For the past week I have been taking my birth control pills one day ahead of schedule. What can I say? I live for the future. I took my Monday pill on Sunday and I took Tuesday’s pill today. I’m trying to figure out how this happened. Possible explanations: a.) took two pills in one day by mistake; b.) traversed a wormhole and then space curved back over on itself; c.) briefly lapsed into an undiagnosed multiple personality, also on the Pill; d.) neglected to calculate variations between menstrual cycle and Gregorian calendar and forgot to take the special Leap Pill that I need to take once every four years, or months, or… something.
But really I think I just took two pills in one day by mistake, most likely sometime over the holidays when I had a lot of days off and the weekends were long. I do remember one day around 10 am where I glanced at my pill card and thought, oh my stars! A pill untook! and popped it, because Heaven knows, I need to keep my skin clear. I’ve checked online and asked around enough to know there isn’t any immediate problem, but now I’m wondering what the hell to do when I get to the end of the pack. Do I just skip a day when I get to the Mystery Pills in the final week? Will my Start Day be henceforth one day ahead? Can I fix all this if I fly west to Japan? Any ideas? Anyone?
And lest you worry that I’m letting a bunch of online strangers tinker with my pharmaceutically-regulated woman-rhythms, I am waiting to hear back from my doctor about this. Just thought I’d share in the meantime.
*Kutesy title spelling intended to evade Google searches by kurious folks, konfused teens, or extremist kooks.
Posted by Wendy | Mon 01.09.06 02:28 PM | Comments (25) | TrackBack | send link
Ladies! Are you sick of getting the stink-eye whenever you bring your small children to froofy coffeehouses? Tired of having to take them to some sticky McDonaldLand to turn them loose? Or maybe you keep reading about those snotty parents who seem to feel no compunction about letting their spawn run amok in grown-up places and find yourself wishing that you could act that entitled and self-righteous. Looks fun, doesn’t it?
But where can you take your kids, relax a little, and impose your own values on strangers? Forget those twee little bakeries with their overpriced scones and tin ceilings: Why not take your kids to the pharmacy at Target instead? Or Rite Aid? Or Walgreen’s? Any pharmacy, in fact, with a policy of employing pharmacists who believe children are so special, they think it’s a shame when you try to not conceive them. These nice people in white coats will be thrilled to host your rambunctious toddlers for a couple hours while you shop. Sure, they make it hard for you to get Plan B, but you can always count on them for a big dose of Plan Wheeeee!
Who says a pharmacy isn’t a kid-friendly place? Some of these pharmacists like children so much, they want you to have the ones you didn’t even mean to have! And when you think about it, pharmacies are awesome places for young children to run and play, especially behind that door marked PRIVATE (Go on in! These folks don’t care about privacy!) which leads to a wonderful land of bottles and jars to shake shake shake. Plus plenty of childproof caps to challenge them, hundreds of colorful little beadies to count, lots of new words to learn (Say it: “Meth-o-trex-ate.”) and no shortage of arthritic elderly friends to trip up. Really, it’s like a Montessori school with Muzak.
Some folks think the kind of pharmacists who refuse to fill emergency contraception prescriptions are judgmental and stodgy, but that's just not true at all. They're actually spontaneous and fun, always encouraging you to embrace the unknown! Hey, take a chance on that broken condom!, they'll say, or aw, what's another baby? or just because he's a date rapist doesn't mean he can't be a good daddy! This whimsical approach to life means they won't mind at all if your 3-year old wants to repeatedly kick the glass case where the razor blades are kept, stick Nicorette patches on Mrs. DeSimone's leg while she waits to pick up her heart medication, or see what's inside Mr. Thermometer. In the meantime, especially if you're at Target, you can shop for thongs, or liquor, or wholesome toys, content in the knowledge that someone with moral values is looking out for your children, even the children that don't exist yet. Try getting service like that at some dismal Chuck E. Cheese with stained carpet.
Of course, if something happens to your child, you can always sue. Which is more than you can do in the event your pharmacist decides he doesn't want to commit a "pharma-sin" by filling your emergency contraception prescription, but I digress. While I'm not a mother myself (as long as my birth control works, ha ha!), it heartens me to know that should I ever choose to have children (or NOT choose and still have 'em, ha ha!), they are some places where they'll always be welcome.
(Thanks to Gwen for some links.)
