Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

by Lindy West

“Shrill” is a gendered insult; calling a man “shrill” makes as much sense as calling a smell “tall.” To be shrill is to reach above your station; to abandon your duty to soothe and please; in short, to be heard.

I watched as Trump was elected president, thanks to strategic voter suppression, the Electoral College, and the white supremacy in my nation’s DNA.

There was a time, I am told, when I was very small, that I had a ready response to the question. The answer was ballerina, or, for a minute, veterinarian, as I had been erroneously led to believe that “veterinarian” was the grown-up term for “professional animal-petter.” I would later learn, crestfallen and appalled, that it’s more a term for “touching poo all the time featuring intermittent cat murder,” so the plan was abandoned. (The fact that ANY kid wants to be a veterinarian is bananas, by the way—whoever does veterinary medicine’s PR among preschool-aged children should be working in the fucking White House.)

The world is not kind to big, ugly women. Sometimes bitterness is the only defense.

Please don’t forget: I am my body. When my body gets smaller, it is still me. When my body gets bigger, it is still me. There is not a thin woman inside me, awaiting excavation. I am one piece. I am also not a uterus riding around in a meat incubator. There is no substantive difference between the repulsive campaign to separate women’s bodies from their reproductive systems—perpetuating the lie that abortion and birth control are not healthcare—and the repulsive campaign to convince women that they and their body size are separate, alienated entities. Both say, “Your body is not yours.” Both demand, “Beg for your humanity.” Both insist, “Your autonomy is conditional.” This is why fat is a feminist issue.

It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women’s safety and humanity are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience.

The real scam is that being bones isn’t enough either. The game is rigged. There is no perfection.

(In a certain light, feminism is just the long, slow realization that the stuff you love hates you.)

The blood is the same—the only difference is where it’s coming from. The disgust is at women’s natural bodies, not at blood itself.

Yeah, personally I hate my period and think it’s annoying and gross, but it’s not more gross than anything else that comes out of a human body. It’s not more gross than feces, urine, pus, bile, vomit, or the grossest bodily fluid of them all—in my mother’s professional opinion—phlegm. And yet we are not horrified every time we go to the bathroom. We do not stigmatize people with stomach flu. The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny.

Real change is slow, hard, and imperceptible. It resists deconstruction.

I now get yelled at and made fun of for a living—my two greatest fears rendered utterly toothless, and, even better, monetized.

I used to describe it as “reverse body dysmorphia”: When I looked in the mirror, I could never understand what was supposedly so disgusting. I knew I was smart, funny, talented, social, kind—why wasn’t that enough? By all the metrics I cared about, I was a home run.

Women, it seemed, were obliged to be thick-skinned about their own rapes, while comics remained too thin-skinned to handle even mild criticism.

There is nothing novel or comedic or righteous about men using the threat of sexual violence to control noncompliant women. This is how society has always functioned. Stay indoors, women. Stay safe. Stay quiet. Stay in the kitchen. Stay pregnant. Stay out of the world. If you want to talk about silencing, censorship, placing limits and consequences on speech, this is what it looks like.

Just because you haven’t personally experienced something doesn’t make it not true. What a concept.

Those days eat at me. Why didn’t I spend more time sitting with him? Why did I sleep so much? Why didn’t I read out loud to him, our favorite books, the ones he read to me when I was little? Why was I so fucking chirpy in all of our interactions, desperate to gloss over the truth, instead of letting myself be vulnerable with him? Why the fuck did I move to L.A. three months before he died? What was wrong with me? Who does that?