A Solid Six in LA
My appearance got a D and it hurt my feelings.
(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to ♥️ ! Each ♥️ makes me base less of my self-worth on my looks, and more on my ability to churn out content!)
Last Sunday evening, I sat at our backyard picnic table, surrounded by other attractive — but not TOO attractive — parents. Various bottles of cheap Sauvignon Blanc were circulating while, in the pool beside us, a swarm of children (ours) flopped over each other like future fish sticks in a tilapia farm. Occasionally, a child would blast an adult in the face with a surprisingly powerful long range squirt gun - a courtesy reminder not to enjoy ourselves too much, now that we’ve been reduced to slowly rotting meat sacks, fulfilling our use only when facilitating fun for our spawn. And yet, we WERE enjoying ourselves, and the beautiful weather, and the wine. Then, somehow, the conversation found its way to our general attractiveness as a group. (That’s why I mentioned the fact earlier in this newsletter. Otherwise, it would be a very weird thing to mention. This isn’t MomTok, okay? We weren’t about to chuck our keys into a fishbowl. I was just trying to have a wholesome night of family fun.) Anyway, much like I find our collective physical appeal a gauche detail to mention in this newsletter, I found it weird to be discussing that evening. I know that we’re all constantly judging others’ appearances and worrying about our own, but these days, I prefer to limit any musing about my own looks to my husband, when I’m whining about how “old and fat” I’ve gotten, because he’s legally obligated to tell me I’m not. Anything more public feels undignified.
One very dear friend with whom I take a weekly exercise class mused that our fellow classmates would be shocked to see us in the wild, given that, without makeup in our workout clothes, we apparently look like total dogs. “But in real life, we’re solid sixes!” I tried to steer the conversation in another direction (because I hate conversations like these) by (over-)sharing that at various times in my life, I’ve had female friends express vehement confusion and frustration when I’ve received male attention because “we’re the same amount of pretty!” or “you’re not any hotter than I am!” These claims, while true, have hurt my feelings.
“But this is Los Angeles! We’re ALL solid sixes in LA!” Insisted another friend at the table. Also a true statement.
“Exactly! I don’t get it. I’m saying it about myself, too!” reiterated my dear friend who doesn’t actually look like a total dog in our exercise classes at all. But I was already humiliated by the openness of the conversation, humiliated by the personal details I’d shared, humiliated to be publicly judged and deemed a solid six. In short, it hurt my feelings.
Essays like these are 43% of the reason the world justifiably hates white women. (Other reasons may include: our deference to white men, calling the police for no reason, sugar free candy, blaming other people when our children act like assholes, our weaponized tears, Lilly Pulitzer dresses, the fact that I’m writing a newsletter about body image when genocide abroad and fascism at home are flourishing… the list goes on.) And yet, recently I read a Sarah Miller piece that was so devoid of self-pity and so resonant, it emboldened me to try to broach the subject of how, like most women, I feel constantly hogtied by anxiety about my physical appearance. Like Sarah Miller, I was a fat child. We don’t need to rehash all the fucked up things children and adults alike think it’s perfectly fine to say to a fat kid. However if my siblings think I’ve let go of them singing, “Three feet tall and four feet wide, three feet tall and four feet wide, three feet tall and four feet wide, how about a hand for the hog?!” or “fatty fatty two by four, can’t get through the bathroom door” I HAVEN’T. Success was my revenge. Unfortunately, now my success has waned, I guess I’ll just have to outlive you both. Anyhoo, the desire to be thin wasn’t so much about being noticed, but about being left alone. For me, being fat was the beginning of many years of worrying that people hate me without knowing me, or that I’ve done something wrong without realizing it. Of course now, I just seem like a grown woman with crippling self-esteem issues, but when I was a fat kid, people really did hate me without knowing me! I had done something “wrong” without realizing it, by eating a whole sleeve of Mother’s Iced Oatmeal Cookies in one sitting.
Can commiseration ever be kindness? Sometimes. For example, if in high school, someone had told me they also got a 1 on the AP Physics exam, even though you only had to get 40% of the test right to get a 5, that definitely would have made me feel like less of an idiot. But it never made me feel better when, while trying on bathing suits next to a thin little girl, my mother would give me a sympathetic frown and whisper, “oh, don’t you just hate that?!” That my mother hated her own body didn’t make me feel better about hating mine. It just made think, well fuck, guess I’m never growing out of this. It’s no great insight to point out the perversity of women’s collective self-loathing. Amy Schumer did that like 12 years ago, which made me laugh and also reminded me how silly I feel just by being a woman, in a pathological, uncorrectable way. It was the same way I felt when I watched Bo Burnham’s White Woman’s Instagram. Of course, that this kind of parody offends me only accentuates its precision. My self-seriousness makes me even sillier. If I can’t laugh at myself, I’ve proven their goddamn point! And yet, when it comes to unflattering gender stereotypes, I wish women had gotten at least a few respectable toxic traits, like anger management issues, or the pursuit of pleasure even when it comes at the expense of everyone you love. You know, the cool stuff.
Above all, I’m frustrated with the cultural whiplash of being a middle aged woman, of experiencing the hard truth that the world will not be kind to you if you are fat, even as a child, of living through the ‘90s and the anorexic aughts, of scrolling through the Instagram Ozempic faces and Wegovy wrinkles of today, while also feeling small and brittle that I haven’t gotten over all this shit by now. Sarah Miller writes:
“There is no happy ending to this part of my story. They got me, and they will never let me go. I will die with my fat-free Cool Whip in one hand and my gym pass in the other and a drawer of size 29 jeans that I will never fit into again. It is fine. Just let me lie here. I beg you, if you can, to go on ahead without me. And if you see them coming, keep running, don’t stop, and don’t turn around. There is no joy life can bring that depends on them catching you.”
Perhaps stupidly, I still hope for a happy ending, where I come to love and accept my physical appearance as is, or at least get so fucking hot that it’s impossible not to. But the other day, talking to my same dear friend who thinks I look like total shit when I exercise, she said to me, “Growing up, I never expected anything I got to depend on my looks. Why? Did you?” While 43 years of learning that love, success, and basic acceptance depend on a smooth face and a tight ass cannot be unlearned in an instant, perhaps my friend’s perspective is the better goal to aim for. To forgive yourself for not getting over what the world has shown you, and then to keep trying anyway.