On top of the normal American puritanical shit, I had another reason to feel disgust with my sexual appetite: I was fat. And in my filled-with-internalized-fatphobia-mind, fat people—especially fat teens—were not allowed to be sexual. When I saw Hairspray in theaters with a group of my size 0 friends, I remember burning with resentment that Carly Wooldridge loved the movie. She wasn’t fat! A movie starring an overweight and horny teenage girl?! This movie was mine. I bought the soundtrack immediately simply to express to everyone that I liked the movie more than Carly did; unfortunately, she already owned the CD and no one else was keeping score. She was obsessed with Zac Efron, and I with the idea that a fat teenager could be attractive to someone as hot as Zac Efron. The relationship between Tracy and Link in the movie was the ultimate fantasy for me. Unfortunately, in real life, perhaps because I didn’t end segregation on my local TV station or have an amazing singing voice—not that either of those things would have likely impressed the guys at my school—I was destined to be alone. This was a particularly heartbreaking prospect since I was constantly in love with and wildly horny for everyone around me.
My father similarly grew up a fat kid and as such placed an oversize importance on people being attracted to him. I don’t think he’s been single-single—like not dating anyone—since he lost weight at nineteen. His best friend Jim once commented, “I don’t think he’d be like this if he’d just been asked to one Sadie Hawkins dance.” And I think Jim’s right, both about my father and about me. The longer I went without getting sexual attention, the more I got into watching and reading about it, and the media I was consuming only reinforced the belief that I needed to be thinner in order for someone to ever want me. There is something about youth, at least as we see youth in media, that promises sexual experiences, even if they be rushed and unsatisfying, and when you don’t get those experiences, you feel like a FREAK.
This is especially true for women. There is no shortage of messages, both explicit and implicit, screaming at you that the most sexually desirable thing you can be is a teenage girl (so fucked-up). This just made me even more hurt and angry that as a teenage girl I wasn’t sexually desirable to anyone around me. It wasn’t just my perception, either. It’s not like that problematic but highly catchy One Direction song where I just didn’t know that I was beautiful, thus making myself desirable to men. No, media and fellow ninth graders were very clear on the issue of fat women: not hot. Funny, sure. Slobbish? Yeah. But not hot.I
In recent years, there have been two rom-coms made about hot guys falling for overweight women, but only AFTER THEY GOT HIT IN THE HEAD AND ENDED UP AT THE HOSPITAL. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of movies about a schlubby guy somewhere between fourteen and fifty-four years old trying to hook up with someone way out of his league, and in none of them did the protagonist even have to go to urgent care. The messaging is clear: if you’re a girl who isn’t under 135 pounds, you would have to have a traumatic brain injury to think you could get with an attractive guy. If you ever want to have sex, ladies, your job is to be hot. (And by hot, we mean thin.) And, boy, did I ever want to have sex! Even if it was the same as jerking off.
My sister Lena, who is three years older and hundreds of times bolder than I am, started buying Cosmopolitan magazine when she was fourteen. I immediately started stealing them from her room, which rightfully drove her nuts, and often led to blowout screaming matches. My mom would try desperately to mitigate these fights by saying, “Lena! It’s not like she’s going to read the words off the page!” Which is true, but to be fair, stealing them was fucked-up of me. The thing was: Cosmo is horny, and once I found that out, there was no way I wasn’t going to steal it. Cosmo was the only “person” willing to talk to me about sex; everyone else avoided the topic with me aggressively. It’s wild to me that the horniest mainstream magazine for women is mostly just sex tips on how to make sex feel better for men, when men get to watch and read all kinds of porn directed right at them. Because we are required to be virginal and pure and adventurous sexual objects who exist solely for the pleasure of men. That’s why our sex advice is about making him come. So while I loved Cosmo, she also let me down. Where was the porn for me?
