Everything's Trash, But It's Okay

by Phoebe Robinson

  Even though I’m a proud AF feminist who was raised by two super badass, intelligent, and fiercely independent parental units, I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that, for many years, I used to watch Bridget Jones’s Diary, in particular the scene where Mark Darcy tells the charmingly hot mess Bridget, “I like you very much, just as you are,” the way LeBron James watches game tape. Just pressing rewind, marking X’s and O’s, and figuring out how to get the desired result of some dude thinking I’m so perfect that the way he sees me changes the way I see myself. Thankfully, I don’t feel that way anymore. However, that’s not going to stop me from telling you the closest I ever came to a Darcy/Jones moment IRL.

  One night, I was platonically dining with one of my agents and explaining how I wanted to drop ten pounds before doing some on-camera work. He responded, “You’re beautiful the way you are.” Now Old Pheebs would’ve dined on this compliment for weeks—nay, months!—like when Thanksgiving has come and gone, yet your parents are still making you dry-ass turkey sandwiches as your school lunch even though it’s Groundhog Day. But New Pheebs? New Pheebs is like, “Uh, duh, of course I’m beautiful, but also, like, I pay you 10 percent, so I cannot trust you.” This is not to say my agent is not a great guy; he is top-notch and probably meant what he said to the max, but he also ain’t trying to fuck up his direct deposits, so he couldn’t really say anything to me that doesn’t sound like a Bruno Mars lyric. The only difference is I was at a point in my life where I didn’t care whether he, or any other dude for that matter, felt positively or negatively about my looks. All that mattered was how I felt. I wish I could say this shift in my thinking happened a while ago—it’s only been a few months; thanks self-help books!—but my confidence made it seem like years, right? Well, it doesn’t matter how new this confidence is; I’m simply thrilled that this next level of self-acceptance is here, so yay! But also snooze, because this’ll make for a boring essay if I don’t take a stretch-the-old-hamstrings break during this victory lap and go back to a time when, unfortunately, outside opinions mattered too much.

  The year was 2010. Wait. To fully enjoy this story even though I’m not in the room with you, open a bottle of wine, get yourself in a 2010 kind of mood, and cue up “Empire State of Mind.” Great. Ready?

  The year was 2010, and this was me in a nutshell: almost twenty-six years old, had been doing stand-up for two years, lived by myself, had a decent day job as an office assistant to a couple of entertainment lawyers, and was hella single and could not understand why. Of course, now I do. I regularly wore a pair of square-toed Nine West pumps (stage whisper: I had no swag), I was still exclusively drinking whiskey sours and thinking that made me cool (normal whisper: I had no swag), and when I wasn’t doing stand-up, I spent many nights watching “diet woke”* TV like John Quiñones’s What Would You Do? (for the person looking over your shoulder while you’re reading this in public: I HAD NO GAHTDAMN SWAG!). In fact, I literally just got swag about one summer solstice ago and I’m certain I just lost it because I measure time in solstices. But for real, who are these people who have swag in their twenties? Or in their teens? I’m talking about teens like the singer Monica.

  She was young as hell when she sang about not messing with you romantically, spiritually, or emotionally while on her period in “Don’t Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days)” over a fire beat that had grown-ass women and men bumping it in their cars. Not only that, but It. Was. Her. Debut. Song. That’s right: Monica Denise Arnold was out there in those streets from the beginning, standing in her truth in the Always Infinity with Wings aisle. And the pièce de résistance? She was only fourteen when she did all of this. When I was fourteen and had my period, I’d quickly and not so discreetly wrap a zip-up Eddie Bauer fleece around my waist after bleeding through my pants at school, and when anyone would ask me why I did that, I’d just say, “DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT!”

  Anyway, after listening to me complain about being single, my mom suggested I try Match.com since the company I worked for owned it, meaning I could probably join without having to pay for a membership. Which, if I remember correctly, I did, so yaaas Gaga for free shit. I wrote my bio with the help of my friends, uploaded a bunch of pics, including my singular “hot” photo (me with a baby fro, wearing jeans and a vest, with a hot-pink hand-me-down Joe Boxer T-shirt underneath) that I’m sure dudes read less as hot and more as “tech avail* for background work in a Subaru commercial,” and I set about finding myself a boyfriend to prove to myself that I was attractive because I was lovable and lovable because someone found me attractive. To be honest, my time on Match is mostly a blur to me as I was a member eight years ago, but there is one guy—let’s call him Eric—who I remember vividly, the way you recall a particularly gnarly episode of food poisoning.

