With the demise of Elastic Waist (and by the way, the URL is now dead, so you can’t even peruse its archive for old posts if you wanted to, and no, apparently I can’t repost them here either, even though I have them and I, you know, WROTE them. Yeah. I know. That’s why they call it “The Man”) I basically took the entire month of January off from looking at or thinking about weight, media, weight in media, media in your weight, or anything to do with celebrities. And man, I kind of didn’t miss a LOT of it, because a lot of it was really negative, insidious bullshit and even if it wasn’t, my trigger finger was so finely honed after two years of being paid to have an opinion and to craft reactions to said bullshit that I couldn’t even read something benign without getting my eyebrows all twisty and doing a little jaunty neck jut and spouting “What the hell does she mean “normal” size?” It’s been kind of a relief to not be that person for a short while. Even if I really am that person, deep down inside.
So I’m a little behind the game when I opened up my Google Reader to peruse the old faithfuls around the blogosphere and read this post by the always delightful Plumcake and had a huge colossal “OH MY GOD” revelation. She’s right. The only defense a fat girl has against the world is to be considered nice and harmless. That’s it. And by wearing applique sweatshirts and Winnie The Pooh t-shirts, it’s the fashion equivalent of cowering. And that’s the reason that plus-size clothing manufacturers continue to make voluminous clothing with goddamned birdies and kitties sewn across the bosom: because we keep gravitating to them. It’s engrained. It’s psychological. It’s fucking conditioning.
This explains so much.
Let me tell you a little secret: I am not a cheerful person by nature. I’m sarcastic and snippy and often, I say things that sound entirely wrong, jokes fall flat on their faces and end up offending people, and sometimes I’m clueless and don’t even realize that I should be saying sorry. And I complain a lot. I complain about people I dislike, about people I like, about people I love truly and deeply with every ounce of my being (and trust me, that’s a whole lot of ounces). I am, as Esteban likes to put it, very uncharitable at times, at least when it comes to the things that come out of my mouth. And I recognize that this is off-putting to normal people (”what does she mean by NORMAL!?”), to people who don’t realize that my humor and delivery is pretty dry and that my actions speak much louder than my words. Well, they’d pretty much have to or I’d have no friends at all.
Jen Wade always makes fun of me for saying that I’m edgy for Wisconsin, but it’s absolutely true. I have learned to camouflage my personality and only let the mean come out when I’m in a safe space for snark. Likewise, I tend to dress in a lot of Old Navy and Land’s End when I’m on the home turf because to wear my dresses and cute shoes would set me apart in the land of New Balance and North Face. It would be putting on airs. It would be, as Plumcake noted, unfriendly.
It shouldn’t have to be that way but when I look at all of the round bodies in this city, I can only imagine that they are feeling it too, or they haven’t even realized that it’s happened to them. When I see a flirty size 22 girl wearing vibrant prints or more than two colors, I assume that she’s visiting from one of the coasts. And no, it shouldn’t be that way, and maybe it’s only that way in Northeastern Wisconsin, where everything’s a little backwards and conservative and crazy. Sure, I’ve tried to set examples, tried to be a fashion leader for the fat girl but I usually end up having to field a bunch of questions about my clothing that are thinly-veiled backhanded compliments and the line of questions usually contains the statement “Well, it sure is different!” There’s a distancing there, almost palpable and quite frankly, I’m tired of it, so I save the cute stuff for travel and wear safe winter drab all year round in the flyover states. It’s not sad, it’s simply survival. Or maybe I’ve just given up.
It could be that too. Or maybe it’s the product of working for 12 years in an uber-conservative stale cubicle farm where it was completely acceptable to wear white tennis shoes with black trousers. But I would be lying if I said that one of the four thousand irrational things that have gone through my head in the past 12 days is “Maybe I got laid off because they wanted to punish me for wearing so many designer shoes?” Yeah. I know. Hello, Crazy.
