The Manner of Fatness
My body makes a mockery of traditional femininity with shoulders like propellers and thighs like stabilizers; my body is a footnote, a shotgun, a carnivore. Mauled by the products of my own fantasies, carvings and stains and unwanted firefights like warpaint on my skin: my body is a kamikaze bomber plane.
But girl’s bodies aren’t supposed to be powerful—we are vessels for other life, not our own. They’re supposed to be dainty and innocent and weightless; yearning. Hourglass figures, collarbone divots like marble bathtubs, dolphin skin, girls' bodies are supposed to be breakable. I can bodysurf the Pacific Ocean in 50 degree weather, I get burned at work so often that I don’t feel it anymore, I know how to starve, and I don’t get cold easily; please, break me.
The shoulders like propellers and thighs like stabilizers come in handy in exactly one environment—water. I’ve always liked the water. My sister likes it too —we are the first to dive under the waves when we go to the beach. I like to think it’s because our grandpa was a sailor in the merchant navy. We’re going to get matching mermaid tattoos when she comes and visits me sometime. I revel in laughing at my skinny friends who screech that it’s too cold when the icy ocean licks at their toes, thirsty for easy flesh, or the wind whips the sand into their eyelashes. Oregon beaches are not for everyone, and when they say it’s too cold there and that we should go to the Sandy River or something instead, it makes me feel special, wanted, preferred over someone else. I want a drowning skinny girl to ask for my help, choking on water as her voice croaks and her legs die out because she was an idiot and thrashed all her carrot-given energy away. I would wait a deadly second before helping her, just so she knows what it feels like to be painfully contained in your own form. I play water polo now, where drowning people is part of the sport. The girls are like me, I accidentally jostle one of them too hard in a scrimmage and they drag me down so I pull their cap off, but then we get out of the pool and the adrenaline is forgotten. We all just need an outlet for the world telling us that our bodies are a contradiction.
Being this size soiled the youthful innocence of my girlhood, cracking me into something bitter and spiteful and poisonous, like black licorice or a school shooter. The blissful ignorance of not yet knowing how the world sees you is the bedrock of childhood, but I learned how to hide from myself early. I was too big to be a “little girl” but my hair was too long to be a boy.
I wanted to be a boy though, boys are strong and expected to become something, so I stopped wearing pink because pink was girly and girly means weak and I wanted to be tough, so I played tag at recess and wore dirty trainers and didn’t wipe the dirt off my knees and shunned One Direction because whatever girls like is a balefire of fragility. Girls who like pink get their hearts broken, and I wanted to be the heartbreaker because boys too should know what inferiority tastes like. I was stumbling within what I eventually learned to call “patriarchy”, and how it convulses talons in every aspect of girl’s lives: self expression, masturbation, jobs, marriage, and most apparently, sex.
When we learned about sex in school, they didn’t teach us about how it can be violent, how it can even hurt people who haven’t had it before. If fifth grade was a production, sex ed pulled beauty standards center stage. All people could talk about who was cute and who wasn’t; what was cute and what wasn’t. When we went to Ally Jackson’s house after soccer games, she showed us this book she found in her mom’s room that called sex “fucking”, that we all giggled at and then each secretly read. At Lola Martin’s birthday party that year, she showed us the picture of Max Lewis that she kept by her bed, because “god gave me fingers for a reason.” We didn’t know then that female masturbation is frowned upon, that our fertility is put before our pleasure. Later we would say fuck that and give each other vibrators as birthday presents.
When we learned about rape, I was relieved. They told us stories about drunk girls in skimpy clothing getting raped, but I don’t wear those kinds of clothes, I don’t go out, I don’t look like them, and no one finds me pretty, so I should be good. I don’t look nearly tasty enough to tempt someone out of morality, and I liked that. It was the first time I felt safe in my body, protected, grateful, loved by what held me. Later I learned that fat girls get raped too, because it’s easier for us to mistake fetishization for love.
