Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It (20 page)

Months later, after the buzz died down and our children were getting ample indoctrination into the loving relationship that was now mom + dad = 4ever, I awoke in bed and reached for Andy, but he’d already left for work for the day.

August 5, 2013

To: Andy

From: Brittany

Alright man take two, five things you love about my body.

To: Brittany

From: Andy

Only 5? I’d pick the curve of your waist between your boobs and your butt, the spot on your wrist where you dab perfume, your hair when you take it down in the morning, the really soft skin between your boobs, and all the freckles on your arms and shoulders.

To: Andy

From: Brittany

Weird, those are my 5 favorite things, too. We have similar tastes in body parts; I should show you my freezer collection sometime.

Subject: How much I love you!

From: Brittany

To: Andy

I love you so much, sometimes it hurts my bones. I love you so much, I often forget what I was even doing. Like, I went to go to the bathroom, and then thought about how much I love you, then I walked back out and peed in my jeans. I love you so much air seems stupid compared to you. I love you so much that if you accidentally broke my new camera and shattered my lens because you set it on the car hood while you got distracted, I wouldn’t even be mad at you because my love for you makes that physically impossible.

Now, say it back.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Wait what?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

SAY IT BACK!!!!

In high school, my grandmother bought me the book
Letters to Sartre,
by Simone de Beauvoir. The book featured love letters from de Beauvoir herself to Jean-Paul Sartre, the famed French novelist, philosopher, and political activist, giving you an inside glimpse at their love and relationship, which was both stormy and addictingly passionate. It remains one of my favorite books to this day. You hear lots of people mourn for the lost art of writing letters, and I would be one of those letter-writing people if my hand weren’t hardened into a giant texting-induced claw, unable to hold early-twentieth-century writing instruments. I do, however, mourn the loss of messy love. The kind of love that is spilling down the front of you as you struggle with both hands to hold on to it.

I never wrote Andy any letters. I actually don’t even own stamps and haven’t been inside a post office since 1995. Are they fourteen dollars now? I honestly have no idea?

But I do pride myself on the power of the typed word, and use it often to convey emotion, complain about my lost airline baggage on Twitter, and write love notes to my husband. Like Sartre would have done, Andy saved all my emails. I’d like to think it was out of love, but he said it had more to do with potentially needing them as evidence one day. Love. It makes you crazy.

Subject: Sex Dolls

From: Brittany

To: Andy

Do you know anyone who can make a full body mold of me and all my holes?

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Your holes?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

Yeah. Ears, nose, mouth, belly button, butt, pee and sex.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Sex hole, awesome, let’s start the argument now, what’s the goal here?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

Um- to make life size sex dolls to sell on the Internet? I saw on My Strange Addiction that gently used ones start at 6k on Craigslist.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

What does gently used mean?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

I think it just means she only gave head but still has her doll hymen, so maybe don’t kiss her on the mouth?

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Some days the way your brain works makes me not want to kiss YOU on the mouth.

Subject: The Salon?

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Hey- what is this $100 salon charge every few weeks?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

Waxer.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

That seems expensive for waxing?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

It’s a normal price, plus we can write it off as a medical expense.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

How is you being hairy a medical expense?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

I stopped going to my OBGYN because she always makes me get on the scale and I hate that, so I just have Rachel peek up there every 6 weeks to make sure it looks normal and cancer-free.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

But she’s not a doctor?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

Who really is these days?

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Actual doctors?

Subject: The Pacific Time Zone Is Weird

From: Brittany

To: Andy

Greetings from the past.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Not explaining this to you again.

From: Brittany

To: Andy

Anything you want me to change for you?

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Not how time zones work.

From: Brittany

To: Andy

I can do anything but be seen by your dad, for fear he might fall in love with me and cause a paradox that would result in your non-existence.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

You aren’t in Back to the Future.

From: Brittany

To: Andy

We could rig the lottery!

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Nope.

From: Brittany

To: Andy

If you find out Danity Kane is getting back together, call me, I want to make sure to be ready for it.

Subject: Golf

To: Brittany

From: Andy

Hey- I’m going golfing after work, but it doesn’t mean I want a divorce or that we need counseling. This is only a heads up.

To: Andy

From: Brittany

???

To: Brittany

From: Andy

I saw you talking about starting your period on Facebook this week, so I decided to play the offense. I’ll bring home cake.

To: Andy

From: Brittany

We’re soul mates.

Subject: Shopping List

From: Andy

To: Brittany

What am I getting on the way home?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

Children’s Mucinex Cough, Advil for me, tampons if you can, and pop.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

What kind?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

Diet Pepsi.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

No, the tampons?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

OH! HAPPY CLAP I LOVE YOU, Ok Kotex Super- they’re black.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

That’s a good idea actually so you don’t see how gooped up and slimy they get.

