Fight Like A Girl Page 4

  We learn what happens to those girls, and it teaches us what not to do. Don’t grow, but shrink. Use your inside voice at all times. Pick at your food, and pretend you’re full before you actually are. Dress for your shape. If your shape isn’t willowy and thin, drape yourself in layers of fabric and silent apology. Don’t offer opinions before confirming that other people, especially boys, share them. Don’t say no to things when people want them from you. If people take things that you didn’t want to give them, be prepared to explain why you didn’t say no. Keep your legs closed – on public transport, in the living room, while watching TV, while lying in bed, while lying with someone else. Be the gatekeeper. Know that boys can’t help themselves, that it’s your job to help them learn self-control, but you must never, ever, ever tell them that, because it’s not fair to treat boys like they’re dangerous. Sacrifice yourself so that they might become better people. Be the scaffold they need to climb to heights greater than you’ll ever be supported to reach.

  Be aware that the space you take up is borrowed and your right to occupy it is dictated by your willingness to offer something in return – prettiness, acquiescence, unquestioning agreement, a fuckable rig, the right balance of morality and sexuality (which – surprise! – turns out to be impossible to achieve because the goalposts change whenever you move towards them), and an unassuming smile that says, ‘Frankly, it’s just an honour to be included.’

  Absorb the message that other girls – the girls you tumbled with and played fairies and space heroes and mermaids with, the girls you curled up with to whisper secrets in the dark, the ones you choreographed dances with, painted with, climbed trees with, ate ice-creams with, learned to swim with, fought with, made up with, fell in love with, wore flower crowns with and developed secret languages with – are not your friends. That women can’t be friends because women are each other’s own worst enemies. That it is women – not men, not society and certainly not patriarchy – who are responsible for the trauma, self-doubt and hurt that is part and parcel of being a woman.

  Above all, understand that whatever happens to you is always your own fault.

  At thirteen, it seemed clear to me suddenly that this world, the one which had previously brought so much unbridled delight and laughter, that had made me feel ten feet tall, was no longer interested in having me play in it. I had danced up and down staircases, roly-poly and resplendent in lycra shorts stretched tight over a round tummy, and I had never been made to feel like this was wrong. When I dressed myself in the morning, it wasn’t in a state of panic or worry, my brow furrowed as I pondered which outfit would make me feel like fewer people were pointing at me. I didn’t catch glimpses of myself in the mirror and feel a sudden burst of shame at having seen the contortion of a double chin or a flabby arm that seemed able to announce my presence in a way my mind and heart could not.

  I was yet to experience that sudden and uncomfortable shift in perception that would become so familiar later: that feeling you get when your awareness wrenches itself from your body to float above you and calculate all the ways you and your inherent womanhood don’t belong.

  When you’re a child, you consider yourself as a whole being. Heads and shoulders and knees and toes. If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands. But the process of becoming a woman involves the stripping away of key parts of yourself by outside forces as you look on a bewilderment that quickly turns to shame. Eventually, it doesn’t matter how you try to do the sums. All that’s left is an assortment of pieces, and none of them seem to add up.

  I am thirteen, and I think I’m worthless. I am thirteen, and I hate myself. I am thirteen, and all I want to do is disappear.

  For girls, the pursuit of thinness is so often tied up with the desire to take up less space. The adults who monitor our childhood watch as we grow up and out, and then suddenly absent themselves when adolescence creeps in and marks the start of what can be the lifelong attempt to fold ourselves neatly away. We are like little Alices, searching for perfect potions to help us shrink and dreading the bite that will send us shooting up through our house and into a state of monstrosity. Eat me. Drink me. Up. Down. In. Out.

  What kind of world do women occupy when we experience an average of 4745 negative thoughts about our bodies every year? When 97 percent of women admit to thinking ‘I hate my body’ at least once a day?

