Shrill

by Lindy West

  “I’m not interested,” I insisted.

  He glared for a moment, then said, “So you’re fine looking like that and getting the cancer?”

  My ears roared. “That’s rude,” was all I could manage. I was still small then, inside. He laughed and walked out.

  Over time, the knowledge that I was too big made my life smaller and smaller. I insisted that shoes and accessories were just “my thing,” because my friends didn’t realize that I couldn’t shop for clothes at a regular store and I was too mortified to explain it to them. I backed out of dinner plans if I remembered the restaurant had particularly narrow aisles or rickety chairs. I ordered salad even if everyone else was having fish and chips. I pretended to hate skiing because my giant men’s ski pants made me look like a smokestack and I was terrified my bulk would tip me off the chairlift. I stayed home as my friends went hiking, biking, sailing, climbing, diving, exploring—I was sure I couldn’t keep up, and what if we got into a scrape? They couldn’t boost me up a cliff or lower me down an embankment or squeeze me through a tight fissure or hoist me from the hot jaws of a bear. I never revealed a single crush, convinced that the idea of my disgusting body as a sexual being would send people—even people who loved me—into fits of projectile vomiting (or worse, pity). I didn’t go swimming for a fucking decade.

  As I imperceptibly rounded the corner into adulthood—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—I watched my friends elongate and arch into these effortless, exquisite things. I waited. I remained a stump. I wasn’t jealous, exactly; I loved them, but I felt cheated.

  We each get just a few years to be perfect. That’s what I’d been sold. To be young and smooth and decorative and collectible. I was missing my window, I could feel it pulling at my navel (my obsessively hidden, hated navel), and I scrabbled, desperate and frantic. Deep down, in my honest places, I knew it was already gone—I had stretch marks and cellulite long before twenty—but they tell you that if you hate yourself hard enough, you can grab just a tail feather or two of perfection. Chasing perfection was your duty and your birthright, as a woman, and I would never know what it was like—this thing, this most important thing for girls.

  I missed it. I failed. I wasn’t a woman. You only get one life. I missed it.

  There is a certain kind of woman. She is graceful. She is slim. Yes, she would like to go kayaking with you. On her frame, angular but soft, a baggy T-shirt is coded as “low-maintenance,” not “sloppy”; a ponytail is “sleek,” not “tennis ball on top of a mini-fridge.” Not only can she pull off ugly clothes, like sports sandals, or “boyfriend jeans,” they somehow make her beauty thrum even more clearly. She is thrifted J.Crew. She can put her feet up on a chair and draw her knees to her chest. She can hold an ocean in her clavicle.

  People go on and on about boobs and butts and teeny waists, but the clavicle is the true benchmark of female desirability. It is a fetish item. Without visible clavicles you might as well be a meatloaf in the sexual marketplace. And I don’t mean Meatloaf the person, who has probably gotten laid lotsa times despite the fact that his clavicle is buried so deep as to be mere urban legend, because our culture does not have a creepy sexual fixation on the bones of meaty men.

  Only women. Show us your bones, they say. If only you were nothing but bones.

  America’s monomaniacal fixation on female thinness isn’t a distant abstraction, something to be pulled apart by academics in women’s studies classrooms or leveraged for traffic in shallow “body-positive” listicles (“Check Out These Eleven Fat Chicks Who You Somehow Still Kind of Want to Bang—Number Seven Is Almost Like a Regular Woman!”)—it is a constant, pervasive taint that warps every single woman’s life. And, by extension, it is in the amniotic fluid of every major cultural shift.

  Women matter. Women are half of us. When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time—that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women’s safety and humanity are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience.

  I watched my friends become slender and beautiful, I watched them get picked and wear J.Crew and step into small boats without fear, but I also watched them starve and harm themselves, get lost and sink. They were picked by bad people, people who hurt them on purpose, eroded their confidence, and kept them trapped in an endless chase. The real scam is that being bones isn’t enough either. The game is rigged. There is no perfection.