Posted by Wendy | Thu 11.17.05 04:16 PM | Comments (36) | TrackBack | send link
There is something I need to tell you. I mean, you’re going to find out anyway, but I thought I’d tell you first: I’m really Tyra Banks in a fat suit.
Yes, I know that all this time you thought I was just a chubby white girl. I’m sure it sheds light on a lot of things, such as my inexplicable personal happiness. Well, now you know I’m happy because, hello! I’m Tyra Banks! I have my own production company! And here you thought I was just happy because I ate all the pies!
No doubt it all makes sense now. You’ve probably wondered how I managed to ever accomplish anything, what with all the obese-person stuff I have to do every day, like shuffling sadly down the street, getting my big fat feelings hurt by store clerks, and being rejected by dull little metrosexual men. I’m glad I’m Tyra Banks and don’t have to do those things all the time. Well, except for eating KFC. I’d do THAT all the time! Ha ha!
(You know, it’s only okay to laugh because I’m Tyra Banks and I have a syndicated talk show (check your local listings!). If I was a real fat person the laughter would HURT. You know that time I made the girls on ANTM wear stiletto heels two sizes too small? Like that, but in the soul.)
I know it comes as a shock to learn that I’m Tyra Banks wearing a fat suit, but I hope it makes America aware that really, everyone afflicted by obesity has a beautiful person wearing him or her, too, and that deep down, they all feel real supermodel feelings. Who knows who you might find inside an obese person? Maybe Naomi Campbell, who’s actually quite pretty though hardly the household name I’ve become, is trapped inside an obese person’s body. Or maybe she really is obese now. I would like to state for the record, as an honorary obese person, that either way would be fine with me.
That’s all for now. Don’t miss Drag Queen Makeovers on Tuesday! Love, Tyra.
Posted by Wendy | Mon 11.07.05 12:43 AM | Comments (23) | TrackBack | send link
I haven’t even told you of my return to the ranks of the Weight Watchful Ones, have I? That I rejoined WW about a month ago? I’d been doing it online on and off for awhile, but for the past month I have been going to actual meetings in real life, the real world of flesh and blood; of membership cards; of yet more flesh weighed in on real fucking scales in front of other actual live people and everything. Oh, the humanity, and so much of it ON ME.
So it seems I’m fighting again: I’m back in The Shit. Lately I’m more willing to do everything I ought to. I eat mostly the CORE foods but follow the FLEX plan. I have heard this referred to as “Flexcore,” which sounds more like a godforsaken metal subgenre than a way of eating, but it seems to be working. I look up the points information for almost everything. I check the points listing for the Panera menu at DWLZ and Dottie breaks the bad news to me in Comic Sans. And the current new name/slogan/tagline/operating paradigm for the whole WW Program is “Turn Around,” which unfortunately causes excerpts from the song “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler to spiral through my head for at least a half hour after each meeting.
(Did you click that last link? You really should have waited for me to warn you.)
The first week I lost nothing, the second week I lost a bit, the third week I either lost nothing or gained back the bit, but I’ll never know because I skipped that week; subequently this last week I either lost nothing or lost the same bit again. I have a feeling my weight loss is going to progress at about the same pace as an Apartment 3-G storyline, but, hey, it’s something. And I’ll keep you posted.
Posted by Wendy | Wed 08.24.05 10:14 PM | Comments (34) | TrackBack | send link
Oh, wow, the comments still keep trickling in about the Sun-Times editorial. I don’t have much more to say about the Dove ads right now, but I thought I’d bring back a couple of body-image-related entries from my old online journal. They both date back to 2001 and they haven’t been available online for almost two years but they’re in the new (and slowly growing) archives. Since these are four years old now I have to resist a terrible impulse to heavily revise them; I did edit them a little.
Imaginary Fat People is from July 2001. Part of it is about fat suits—that summer the previews for Shallow Hal were running in the theatres, America’s Sweethearts had come out, and Fat Monica was a big fat stereotype-on-a-stick, and it seemed a good time to say something. And Screw Shari is from May 2001. It’s a rant on this dumb survey I read about in Marie Claire, and it’s nowhere near as high-minded.
I liked book touring but I really, really like not touring, too. I know I’m still slightly recovering because there are some days when my routine existence suddenly feels like a big bouquet of retardedly simple pleasures. I get to go places using my own car! When I am done with work I get to come home! After dinner I can take a walk! And in the park by my home there are dogs, and flowers, and the Righteously Outrageous Twirling Corps practicing their routines, and everything. So I’m going to enjoy all that for awhile, if that’s okay with you.
