The Clothes Make the Girl

by Brittany Gibbons

  Listen, I know some people have really strong feelings about shape wear. First there are angry dudes on the Internet who say women who wear Spanx are somehow cheating or deceiving them. As if women are tricking men into liking them by reshaping their bodies. This just speaks to a general misunderstanding about what foundation garments are, and the failure to understand such concepts as object permanence. Women aren’t changing their bodies with Spanx—it’s not liposuction. For me, Spanx are the difference between having smooth fat or visible panty-line fat. Those are the choices I get; none of the choices are Kate Moss.

  Shape wear is often panned by some women as the antithesis of body positivity. And there are valid points to their arguments. You shouldn’t ever feel that your body has to look or behave a certain way in order to be beautiful. Almost all women-targeted marketing is done through the promise of weight loss or beauty. And Spanx and corsets are great ways to swing your body pendulum toward a more normalized beauty standard.

  Can you be body positive and wear shape wear? Um, yeah, I think so. Loving your body is about being comfortable in your body, and only you get to set the parameters of that, only you get to decide what it looks like, and only you know where your finish line is. Never let anyone make you feel ashamed about what you decide, or don’t decide, to put onto your body. If you feel like you’re beautiful only when you wear shape wear, I’d say we have some work to do. But if you wear Spanx because you like them, and like yourself just as much when you don’t, carry on, my wayward sister!

  So, as I was saying, I decided to wear Spanx to smooth out the beautiful lines of the trumpet gown, and in this instance, Spanx is plural, as in, I wore two pair. (I wanted to clarify that, because the plural of Spanx is Spanx . . . like deer or moose, so it can be confusing.)

  The first layer looked like giant briefs, which, if we’re being honest, is a typical Brittany move; I like to wear things that make me feel held in, because this makes me feel safe and comfortable. I wear many garments pulled up to my retinas—jeans, skirts, period underwear—so these granny panties Spanx are really not outside my wheelhouse. Then over that, I layered a pair of tummy/thigh combo Spanx. I don’t know the technical term, so I refer to those as the “half-wrestling-singlet variety.”

  The first ten minutes of being dressed is the best and most effective the shape wear will ever react to my body. The second I have to sit down, it’s like a slow, painful prison escape to the floor for these bitches.

  To the window, to the wall!

  Til the sweat drop down my balls

  Til all these bitches crawl . . .

  Yes, that’s right, Lil Jon was rapping about wearing Spanx in the summer the whole time.

  Six hours later, the wedding was over and we climbed out of a taxi and took the elevator to our room on the thirty-fifth floor overlooking Navy Pier. As I explained earlier, our general rule is that if we are away from our kids, we have sex, unless we’re away doing something where that would be frowned on, like going to prison or lying in a hospital bed giving birth to a baby. Otherwise, even if we are tired or grumpy, we try to make it a point to take advantage of our time alone. It’d be like going to Memphis and not visiting Graceland.

  “What is happening under here?” Andy asked, unzipping my gown while I pulled the fake lashes from my eyelids.

  Normally, I would not handle my shape-wear business in front of him. We don’t have many secrets between us, but some things are worth being left unseen to keep the mystery alive, and putting on shape wear is one of those things. Nobody wants to know how the sausage gets made. Especially since one of the names I use for shape wear is “sausage casing.”

  “How do I get this off?” he asked, confused about what tube to attack first.

  “Don’t worry about it.” I kissed him as we fell back onto the king-size bed.

  Spanx, the brand-name kind anyway, come conveniently equipped with an open hole in the crotch for easier bathroom access. The idea is that you don’t have to pull your Spanx off, you can just squat and pee through the existing hole. If you are wearing any other brand of shape wear, it’s really easy to take a pair of scissors and DIY that little slit yourself. Just don’t get too aggressive with your cutting; it’s all too easy to go from shape wear to assless chaps.

  In my opinion, the brand-name pee hole is a little on the small side, so while that makes for tricky aim, especially when you’re drinking, it does make me feel a little bit tighter when it counts, if you know what I’m saying . . .