  I listened to Howard Stern every morning in college. I loved Howard. I still do, though I had to achingly bow out as my feminism solidified. (In a certain light, feminism is just the long, slow realization that the stuff you love hates you.) When I say I used to listen to Stern, a lot of people look at me like I said I used to eat cat meat, but what they don’t understand is that The Howard Stern Show is on the air for hours and hours every day. Yes, there is gleeful, persistent misogyny, but the bulk of it, back when I was a daily obsessive, at least, was Howard seeking validation for his neuroses; Robin cackling about her runner’s diarrhea; Artie detailing the leviathan sandwich he’d eaten yesterday in a heroin stupor, then weeping over his debasement; Howard wheedling truth out of cagey celebrities like a surgeon; Howard buoying the news with supernatural comic timing; a Sagrada Familia of inside jokes and references and memories and love and people’s lives willingly gutted and splayed open and dissected every day for the sake of good radio. It was magnificent entertainment. It felt like a family.

  Except, for female listeners, membership in that family came at a price. Howard would do this thing (the thing, I think, that most non-listeners associate with the show) where hot chicks could turn up at the studio and he would look them over like a fucking horse vet—running his hands over their withers and flanks, inspecting their bite and the sway of their back, honking their massive horse jugs—and tell them, in intricate detail, what was wrong with their bodies. There was literally always something. If they were 110 pounds, they could stand to be 100. If they were 90, gross. (“Why’d you do that to your body, sweetie?”) If they were a C cup, they’d be hotter as a DD. They should stop working out so much—those legs are too muscular. Their 29-inch waist was subpar—come back when it’s a 26.

  Then there was me: 225, 40-inch waist, no idea what bra size because I’d never bothered to buy a nice one because who would see it? Frumpy, miserable, cylindrical. The distance between my failure of a body and perfection stretched away beyond the horizon. According to Howard, even girls who were there weren’t there.

  If you want to be a part of this community that you love, I realized—this family that keeps you sane in a shitty, boring world, this million-dollar enterprise that you fund with your consumer clout, just as much as male listeners do—you have to participate, with a smile, in your own disintegration. You have to swallow, every day, that you are a secondary being whose worth is measured by an arbitrary, impossible standard, administered by men.

  When I was twenty-two, and all I wanted was to blend in, that rejection was crushing and hopeless and lonely. Years later, when I was finally ready to stand out, the realization that the mainstream didn’t want me was freeing and galvanizing. It gave me something to fight for. It taught me that women are an army.

  When I look at photographs of my twenty-two-year-old self, so convinced of her own defectiveness, I see a perfectly normal girl and I think about aliens. If an alien came to earth—a gaseous orb or a polyamorous cat person or whatever—it wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference between me and Angelina Jolie, let alone rank us by hotness. It’d be like, “Uh, yeah, so those ones have the under-the-face fat sacks, and the other kind has that dangly pants nose. Fuck, these things are
gross. I can’t wait to get back to the omnidirectional orgy gardens of Vlaxnoid 7.”*

  The “perfect body” is a lie. I believed in it for a long time, and I let it shape my life, and shrink it—my real life, populated by my real body. Don’t let fiction tell you what to do.

  In the omnidirectional orgy gardens of Vlaxnoid 7, no one cares about your arm flab.

  Are You There, Margaret? It’s Me, a Person Who Is Not a Complete Freak

  The first time I was informed that my natural body was gross and bad I was at a friend’s house. We were eight or nine, still young enough to call it “playing” instead of “hanging out,” and my friend looked down at my shins shining with long, iridescent blond hairs. “Oh,” she said with recently learned disgust, “you don’t shave your legs?” I went home and told my mom I needed a razor. I can still see her face.

  “You know,” she said, equal parts pleading and guilt-tripping, “your grandmother never shaved her legs, and I always wished I hadn’t either. Her leg hair was so soft. You can’t get that back.”

  “Mom, it’s fine,” I groaned. I’m sure I was short with her. I didn’t want to be doing this either.