Posted by Wendy | Thu 08.04.05 09:53 AM | Comments (18) | TrackBack | send link
Okay, so that Chicago Author’s Roundtable is this coming Monday night—not, as I’d totally foggily reported last week, this past Monday. (I guess that’s obvious, since time moves forward and not backward.) I hope you’ll come to the lovely air-conditioned comfort of the Sulzer Regional Library to hear Zulkey and Erin and Kevin Guilfoile and me, along with Kevin Smokler, who is touring this summer as the editor of a very cool book, and who is a great person to commiserate with about the bugfucking crazy business of having to push your own book as much as possible within about six weeks and on about four hours of sleep per night. We’ll be talking about stuff like what it means to have both online audiences and books to promote, whether having an internet presence can help a writing career, and, most importantly, discuss the mystifying differences between a blog and a chatroom (kidding).
So please come. It’ll be fun. I have no idea whether the table will actually be round. That could be awkward.
I feel I ought to provide some updates regarding the dicksmackery observed in Wednesday night’s post.
It seems Bill Zwecker was pretty much spanked by his co-anchors on the Channel 2 morning news the day after his blog post (video here), and they read some viewer/reader email, including one my friend Brenda wrote. Richard Roeper continues to totally leave his karmic toilet seat up by posting a brief response at the end of his Thursday column, in which he's under the impression that we ladies a.) need him to tell us that the Dove women are indeed "normal-sized," b.) are persecuting him for his "preference for fantasy-thin women in their underwear" and c.) have no sense of humor whatsoever.
To which I'll respond:
a.) Look: if you think the Dove women are chunky, you think they're chunky. God knows how your eyes work, but we trust our own, and we also trust our knowledge of Standard English enough to understand that "chunky" isn't what you say when you mean to convey "normal-sized" with humorous intent. It's just what you say when you're a dickclown.
b.) We never asked for you to apologize for your preference for fantasy-thin women in their underwear. You don't have to apologize for your preference for fantasy-thin women in their underwear any more than you should apologize for preferences for fantasy-fat women wrapped in Cling Wrap, say, or fantasy-freakshow women with six to eight impossibly perky double-D-cup dirtypillows, or whatever the hell happens to rock your little Richard, Roeper. We never asked you what your fantasies were to begin with, and in fact we wouldn't give a shit about your fantasies if you hadn't published a petulant half-assed half-column about how icky the Dove women are for not fulfilling them.
c.) Um, we're so funny we have the motherfucking power to make your columns funnier retroactively. Did you like how your July 19th column got funnier after July 19th? Notice how all those lines that weren't jokes on July 19th are totally jokes now? Isn't it cool how you're funny, but only when you write crazy nutty time-release jokes that we don't get? Ha ha!
Have a good weekend. I'm going to see Gravy Train!!!! tonight, because they are my fantasy women. (And that includes the two guys.)
(I've recently upgraded and redesigned this site. To view the reader comments for this entry on the old site, click here. New comments can be left below.)
Posted by Wendy | Fri 07.22.05 02:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | send link
Thank you, Sun-Times and Channel 2 fellas, for exposing those Dove billboards for the anti-erection propaganda that they are. That’s right: in their menacing white panties, the Dove women are chunky size-ten threats to the fantasies that Chicago newsmen clearly feel entitled to enjoy at all times, or at least while commuting or running errands, or rushing out to cover a breaking story about a fire or a murder or whatever, or otherwise cavorting through the vast, roofless Playboy mansion that is our entire goddamn city. Because apparently it’s bad enough that actual women are allowed to walk around Michigan Avenue or Navy Pier with their real live fleshy-flesh sticking out from under shorts and halter tops as if it were hot out or something, as if Richard Roeper’s boner wasn’t totally at stake. (Does he think it’s like his thumb and that he gets to vote with it?)
Plus I love it when these editorials say stuff like “ads should be about the beautiful people” (see the second segment), and “if I want to see plump gals baring too much skin, I’ll go to Taste of Chicago,” as if it were all just a matter of venue—because, what, it’s of great masturbatory importance to see chubby chicks in one place and not another? Like are there secret freaky Old Testament-style Jerk-Off Laws that prohibit getting off on “real women” when they’re served up on the same platter used for taut model fantasy fucktoys? I know these guys are talking out of their asses, but there’s a whiff of righteous outrage coming out of there, too, and it’s creepy.
