by Lindy West
I think the most important thing I do in my professional life today is delivering public, impermeable “no”s and sticking to them. I say no to people who prioritize being cool over being good. I say no to misogynists who want to weaponize my body against me. I say no to men who feel entitled to my attention and reverence, who treat everything the light touches as a resource for them to burn. I say no to religious zealots who insist that I am less important than an embryo. I say no to my own instinct to stay quiet.
Nah, no thanks, I’m good, bye. Ew, don’t talk to me. Fuck off.
It’s a way of kicking down the boundaries that society has set for women—be compliant, be a caregiver, be quiet—and erecting my own. I will do this; I will not do that. You believe in my subjugation; I don’t have to be nice to you. I am busy; my time is not a public commodity. You are boring; go away.
That is world-building.
My little victories—trolls, rape jokes, fat people’s humanity—are world-building. Fighting for diverse voices is world-building. Proclaiming the inherent value of fat people is world-building. Believing rape victims is world-building. Refusing to cave to abortion stigma is world-building. Voting is world-building. So is kindness, compassion, listening, making space, saying yes, saying no.
We’re all building our world, right now, in real time. Let’s build it better.
Acknowledgments
First, to the Wests and the Oluos. I am so lucky.
To my mom, Ingrid, for teaching me that there’s a right way and a wrong way, for taking care of me, and for always following through. To my dad, Paul, for modeling kindness and ebullience, blazing creativity and unconditional love. I miss you. I wish you could have read my book.
To my agent and friend, Gary Morris, who is just the best, for being so patient and encouraging while I figured out WTF a book is. To the whole team at Hachette, especially Mauro DiPreta. It is so fucking cool that you hitched your wagon to this fat feminist abortion manifesto—your confidence in me means everything—and I’m sorry I said “fart” so many times even after you asked me to pump the brakes on that.
To Paul Constant, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Guy Branum, Corianton Hale, and Amelia Bonow for the guidance and reassurance. To every member of the Secret Book Writing Accountability and Crying Group—you are my medicine. To Charlotte and John MacVane for the solitude and whoopie pies. To Hedgebrook for reaching out to me with such supernaturally perfect timing that I almost believe in god now (and/or wiretapping?). To Meagan Hatcher-Mays for being a better version of me. You ate the thirteenth biscuit. To Annie Wagner and Jessica Coen for my big breaks. To Ira Glass and Chana Joffe-Walt. To every fat person who’s ever sent me an e-mail. To my Stranger family, my GHS family, and my Oxy family. To Tamora Pierce audiobooks and every flavor of Runts except banana.
Thank you.
And to my husband, Ahamefule J. Oluo: You are the best thinker and funniest joke writer and most brilliant artist in the whole world, but you’re an even better partner. I love you, I love you, I love you.
* “Gay snake” felt kind of weird, so I texted my friend Guy Branum.
ME: Is it problematic to refer to Sir Hiss as a gay snake?
GUY: He’s super gay. He exists in the tradition of insidious gay dandies.
ME: That’s still fucked up, though. Is Prince John gay? Wait, is Jafar gay???
GUY: Jafar is super gay. Prince John is effete and incompetent. Scar is gay.
ME: Those are all the exact same character! They even have the same voice! Disney is the worst.
GUY: Pop culture is the worst. Disney only uses character tropes we’ve seen before. We gays are unnatural and preoccupied with power. A common theme here is conniving outsiders trying to steal the game—manipulate the system to gain power/protection the non-noble way. Grima Wormtongue, all Jews, gays, women who gossip or do anything but be pretty and passive.
ME: I’m so grossed out by how aggressively Disney trains children to defend traditional straight “alpha male” authority.
GUY: It’s changing.
ME: We are fun at parties.
† I know that this bear’s name is technically Little John. But Little John is clearly a character being played by a bear actor named Baloo, who also played himself in The Jungle Book and, decades later yet seemingly un-aged, in Tale Spin. (Sub-theory: Baloo is the thirteenth Doctor.) I’m calling the bear Baloo and this conversation is over.
* I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT KING TRITON. Specifically, King, why are you elderly but with the body of a teenage Beastmaster? How do you maintain those monster pecs? Do they have endocrinologists under the sea? Because I am scheduling you some bloodwork. While we’re on the subject, a question for the world at large: What is the point of sexualizing a fish-person? It’s not like you could really have sex with King Triton, because FISH PENIS. I don’t think fish even have penises anyway. Don’t they just have, like, floppy anal fins that squirt out ambient sperms in the hope that lady-fishes will swim through their oops-cloud? Is that really what you want from your lovemaking, ladies!? To inadvertently swim through a miasma of fin-jizz and then call it a night? A merman is only a hottie with a naughty body if you are half attracted to fish. In conclusion, IT’S A FUCKING FISH-MAN TRYING TO DRAG YOU TO THE OCEAN FLOOR, WHERE IT PLANS TO USE YOUR DEAD BODY SEXUALLY. KILL IT. IT HAS A FORK.
