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In high school, my best friend and I bonded over the unspoken naughtiness of losing weight on purpose. Deciding how much space we were to take up was not technically allowed, though every woman in our lives, it seemed, was doing just that, their attendant menfolk grinning smugly in their wake.

Like other Millennials, my best friend and I participated in diet culture defiantly, our habits windowdressed in implication and silence rather than the humiliating earnestness on display in the tabloids and our own kitchens. The eerie, cheery concern of Weight Watchers and the hysterical effigies of Jessica Simpson in an unforgivable size 4, weren’t for us: we denied their denial. We were not doing this to appeal to the men who would hate us anyway. Our self-harm was subtle and ironic, and perhaps even functional, like that of the many boys we knew, straight and otherwise, who were even better at it than girls were.

My best friend and I maintained our inside jokes with the superiority of the cat who got the cream (though the canary would have been less fatty). Here’s one of them: want to avoid your period? All you have to do is skip a meal or three during the luteal phase of your cycle. It wasn’t funny but we laughed. And isn’t that all that a joke is—an understanding that transpires in laughter?

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