And don’t even get me started on this guy’s remark about these ads encouraging people to be out of shape. Uh, yeah, we can see right through that, and it doesn’t help the “obesity epidemic” any when the chub you’re most concerned about is the one in your pants, dude. We know what’s up with that. (Or what’s not up. Or… ew.)
(I’ve recently upgraded and redesigned this site. To view the reader comments for this entry—and there were plenty—on the old site, click here. New comments can be left below.)
Posted by Wendy | Wed 07.20.05 10:39 AM | Comments (30) | TrackBack | send link
So Salon is running a feature article on the teen plus-size store Torrid today. While it’s more balanced than most stories I’ve seen, pretty much all the press coverage of Torrid has touched on the pros and cons and cultural implications of a store that lets America’s surly young fat girls have miniskirts. And every time I read some handwringing comment about how size 20 halter tops can only encourage rampant epidemic statistical-life-expectancy-altering morbid obesity, I can’t help but think the concern is a little misplaced: that it’s not so much about the size of the damn halter top but who it’s for.
Maybe Torrid is revolutionary and all that, but it needs to be said that it's one of the first stores of its kind for girls—nobody ever seems to consider that equivalent stores for guys don't really exist, because guys have had far less trouble finding larger sizes in mainstream stores. I grew up understanding that in a typical department store I'd have to tear apart the racks to find an Esprit shirt in a tight size 16 but that the thrasher skateboard t-shirts across the aisle in the young men's department were as big as tents, even on me. Seriously, I remember being fourteen and watching Just One of The Guys on cable and thinking that should I ever be passed over for an important high school journalism prize and thus be forced to switch schools and pass myself off as a guy in order for my talents to be taken seriously, it wouldn't be so fucking hard to buy clothes anymore.
I'm not glad there's a rise in obesity statistics, but I would have liked a store like Torrid twenty years ago. I guess it's no wonder that out of all the different kinds of plus size markets out there, the store that most consistently sets off Fat Apocalyptic alarms is the store for young white girls, because really, hot young white chicks are among our most precious national resources, and without them America's reality shows and porn would suffer. When I read an an article like this where, in the first paragraph, the writer conveys the genteel moral dismay he felt when he passed by a Torrid store and noticed "there were a lot of--how should I put it--well, fat teenage girls inside," the cynic in me can't help but wonder why in the hell Lawrence Goodman, Esteemed Newsweek International Commentator, was paying so much--how should I put it--attention to a girly teen mall store in the first place. Maybe he just wanted to see if the shrug was catching on? And I kind of doubt he could have mistaken the place for a Radio Shack. I know I'm being a little extreme here, but I'm pretty sure that the problem people have with the Torrid girls is not that they're "unhealthy" or "might have their life expectancy diminished by as much as two years." Nope, it's something else, and don't think that the girls don't know what it is. Don't think that wearing a plus-sized hot pink bustier is just about helping themselves feel better, because for every bit of restored self-esteem they might experience when they wear it, there's likely a little bit of fuck you, world mixed in, too.
Which is exactly how it should be when you're sixteen, so there.
Posted by Wendy | Wed 04.06.05 07:40 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack | send link
I don’t usually talk about my job, but someone else has written about reading manuscripts for a children’s book publisher so I don’t have to. And she’s just scratched the surface as far as the kind of stuff we get. Though am I crazy for wanting to read that POPGIRL story? Getting that query in the mail would make my day, I think.
If you’re wondering while I haven’t had a thing to say here about Kirstie Alley and Fat Actress it’s because I wrote about it for an upcoming BUST column. So while you’ll have to wait until late May to see it, please know that I did get paid to watch her flail around and scream hoarsely out her car window at the drive-thru about how she didn’t get her order of fries, which, if you know anything about the mysterious and reportedly hilarious ways of fat people, is NOT something an actual fat person would ever do, since they do everything they can to avoid public displays of blatant fattery. But Kirstie Alley has some weird ideas about fat, because judging from the way she dresses herself now, she thinks being fat comes with a special talent for reading Tarot cards.
I wish I could think of something to say about Celebrity Fit Club on VH1, which was not nearly as wrongheaded as Fat Actress (though—again, what was with all the weird medieval details? The set design? Maybe Hollywood stylists never see fat people outside of Renaissance Fairs and think that we all dress like serving wenches and/or sit in ornate carved chairs?). So, nothing else to add for now, except that in my boot camp class I do push-ups just like Wendy The Snapple Lady and when she did a set of standard pushups that one time I felt sort of personally betrayed somehow.
