and that’s the scary part. This whole situation has revealed a small but malignant polyp of self-loathing in my psyche. For now, it’s disappeared beneath all conscious thought, and I’m free to be the loving, evolved person I want to be. But it’s there and, honestly, I don’t think I can ever remove it completely. “That’s because your physical attractiveness is part of your self-worth and you’re fooling yourself if you think it isn’t,” insisted my friend Dorothy, a longtime feminist.
The world values physical beauty. Yet the idea that thin or beautiful people are inherently more valuable people--well, that’s just crazy and wrong. Except that on some subzero emotional level, I obviously agree. Which brings me to a greater puzzle: Why is what we know so often in conflict with how we feel?
For most of us, reconciling the trilogy of thinking, feeling and doing is tricky, and rarely do we reach any kind of permanent stasis. For instance, lots of people believe that true success has nothing to do with the square footage of their home or their tax bracket, yet deep down they can’t stop measuring their worth in dollars and cents. Or how about all those people who believe in monogamy, but can’t seem to apply it?
The intersection of ideal and reality can be a pretty rough corner, and I don’t really know how to clean it up. I don’t know where to put the guilt that comes from failing to achieve the perfect balance. But I’m going to try and accept that I am on a sliding scale--because there’s no getting off, anyway--and to find the value in traveling back and forth between the way things are and the way I want them to be. And to be very, very grateful for those rare times when it all comes together.