* This is also the rationale that I use to feel better every time there’s a “horse meat in your IKEA meatballs” scandal. Do you think an alien could tell the difference between a horse and a cow? Please.
* There was a part of “Growing Up Female” where everyone was supposed to write their most embarrassing questions on little note cards and the pube instructor would answer them anonymously in front of the class. I don’t remember what my question was, but I do remember that when I went up to put it in the pile, I recognized my mom’s handwriting on the top card. “Please talk about inverted nipples,” it said, succinctly. In the pantheon of Worst Ways to Learn You Have One Weird Nipple, this ranks just above skywriting but just below Guy Fieri naming a dish after it (Lindy West’s Great American Triple-Bangin’ Weird Nip Diesel Dip). Also, it was a totally unnecessary horror, as my inverted nipple eventually became an extroverted nipple ALL ON ITS OWN. It’s even considering going to some open mics. Seriously, you should come.
* “Nothing” except for the unconditional love and support and meticulous care to make sure that I faced the world fully informed about my body and reproductive health! I forgive you for not being a real witch.
* Some forty-seven-year-old advertising copywriter in Culver City named Craig understands.
* Except for Lean Cuisine French Bread Pepperoni Pizza, which is an edible poem.
* RHETORICAL QUESTION—DON’T YOU DARE ANSWER IT.
* A few months ago I was at Walgreens with my mom and walked out absentmindedly clutching a pack of Rolaids. In the parking lot I said, “Oh!” and uncurled my fist. She looked at me like, “You know what to do.” We went back in.
* Have you ever been around dog show people? One time I overheard a prospective buyer talking to a basenji breeder about the breed’s distinctive “yodel.” “They don’t bark,” the breeder said, “but they can make a noise like a woman being raped!”
* Choir actually changed my life and taught me how to dedicate myself to a collective and settle for nothing less than excellence, but, holy god, the outfits were fucked.
* Same goes for you, dildo store cashier. (But thank you for the discount.)
* “Six almonds.”—All diet advice.
* I’ve noticed that a lot of people have trouble with the basic definition of fat acceptance—they want to argue and nitpick about calories and cardio and insurance and health and on and on and on—and if you’re one of those people, wallowing in confusion, fret no more. I can sum it up for you in one easy-to-remember phrase: GET THE FUCK OFF ME, YOU FUCKING WEIRDO. Print it, laminate it, be it.
* Fatphobes love to hold this assertion up as evidence of how delusional and
intractable fat activists are. “Calories in/calories out,” they say. “Ever heard of thermodynamics?” “Uhhh, I’ve never seen a fat person in a concentration camp. High-five, Trevor.” Leaving aside the barbarism of suggesting, however obliquely, that, well, at least concentration camp victims weren’t fat, no fat activist who says “Diets don’t work” is suggesting that you cannot starve a fat person to a thin death. Rather, we are referencing the rigorously vetted academic conclusion that traditional diets—the kind that are foisted upon fat people as penance and cure-alls and our entry exam for humanity—fail 95 percent of the time. Whether fat people fail to lose weight due to simple laziness and moral torpor or because of a more complex web of personal, cultural, and medical factors, those numbers are still real. Those fat people still exist. Pushing diet culture as a “cure” for fatness does nothing but perpetuate the emotional and economic exploitation of fat people.
* In his response to this post, Dan took me to task for cherry-picking that quote, explaining that he wasn’t mocking the flesh rolls of fat people specifically, he was mocking the flesh rolls of all women who wear low-rise jeans without having the correct bodies for it. Oh, okay. FYI, feminism isn’t super jazzed about men policing women’s clothing choices either. (Also, it was totally about fat people, you liar.)
* If I had it to do over again, I would write this last part more clearly, because I think the way it stands undermines my point a bit. What I was trying to convey was that if anti-fat crusaders really want what they claim to want—for fat people to be “healthy”—they should be on the front lines of size acceptance and fat empowerment. There’s hard science to back this up: Shame contributes measurably to weight gain, not weight loss. Loving yourself is not antithetical to health, it is intrinsic to health. You can’t take good care of a thing you hate.