Posted by Wendy | Thu 03.17.05 04:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | send link
Mode magazine is calling it quits, which is kind of a shame. For those of you who live outside the U.S., or are men, or shut-ins, or whatever, Mode was the first mainstream fashion magazine to feature fuller-figured “plus-sized” models—though sometimes it seemed the only thing “plus” about the size numbers was that they were “integers greater than zero.” In general, though, Mode was created to promote an alternative to the kinds of beauty standards put forth by more traditional fashion magazines, and it was great.
Or it was sort of great. Or it was a great idea. I’m afraid to say I always had mixed feelings about Mode. I know I was supposed to be thrilled it even existed, and in a way I was, but I didn’t really like it. As much as I hate to say it, Mode was a little… well, lame.
Or it wasn’t Mode itself that was lame; it was the ads. Or it was the fashion industry. Somehow the whole gestalt of Mode didn’t quite work: on one page you’d see Kate Dillon in couture showing her milky cleavage; on the next there’d be an ad for some crappy knee-length tunic from Fashion Bug Plus. One of the inadvertently interesting things about Mode is that the clash between its pictorial content and its ads revealed the shitty realities of the clothing business—all the assumptions about age and class and aesthetics that make clothes in women’s sizes so depressingly ugly. Which is not to say the magazine didn’t try like hell to change those assumptions; if any progress has been made (and I think there has), Mode probably had something to do with it.
The weird thing about Mode was that it managed to become such an important magazine without having much to offer in the way of magazine. I know a lot of people were willing to overlook the magazine’s skimpy content because the models looked so much more “real,” but I guess I never quite agreed. Intellectually, I can understand the disgust that lots of people feel towards the “unrealistic images” of very thin women in Cosmoor Vogue. Personally, though, I never felt it. Maybe it’s a result of having never been thin in my life, but I never thought those models were supposed to represent me. I never felt I should “aspire” to look like Amber Valletta, and the idea that I ever would seems pretty fucking insulting.
On the other hand, when I read crap like Mademoiselle, I know I’m being encouraged to see myself in the articles—all the quizzes and the slumber-party chatter and the inane advice about relationships and careers and sex and “ways to drive your man wild.” Maybe Mode could have used some of that crap. When you skim all those dippy feature articles in other women’s magazines, you get a sense of the kind of persona they’re trying to sell you. When you read Mademoiselle, you’re the slighty naughty twentysomething party girl trying to make it in the big corporate world. With Marie Claire or the old incarnation of Glamour, you can be kind of shallow, but at least you vote and have most of your shit together. With Cosmopolitan, you can pretend to be a scheming uber-vixen in spike heels. With all these magazines, the persona never quite fits, but that’s kind of the point: you try it on for awhile for kicks.
I could never really do that with Mode, though. Most of their content seemed to consist of technical beauty tips and the sort of generic little feature articles usually found in airline magazines. At best, they’d have a feature story on some fuller-figured celebrity, which was nice and all that, but then again the point was always the same—Look! She’s beautiful! That woman is plus-sized and beautiful!
Maybe the whole problem with Mode was also the same thing that made it so different and radical: whenever you picked Mode, you were trying on the notion of being beautiful. You read Mode; you were beautiful. Every month, the Letters to the Editor were almost always the same—letters from women who were so very grateful to be beautiful at last. Or else letters from men who were practically wanking off at their keyboards because the women they saw in Mode were so beautiful, and they just wanted to let us know that the women in the world who look like the women in Mode are beautiful, too. And then sometimes Mode itself would take it on themselves to remind us that men think we are beautiful, because, actually, we are very beautiful.
I could go on with pointing out the limits of this kind of thinking, and make jabs at their “Ask Emme The Full-Figured Supermodel” advice column (which they ditched a couple of years ago anyway) but instead I’ll just make an analogy: Mode was like that one person who comes up to you at a party when you first get there and you’re all shy and you don’t know if you’ll fit in yet. And that person says, “Oh my God, that skirt is so cute—you look so good in it,” and you say, “Wow, thanks!” and the person says, “Really, it looks so good on you,” and you’re like, “yeah,” and you smile, and the person smiles back, and you sip your drink and smile at the person again, who nods, and then you don’t know what to say because you realize this person has nothing else to say to you. And then you look around, and you think, well, what now?
Don’t think there isn’t a part of me that wonders if I expect too much. I guess I should be glad that Carre Otis thinks being a Mode cover girl is better than being slapped around by Mickey Rourke.