From: Brittany

To: Andy

The box. I mean the box is black. But I should invent those! I can make them green and call them Zombie Fingers!

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Too far.

Subject: Phantom Fetus

From: Brittany

To: Andy

I just felt something kick me from inside my stomach. I assume it’s one of three things . . . a parasite, the Chipotle I had for lunch, or a fetus.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Well for your sake, I hope you are full of tapeworms, gassy or your email was hacked.

From: Brittany

To: Andy

#andyhatesbabies

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Stop hashtagging our emails.

From: Brittany

To: Andy

#andylikesbuttworms

From: Andy

To: Brittany

How are you classified as an adult?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

#andymarrieschildren

Subject: Flu Shot

From: Brittany

To: Andy

OMG.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Here we go.

From: Brittany

To: Andy

You don’t understand, I feel like my ears are underwater, and like, a mermaid is in them screaming.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

No.

From: Brittany

To: Andy

I just saw a duck in the bathroom covered in blood. It was the Bloody Mary of ducks.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Last time I’m having this discussion. It was a flu shot, not tracker-jacker venom. Take a nap until I get home, you’ll be fine.

From: Brittany

To: Andy

Tell that to Glimmer.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

No idea what that means.

Subject: My Birthday

To: Andy

From: Brittany

Hey, have you decided what you are going to get me for my birthday yet?

To: Brittany

From: Andy

Yep.

To: Andy

From: Brittany

Is it clothes? Because you probably don’t realize this, because my sizing is really elusive, but I do most of my shopping in Juniors. So, it really is best to not buy me clothes, because my frame is very unique.

To: Brittany

From: Andy

Right. It’s not clothes.

To: Andy

From: Brittany

Is it jewelry, because it’s hard for me to wear jewelry at work?

To: Brittany

From: Andy

And, by work, do you mean watching DVR’ed Cosby Shows and laughing at stuff you write on the Internet?

To: Andy

From: Brittany

Is my gift being insulted? Is this an early birthday present you are giving me right now? Because you
totally already got me this for Christmas when you said my green beans tasted like a homeless man smells.

To: Brittany

From: Andy

It’s not jewelry.

To: Andy

From: Brittany

Is it a dolphin?

To: Brittany

From: Andy

Did you want a dolphin?

To: Andy

From: Brittany

I don’t want to ruin your gift or tell you what to buy me, but I’ll tell you that if it’s not a dolphin, I’ll be disappointed.

Subject: Dishwasher Tabs

To: Brittany

From: Andy

Hey- I loaded the dishwasher but you’re out of dishwasher tabs.

To: Andy

From: Brittany

You mean . . . WE’RE out of dish tabs?

To: Brittany

From: Andy

Yes, sorry. WE are out of dishwasher tabs, what kind should I get?

To: Andy

From: Brittany

The blue gel kind. And WE’RE also out of panty liners.

Subject: Memorial Day

From: Andy

To: Brittany

Hey- did you deposit those checks?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

Is that a joke?

From: Andy

To: Brittany

No?

From: Brittany

To: Andy

I doubt the bank is even open, Andy. It’s the 14th anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts. Do you know how many of my friends died in that war? It’s insensitive for you to assume I’m even leaving the house today.

From: Andy

To: Brittany

So you’re not going to the bank for me today then??

From: Brittany

To: Andy

I’m ashamed FOR you.

“Obesity is NOT beautiful. Obesity is harmful and unhealthy. You made this choice. I am really tired of these big & beautiful articles.”

—
AURELIABELL
,
H
UFFINGTON
P
OST

“I’m just going to assume your husband is blind or lost a bet.”

—J
ENNA
V, B
RITTANY
H
ERSELF.COM

“You post pictures of yourself online so people will tell you you’re pretty because nobody will say that to you in real life.”

—
KLM1984
, B
RITTANY
H
ERSELF.COM

“Women like you should have your kids taken away. You can’t grow up in life being okay with being fat. It’s child abuse.”

—D
ORY
, Y
AHOO

“You aren’t attractive; you’re basically a fat fetish.”

—B
ONNIE
, CNN.
COM

People are dicks to plus-size women. Moms equate your relationship status to your BMI. Aunts make passive-aggressive comments to you about what constitutes a girlish figure. The guy in line behind you at the Chinese buffet asks you if you’re especially hungry that day. People walk around with a certain level of entitlement to your body, but it’s nothing compared to the Internet. The Internet is a special place people can go to say all the extra-egregious things they are way too cowardly to say to your face.