  I was never one of those kids who couldn’t wait to grow up. Childhood was a solid scam! I had these people who bought and cooked my food, washed and folded all my clothes, gave me Christmas presents, took me on trips, kept the house clean, read out loud to me until I fell asleep, found me fascinating, and spent pretty much all their time constructing a warm, loving, safe bubble around me that gave order and character to life. Now that I’m a grown-up, what do I have to show for it? Audiobooks, taxes, dirty hardwood floors, a messed-up foot, and negative a hundred dollars? A realistic ad campaign for adulthood would never sell: Do you like candy for dinner? And plantar fasciitis?

  Childhood suited me—I was a lucky kid, and my life was simple, it was fun—so I dug in my heels as hard as I could against every portent of growing up, puberty most of all. I was still pretty weirded out from the time my babysitter let me watch Animal House in fourth grade, specifically the part in which a woman apparently extrudes huge wads of white tissue from her chest cavity (is that what boobs do!?); and I wasn’t entirely sold on having a vagina at that point, so I sure as shit wasn’t ready for it to transform into a chocolate fountain (SORRY) and turn my pants into a crime scene once a month. What a stupid thing for a vagina to do! And I had to run a terrifying pink knife all over my legs and armpits once a week to get rid of perfectly innocuous little blond hairs that, as far as I could tell, served no purpose to begin with. Why did I grow them if I just had to scrape them off? Why have a vagina if it was just going to embarrass me?

  “Puberty” was a fancy word for your genitals stabbing you in the back.

  When you’re a little kid, everyone talks about your period like it’s going to be a party bus to WOOOOOOOOOO! Mountain. It’s all romantic metaphors about “blossoming gardens” and “unfurling crotch orchids,” and kids buy into it because they don’t know what a euphemism is because they’re eleven. But it’s also a profoundly secret thing—a confidence for closed-door meetings between women. Those two contradictory approaches (periods are the best! and we must never ever speak of them), made me feel like I was the only not-brainwashed one in a culty dystopian novel. “Oh, yes, you can’t imagine the joy readings in your subjectivity port when the Administration gifts you your woman’s flow! SPEAKING OF THE FLOW OUTSIDE OF THE MENARCHE BUNKER WILL RESULT IN DEACTIVATION.”

  Girls in the ’70s were the cultiest—they couldn’t wait to get their periods and incessantly wrote books about it. “Oh, I hope I get it today! I just have to bleed stinkily out of my vagina before that cow Francine.” The reality, of course, is that when you hit puberty you don’t magically blossom into a woman—you’re still the same tiny fool you were at puberty-minus-one, only now once a month hot brown blood just glops and glops out of your private area like a broken Slurpee machine. Forever. Or, at least, until you’re inconceivably elderly, in an eleven-year-old’s estimation. Don’t worry, to deal, you just have to cork up your hole with this thing that’s like a severed toe made out of cotton (and if you don’t swap it out often enough, your legs fall off and you die). Or you wear a diaper. Or, if you have a super-chunky flow, you do both so you don’t get stigmata on your pants in front of [hot eighth-grade boy I’m still too bashful to mention]. Also, your uterus is knives and you poop a bunch and you’re hormonal and you get acne. Have fun in sixth grade, Margaret.

  Personally, I couldn’t handle that dark knowledge at all. So, before I hit puberty (and, let’s be honest, for like fifteen years afterwards), I treated my reproductive system like it was the Nothing from The NeverEnding Story: “When you look at it, it’s as if you were blind.” I mean, I washed the parts and stuff, but I had no use for it—and the only thing I really knew was that it was eventually going to screw me over and ruin this sunny, golden childhood biz I had going on. More like vagin-UUUUUUUGGGHHHHHHHH.

  If Google had existed when I was eleven, my search history would have looked something like this:

  how much comes out

  how many cups come out

  how to stop period

  cancel your period

  people with no period

  spells to delay period

  magic to stop period

  blood magic

  witchcraft

  witches

  the witches

  roald dahl

  new roald dahl books

  free roald dahl books for kids

  (Priorities.)

  My mom—probably sensing my anxiety—dragged me to a mother-daughter puberty class called Growing Up Female*—four hours on a sunny Saturday, trapped in my elementary school library talking about penises and nipples with my mom. Strangely enough, this did not make my eventual pubin’-out process less awkward.

