My freshman year I signed myself up for the yearbook club’s photo team. One guy on staff who was a senior took it upon himself to teach me how to use a digital camera and edit in Photoshop. I turned out to be pretty good at it, and so it was assumed that I might take the helm someday. I remember he wore a lot of expensive-looking sweatpants and a thin gold chain, and he smelled like Abercrombie & Fitch. He had a superhot, superskinny girlfriend who was always mad at him.
One day after school we were all in the yearbook room, and I was crouching down in front of the cabinets trying to find a book when I felt something cold and hard press into my skin. I jumped up and found him on the floor behind me, laughing hysterically. He had put a penny in my butt crack, which I guess had been showing while I was crouching, thanks to my low-rise jeans. Behind him was a group of guys, also laughing.
I don’t remember what exactly I said, but I do remember feeling my entire body turn splotchy and red, and I know that he told me to calm down, to lighten up, to take a joke. A few weeks later, when his girlfriend finally dumped him, he pulled me into an empty classroom and offered me a back massage that ended with his hands up my shirt. I didn’t say no, but I definitely hadn’t said yes, either, and was instead frozen with embarrassment. I was fourteen.
He started texting me late at night, texts that I’d read under my blankets on my flip phone. I worried that if I didn’t go along with it, he would stop teaching me Photoshop, so I led him on for a while, realizing also that I had a little bit of control; he seemed to actually, in a weird way, like me. But after a few awkward weeks of me fumbling through flirtation, I think he understood that I wasn’t ever going to hook up with him, and we stopped speaking. I taught myself more Photoshop, and the next year I became the official photo editor of the yearbook anyway.
I’d had a middle school “boyfriend” before that situation who’d tried for the better part of a year to have oral sex with me, unsuccessfully. I never would have considered myself a prude, but my sexual experiences were truly limited to the ones in my head, which in turn never went past daydreams about kissing. I didn’t know what to make of the way boys were treating my body. They seemed to feel entitled to it, like the mere fact of my presence meant they were owed something, and I understood that this simultaneously gave me power and rendered me powerless.
To this day I can’t think about low-rise pants without feeling the ghost of a penny being forced into my butt crack, and the subsequent laugher; as Dr. Christine Blasey Ford put it to the Senate in 2018, “Indelible to the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter…”
I was coming of age in a time when everything was hypersexualized, but I didn’t understand the relationship between that and actual sex, a disconnect that’s one of the main reasons I didn’t realize I was gay until after high school: it was like being disembodied. There was no connection between the performance sexiness and my own pleasure, because I legitimately didn’t feel any, even by myself. I might have worn low-rise jeans to look “hot,” but I wasn’t thinking about wearing them to look sexy, though I suppose that was the effect they had, buttoning dangerously close to the top of my (also low-rise) underwear. (In her book Female Chauvinist Pigs, about American culture in the early 2000s, journalist Ariel Levy described a similar phenomenon among the female teenagers she interviewed—a disconnect between the performance of sexiness and feelings of pleasure—which she attributed to the contradiction between the push for abstinence-only education and the inescapable raunchiness of pop culture. While she was researching and observing, I was living it.)
Low-rise jeans looked good on me at first, but only because I had started puberty just two years before, and I had yet to develop hips, or cellulite, or a stomach, really. The female celebrities who wore them also had adolescent bodies—long, flat tummies and tiny butts, without any back fat or love handles. Over the next couple of years as hormones raged through me, I got that teenager puffiness, which included a belly, and suddenly those low-rise pants became my enemy. Not wearing them didn’t occur to me. Instead I took to wearing them with bulky knit sweaters or zipped-up hoodies, anything to hide the soft flesh that piled up above that tight waistband. I was often accidentally ripping off the belt loops trying to pull my jeans up over my love handles. Eventually I realized they’d fit right if I simply didn’t eat until dinner for enough days and then weeks in a row, so that’s what I did.
The idea of body positivity had not entered the mainstream. I understood that it was “bad” to have an eating disorder, and I think I noticed Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, but it was also the time of Destiny’s Child, Britney Spears, Kate Hudson, Keira Knightley, and Paris Hilton, and all their teeny-tiny bodies with their long, flat stomachs, hollow between their pointy hip bones. Fat women were mocked mercilessly in movies, on TV, and in real life. Fat jokes were just jokes. I was “lucky” to be a skinny-ish teenager, even though I had to go hungry to get there; the trendiest jeans actually came in my size.
In hindsight I’m struck by the relationship between the clothes that were in style, the hypersexualized, nearly pornographic celebrity culture, and the political climate. I was too young to be aware of how closely everything was related, and further, how subject to change they’d be; as a young teenager my reality felt like the only one that had ever existed. There was just one world, one set of values, one acceptable way to have a body, one cool way to dress it.