Writing online has opened me up to an entire world of negative commentary. While it is, at times, soul crushing and obnoxious in a very
do you kiss your mother with that mouth
fashion, it’s not entirely unexpected. I once saw commenters on a CNN.com article ridicule a blind paraplegic kid and then blame him for killings in Benghazi, so very little in terms of online discourse surprises me anymore. But what was unexpected was who it was coming from . . . other women. Men did it, too, sure, but the woman-on-woman genocide was a complete surprise.

In my personal experience, negative male commentary about my body is primarily full of superficial generalities, like “you’re fat” or “you’re ugly,” further backed up by all the ways they wouldn’t sleep with me, which would be devastating if my primary goal was making a man’s dick hard. It’s important to note, however, that the majority of online response I get from men is positive. They often applaud my curves, thank me for validating the bodies of their wives and daughters, and in some cases email me for my phone number and relationship status.

Women are a completely different monster. There is no greater species better crafted for emotional terrorism than women. We slice away at the Achilles until our victims are left feeling completely devoid of value and unfit for love, friendship, and in extreme cases, air. We’ve been bred to see others’ successes as a direct assault to our own, and this is especially true when it comes to weight. Seeing someone who is heavier than us viewing themselves in a positive light is detrimental to our own self-esteem. So we attack and tear down until eventually that person feels as bad
about herself as we do about ourselves. And for some reason, that goes into the win column. Hell, ladies, we don’t even need the fashion industry and society to do this for us; we’re busy enough trying to meet the demands of doing it to each other.

A couple of things about fat shaming.

         
1    It’s a real thing.

         
2    If someone says you are doing it, and your response is “am not,” you probably are.

No one is arguing that obesity isn’t an epidemic. We see it all over the news. Fat people with their heads cut off or blurred out walking down the street uncomfortably or eating in fast-food restaurants. Not the skinny people. The skinny people eating there are fine; it’s the fat ones who are the problem. These are all images society needs us to see. We need to be told that this is what fat looks like, and
oh isn’t it disgusting,
because I swear to God, that is the only way anyone can possibly sleep at night or justify the way fat people are treated in this country.

Reminding me I’m fat in the comments of my blog, bullying me in online forums, providing me with no fashion options, shaming me at restaurants, ridiculing me in gyms, mocking me on national television—how’s that working out? Well, according to a recent study out of the Florida State University College of Medicine, not so great. “People who felt discriminated against because of their weight were more likely to become or stay obese.” (That sound you hear right now is millions of plus-size people across the world sighing a collective “no shit.”) I’m not trying to make anyone feel like less of a special snowflake here, but chances are, if you are
calling somebody fat, you’re probably not the first one to tell that person that. My guess is, it’s been beaten into them the majority of their lives by several people before you. I’m not sure what the clinical trial time frame on shitty social experiments is, but we’ve been fat shaming people for years with an impressive zero percent success rate. Unless we’re measuring success rates in suicides and eating disorders, in which case the numbers are slightly more impressive.

The reality is that fat shaming doesn’t force me into being thin, and you can sit there from the comfort of your small pants and tell me I’m gross or unworthy of love until you’re blue in the face, but it won’t make me pick up a kettle ball. It will, however, make me pick up a candy bar in the closet where I hide to eat alone because seeing me eat in public grosses you out. That’s right, motherfuckers, fat people adapt.

So how do I combat the shaming? Instinctively I want to grab the water bottle I use to squirt my cat with when she’s being a dick, but based on the ineffectiveness demonstrated when I squirt my kids with it, it’s probably futile. Also Andy kept screaming at me every time I sprayed his laptop with water.

Instead, I realized that people are allowed to say whatever they want to me about my weight, but it’s entirely up to me how much power I let those words have over me. I’m not obligated or required to accept negative commentary about my looks. I’m not less confident or honest for ignoring that it’s there. I’m just confident enough to know it’s not true.

Are you a doctor? Are you my doctor? Am I shifting around uncomfortably on a paper-covered table in your house? No? Okay, then you don’t get to make wild accusations about my health based
on how I look because you are not a real doctor, you are a pretend Internet doctor. Not the same thing. You are basically as qualified to distribute medical advice as those douchebags from spring break who walk around with “Part Time Gynecologist” shirts on. As a rule, and you can decide how applicable you feel like this may be for yourself, I just go ahead and assume everyone is healthy unless they are actively mainlining heroin into their arms. It’s a courtesy I afford all people by way of basic human decency.

After I had my second child, I was carrying the weight of two back-to-back pregnancies; literally, I had given birth twice in an eleven-month span, gaining a combined eighty pounds. While I physically felt okay, and my blood pressure and levels were all completely normal and healthy, I was mentally destroyed, living in my father’s sweatpants and oversize men’s T-shirts. I ran into an old classmate from high school in the grocery store and she asked me how far along I was. I was not pregnant. I woke up the next morning determined to lose weight.