  In the heat of the moment, Andy noticed nothing, he was far too distracted by my boobs and the pretty bra and the fact that we could hump to our hearts’ content without little fists banging on our bedroom door, and us having to yell, “Go away, we’re on the phone with Santa!”

  After we finished, Andy ordered hamburgers and fries from room service, and joined me lying quietly on the still-made bed, looking out the wall-length window at the colored lights on the water.

  All at once it all became too much.

  “You have to get these off of me,” I gasped, feeling suddenly light-headed and trapped.

  I clawed at the spandex while Andy dug through my purse for tools. A few moments later he pushed me back, and using the emergency corkscrew I keep in my bag at all times, tore through the two layers of shape wear, and peeled the moist black scuba suit from my body.

  I filled my lungs to capacity for the first time since being seated on the groom’s side at three o’clock sharp.

  “It burns. It burns so good.”

  It was like baptism by shape wear, and I emerged from the water born again and with this weird linea nigra from the tummy seam.

  But, I have to say . . . the sex was kinda worth it.

  Not everything I wear under my clothes is made of spandex and serves the sole purpose of a foundational torture. Yes, due to my size, support is needed, but sometimes I just want to wear something so sexy it gets me instantaneously bent over a bed. Or a desk. Or the inside of an elevator.

  Up until very recently, plus-size undergarments were made for comfort, not seduction. The “sexy” lingerie we were offered came from twenty-four-hour adult stores right off the exits of major interstates. It came in plastic costume bags generically labeled PLUS SIZE, and all of it reflected some sort of fetish or sexual role.

  Being a sexy nurse is fine on Halloween, but on a Tuesday in March, I want to be the sexy adult, author, and businesswoman I am, no costume needed. Curvy women weren’t getting the message that they could just be sexy as themselves, and not have to pretend to be someone else entirely.

  Don’t get me wrong, I am not at all against role-playing, Andy and I often role-play during our date nights, pretending to be two strangers meeting for the first time after connecting on Tinder. He plays a single British businessman with a strong affection for dogs who’s only in the country for a week. I’m Sheryl Sandberg ready to lean into a good time. It gets pretty steamy.

  But under normal circumstances, I just want to wear something that makes me feel gorgeous and romantic, and that can look different for everybody.

  Confession, I have never seen The Notebook, and I’ve only seen the first half of Titanic. I’m going to assume everything turns out fine for both couples.

  But if Jack were to paint my portrait in the parking area of a doomed cruise ship, I wouldn’t be naked. Lying on my side can cause my boobs to get a little too “Picasso” when left to gravity. Instead I’d be wearing a lavender lace bra under a thinning white V-neck T-shirt and matching lavender lace boy shorts with my hair tossed up in a ponytail.

  That right there is my sex outfit. My “leave-the-lights-on, you’re-definitively-getting-laid, head-cocked-to-the-side, bottom-lip-nibbling” sex outfit.

  The sexiest women I know are sexy because they feel sexy for themselves first. I spent far too much of my life trying to make myself desirable for someone else and, in so doing, allowing that person to enjoy my body more than I enjoyed my body. I put on tank tops with built-in bra
s and covered my body with duvets. Sex was sweaty and hot because I hid shamefully under a blanket in the middle of summer, not because I was enjoying it and it was erotically aerobic. I lay on a bed, and while he moaned with pleasure, I focused on keeping my legs flexed enough so they wouldn’t jiggle. When I got onto my knees I asked him to go slower so that my ass didn’t slap so loudly against him. And when I rolled onto my side, I grabbed the pillow from behind my head and squeezed it to hide my stomach.

  Being sexy for my husband wasn’t working for him because it would have required a miner’s hat to actually see me in the dark, and it wasn’t working for me because I wasn’t present enough to enjoy it anyways. Not with all the flappy and sticking and slapping noises and trying to control everything.

