Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

by Lindy West

For me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was subsumed by a far more pressing question: “What are you?”

fat women were sexless mothers, pathetic punch lines, or gruesome villains.

they get married in a condescending-ass ceremony that’s like “Awwwww, look, the uglies thinks it’s people!”

Hollywood’s beauty standards are so wacko that they trick you into thinking anyone who isn’t Geena Davis is literally a toilet.

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

I could not claim any sexual agency unless I forced myself upon a genteel frog;

provided I located a chubby simpleton who looked suspiciously like myself without a hair bow, and the rest of humanity would breathe a secret sigh of relief that the two of us were removing ourselves from the broader gene pool.

There were people-sized people, and then there was me.

Having it applied to you as an adult is a cloaked reminder of what people really think, of the way we infantilize and desexualize fat people.

Fat people are helpless babies enslaved to their most capricious cravings. Fat people do not know what’s best for them. Fat people need to be guided and scolded like children.

There is not a thin woman inside me, awaiting excavation.

am one piece. I am also not a uterus riding around in a meat incubator.

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.

All my life people have told me that my body doesn’t belong to me.

Jack LaLanne fucked a tanning bed and a Benjamin Button came out.

Over time, the knowledge that I was too big made my life smaller and smaller.

never revealed a single crush, convinced that the idea of my disgusting body as a sexual being would send people—even people who loved me—into fits of projectile vomiting (or worse, pity). I didn’t go swimming for a fucking decade.

Without visible clavicles you might as well be a meatloaf in the sexual marketplace.

America’s monomaniacal fixation on female thinness isn’t a distant abstraction, something to be pulled apart by academics in women’s studies classrooms or leveraged for traffic in shallow “body-positive” listicles (“Check Out These Eleven Fat Chicks Who You Somehow Still Kind of Want to Bang—Number Seven Is Almost Like a Regular Woman!”)—it is a constant, pervasive taint that warps every single woman’s life. And, by extension, it is in the amniotic fluid of every major cultural shift.

When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time—that moves the rudder of the world. 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.)

When I say I used to listen to Stern, a lot of people look at me like I said I used to eat cat meat,

Howard would do this thing (the thing, I think, that most non-listeners associate with the show) where hot chicks could turn up at the studio and he would look them over like a fucking 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.

The “perfect body” is a lie.

“Puberty” was a fancy word for your genitals stabbing you in the back.

“unfurling crotch orchids,”

Don’t worry, to deal, you just have to cork up your hole with this thing that’s like a severed toe made out of cotton (and if you don’t swap it out often enough, your legs fall off and you die).

diaper nuggets (#copyrighted),

shame canyon.

The taboo is strong enough that a dude once broke up with me because a surprise period started while we were having sex and the sight of it shattered some pornified illusion he had of women as messless pleasure pillows.

We do not stigmatize people with stomach flu. The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny.

This is just a wacky idea I had, but maybe it’s not a coincidence that, in a country where half the population’s normal reproductive functions are stigmatized, American uterus- and vagina-havers are still fighting tooth and nail to have those same reproductive systems fully covered by the health insurance that we pay for.

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

Every human being is a wet, gassy katamari of triumphs, traumas, scars, coping mechanisms, parental baggage, weird stuff you saw on the Internet too young, pressure from your grandma to take over the bodega when what you really want to do is dance, and all the other fertilizer that makes a smear of DNA grow into a fully formed toxic avenger.

Trying to pee into a cup is like trying to fill a beer bottle with a Super Soaker from across the room in the dark.

But “I have grown accustomed to you because I have no one else” is not the same as “Please tell me more about your thoughts on the upcoming NESCAC cross-country season, my king.”

I thought, at the time, that love was perseverance.

being alone with another person is much worse than being alone all by yourself.

Privilege means that it’s easy for white women to do each other favors. Privilege means that those of us who need it the least often get the most help.

warned that, after I took the second pill, chunks “the size of lemons” might come out. LEMONS.

Imagine if we, as a culture, actually talked frankly and openly about abortion.

Imagine if people seeking abortions didn’t have to be blindsided by the possibility of blood lemons falling out of their vaginas v...

not because I regret my abortion or I buy into the right-wing narrative that pregnancy is god’s punishment for disobedient women, but because it’s so easy for an explanation to sound like a justification. The truth is that I don’t give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grows inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no “good” abortions and “bad” abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don’t, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies.

The truth is that life is unfathomably complex, and every abortion story is as unique as the person who lives it. Some are traumatic, some are even regretted, but plenty are like mine.

If it weren’t for the zealous high school youth-groupers and repulsive, birth-obsessed pastors flooding the public discourse with mangled fetus photos and crocodile tears—and, more significantly, trying to strip reproductive rights away from our country’s most vulnerable communities—I would never think about my abortion at all.

My abortion was a normal medical procedure that got tangled up in my bad relationship, my internalized fatphobia, my fear of adulthood, my discomfort with talking about sex; and one that, because of our culture’s obsession with punishing female sexuality and shackling women to the nursery and the kitchen, I was socialized to approach with shame and describe only in whispers.

But the procedure itself was the easiest part. Not being able to have one would have been the real trauma.

“Where do you get your confidence?” is a complex, dangerous question. First of all, if you are a thin person, please do not go around asking fat people where they got their confidence in the same tone you’d ask a shark how it learned to breathe air and manage an Orange Julius.

As a woman, my body is scrutinized, policed, and treated as a public commodity. As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and—the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on—my ability to be loved.