  According to a study conducted by the University of Central Florida, nearly 50 percent of American girls aged three to six are already concerned about their weight. Could it be because diet and diet-related industries bring in an annual revenue of $33 billion? Or could it just be that misogyny has always been the happy bedfellow of capitalism, and distracting women from realising our true potential by encouraging us to find self-worth through invisibility is sweeter when you can make a profit from it?

  Why is the measure of a man’s worth meant to be the size of his integrity while the measure of a woman’s is the size of her waist? Why do we sit by and participate in this spectacle of judgment, picking over photographs of women taken at beaches and noting not their grins but their fat rolls or rib cages or cigarettes or stretch marks or wrinkles or whatever else we want to pluck out of a modern-day still life to use as ammunition against her right to just exist in peace?

  How can we move through the world each day, all six billion of us, and not hear that piercing shriek that emanates from the souls and hearts of girls and women the world over?

  It’s the shriek that screams notice me even as it also yells don’t look.

  When I think back on those days now, on the self-hating, the purging, the heartbreaking self-analysis that took place in my journals, I’m astonished that nobody seemed to notice. I lost over a third of my body weight in the space of a single school term, and the only person (outside of a brief interaction with my mother) who thought to check if everything was okay was a kindly teacher whose enquiry I summarily discarded as jealousy. Beyond that, I was adrift in the same ocean of poisonous messages as all girls seem to be. Being thin is good. Being thin is healthy. Being thin is pretty. Being thin will make boys like you. Being thin will solve all your problems. Being thin brings you worth. Being thin means you are in control.

  Because the flip side of these messages is almost too terrible to contemplate if you’re an average girl raised in an average world where the average person averagely hates you, based on the law of averages. Being fat is bad. Being fat is unhealthy. Being fat will make boys loathe you. Being fat will cause you problems. Being fat makes you worthless. Being fat means you have no control.

  Poor body image – the pain girls are conditioned to think is normal – is hereditary. As my weight loss hit its most extreme level, my mother fretted one night that it had gone too far. I had gone downstairs wearing nothing but a bra and my brand-new school trousers to show her what they looked like, but instead of admiring them, she recoiled at the sight of my sunken breasts and prominent bones. ‘You need to stop,’ she pleaded with me. Her concern seemed jarring, because it came after weeks of hearing nothing but praise for my efforts. She had even happily agreed when I made her promise to pull out the tough love card if I started to ‘get fat’ again. Jealous! I screamed later to my diary. She just wants me to get fat again!

  Some years later, when we’d left England for Australia and I’d regained most if not all of the weight I’d lost at thirteen, my mother admonished me one night as I reached for a second helping of whatever we were eating for dinner.

  ‘Clementine,’ she chided, ‘do you really think you need that?’

  I stared at her, my hand in mid-air, a mixture of humiliation and indignation beginning to swirl inside. ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I think you could do without eating it,’ she replied. My face must have signalled something like fury, because the next thing she said was, ‘Don’t give me that look. You once made me promise to tell you if you started to get fat again, and I’m just keeping my promise.’

  I was astounded, not onl
y by the fact she’d remembered a silly thing said years ago by a child who was clearly in the grips of an eating disorder, but because the existence of that eating disorder seemed to have been completely erased from her memory.

  Don’t be tempted to rest all the blame squarely on my mother’s shoulders, though. For all his excellent qualities, my father was also squeamish about the idea of having fat daughters. I think he believed, as so many do, that fatness offered the world a negative impression. Fatness, particularly in women, was a sign of weakness or failure. It was more important for a woman to be pretty than it was for a man, because women had a responsibility to make the best of themselves. I remember my father getting very agitated one day because my stomach was peeking out between my shorts and my t-shirt (this was the summer of 1999, when it was basically impossible to find a t-shirt that wasn’t designed to be three inches shorter than was comfortable). I was just schlepping about at home, but he suddenly pointed at the exposed flesh and yelled something about how my stomach was ‘hanging all over the place’. Another time, he observed how unfortunate it was that a woman he knew was fat because ‘she would be so pretty if she lost some weight’.