  Andy telling me he thought I was sexy wasn’t working, because I didn’t believe him, and then it hurt his feelings that I didn’t believe him, so then I was apologizing for not believing him, which is an asinine thing to have to apologize for, and what the hell was happening?

  I remember thinking, I don’t want to die, go to heaven, and when St. Peter asks me if I had fun, have my answer be, “No, but I tried really hard to make sure everyone else did.” As women, we are raised to be selfless beings. It’s why our dinners are always cold when we finally sit down to eat. Or more accurately, stand over the counter and shovel our food in after everyone else leaves the kitchen.

  Your priority in this life is you. Yes, keep the kids alive, and be a great partner in your relationships, but none of that should come at the expense of you. And for me in the bedroom, it most certainly was. Even after I got my life back outside the bedroom.

  Here’s the thing—you don’t need to lower the bar, and in fact, you shouldn’t. You need to realize that you are the one who holds the bar to begin with. Being sexy and comfortable are not mutually exclusive.

  I’m not telling you to spend the rest of your life in sweatpants, but I don’t think we’re giving the people in our lives, or ourselves, enough credit if we assume the only way anyone will want us is if we stop looking like we actually enjoy being ourselves. The road to sexy starts with one step.

  My first step was buying some decent drawers. I looked in my underwear drawer and realized how atrocious my underwear supply had gotten. I’ve worn swimsuit bottoms to gynecologist appointments because I hadn’t bought underwear since before having children. Now I know that all my doctor does is look at vaginas all day, and I’m sure she’s seen some doozies, but I was ashamed to let her see the sad state of my undergarments: high-rise maternity underwear that had faded to almost nothing, elastic coming through at the waist and leg holes, and fully stained from heavy period use.

  It’s really hard to feel sexy when you look like a nursing-home patient. It’s just that underwear had always been a low-priority purchase for me. My kids always needed something more than I needed cute panties.

  So during the dark drawer days, I went to the theater with friends to see Fifty Shades of Grey, and of course bought a giant bin of popcorn, even though the older I get, the less my bowels enjoy it. Seriously, I can’t say no to it, yet can’t make it through a movie without violently shooting that salty business back out of my body.

  All of a sudden there was a point in the movie, about the halfway mark on my popcorn bucket, when I laughed so hard that I pooped my pants. Not a ton, but enough for it to be the type of emergency you address right away.

  I remember reading that some cinema chains purchased plastic seat covers for their theaters because they thought the movie would turn so many women on they’d simultaneously ejaculate. Perhaps they should also have planned for laughter-induced popcorn shits.

  When I got to the restroom, I simply cleaned myself off and tossed my underwear in the garbage, no second thoughts given. After the movie, I recounted the hilarious story to my friends and they were horrified, not that I’d pooped my pants, we’ve all been there, but that I’d just tossed my underwear away.

  “Why wouldn’t you wrap it up and put it in your purse?” Meredith asked. “You don’t throw away good underwear.”

  They all nodded in agreement, and then I explained that I didn’t have good underwear. Just the threadbare kangaroo-pouch-looking stuff from when I was pregnant, and I realized then that my friends probably wore this thing known as gooooood underwear. Grown-ass women need grown-ass underwear, and I had totally missed the boat on this.

  I now have two underwear drawers. The first, comprising more everyday options, includes sleek black bikini cuts, some higher-rise briefs that make me feel held in under dresses, and my official “period underwear.” Which is no longer old underwear with stains on it, but rather more expensive investment pieces of Thinx that are lined with magic and hold entire tampons’ worth of blood. Seriously, what are those things made of?

  My second drawer is full of satin and lace, the kind of underwear you wear when you need to know that underneath your clothes you’re pure sex and strength. What this drawer lacks in breathability and natural fibers, it makes up for in confidence and fun. Let’s just say that I don’t wear anything from this drawer to church. Not because of Jesus, but because they don’t have air-conditioning in the house of the Lord, and between the sweat and the satin, I’d slide right off the pew.