I was finally able to vote in the 2008 election, which meant I got to cast my first-ever ballot for Barack Obama during my sophomore year of college. We were in the middle of what journalists told us was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and Obama’s campaign message was simple: HOPE. We sorely needed it. For the first time in my life I felt a connection to a politician; here was a relatively young person who talked about things like women’s equality and had crowds chanting “Yes we can!” Like my generation, he was on social media. He was against gay marriage at that point but also said he would be open to discussing it, which was definitely more than what Bush had said. (Bush had, in fact, proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would ban it forever, while it was already illegal.) I had started dating girls just a few months before the election and was suddenly painfully aware of how my life would be impacted by the personal beliefs of lawmakers.
My coming out was also timed to the boyfriend jeans trend—blissfully soft and saggy straight-legged pants with generous pockets that looked fine no matter what I’d eaten or how close I was to my period. As a new lesbian, and someone who came out in the context of a relationship, not a community, I had no idea how to go about finding my people. I wanted nothing more than to be visible to others, and the tomboy silhouette of a boyfriend jean helped a lot. Plus, they were so comfortable, and physical comfort acted as a metaphor for how it felt to realize I was gay. There was power in jeans that fit. It was a new kind of sexiness, one that was outside of any sort of male gaze.
I wasn’t sure what exactly my gender presentation should be, though. I’d always been so feminine, and when I came out, I was generally attracted to other feminine girls, but they seemed to only be interested in me when I was dressed androgynously. I took to wearing my boyfriend jeans with gray or black Hanes tank tops, the kind you buy in bulk from Kmart, and stopped wearing a bra. I started shaving parts of my head and then eventually all of it. Being visibly queer made me feel more myself than I ever had, even if I had yet to fully nail down where my femininity fit within it.
Although I felt physically comfortable in soft, saggy jeans and tank tops, I soon realized I wasn’t sending the right message. I remember once bringing a woman home with me from a party, and when she entered my bedroom, she looked around at the mess of makeup and products and exclaimed, “Oh my god. You’re such a girl!” I decided in that moment that I hated her. And also that I needed to dress more femininely if I wanted to be seen for who I fully was.
Around that time, at a queer poetry event put on by NYU, I spotted a woman who looked
like no one I’d ever seen before. She was the tallest person in the cluster of girls she was talking to and had long, bleached-blonde hair. She was wearing red lipstick and high-waisted jeans with a thin cotton tank top tucked in. When she lifted her arms, soft patches of blonde armpit hair were revealed. She caught me staring at her and smiled. That night she sent me a friend request on Facebook and asked me out. We went on a few dates before she completely ghosted me. It was for the best, though: It wasn’t so much that I was attracted to her. It was that I finally had an example of how I wanted to look. I had never really seen someone who was so feminine and so clearly gay.
She was also, as it turned out, a trendsetter. No one was wearing high-waisted pants yet. But within a few years, with Obama in the White House for a second term and equal rights for women and minorities on the horizon, high-waisted pants settled over everything like a warm blanket. A shape that flatters hips and booties, high-waisted jeans seemed to be designed with actual curves in mind—the way they encompassed that part of your lower back that isn’t technically your butt but isn’t not your butt, either, and how the front held your whole belly, holding it in or expanding with it but either way not cutting it off.
This, too, was good timing for my personal life: I was ready to return to the femininity that felt the most natural to me, and I had realized that the women I liked most didn’t really care at all about the rise of my jeans.
As my understanding of my own gender evolved, so too did the high-waisted pants trend, which changed over a few years from skinny ankles to wide-leg trousers. Suddenly, the bigger your pants were, the better. It was the opposite of what I’d grown up with: whereas I remember going to Delia’s and squeezing myself into the tiniest, skinniest lowest rises I could find, I was now looking for exaggerated widths. It was a game-changer, one that happened in tandem with a developing awareness about the ways in which the fashion industry had led women to think our bodies were fundamentally flawed by not designing clothes for curvy bodies. My first story for Nylon print in 2014 was about wearing wide-fit clothing and how powerful it could be to intentionally take up space.
But high-waisted pants weren’t without complications. They weren’t always comfortable; we went from bisecting our stomachs with a low-rise waistband to hoisting them up and zipping them away entirely. In that way they were more traditionally flattering but harder to eat in, and harder still to sit in for a long workday. Jesse Kamm, the designer credited with truly bringing the high-waisted silhouette to the masses with her 2013 debut of the now cult-classic sailor pants, later made headlines again when women began pointing out that her pants don’t run above a size 12, limiting the women who can benefit from the high-waisted, wide-leg shape to the same ones that could enjoy low-rise pants. For plus-size women, the progression from low-rise to high-rise didn’t seem like progress at all.
Similarly, the sociopolitical progress made under Obama turned out to not be as widely celebrated as those of us living in progressive bubbles liked to believe—bubbles that were popped in 2016, when we were all so sure we were about to witness the election of the first-ever female president. I wanted Hillary Clinton to win so badly that it felt like an ache. I read the overtly sexist reporting on the election with a pit in my stomach. During the debates when Trump would loom over her menacingly, I wanted to scream, Run! But I also didn’t want her to run away; I needed her to stay and fight. Trump was the embodiment of every guy who had ever assaulted me or bullied me or harassed me, and he was being taken seriously.