  Again, before you condemn my parents, take a breath. Yes, parents or guardians can play a significant role in perpetuating the patterns of self-hatred that are inflicted by an obsessively poor body image. But having a child doesn’t make you a suddenly perfect person, nor does it instantly allow you to release the baggage that was built by others for you to carry when you were a child yourself.

  My mother often talked of being chubby when she was little, teased for being bigger than her younger sister. Her own mother, renowned as a Great Beauty, had sustained permanent emotional damage from being interned and sexually abused in a Russian concentration camp during World War II. She spent the rest of her life simultaneously hating men for the violence they’d inflicted on her while believing she had no other options but for them to take care of her. Feminine beauty was highly valued in my mother’s home – for many years, my mother felt inadequate in comparison to her sister and mother, the latter viewing her daughters as competition for the affections of the many men who came in and out of her life. To understand how I learned to hate myself by watching my mother, you have to understand how she was taught to hate herself too. Never satisfied with her efforts to achieve the impossible task of becoming less than what she was, she tried every fad diet going except the one which gave her permission to love herself exactly as she was.

  It’s a bitter tragedy that she spent her life trying to be thin only to have her ability to eat taken from her by stomach cancer when she was fifty-seven. For weeks, she lay in bed wasting away as we waited for death to come and relieve her of her suffering. At her funeral she lay there in the open casket wearing a formal suit she hadn’t been able to fit into for many years. Her cheekbones were majestic, and sharp enough to cut my heart in two.

  Shit happens to everyone, not just ourselves. I didn’t grow up hearing that it didn’t matter what my body looked like, only how it felt, because my parents didn’t grow up hearing those things either. My mother didn’t have the benefit of internet op-eds and women’s websites dismantling all this stuff for her. All she had were the lessons she’d learned in childhood, delivered by a mother who wasn’t capable of loving her to even a tenth of the degree that my mother loved me and my siblings. I’ve learned many things about love from her and my father. I’ve learned that it’s important to talk to each other, which we always did. I’ve learned the benefit of laughter and play, which we always had. I’ve learned, based on the reports from some of my friends, how lucky I am to have family who aren’t afraid to kiss and hug and say ‘I love you’ every time we say goodbye or goodnight. But I’ve also learned not to teach children that their body is an enemy. I’ve learned how important it is to model self-love as a rule, to demonstrate to impressionable young minds that they are so much more than the sum of their parts.

  As a girl, all I ever wanted was to have some control over my life and the space I was told I was entitled to occupy. Being big and loud and awkward did not earn you a place at the table. This acceptance was only granted to women whose bodies indicated an awareness of How Things Worked. I resented the girls for whom this privilege seemed to come naturally, and I hated myself for having to work so hard to achieve it. From that first moment in the car when I looked at my belly and heard it whisper fat to me to the moment this morning when I stood in front of the mirror and tried to see if my exercise plan was working, I have spent more than two decades worrying about whether or not my body is small enough to excuse my womanhood. More than two decades feeling emotionally convinced of the intrinsic connection between my worth and my size, even when every rational part of my brain tells me that’s ridiculous. I know it’s ridiculous. I believe it’s ridiculous. I tell other women it’s ridiculous.

  But it doesn’t seem ridiculous when you’re walking down the street and you’re struck by the self-loathing belief that all the world is pointing at you and thinking to themselves, ‘That fat cow really shouldn’t be wearing those shorts.’

  Imagine how much precious time and energy we would save if we could just figure out a way to let all of this shit go. If girls and women could wake up in the morning and smile at themselves in the mirror instead of turning from side to side, measuring all the ways in which our bodies have let us down again today. And imagine how much easier it would be for us to believe this if everyone else would stop measuring women’s value by whether or not our thighs touch in the middle, offering their unwanted commentary about what women should and shouldn’t wear or sneering at us for having the audacity to act as if we deserve respect rather than derision.