  I don’t want to give you guys TMI, but let’s just say that my “Aunt Period Blood” eventually did come to town. When it arrived, my avoidance was so finely calibrated that I blocked out the memory almost completely. I think, though I don’t know for sure, that I was swimming in the ocean near my uncle’s house: a wide, shallow inlet where the flats bake in the sun until the tide pours in, and then the hot mud turns the whole bay to bathwater. I can recall quick flashes of confusion and panic, guiltily unspooling toilet paper in an unfamiliar bathroom by that strange, sticky beach.

  I did not want to talk about it. I avoided talking about it so assiduously that—for years—I invariably failed to tell my menopausal mom when we’d run out of stuffin’ corks and diaper nuggets (#copyrighted), forcing her to run to the grocery store at inhumane hours while I squeezed out silent, single tears in the car. (If this had been a Roald Dahl book, she would have developed clairvoyance and summoned the ’pons by telekinesis and/or delivery giant. Thanks for nothing, regular human mom.*)

  This avoidance (and my life) reached an all-time nadir one morning when my mom didn’t have time to make it to the store and back before work, so I was forced to go to school wearing a menstrual pad belt that had been in our first aid drawer since approximately 1861. If you’ve never seen one of these things, because you haven’t been to THE ANTIQUITIES MUSEUM, it is a literal belt that goes around your waist, with two straps that dangle down your front and back cracks, ice cold metal clips holding a small throw pillow in place over your shame canyon. I wish I could tell you I only had to go through that once before I learned my lesson.

  One time, I noticed that the little waxy strips you peel off the maxi pad adhesive were printed, over and over, with a slogan: “Kotex Understands.” In the worst moments, when my period felt like a death—the death of innocence, the death of safety, the harbinger of a world where I was too fat, too weird, too childish, too ungainly—I’d sit hunched over on the toilet and stare at that slogan, and I’d cry. Kotex understands. Somebody, somewhere, understands.*

  Then, each month, once my period was over, I would burrow back into snug denial all over again:
pretending my lady-parts didn’t exist and that nothing would ever, ever come out of them, to the point where the blood would surprise me all over again, every month.

  Twelve years later, I finally said the word “period” out loud in public.

  Part of that anxiety came from the fact that, particularly in my youth, I was a hider, a dissociater, a fantasist. It was easier to bury myself in stories than to deal with the fact that the realities of adulthood were barreling down on me: money and loneliness and self-doubt and death.

  Part of that anxiety came from the fact that, as a fat kid, I was already on high alert for humiliation at all times. When your body itself is treated like one big meat-blooper, you don’t open yourself up to unnecessary embarrassment. I was a careful, exacting child. I hoarded my dignity. Even now, I watch where I step. I double-fact-check before I publish. I avoid canoes.

  The most significant source of my adolescent period anxiety was the fact that, in America in 2016 (and far more so in 1993), acknowledging the completely normal and mundane function of most uteruses is still taboo. The taboo is so strong that it contributes to the widespread stonewalling of women from seats of power—for fear that, as her first act in the White House, Hillary might change Presidents’ Day to Brownie Batter Makes the Boo-Hoos Stop Day. The taboo is strong enough that a dude once broke up with me because a surprise period started while we were having sex and the sight of it shattered some pornified illusion he had of women as messless pleasure pillows. The taboo is so strong that while we’ve all seen swimming pools of blood shed in horror movies and action movies and even on the news, when a woman ran the 2015 London Marathon without a tampon, photos of blood spotting her running gear made the social media rounds to near-universal disgust. The blood is the same—the only difference is where it’s coming from. The disgust is at women’s natural bodies, not at blood itself.

  We can mention periods obliquely, of course, when we want to delegitimize women’s real concerns, dismiss their more inconvenient emotions, and perpetuate the myth that having outie junk instead of innie junk (and a male gender identity) makes a person an innately more rational and competent human being. But to suggest that having a period isn’t an abomination, but is, in fact, natural and good, or—my god—to actually let people see what period blood looks like? (This is going to blow a lot of you guys’ minds, but: It looks like blood.) You might as well suggest replacing the national anthem with Donald Trump harmonizing with an air horn.