Do you realize just how few depictions there are in popular culture of young horny women? Or even adult horny women? Fleabag felt like a revelation because it depicted a woman wrestling with her sexual desire in a deeper way than the broad strokes of horniness they gave Samantha in Sex in the City. Women who are nuanced, competent individuals who want to have sex that makes them feel good and who aren’t the butt of a joke? There are like four movies total that have characters like this, and they’re all indie movies that didn’t do well commercially but should have. Pretty much every other movie on earth is about a horny dude, with the possible exception of the Harry Potter films, because there’s no sex at all in them, which is boring as fuck. (How did y’all make it through SEVEN books about teenagers where no one fucks and sucks? I truly cannot fathom this.) There is a truth universally acknowledged that men are constantly thinking about sex, and not just thinking about it, but seeking it out. Well, guess what, society? Ladies are horny, too!
But that’s not something we’re supposed to talk about. When I was younger and somehow both much smarter (I got As in AP calc, bitch!!) and much dumber (I wasn’t a feminist yet) than I am now, I spent a lot of my time around guys joking about female masturbation owing to the simple fact that no one else was talking about it, and it therefore got me attention. None of my female friends and I talked about it with each other, other than perhaps a onetime timid exchange of “Do you…?” / “Yeah? Me too.” But I loved talking about it to guys because they were so shocked and, at least in my mind, excited to hear that women indeed did want to have sexual experiences. Looking back, I think I mostly just made everyone super-duper uncomfortable, but I thought that was a key part of jokes, because I watched too much Chelsea Lately at the time. I promise I’m better now.II
Honestly, though, masturbation jokes and the reaction they got reinforced the idea that as someone who was both fat and a woman my enjoyment of sex—my simple desire to have sex with another person—was a type of transgression. Something to tell jokes about, if I wanted to talk about it at all. Something profane. The jokes were my way of trying to normalize my own voracious sexual appetite. This was before the days of Twitter and “Spit on me, Rachel Weisz,” or “Hit me with a bus, Michael B. Jordan.” I didn’t know other women were also desperately horny. Even Cosmo often framed sex as something nice to do with a partner rather than an all-consuming preoccupation.
While I was embarrassed by my seemingly insatiable desire for sex, there was one thing that went even beyond that shame: my interest in love. Up until at least college I could more easily watch TV in the same room as other people when someone was getting railed than I could when two people were declaring their love for one another. (Honestly, I still often find it squirm-worthy.) Masturbating and having sex were things I could, and did, joke about. They were cool but transgressive, I felt. Love was not. In no way was love cool. I was under the impression that it was feminine and, therefore, icky. While someone might put up with a thinner, hotter person wanting love from them, as a fat woman it felt like way too much to ask for. I convinced myself for many, many years that I actually found romantic love gross and overrated.
That did not stop me from desperately consuming every single book, movie, and television show I could find about the topic. I have seen almost every single mainstream rom-com made since 1980, and many from before then. I read dozens of romance novels a year, usually within a day, and I have since I was about fourteen. Yes, I wanted to **** Brendan Fraser’s ****, but I also thought that I could really end up marrying Heath Ledger someday, if I simply lost weight, and only if he agreed to give up smoking. In real life, I maintained a crush on at least one person virtually nonstop from age five (Michael Bernard) on. Clearly, on some level, I was still into the idea of love, even if I acted disgusted and above it.
This was self-preservation. I suspected love was not coming for me.
In sixth grade, I stupidly let one of my friends tell Ben Cannon that I liked him. I think I mostly liked him out of a sense of protection or pity for him, because a friend of mine, Annie Manwaring, was obsessed with him to the point of being creepy—she saved a Kleenex he threw at her once—and I thought he deserved better, which perhaps morphed into me liking him. Or maybe Annie just talked about him so much that I became preoccupied, too. Either way, when Ben found out that I liked/was scared for him, he looked up across the room of Mr. McGee’s sixth-grade science class and let out a simple yet effective “Ew.” I turned bright red and my whole body got hot. Like on-fire hot. Like a sunburn, but everywhere. It felt like I was being incinerated. What the fuck had I even been thinking letting someone tell him that I liked him? Never. Fucking. Again.