I was in Lisbon, Portugal, by myself, when he won the election. I had cast my absentee ballot and then left the country for a tech conference called Web Summit with fifty thousand attendees. I was moderating two panels, one with the founders of famous music festivals and another with a DJ. I’d agreed to the latter because I’d been told that the DJ was trans and an active part of the community in Portugal, which sounded really interesting—it was only once I got there that I realized it was a miscommunication thanks to the language barrier: he was a trance DJ. And an active member of the Portuguese trance community.
At any rate, I went to bed at midnight on Election Day, which was about six p.m. at home, expecting to wake up to a new feminist world. All my friends were having election-viewing parties. I woke up at seven a.m. to hundreds of texts, and under the covers with one eye open, I frantically tried to figure out what had happened. I scrolled through my Instagram timeline (which was still chronological) and watched as everyone’s joyful selfies from their parties devolved into drunken sorrow. When I finally put the pieces together, I sobbed. Eventually I pulled some clothes on and made my way deliriously to the hotel’s breakfast buffet, where all around me I could hear people murmuring in different languages, the word “Trump” the only one I understood. I’d never felt so alone in my life.
On my way home, when the plane landed, people in “Make America Great Again” hats chanted, “USA! USA!” And then, at the immigration window at JFK Airport, I got stopped by border security. Thanks to the way I’d changed my look so many times over the past decade, my hair in my passport photo was long and dark brown, and in person it was short and blonde. They didn’t think my passport was mine. They asked for additional ID, but in my driver’s license photo, my head was shaved. They asked me in patronizing tones how often I went to the hair salon. I was jet-lagged and hungry and not in the mood to be taunted by uniformed men, and I couldn’t rein in my attitude. They ended up detaining me for several hours in a small windowless room. Finally I was brought into an office where a man at a computer asked me detailed questions to verify my identity. He eventually asked me for my paternal grandfather’s address and decided to let me go when I said, “He’s dead.”
I texted about it with a friend on the way back to Brooklyn, and she said, “Babe, welcome to Trump’s America.”
Trump’s election to office wasn’t just a win for Republicans; it was a win for men everywhere who thought they should be able to grab women “by the pussy.” His power made way for everyone’s down-low sexism, racism, and homophobia to be aired. In 2017, the FBI reported the highest surge in hate crimes since 9/11. There were nazi rallies across the country. Even in New York City, it felt suddenly unsafe to exist, especially on the subways, where I was attacked physically and verbally by men multiple times. Once while I was on the way to work holding hands with my girlfriend, Wallace, a man spit on us.
The social media activism that flourished under Obama took hold in a new way, with women using Twitter and Instagram to organize global marches. Perhaps because it felt like there was nothing we could do about Trump, women had other targets, taking down serial rapist Harvey Weinstein, and then the #MeToo movement gained traction, which had women calling out abusers across industries. Social media became a place to perform political views that were no longer represented in government. In response, women in media, especially women of color, self-identified feminists, Jews, and queers, saw an increase in death threats online, but it did little to quell the movement; if anything, the death threats validated its importance.
Part of the political performance on social media for progressives included the integration of body positivity into social justice content. Inspired by the work of fat activists, women began tagging their curvy selfies with #effyourbeautystandards and #selflove. The problem, though, was that thin women were doing it, too; women whose bodies were probably never marginalized for their size wanted in on the self-love, seeking validation for their insecurities through means created by women who were actually oppressed for the way they looked. Body parts got hashtagged. Even though the skinny-driven #thighgap was replaced in popularity with #thighbrow, the name for a line that sometimes appears on women at the top of their thighs when they kneel, through this labeling of body types, a hierarchy was implied. For every person who saw themselves reflected in a trending body part hashtag, someone did not.
Even before hashtags, women’s body parts have been going in and out of style for as long as there’s b
een style. What’s meant by that, really, is that for the moment, people with a certain physical characteristic are privileged. When I was a teenager, it was stomachs. Everyone wanted a six-pack. The best way to show your flat stomach off was with low-rise jeans; they were especially cool looking if you were skinny enough to have your jeans reveal the top of a V-shaped muscle that started at your hip points and ended just out of sight.
Later, when the Kardashian sisters rose to fame, big butts became cool—a shape that tends to look fabulous in a high-rise waist. But the thing is that our body types don’t change with the trends; big boobs, for example, are sometimes in and sometimes out, which changes what you’ll see on the runways and in ads, but people with flat chests like me—unless they have surgery—remain the same and therefore are allegedly sometimes cool and sometimes not. It’s a sneaky way to make sure someone is always feeling like garbage, while other people are celebrated for simply being born into a certain body that happens to fit well into the newest clothing.
Lest any one kind of woman get used to her body type being in style, now that Kim Kardashian fandom has shifted to Kendall and Kylie, her younger, less curvy half sisters, and their circle of supermodel / pop star BFFs, fashion has begun creeping back to the shapes I grew up with, like low-rise jeans paired with crop tops to show a long expanse of flat stomach between the two. This time, though, you have to have the skinny stomach with wide-set hips and a bootie, an exaggerated hourglass shape that looks best when squatting or kneeling. It’s most noticeable within what I’ve heard called the “Instagram Generation.”
Everybody (Else) Is Perfect Page 7
