Size Matters

I spent a lot of my life feeling out of place in my own body growing up. I've always been bigger than average, both in weight and in height. As a child this weighed a lot on my confidence, especially in my growing years when self esteem first started to present itself and I realized that being large had bigger repercussions than just being better at sports or getting things off of shelves. I soon found out that to be a woman and to be large was to be marginalized. However rather than confront the forces that caused this insecurity, I bought into the cultural narratives of what I was supposed to be. I would often dream of the days of wearing size small shirts, with thighs that didn't touch, lounging carelessly with my boyfriend by the beach and feeling envied by all. This is, after all, what I saw all over magazines and in the movies. This was the implicit tale told to me as the way to my ultimate happiness and worth.

So when I was in my sophmore year in high school, I decided I was done feeling worthless. I wanted to feel powerful, and the only way I knew how to do that and come close to the dream of acceptance and normalcy was through weight loss. So I began to diet--no not diet. I began to obsess about my weight loss in an unhealthy way. I became anorexic. People are always confused when they hear of someone above average weight being anorexic, because the ones we see are the extreme concentration-camp victims of this horrible epidemic. They want proof of your commitment to be thin, they want near emaciated status. Very few people truly understand that it is a mental condition far before physical conditions can be seen, and as such many more women fight with this social disease because of this proof. Now thank God that I never carried through with it to that extent of being extremely thin, but the fact was that for a time I was: I worked out so relentlessly and rarely rewarded my body with nutrients, that the weight just started falling off. And instead of concern, I got praise.

I was no supermodel, and in the scope of things 30 pounds isn't much to shout out about. Leveling out to a size 12 isn't many people's ideals of success. But it gave me a glimpse of how the other side lived: the privileged side. The ones who made themselves weak to be strong. Those women who conformed to the obsessive ideal that to be thin was to have power, and only thin people could be loved. Because love was dependent on outside approval and adherence to the female standard of beauty, most especially the male stamp of approval. And the amount of men that I had interested in me after I lost weight was astounding, as was the degree to which it defined my happiness at the time.

Since that time, as I've come into myself, my weight has fluctuated. I've put weight on healthily and unhealthily through the years but the fact remains: size matters. People don't like to admit it, but thin privilege exists. It exists wholeheartedly, and in nowhere is this practice more prevalent than in female standards of beauty. It is part of the female experience at every step in her life. Because as much as we don't like to admit it women are still objects. Feminism, despite making some strides, has still not met its original agendas. Gender equality is not fully actualized and there is still work to to. We continue to live in a world obsessed with rewarding women for diminishing their place in society not by not following what is healthy, but what is thin. Women are taught from a young age to covet thinness because to be thin is to not take up much space in society. To be thin is to be weak. And to be weak is to be a woman. And this narrative is sanctioned because it legitimizes the objectification of women.

But I am here proud to say that I am a big girl. And not big girl in the condescending way people say it, where they roll their eyes when you say you have big bones and silently write you off as some jolly fat widow with 16 cats. I mean I am a big girl: I proudly take up space. I have a body and a mind and a spirit that is my own and it demands to be seen, to be appreciated, and to be accepted in its own power. I have a body that I know is worthy of love and desire. The body that I was given is damn beautiful, at any age and at any size in which I treat it with healthy respect and admiration.

Size matters because it is a part of who I am. But it is not entirely what I am, because I am not an object. I am not a size. I am not a dehumanized number on a scale of worth. You will not try and defeat me by taking a size 12 body--what is the average size of a woman in the US--and try and tell me that it translates into a large, or an extra large, and try to socially construct an identity for me that is less than what I had planned for myself. But my body is not up for scrutiny and discussion, for valuation and stratification. It is mine and it is imperfectly perfect.

You can say society is a bitch. That it's sad, but that's just the way things are and live in this defeatist attitude with a gender stratified existence. Or you can live in delusion thinking you fight this ridiculous standard while your actions speak differently. But by quiet consistent dieting, you play along. By sitting around complaining about the fat on your thighs, they win. By legitimizing any woman who has ever felt alone and understood that it was because her body did not fit man's ideal, you give in to this devaluation. Collectively we perpetuate a culture whereby women feel that their true mark of success, however intellectual and powerful is meaningless unless she must first prove her physical standard. Where the Secretary of State has to defend the way she does her hair before she can come to talk real politics. Where any woman has to apologize for being more than an object.

I refuse to live in such a world and support this perspective and I hope that all women can become empowered to the point where they too stop playing this gendered game. By loving myself, I fight the good fight. Though as a feminist, I try to be conscious about the ways I myself validate the system so that I am not asking of others what I cannot do myself. Because I am not perfect, and I still feel at times that being a certain size will bring me happiness. That it is because I have love handles that no man wants to hold me. That the worse thing to happen is to die alone unloved and unapproved by man. But then I remember that my mouth was made to speak from an independent mind and not as a receptacle for obligatory blow jobs and I discard this notion of my worth as being externally assigned. In this consciousness I take personal ownership for my confidence and assign myself individual worth. And I commit to love myself every day for exactly who I am--big, beautiful, and unapologetically present.