* I call all anonymous Internet dill-holes “Kevin,” not because I think “Kevin” is a bad name (you know I love you, my Kevins), but because—being from the Home Alone generation—it’s so easy to hear a fed-up mom screaming it up a staircase. “KEVIN, WHAT IS A ‘BRAZZERS’ AND WHY IS IT ON MY BANK STATEMENT?”
* I did once receive an angry e-mail from a man informing me that “asshole” is an anti-male slur, which is about the level of understanding of female anatomy that I’d expected from someone who believes in “reverse sexism.” (Just kidding—women poop out of our vaginas like a parrot.)
* THIS ACTUALLY DID HAPPEN. I WOULD NOT JOKE ABOUT HOLLY ROBINSON PEETE.
* There’s more: “I called my blanket Hi Ho. It didn’t follow me everywhere, but it was the comfort I sought when fear and injury came. On the day of the car accident on the way to the preschool, I had Hi Ho with me. It was forever stained with my blood, and while it remained beside me in my crib at night after it had been washed, the brown stains remained and tarnished the magic. The warmth was still there but the reassurance was gone. A year or so later we named our new Cocker Spaniel Hi Ho.”
* Body of e-mail: “My rules are: Wash your hands as soon as you get home. Then go around with a Clorox wipe and clean the doorknobs, light switches, and faucets. Of course, wash before you eat and keep your hands away from your mucous membranes, including eyes. I wish I could quarantine you until this thing settles down, but I will trust you to keep yourself safe. If everybody in your house does the same, then you can feel safe at home… unless you accidentally let a sick person inside. Love you. Mom.”
* Still haven’t. Only 20 percent clear on the definition, to be honest.
* Once we got bored of Lambada, a few months into the school year, he’d switch to a Spanish dub of the 1996 Michael Keaton human cloning comedy Multiplicity, or Mis Otros Yo.
* [Fire hose of vomit]
* Every time we drove across a certain bridge, near my sister’s house in Silver Lake, my dad would bring up the great flood of 1938 when the river broke its concrete banks: “Your grandfather always told me the water came right up level with this bridge. Hoo-wee, boy, all the way up here! Can you imagine?” I couldn’t. The L.A. River I knew was a brown, trickling ditch. A joke. Dad was three in 1938, fifteen years before his dad died. My widowed grandmother was so bereft at the loss of her still-young other half that she drank herself into early dementia. She was gone before I was born—it was love that killed her. I’d grind some portent out of that if it wasn’t the commonest thing in the world.
* Yo! Bank! Other policy suggestion! TELL PEOPLE ABOUT THE NEGATIVE-A-MILLION-DOLLARS POLICY BEFORE YOU NEGATIVE-A-MILLION-DOLLARS THEM RIGHT WHEN THEIR DAD IS DYING AND THEIR PERSON JUST CHANGED HIS MIND.
† The bank eventually refunded my $ 750 and said I could decide whether or not to file a police report. I didn’t. I’m glad that lady got to keep that money—I hope it helped her out of a jam.
* Unless you hate your dad, I guess, in which case you can cross your fingers for whatever you want, as long as you are not crossing them around the trigger of a dad-murdering gun!!! (Look. Don’t murder your dad. It will not make your boyfriend get back together with you. I DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH MORE CLEARLY I CAN SAY THIS.)
* We had like six.
* “Whale” is the weakest insult ever, by the way. Oh, I have a giant brain and rule the sea with my majesty? What have you accomplished lately, Steve?
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Lady Kluck
Bones
Are You There, Margaret? It’s Me, a Person Who Is Not a Complete Freak
How to Stop Being Shy in Eighteen Easy Steps
When Life Gives You Lemons
You’re So Brave for Wearing Clothes and Not Hating Yourself!
The Red Tent
Hello, I Am Fat
Why Fat Lady So Mean to Baby Men?
Strong People Fighting Against the Elements
The Day I Didn’t Fit
Chuckletown, USA, Population: Jokes
Death Wish
It’s About Free Speech, It’s Not About Hating Women
The Tree
The End
The Beginning
Slaying the Troll
Abortion Is Normal, It’s Okay to Be Fat, and Women Don’t Have to Be Nice to You
Acknowledgments
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
Portions of the following chapters were previously published in different form: The Red Tent in The Stranger; The Day I Didn’t Fit in Jezebel and The Guardian; and The Beginning in The Guardian. Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed, whether or not so noted in the text.
Copyright © 2016 by Lindy West
Cover design by Chelsea Cardinal
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: May 2016
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ISBN 978-0-316-34845-4
E3-20160402-JV-NF