  I learned to like myself more when I began playing roller derby. Being in a community of women athletes was fun, but it was also empowering. I began to look at my body as something with a use and a purpose, something that could do things, rather than something that existed just to be looked at and critiqued. On the track, using my body for sport and play, I feel like a child again in a good way. I am powerful. I am good. I am worth something. Other people see it and, more importantly, I see it.

  This is one of the secrets. It’s finding the things that your body likes to do and then doing them. It might be swimming. It might be running. It might be lying on the grass and feeling a hundred different green blades tickle your skin. It might be standing in front of your bedroom mirror and dancing just for yourself. I do that a lot.

  Find something that your body likes to do and let your body do it. Let your body do it because it deserves as much as any other body in the world to shake itself to the rhythm of the beat, to plunge into the roiling waves and surf itself in to shore, to drape itself in beautiful colours, to stride through a crowded room and announce itself with confidence rather than apology, to be kissed, to be touched, to fuck and be fucked, to run, to be nourished and fed, to rollerskate in teeny-tiny shorts, to recline, to sleep, to be at peace. All bodies are good bodies, and that includes yours.

  This is part of the self-love that we so often deny ourselves.

  Write down a list of all the things that you’re good at and all the things you enjoy doing. When you’re feeling down or insecure about yourself, take that list out and remember that your body is a good body.

  Thank your body every day for the way it cares for you. Care for it in return. Do nice things for it. Have a bath. Get a massage. Go for long walks in the countryside and feel the unique pleasure of going to bed with tired legs that have taken you to see the world in all its glory. Masturbate – frequently! Your body and you deserve to feel good in every way. Don’t be ashamed about touching yourself. It’s your reward for being so awesome. I reward myself for being awesome two, sometimes three times a day. Because I’m worth it.

  Try to banish negative thoughts by replacing them with something positive. Or, as comedian Luisa Omielan says, grabbing her tummy, ‘Do you know what this means? This means I go out for dinner with f
riends. This is my present to myself.’

  Help your friends to love themselves too. If someone you know says something negative about themselves, say, ‘Hey! That’s my friend you’re talking about! Don’t be mean to my friend!’ Think about the way you talk to yourself as well, and ask if it’s something you’d be comfortable saying to someone else. Chances are it’s not. So don’t say it to yourself.

  A lot of guff is spoken about ‘health’ and fatness, as if the real reason people feel entitled to shame other people’s bodies is out of concern for their welfare. Do you know what’s not healthy? Being at war with yourself. Hating yourself is not healthy. Fixating on the bodies of other people and how they compare to yours is not healthy. Starving yourself to fit in with the arbitrary ideals created and policed by other people is not healthy.

  Fatness is not a disease, and it’s not contagious. The only thing that’s contagious is the temptation to pile hatred into a completely random and often genetically determined physical self and turn it into a symbol of disgust and worthlessness. We need to stop passing on the toxic messages that have travelled down from generation to generation and start creating a new paradigm of what it means to be good. Of what it means to be different. To be diverse. To be valuable. We need to tell our children that they are everything they need to be. We need to tell our girls that their bodies exist for them to use, not for others to look at.

  Remember this, above all else: there is no wrong way to have a body. You are perfect just as you are. You are exactly the way you are meant to be. Love yourself. Because you are worth loving.

  Get ready for your close-up, baby. You’re gonna be a star.

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  3 –

  REAL GIRLS

  Learning to love your body is one thing, but convincing manufacturers to make clothes that will fit it is another thing altogether. Incredibly, women didn’t all fall out of the Woman Factory in five different perfectly ascending sizes of the exact same shape. So instead of using standard numerical sizing on clothes, why not divide items according to what women’s bodies actually look like and the different tastes we have? We’re all genetically coded to store fat and muscle differently. For example, my sister was blessed with a magnificent cleavage. Her breasts form the kind of narrow chasm that looks like it might be hiding diamonds or maybe even the crushed bones of those men who, mesmerised by the glittering jewels, slipped into its crevice one day never to be seen again.