I got called a feminist before I knew what it meant, by a boy who didn’t know what it meant either. It was in seventh grade, and he said that women exaggerate how badly their periods hurt, and when I interjected he spat out the word coated in as much venom as his 12 year-old body could make. The spittle that accompanied it out his mouth looked like cum, unsolicited and unwanted, like his mouth was a rapist and the sound barrier between us was my vagina, raw and unconsenting and forever mauled by his verbal deposit.
Two years later I would discover slam poetry, which was too juicy of an opportunity for boys like him to pass up totally ripping on. Instagram meme accounts post clips of the LA Brave New Voices team’s “Rape Joke” poem all the time, captioned with laughing emojis or assorted variations of “look at this shit y’all lmaooo.” My senior year I praticed spreading my arms out like an eagle when I would give my final feminist slam poem to the audience, bat wings and wolf tattoo unapologetic. Covid got in the way of that, but one day I will stand on a stage somewhere and fulfill it. Another fat girl being bitter, but this time I don’t care about any of it.
Today, I have a plethora of feminist t-shirts. My favorite one says “feminist killjoy,” because once on the train on the way to school, a man yelled at me what he thought my bra size was, so I flipped him off; he rushed me so I kicked him. From the ground he looked up at me and said, “you’re a killjoy alright.” I liked the annoyance in his eyes. It made me feel powerful. It’s just that at times it’s hard to forget all that’s been said to me about the way I look. I believe other women —I think we’re all beautiful and badass and can do anything we set our minds to. Other times they cut in front of me to talk to a cute guy: or tell me about how exhausting it is to be flirted with all the time and that they wish they were more like me, never seeming to care about being single; or a guy at work accidentally drops an entire pan of garlic bread fresh out the 600 degree oven because he sees a pretty girl half my size in a skirt that probably wouldn’t fit around my thigh walk in. It’s in those moments that a dark part of me takes over, a carnivorous vendetta stitched of envy and panting. It makes me say that they like it when they tease men with their low necklines, so they shouldn’t be mad when they get catcalled, and then I feel bad and I hide away in my room and eat Cinnamon Crunch and watch the same YouTube videos over and over again and play solitaire and name my plants. A serial killer on Criminal Minds ate Cinnamon Crunch when he was sad too.
The downtown Target must sell out of bralettes in the days leading up to home football games. Every Saturday I’m reminded of the one Mean Girls quote about Halloween being an excuse for girls to dress slutty without anyone pointing it out. I feel like every Saturday is Halloween now, but not with cool costumes, just the same variation of short, ripped jean shorts and crop tops. I like to watch everyone walk to the game from my 10th floor window like a suburban mom stalking her neighbors. Some of the girls wear tiny shirts that expose their backs; you can see the etchings of their spines dent their thin skin, like their skeletons want to come out and play too. I find myself staring at them, my head cocked slightly to the left like Hannibal stalking his prey. I imagine making a mini model of Stonehenge with their vertebrae, or sharpening their bones into butter knives, or hanging their teeth off my backpack so they make little clinking noises when they bump into the zippers. I want to unzip them to show them how badly a body can hurt. It isn’t enough for me to imagine if I looked like them. I want them to look like me too, so we both get a turn to feel unworthy. I’d like to go to a game sometime, but I’m worried that it will bring back all the feelings I’ve tried so hard to let go of and I’ll go home with a manifesto.
I want to be desired, for some boy to think that I’m not too much, for him to kiss my scars better and not feel like I’m betraying all my feminist t-shirts. For people to stop calling stretch marks tiger stripes or lightning bolts or whatever metaphor other than what they are because they’re ugly, and we have to compare ugly things to pretty things for people to accept them. It’s complicated being a girl this size, who plows through water like a battleship but globs her way through dry land, who is just trying to get through college without harm. I don’t want to be another fat girl cold case.