But then seventh grade came along and I liked Dominic Coultrip, who was always super nice to me—of course I liked him. Unless I was in a group project, no guy ever talked to me.III Guys talked to my friends, I joked around awkwardly on the periphery, the guys laughed and then returned their attention to my friends, girls who emitted polite giggles and fit into denim skirts. One day in computer lab Dominic Coultrip found out that I liked him—Serial, please do a podcast to find out who told him. I carefully avoided him for the rest of the day until he approached me in Mrs. Goeke’s science class (WHY IS IT ALWAYS SCIENCE CLASS?) and told me super, super kindly that he didn’t like me at all but that I was very funny, which was so much worse than Ben’s response, because while I agreed with Ben’s assessment of me, I did not agree with Dominic’s. I assured Dominic that I didn’t actually like him—that someone had given him bad information—a lie, which he very generously let me tell.
After that, I stopped telling friends about my crushes. What was the next person going to do when they found out I liked them, vomit? I’d barely survived disgust and condescending kindness. I didn’t need any further confirmation that I was an ugly piece-of-shit hag whom no one would ever be horny for, the very thing I wanted most. At that time, I truly believed the zenith of human experience was someone being attracted to you.IV This belief caused me absolutely zero problems at all.
Just kidding.
Too Many Servings of Ketchup
A doctor broke the news to me when I was in fourth grade. More accurately, a doctor broke the news to my mother, who then broke it to me: I hated myself.
He was an ear, nose, and throat doctor named Dr. S, whom I’ve always associated with cotton balls, although I have no explanation for that. Both my sister and I had ear surgeries young, so maybe he was the first person to show me a cotton ball. I don’t know. This isn’t about him!
I had gotten out of school (thrilling!) for a few hours in order to get an appointment with Dr. S, which went normally, as far as I remember, until the end, when he sent me out to the lobby while he talked to my mother. I felt this was weird, but I didn’t know enough about ears, noses, or throats to know what was happening. When my mom came out, she was crying and she shuttled me out to our waiting Honda Odyssey. My mom crying is pretty standard fare—everyone in my immediate family cries early and cries often—but every time she cries I am paralyzed with fear that I have Done Something Wrong.
This time, she was crying because Dr. S had informed her that I hated myself. My presenting symptoms: I had black nail polish on and I was wearing all black and I was fat. First of all, I wore all black because I was fat and black is supposedly slimming.I (Also, my entire dad’s side of the family wears all black because we’re Italian; I don’t know what to tell you, Dr. S.) And I was fat not because I hated myself but because I loved eating and couldn’t stop and my metabolism is certifiably slow.
Until Dr. S, it did not occur to me to hate myself. I didn’t think that was really an option, since, you know, I was stuck with myself. That’s like hating the sky. Like, okay, cool, now what?
Here’s where I could give Dr. S a break and presume that he meant well, but I really don’t care. He’s a white dude who probably made six figures for decades and had free health insurance the whole time, so I don’t give two shits about making sure we all think well of his intent. I get the idea behind telling a parent that you’re concerned about their child as a medical professional. However, (a) first of all, YOU’RE AN EAR, NOSE, AND THROAT DOCTOR, BUDDY. And (b) second of all, the reason that Dr. S presumed that I hated myself and pulled my mother aside to chitchat about that was simply because he believes fat people hate themselves. There is no way he would have confronted my mother if I’d been thin. Even if I’d been too thin.
Before the revelations of Dr. S, I’d certainly disliked my body. It wasn’t like I didn’t notice and feel the differences between my body and other kids’. I was the slowest to run a mile in gym class, I didn’t look as “good” in clothes, and Natalie Buckner stopped being my friend in first grade because I was “getting fat.” I knew what was happening, but I was also innocently self-absorbed enough, as many kids are at age nine, to not have considered self-hatred an option.