And don’t think I don’t realize how powerful Mode really was. Whenever I hear people praise the magazine (which is often), they’ll always say something about how amazing it was just to see the kind of body types in Mode’s pictorials—and how it made them see the models in the other magazines differently. “You don’t realize how skinny those chicks in Elle are until you look at the women in Mode,” they say. Mode made the most difference when it functioned like a test pattern—images designed to help us adjust our eyes, that showed us what normal looks like.
Well, now we know what it looks like; now we know it’s beautiful. And now it’s time for something else to happen.
Posted by Wendy | Sun 09.30.01 08:04 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | send link
I went to see America’s Sweethearts last week. I’d heard the movie kind of stunk, and I could have seen John Cusack’s big, adorable head spout much better dialogue in other movies, but I went anyway. I went to see Julia Roberts in the fat suit. I needed to see what the film industry’s idea of a 180-pound woman looked like.
It turns out that Julia Roberts really does look like a 180-pound woman in the fat suit. I was pretty impressed, actually. She had some fakey-looking chubbiness around her face, but the general idea was right. She had a full face; she had a belly and a more ample chest, and what impressed me the most when I first saw her—when she walked into the hotel room in that flashback scene—was that she was just the Julia Roberts character with a fuller face and a belly. She acted the same way and she dressed pretty much the same way (Though when you’re the size she’s at in that scene, you don’t tuck your top in. You just don’t.).
But for the most part, the illusion worked. Almost. Because then the next time Julia Roberts made an appearance in the fat suit, she was stuffing her face. She was on a movie set and lingering by the craft services table with her cheeks full of food, with one hand feeding herself and another hand reaching for more food. The moment that scene came onscreen, everything changed about Julia Roberts’ performance in a fat suit. She’d become an imaginary fat person.
Imaginary fat people have food in their hands most of the time. Or their pockets. Often imaginary fat people speak with their mouths full. Imaginary fat people are socially awkward. Imaginary fat people are thin inside, but it’s hard sometimes to tell where the inside leaves off. The fat of imaginary fat people exists either in a fat suit or nowhere at all.
I’m talking about more than just onscreen stereotypes of fat people. Imaginary fat people aren’t quite the same thing. Their actions are stereotypical, certainly, but they come off quite differently than those of an overweight actor who performs fat-person cliches. Chris Farley played plenty of scenes in which he ate like a pig and smashed chairs by falling on them, but these things were about his physical comedy, the way he use his size, not the fact of his size in itself.
Imaginary fat people can be fat without the distractions of “character.” Fat is the character and imaginary fat people breathe themselves into life. They have nobody to blame but themselves.
During Julia Roberts’s first fat suit scene, the audience in the movie theatre didn’t know how to respond. When the hotel room door opened to reveal her standing there with her fat, there were a few tentative snickers; possibly a few were inadvertent, from surprise. Later, during the food scenes, the audience burst out laughing abruptly but wholeheartedly, relieved, as if they understood something at last. Or as if someone who had made them uncomfortable had suddenly left the room.
They also laughed when Julia Roberts gotupset and went down to the restaurant of the hotel by herself—a different hotel this time; now she was thin—and she ordered three big plates of food at once and ate from them voraciously. Of course they were laughing at the fat person who wasn’t there anymore. I mean, I laughed, too.
But then I realized I would never do that—eat like the way she was eating, alone, in public. Everyone I know who is fat has a problem with eating in front of strangers. You worry what people will think about you, what they’ll imagine.
An imaginary fat person doesn’t need a fat suit, but it helps. Think about all the Fat Monica jokes that have been told over the years on Friends. For a while it was enough to make verbal references to Monica’s past life as a fat person, sort of an inside joke. Skinny Monica would respond with little more than an exasperated look—oh, you guys! —whenever Ross and Rachel and Chandler made jabs at her phantom fat. The jokes were on nobody. But at some point it seemed everyone wanted to see the nobody, so the show’s writers put Monica in the fat suit, they wrote flashback sequences and alternate-reality episodes in which she would appear.They made the joke bigger and brought us all inside of it.
It sounds like that movie Shallow Hal will have the same kind of mind tricks as well—the movie where Gwyneth Paltrow plays a fat woman in some scenes and a thin woman in others. Supposedly the gimmick is that whenever Jack Black looks at her in the fat suit he sees her as a thin woman for some reason, and through this illusion he falls in love with her—therefore he really falls in love with a fat woman. But of course the fat woman isn’t real; only Gwyneth Paltrow is.