  Eric was a teacher who lived in Philly. He was cute, seemed kind, and laughed at my jokes when we flirted on Match.com. After a few days, we eventually escalated to Gchatting frequently throughout the day, which is code for “I like you more than I like doing my work, which I need in order to keep my dental plan.” #CurseOfPotentialNewPeenOrVajeen. We upgraded to phone calls, and then he said that magical sentence: “I want to come to NYC so we can go on a date.” Cue the confetti, lift my ass in the air the way Johnny Castle did Baby at the end of Dirty Dancing, and then let’s go to the DMV so I can combine our last names with a hyphen. What I’m getting at here is that your girl, up until her last breakup, had a penchant for not only putting all her eggs in one basket at the first sign of interest from a dude, but chopping down the bamboo stalk, stripping it, weaving it into a basket shape, shellacking it, and outfitting it with crinkle-cut decorative filler paper, marshmallow Peeps, and Cadbury eggs. I had zero chill and held the secret hope that every potential suitor was going to turn out to be “the One.” I blame romantic comedies and society (but not my parents!) for conditioning every straight woman to approach dating like it’s a Black Friday sale at Century 21 while straight dudes are taught to be as relaxed as a black woman’s hair during a 1960s Civil Rights march.

  Anyway, Eric made plans, and I made sure to tell a couple of my besties, Karen and Jamie, about this upcoming date just on the off chance that if I went missing, they could do their low-budget Nancy Grace investigation into my disappearance and by “low-budget Nancy Grace investigation,” I mean they would just call the police because they are an interior designer and an actress/comedian. The point is, my friends were on “Don’t Let Phoebe Die” duty; meanwhile, I didn’t tell my parents about this date because I didn’t want to jinx the situation—if things didn’t work out with Eric, Ma and Pa Robinson wouldn’t have had to worry about adjusting Christmas dinner recipes to account for one less portion. #JokesNotJokes. I got ready for the date and met Eric in the city. He was just as cute as in his photos, and he picked a delightful restaurant for dinner. The chemistry was there, the food was great, and the conversation was fantastic. Well, mostly.

  At one point, we were talking about stand-up, and he said something to the effect of “I don’t think that many female comedians are funny, but you’re really funny.” If a dude were to say that to me now, on a date or otherwise, I would politely ask him to do humanity a favor and swan-dive down an empty elevator shaft into the seventeenth circle of hell aka Shaquille O’Neal’s bare feet (Google that shit—it will make you want to get right with whatever God you believe in). But that’s New Pheebs. Old Pheebs was knee-deep in the innocence of youth and open to teaching a sexist dude in the hopes that my bootleg and on-the-fly “Don’t Have Turds for Brains/Women Are Awesome, Obviously” course was going to make him less a ding-dong and more husband material. I remained on the date, willing to overlook this red flag. The rest of the conversation was fun and free-flowing. He paid for dinner, we went for a stroll, and I suggested we hang out my place to watch a movie with the hope that we would make out with our tops off like Felicity was prone to do on season one of the show.

  We arrived at my adorable
one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment. It was minimally decorated with a bedroom set from Macy’s and approximately 17,000 DVDs. You see, I was a movie and TV nerd, so I most definitely needed all six seasons of the ahead-of-its-time HBO prison series Oz and not a coatrack. #Priorities. So Eric and I chatted for a little bit and then decided to watch the 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers. Let’s take a moment because I need to drag both of us for this foolish choice. I had 36,000 DVDs for us to choose between, ranging from cutesy (Brown Sugar), scary enough to make us cuddle close together but not enough to ruin romantic vibes (The Ring), and vintage sexiness with high drama (Carmen Jones), and we. Both. Still. Chose. Wedding Crashers. That’d be like getting ready to fight any of the X-Men by choosing from myriad superhero powers including invisibility, telepathy, and weather modification and instead going, “I think I’ll use this dusty-ass musket that takes seven minutes to reload and was last used during the Civil War.” Completely stupid, right? Sure, but ya know what? Eric and I still ended up making out, so I guess watching peak Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn is enough to get my motor running, which is something I can’t unlearn about myself. Derp.

