ISSUES
: Body Confidence
Chapter 1: Body Image
26
The ‘perfect body’ is a lie. I believed it
for a long time and let it shrink my life
As a child, Lindy West was told she was “off the charts”. In this exclusive extract from
her new book,
Shrill
, she explains how society’s fixation on thinness warps women’s
lives – and why she would rather be ‘fat’ than ‘big’.
By Lindy West
I
’ve always been a great big
person. In the months after I
was born, the doctor was so
alarmed by the circumference
of my head that she insisted my
parents bring me back, over and
over, to be weighed and measured
and held up for scrutiny next to
the “normal” babies. My head was
“off the charts”, she said. Science
literally had not produced a chart
expansive enough to account for
my monster dome. “Off the charts”
became a West family joke over
the years – I always deflected it,
saying it was because of my giant
brain – but I absorbed the message
nonetheless. I was too big, from
birth. Abnormally big. Medical-
anomaly big. Unchartably big.
There were people-sized people,
and then there was me. So, what
do you do when you’re too big, in
a world where bigness is cast not
only as aesthetically objectionable,
but also as a moral failing? You fold
yourself up like origami, you make
yourself smaller in other ways,
you take up less space with your
personality, since you can’t with
your body. You diet. You starve,
you run until you taste blood in
your throat, you count out your
almonds, you try to buy back your
humanity with pounds of flesh.
I got good at being small early on –
socially, if not physically. In public,
until I was eight, I would speak
only to my mother, and even then
only in whispers, pressing my face
into her leg. I retreated into fantasy
novels, movies, computer games
and, eventually, comedy – places
where I could feel safe, assume
any personality, fit into any space.
I preferred tracing to drawing.
Drawing was too bold an act of
creation, too presumptuous.
My dad was friends with Bob
Dorough, an old jazz guy who wrote
all the songs for
Multiplication
Rock
, an educational kids’ show
and
Schoolhouse Rock!
’s maths-
themed sibling. He’s that breezy,
froggy voice on ‘Three Is a Magic
Number’ – if you grew up in the US,
you’d recognise it. “A man and a
woman had a little baby, yes, they
did. They had three-ee-ee in the
family...” Bob signed a vinyl copy
of
Multiplication Rock
for me when
I was two or three years old. “Dear
Lindy,” it said, “get big!” I hid that
record as a teenager, afraid that
people would see the inscription
and think: “She took that a little too
seriously.”
I dislike “big” as a euphemism,
maybe because it’s the one
chosen most often by people
who mean well, who love me and
are trying to be gentle with my
feelings. I don’t want the people
who love me to avoid the reality of
my body. I don’t want them to feel
uncomfortable with its size and
shape, to tacitly endorse the idea
that fat is shameful, to pretend I’m
something I’m not out of deference
to a system that hates me. I
don’t want to be gentled, like I’m
something wild and alarming. (If
I’m going to be wild and alarming,
I’ll do it on my terms.) I don’t want
them to think I need a euphemism
at all.
“Big” is a word we use to cajole a
child: “Be a big girl!” “Act like the
big kids!” Having it applied to you
as an adult is a cloaked reminder
of what people really think, of the
way we infantilise and desexualise
fat people. Fat people are helpless
babies enslaved by their most
capricious cravings. Fat people
don’t know what’s best for them.
Fat people need to be guided and
Social body pressure
Do you think that society puts too much or too little pressure on men/women
to be fit and attractive?
Source: Half of women have felt bad about their body after seeing an add, YouGov, 11 September 2015.
Too much
The right amount
Too little
Men
Women
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
41%
27%
14%
74%
14%
2%