When you think about it, imaginary fat seems to be the only kind of fat the popular media can deal withat all. For months I’ve been reading stories in Us and People which insist that actresses are looking “healthy” again, natural again—using as their proof photos showing actresses first in their “too skinny” mode and then at their heavier, “more comfortable” size. I could pick out a few differences here and there—Portia de la Rossi’s arms, maybe, which are no longer as bony—but for the most part I couldn’t discern any kind of significant change in size. It’s a bizarre visual exercise: object lessons in looking at fat, in recognizing it only after carefully studying its absence.
We’re being told to look at ordinary arm flesh, or the occasional spill of skin out the side of a tight strapless dress, or the tissue that covers the hip bones—we’re told to take particular note of this stuff, and call it fat. The only fat we’re allowed to consider is the fat on someone like Charlize Theron. The only acceptable fat is practically invisible.
In the middle of Us magazine’s cover story “Hollywood’s Obsession With Weight” was a sidebar with a positive story about Carnie Wilson’s weight loss surgery. Having the sidebar there didn’t really seem to make sense, because the rest of the story was about actresses who were losing too much weight. But then, when you start to think in terms of imaginary fat, it makes perfect sense to include Carnie Wilson. Do you think anyone would have really given a shit if Carnie Wilson had lost all her weight by dieting and exercising? She would have gotten some press and some praise, probably, but the real attraction is that she lost the weight so quickly. Read any story about her and notice how often she’s quoted as saying things like, “It was as if I’d blinked and the weight came off.”
If fat can vanish like that, it might not be that real, right? We must love to think so.
Posted by Wendy | Sun 07.29.01 08:57 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack | send link
So the June 2001 issue of Marie Claire has the results of some survey in which readers were asked how much money would induce them to do things like cheat on their partners or have a one-night stand or gain ten pounds permanently. For the ten-pound propostition, women could name a price of $100, $1000, $600,000 or state “no amount is enough,” and for each option the article ran a quote by a woman who explained her choice. The fact that more than half the women surveyed went for the last choice—no amount is enough—strikes me as depressing and yet kind of intriguing, and I’m sure there are all sorts of interesting reasons why so many women wouldn’t go for gaining ten pounds in exchange for, um, financial freedom. But all the magazine could come up with was this quote by “Shari, 34, nurse,” who says:
“I’m comfortable with my body, so adding ten pounds to it would take an unthinkably large amount of money—more than any lottery. The extra weight would bring me up a size and probably show more in my face and hips.”
All right, so I really don’t see any problem with that first part. It sounds like a matter of being at a certain comfort level and not wanting to change things. That kind of makes sense. But then Shari, 34, doesn’t shut up. She blathers on:
“I’ve always been a size 2, and I’m lucky not to have to diet, or go to the gym. Though I don’t flaunt my figure, I think I look good in almost all clothing styles. The ten extra pounds wouldn’t pose a health risk, but it would be noticeable to others—and that would bother me. When you’re thin, people offer flattering compliments like, ‘Oh, you are so lucky to be that skinny.’ If I gained weight, the positive feedback from others might disappear—and that could chip away at my self-esteem.”
This has to be one of the most dumbassed things I’ve ever read. Especially that last sentence. “Chip away at her self-esteem,” as if her sense of self-worth was some kind of Franklin Mint collectible she’d ordered.
She says that if she gained ten pounds permanently the compliments might disappear. If she was a size FOUR. And that this could adversely affect her belief in herself so profoundly that six hundred thousand dollars or more would not be worth the chance that perhaps friends and strangers would no longer fawn over her completely fabulous metabolism, because then if that happened she’d most likely spiral irreversibly downward into an existential wretchedness, and she’d shuffle along with her ponderous size 4 hips, forsaken, with no other choice whatsoever but to frequent trashy bars, drinking grain alcohol and slurring profanities and desperately climbing onto the laps of strange men and crazily dry-humping them and offering them hand jobs or whatever—not for money, of course, because she’d have six hundred grand socked away—but for the attention.