  At this point, I will fast-forward through details because (1) my parents are reading this, (2) from what I’ve heard, erotic novels describe hetero sex with a lot of nauseating descriptors, such as “her center,” “flesh mound,” and “the heart of her femininity,” and so on, and I don’t want to put you, dear reader, through that, and most importantly, (3) it’s what happened after sexy times that matters.

  Eric and I returned from the Bone Zone and chilled in my bedroom, surrounded by 45,000 DVDs and the faint sounds of Wedding Crashers dialogue in the background. We drank some water and engaged in some casual small talk while cuddling. A couple of beats of silence and then homeboy started up with a quasi-serious tone that Boyz II Men’s Michael McCary had when he would drop his patented monologue during “End of the Road.” Eric began, “Ya know . . .”

  RECORD SCRATCH! Let’s pause for a sec. If you’re post-coi-coi aka post-coitus with someone and s/he starts a somber-sounding sentence with “Ya know . . . ,” please understand that what follows will not be “. . . I think we should be exclusive,” or “. . . Leah Remini deserves a Purple Heart and a lifetime supply of agave syrup for all the tea she spilled in her Scientology docuseries,” or “. . . hotels should stop only putting grilled cheese sandwiches on the kids’ menu. It’s not a kids’ food, but pure joy to be enjoyed by anyone.” Instead, what’s coming around the mountain, here she comes, will be such an outrageous pile of garbage that it will make Oscar the Grouch be like, “Lemme hit up my real estate agent and see if I can put a bid on this place.”

  Eric began, “Ya know . . .”

  And then I began cautiously, “Uh-huh?”

  “. . . there are exercises that you can do to tone up your thighs.”

  NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPE.

  JUST FUCKING NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPE! Y’all, this the biggest nope I done noped in my entire life. Bigger than the nope I feel when I see a grown-ass dude wearing Crocs with socks. Bigger than the nope when my iPhone goes from 40 percent to 12 percent all because I played the game Two Dots for approximately three and a half minutes. And bigger than the nope I screamed when a pigeon drive-by-pooped on my arm and friends told me that means good luck. Sorry, but if birds messily taking dumps on me the way a pastry chef tries to finish icing a cake with three seconds remaining on a MasterChef challenge is supposed to signal something good is coming my way, well, let me go on record stating that I would rather have a mediocre life with C-plus peen and C-minus cuisine. Anyway, Eric telling me, mere seconds after sex, that my thighs are subpar def belongs in the Nope Hall of Fame, but in that moment, I didn’t have the strength or self-love to yell out a “Nope” or kick him out of my apartment.

  Instead, I was stone silent, which he didn’t realize was because he had deeply hurt my feelings. He wrongly assumed my silence meant, “Oh, really? Golly gee, let me pull out a tape recorder and notepad like I’m Peter Parker taking copious notes for my front-page story for the Bugle.”

  He continued: “Yeah, you could be more toned, but no worries, you don’t need to lose weight. This is an easy fix.”

  Bitch, I wasn’t worried. And unless your name is Bobby McFerrin, singer of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” don’t you ever in your life insult my body and then drop a dollop of “no worries” on top like it’s Cool Whip on a slice of peach cobbler. Besides, my thighs don’t need fixing because they’re not a problem to begin with! They’re two cocoa-colored powerhouses that are strong enough for my niece to climb and hang from, yet tender and delectable enough to be the star of a six-piece drumstick box (no coleslaw, but double the mac and cheese, duh!) from KFC. So, if anything, you should be grateful AF that this Black-leesi even said yes to the sex with you.