My mother was caught off guard by having a fat kid. At the time she met my father, he was in the best shape of his life, obsessively exercising and carefully dieting to stay fit. I’m sure she knew his origin story of being a fat kid; he refused to dance at their wedding or go swimming ever—two very common aversions for ex- or current fat people. As Guy Branum described in his book My Life as a Goddess, “Fat people are told we are supposed to be obsessed with our bodies but never take pleasure in them.” When my dad got remarried after they divorced, he and my stepmom had an accordion player at their wedding in lieu of a band or a DJ, I presume so that no one would expect any dancing. I still don’t think it occurred to my mom—a tiny, birdlike woman who passed on to me her delicate wrists and nothing else!—that her child would be overweight. I know it had to have occurred to my father, for whom fatness and youth are inextricable. When I started getting fat around the same age he had exactly forty years earlier, I suspect it felt like fate. I was already like him in just about every other way (shy, unibrow, very expressive dresser).
It took a while after my seminal appointment with Dr. S for me to be concerned that something might actually be “wrong” with me. I was sitting in the front seat of my mom’s car outside of Subway while my sister Lena ran in and got a sandwich before she had to head to choir practice. I’d gotten french fries from somewhere. I would say McDonald’s, but these were crinkle-cut fries, which we all know McDonald’s doesn’t serve, and which I think we can all agree SUCK.II Anyway, I had already eaten dinner, and I started eating this cardboard tray of shitty fries and my mother told me to stop, that I’d already had enough. I agreed wholeheartedly with her. I was full. I didn’t need any more food. I wanted to stop. I knew fries weren’t good for me, but more than that, I thought these fries tasted like shit and I wasn’t hungry. But I couldn’t stop. I kept watching my hand feed my mouth, but I had no control. I felt like screaming, but I knew that would freak my mom out. (Yelling, “HELP, I CAN’T STOP EATING FRIES, IT’S AN OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE RIGHT NOW, PLEASE HELP!!!!” is not chill, and my mother is a worrier). So instead, I picked the least weird option, which was to keep eating the fries even as my mother tried to get me to stop. Even as my own brain tried to get me to stop.
I knew then that I had a problem. Around the time I entered middle school, people around me got a lot more bold about my “weight problem.” Let’s be clear: my weight was in no way a problem for literally anyone, other than possibly me. My stepmother, another naturally thin woman in my life, swore that what I had was “baby fat” and that she had hers until nineteen.III By age twelve, it was pretty clear that it was more than baby fat; I could and often would eat an entire large pizza by myself. People—parents, medical professionals, aunts, really any adult I came in contact with for long enough—came up with some pretty great theories as to why I’d gotten fat, which they of course shared with me:
My parents let
me have too many treats.
My parents never let me have any treats, so when I did get them, I went overboard.
My body never felt full.
I was punishing my body.
I had too little going on in my life.
I had too much going on in my life.
I wasn’t mindful enough when I ate, which was evinced by the fact that I often danced while eating or enjoyed the food too much.
I was upset about my parents’ divorce.
I simply didn’t know about healthy choices.
The last one was one of the most ridiculous. It’s not like I didn’t get what eating healthy was all about. Here’s my moment to sound like a total ass, but I was scoring in the 98th percentile of my state in standardized testing and everyone thought I couldn’t figure out that eating a second breakfast of a soft pretzel with cheese and four sugar cookies when I got to the cafeteria in the morning was bad for me. At one point, my mom literally called the school and told them to stop selling me breakfast, and then I tried to scam and lie to the poor lunch ladies, who did not need to add “Keep my kid from gaining weight” to their job. I fucking knew what the problem was.
The problem was I couldn’t stop eating.
The first person to describe what was actually happening to me internally was a friend of my mother’s. She was a school nurse with purple hair, purple glasses on a beaded chain, tattoos, and the best gap-toothed smile in the world. And she was a food addict. She’d also been a drug addict before, so if anyone is going to know what addiction was like, it’s her. Food is a particularly shitty thing to be addicted to since, you know, you can’t exactly quit. At a dinner once, she told me about the time at a party where she ended up eating dozens of carrots, and how upset she was by it. A friend of hers failed to understand the problem: “But carrots are healthy!” My mom’s friend explained: “Yes, but I didn’t want to eat them; I just couldn’t stop.”
Well, This Is Exhausting Page 2
