ISSUES
: Body Confidence
Chapter 1: Body Image
28
magnificent
entertainment.
It
felt like a family. Except that, for
female listeners, membership in
that family came at a price. Stern
would do this thing (the thing,
I think, that most non-listeners
associate with the show) where hot
chicks would turn up at the studio
and he would look them over like a
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 eight stone,
they could stand to be seven. If
they were six, gross. (“Why did 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 29in waist was
subpar – come back when it’s a 26.
Then there was me: 16 stone,
40in 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 Stern, even girls who
were there weren’t there.
If you want to be a part of this
community that you love, I realised
– 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 – 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 22 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 realisation
that the mainstream didn’t want
me was freeing and galvanising. It
gave me something to fight for. It
taught me that women are an army.
When I look at photographs of
my 22-year-old self, so convinced
of her own defectiveness, I see
a perfectly normal girl and I
think about aliens. If an alien – a
gaseous orb or a polyamorous
cat person or whatever – came to
Earth, 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. F***,
these things are gross. I can’t wait
to get back to the omnidirectional
orgy gardens of Vlaxnoid.”
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, no one cares
about your arm flab.
8 May 2016
Ö
The above information is
reprinted with kind permission
from
Quercus
Editions
Limited. Please visit www.
quercusbooks.co.uk for further
information.
© 2016 Lindy West