  Okay. Okay. I didn’t actually say any of the above to Eric either, because when I was younger and someone was dragging with me to filth, my reaction time was that of Bobby Riggs when he played Billie Jean King in the Battle of the Sexes tennis match aka I was slow as hell. So instead of defending myself, I just savasana’d my behind in my bed, mentally reciting the Papa Roach mantra I use whenever I’m met with even the slightest of life’s inconveniences: “Cut my life into pieces! / This is my last resort.” And before I could collect my thoughts and respond to anything he said, the idiot JUMPED OUT OF BED, THREW ON HIS UNDERWEAR, AND LITERALLY DEMONSTRATED A SERIES OF EXERCISES I COULD DO TO, in his words, “MAKE YOUR BODY BETTER.” If you made WhatDaFuq.Huh.co.uk the home browser on your computer, then you, indeed, reacted correctly to this trash pile demonstrating lunges, squats, and reverse lunges approximately none point none seconds after sexy times. And with that, let’s add “telling someone the ‘flaws’ about their body that need ‘fixing’” to the list of things you don’t ever say or do to someone immediately after sex, which includes:

  “I killed a guy.”

  “Train is my favorite band.”

  Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd THAT’S IT! Just three very simple things to avoid upon exiting the Bone Zone.

  All kidding aside, it seems after doing an informal survey with my straight girlfriends, the whole negging post-coit is commonplace. Some have been told they get “too wet” down there, take too long to come, are not thin enough to date publicly but are good enough for “sex on the DL,” and one buddy of mine, who is not particularly into period sex but decided to go for it with encouragement from a guy she was dating, was told by him MIDSEX that he didn’t really enjoy the way her vagina smelled while she was on her period. Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?!

  Unfortunately, women are all too familiar with this type of gross body-shaming; furthermore, it is behavior that, for far too long, some men have thought is perfectly acceptable. But before I get into how society has conditioned men to express all opinions, especially the hurtful ones, about women to women, let’s return to #Thighgate2010, because every lady I know—whether she is gay, straight, or anywhere on the sexuality spectrum—has self-esteem issues in part due to outside sources like Eric. And us women all respond differently. Some do work out more. Or eat more. Or starve. Or feel unworthy. Or do the thing that I used to do, which I never, ever will again: mentally try to prove to him as well as to myself why my body and, to a lesser degree, why I, was good enough.

  While this impromptu Legs by Eric demonstration continued, I got my Sarah Huckabee Sanders on, defending myself to myself. I went through the stats: I’m five foot seven, weigh probably 120, 125 pounds, am a size 6 in H&M clothing, which translates to “LOL. WUT?,” and I can mostly eat what I want, in moderation, and not worry about too much weight gain. I know. I know. That is some cringe-y trash, because even at twenty-five, knowing how pervasive society’s toxic beauty standards are, deep down those are the ones I was still measuring myself against to ensure I was “good.” This iffy relationship with my body began w
hen I hit puberty, but by my late teens, the relaysh had officially become complicated.

  When I was in college, I was a size 0. I know, I know, woe is fucking me. But I was very flat-chested, had no hips, butt, or thighs; in fact, there were no curves to be found anywhere. Basically, I looked like one of those paper-thin, rectangular general-admish signs on day three of Coachella that have been abused by every breeze, burp, fart, and queef that had blown their way in the past seventy-two hours. In short, it was not my best look, and I was hella insecure about it. And it certainly didn’t help when one of my college buddies explained I only got hit on by closeted gay men because my boyish figure was unattractive to straight guys. Talk about the call coming from inside the house! Better yet, this call was coming from inside my bedroom closet while I was reaching for my Aldo shoes. Who needs enemies when there are friends straight up willing to pinprick the tiny-ass ego balloon I had to begin with? Still, I hoped, in vain, that my insecurity would lessen as I began to fill out. But nope! Turns out I wasn’t filling out properly.

  By junior year of college, I had joined my school’s improv team, developed a pretty banging social life that offset how much I was watching Oprah alone in my dorm room,* and happily put on some pounds. One weekend, a group of us improvisers were hanging out when one of the dudes I was chatting with took one look at my thighs (I was sitting down, and my thigh meat spread a bit as thigh meat is wont to do) and said, as a “joke,” “I would never date a girl whose thighs spread when she sat down.” Yeeeeeeeeah. As I’m sure we can all assume from my lack of response to Eric, I didn’t say anything to this improviser either, but I will now.