Because even with six hundred grand, a little therapy for this self-esteem problem is apparently not an option. And apparently also trying to gain a sense of self-worth from other things—such as, you know, being a NURSE and helping sick people—is also not an option. Because Nurse Shari probably spends all her time sashaying through the critical care wards wriggling her teeny butt and fishing for compliments from all the paraplegics and burn victims and amputees and chemotherapy patients. “How do I look today? Yeah, uh-huh, I’m totally naturally a size two! People tell me I’m lucky. Do you think I’m lucky? Oh, and it’s time for your dialysis. Anyway, my thighs in these jeans …” It just pisses me off that her inane quote was published in a national magazine where anyone could just pick it up and read it. And that any guy could read it and laugh his baseball cap off because OF COURSE he’d gain ten pounds for a few thousand bucks, no problem; he’d just take the money and buy amateur porn.
And I guess Shari is too stupid to consider that in a few years her body might change and gain ten extra pounds anyway, and when that happens I hope she thinks about how much interest that money could have accrued and how it would have come in handy when her kids needed to be bailed out of jail after getting caught imitating stunts they saw on Jackass, because they’re stupid; stupid by virtue of being raised by Shari, who is stupid. I hate Shari.
(And I hate that those Marie Claire bitches totally set me up to get all pissed off. They probably went through hundreds of surveys before they came across Shari’s and they snickered until they nearly peed on their Jimmy Choo mules and decided to run her quote as if it was something a reasonable person would say. I mean, I hope that’s what happened.)
But I think I would take the $600,000. I think, actually, I would just take the highest amount of money offered, provided it was at least enough to change my standard of living. Although I have to say I’ve been a total whore for compliments lately. Maybe I want to hear this stuff because I’ve actually done something. I’ve been going around for months and months stomping around on the floors of aerobics classes and slinking around Cub Foods looking at all the food labels and trying to memorize the point value for everything like an idiot savant, so I need my props.
I suppose if I gained the ten pounds and got paid six hundred grand, I could go around saying, “Hey! I got paid an assload of money to stop losing weight!” and friends would say “That’s fantastic! And you know, you still look great.” But maybe they’d say that just so I’d pay for their drinks. Also, I couldn’t really take credit for anything except just being lucky enough to have $600,000 offered to me, which would then make me as annoying as Shari.
Taking the money might make me a bitch; would it make me a whore? Sometimes I think it would be nice to have a reason not to care about my weight, and a huge amount of money would be a big reason. Maybe it’s a matter of what’s being sold. I have to think about what that would be.
Posted by Wendy | Sat 05.26.01 12:45 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack | send link
I think all this aerobics crap has been straining my knees and I’ll have to start doing other things instead of hopping around. I’ll swim, I guess, as soon as I can stand the thought of walking around smelling like Chlorox; I’ll get a bike and ride and chap my butt for a while when spring comes, and I suppose I’ll do the elliptical cross-trainer machine some more.
Of all of these options, I like the elliptical cross-trainer the best. I like how it has the word elliptical in it: I like the idea that I am exercising my sense of obscurity. The treadmill, I think, is all about plain old existential banality; the NordicTrack just takes things way too literally, and as for the StairMaster—well, you can tell the StairMaster reads The Fountainhead and that kind of crap. I’m not sure about the dogma of exercycles. I’ll have to think about that.
But when it comes to the elliptical cross-trainer, it's not clear just what the fuck you're doing. You're sort of running . . . but you're also kind of pedalling, except then there's no bicycle . . . and then at the same time you're pulling these lever thingies, which you sometimes also push. And then sometimes the whole thing tells you just to stop pedalling and go in the opposite direction. It's such a Beckett play, that cross-trainer.
Anyway, my knees suck. I think I might get some rubber knee braces, which would make me look like I'm in the roller derby. I'd like that.
I went to WW and in my two weeks of futzing around and eating lots of stuff, I managed to lose 0.2 pounds. That's like about three ounces, right? Somehow those little increments seem more bizarre, especially when I wasn't working particularly hard to lose them. What happened to cause 3.2 ounces of matter to turn into energy--or however the hell weight loss occurs--anyway, what happened? I think of everything I ate in the past week, Thai food and popcorn and chocolate and whatever, all of it somehow turning into a heat vapor and dispatched efficiently and used up completely. And then I guess I use up parts of myself.
What wigs me out, what with my half-assed knowledge of science and all, is that I don't know what these parts are--they're not cells, are they? It's all something else. It's intangible, in much the same way things that bother me about being fat are intangible: I'm happy, but...
Maybe my body feeds on vague dissatisfaction. In which case supply would not be a problem.
Posted by Wendy | Thu 02.22.01 12:52 PM | TrackBack | send link