I lived on a strict diet of 1,200 calories a day, and once my breast milk supply dried up due to lack of nutrients, I began bottle feeding, which freed up my ability to also incorporate drugstore weight loss supplements, 30 Day Shred, and random bouts of binging and purging. Within seven months I had lost close to ninety pounds and was wearing a size 12 jeans. My fingernails and toenails began to crack in half. My hair fell out, leaving quarter-size clumps around my hairline and scalp. I was acutely anemic, reliant on laxatives for bowel movements, experiencing tachycardia . . . and everyone told me I looked stunning. Truly, that I’d never looked better.

It’s amazing to me that at my unhealthiest point, I was the most socially acceptable. Yet, here I stand today at 215 pounds, as healthy as can be, and a total abomination to society.

Some of the most offensive comments I receive are laced with
concern over my health. I can forgive the attacks on my size or marital status because I write it off as ignorance and jealousy, but when they lubricate a stream of shame with backhanded concern for my health, it tells me that they are smart enough to know better, but choose to tear me down anyway.

“I’m not against fat people feeling good about themselves, you know, as long as they’re healthy,” said Caroline, on the
Huffington Post.

Stop it. You don’t get to legislate the parameters of my confidence. I get to feel good about myself because I am a person; my size has nothing to do with it.

You can’t throw a rock at the body acceptance movement and not hit a Marilyn Monroe picture.

“I see your clavicle and raise you Marilyn Monroe and Christina Hendricks. Boom. I just real-womaned the fuck out of you!”

Curvy women cling to her image, whipping it out like a cop badge at the first instance of fat shaming, ignoring the very real fact that Marilyn Monroe was not a plus-size woman, no matter how badly we wish it to be so. We foolishly stand there with our vintage photographs and Pinterest quotes, challenging thin women to a duel over what more clearly defines womanhood.

Real Men Love Curves

Only Dogs Want Bones

A woman without curves is like jeans without pockets; you don’t know where to put your hands.

A few years ago, I was all too eager to ride that train. In 2011, I created CurvyGirlGuide.com, an online magazine and community aimed at plus-size women. From its launch it took off as an undisputed success, winning awards hand over fist, landing contracts with fashion brands eager to cash in on the untapped plus-size market, and further perpetuating the mind-set that, finally, Real Women Have Curves.

It was an empowering message, and it gave women like me a feminine identity, something we’d been largely denied over the years. With companies like Dove stoking the fire, it all felt very okay and exciting. The skinny girls had had their chance in the sun, and it was their turn to be unmarketable afterthoughts for a while. Yes,
this
was winning.
This
was a movement.
This
was political. “Real” and “Curve” were now marketing mainstays.

Somewhere in the midst of all this empowerment and back-patting, another line had been drawn in the sand and history was repeating itself. We were once again presenting one body as the gold standard for beauty and womanhood, which is fun when you meet the requirements, but what about those who don’t? Suddenly I had thin women reaching out to me, saying “what about us?” and “we hate out bodies, too!” It turns out fat women do not have the monopoly on body issues. I was running a website that spoke out against shaming, but at the same time I was sustaining a watered-down form of it.

That wasn’t evolution; that was amnesia.

I always call myself an accidental advocate. I didn’t intend to stumble into a job that had me on the front lines of the fight for body acceptance, but here I am. And as I stand at the top looking down, I realize this is not a plus-size movement, but a woman’s movement. Strength and empowerment are not built on the backs of other women. The realness of a woman is not defined by her curves or lack thereof; real women are those who defend and empower all women, no matter what size their ass is. If we don’t say enough and stop the race to the beauty-standard finish line,
the casualties and the resentment women have toward each other will grow.

In 2013, I closed CurvyGirlGuide.com in its current form, and relaunched it as an interactive community, welcoming to women of all sizes. There are meet-ups and events attended by the thousands of members who call the sisterhood home.

If you were to ask me what the goal of this book was, I would tell you that it was to validate every student loan check my dad still has to write each month. And to tell the story of a woman who didn’t have to lose weight to be great. To prove that those stories about chubby women who have it all aren’t exceptions or television shows starring America Ferrera, but real life.

Feeling good in your skin is 80 percent mental. All right, I don’t have the actual math on that, but 80 percent mental feels accurate, the other 20 percent being kick-ass shapewear and wine. The point is, you provide the narrative for how others perceive you. People treat me like a sexy and confident curvy woman because I act like a sexy and confident curvy woman; my behavior doesn’t give them any other options.

I walk around knowing I have the right to never feel ashamed or disgusted with my body, and if people have a problem with it, it’s on them.

“Hey, weirdo! Stop staring at my body. It’s creepy.”