  I now have sex with the lights on. Not just because my underwear is sexy, but because treating myself to things that make me feel sexy and cared for makes me feel like I am worth feeling sexy and cared for, and I am.

  Also, nobody should be wearing a thirty-dollar pair of panties in the dark.

  CHAPTER 6

  I’m Getting Married; Suck It, Julia Roberts

  Andy weighs eighty pounds less than I do. If my life were a television show, he would be married to my best friend. He and I would know each other, of course. We’d probably meet at a bar while I was out with my girlfriends, and when the thinner one went to the bathroom, he’d call me over to get to know me. And while he asked about my job and where I was from, my heart would flutter a little bit.

  Oh my God, he asked me to sit next to him, and now our forearms are touching on the bar.

  Then Andy would ask me if my friend and I needed a drink, or if we were friends from work. When she came out of the bathroom, he’d ask us if we wanted to join him and his friend in a game of pool. I’d say yes right away, dragging my gorgeous bestie along, and Andy and I would trade banter all night, playfully brushing against each other as we took turns taking shots. And then at the end of the night, I’d stall a bit getting my coat on, and when he walked over to us nervously, my heart would stop. And then he’d ask my best friend out on a date.

  I’d probably be in their wedding, getting paired with one of the bride’s chubby male cousins, and I’d make a hilarious toast. I’d go on to be their children’s godparent and around for all their holiday celebrations, where they’d put their arms around each other across the counter from me and say, “If only a guy could see what a catch you are, Brittany.” And they’d shake their heads.

  I don’t look like the girl who gets the guy, at least not as far as romantic comedies and network sitcoms go. And when that’s the only message you’re getting, it’s really hard not to believe it. You can’t help but think you’re only good enough to be cast in the role of supporting actress/supportive best friend.

  Sure, pretty friend, let me help you meet the man of your dreams.

  Come to my house when you’re fighting with your hot spouse and drink my wine and explain to me why I don’t understand what your feelings feel like.

  By all means, feel free to fix me up with the heavyset man in your office.

  When I text you a photo of what I’m wearing on our first date, tell me I look sassy, and that we make an “adorable” couple.

  And when I get married, treat it with the same maturity you showed when planning your dog’s birthday party. After all, chubby-best-friend roles don’t “get” passion or sexuality. We are just feel-good one-dimensional cartoons acting as wing women so you c
an freely flirt with men at the bar or on the dance floor.

  You are Julia Roberts and I am Rebel Wilson, and everyone knows the movie ends when Julia Roberts gets the guy.

  I met Andy when I was fifteen years old. He had gotten into a car accident in front of my house, asked to use my phone, and he never left. Seriously, I could not get this kid to stop coming over.

  Andy was tall and thin; he played basketball and golf, listened to rap music, and came from a family with money. I was chubby, poor, and hated when people came over to my house because my mom bred cocker spaniels and all of our chewed-up furniture smelled like dogs and was covered in fur.

  I even pretended to sleep in on the weekends so he’d go away, but my mom just let him in the house and sent him back to my bedroom, where he’d sit on the corner of my bed, dogs piled on top of him, waiting for me to wake up.

  What the hell, Mom! Haven’t you ever seen any of the Lifetime movies where thirty-year-old Kellie Martin plays some teenager that was attacked by the otherwise unassuming high school jock?

  His attention was a severe mental adjustment for me. I was so used to obsessing over boys who would never actually date me that I didn’t know how to process Andy and his persistence, undeterred by my fake narcolepsy and bed head.

  I mean, you read the second chapter; I wore JNCO jeans that were made for a boy, for fuck’s sake. What was I to do with a boy who just liked me, the Nominee for Best Supporting Actress?

  I think one of the reasons I have such a strong relationship with Andy Gibbons* is because I learned how to actually like and accept myself right beside him and his insistence on liking and accepting me just the way I was. In fact, I don’t think I have ever had to hide something about me or pretend to like something he liked out of insecurity.