Thoughts on "Plus-Size," and a Guest Post on Fabulosity

Today's word post is kindly being hosted at Plus Size Models Unite, which features interviews (and stunning photos) with plus-size models, shedding some light on the industry. I wrote a post for them about the history of the term "plus-size," which was fascinating to research. (I was particularly amused by Lane Bryant's early use of the term "junior plenty," which I guess was phased out by my day. All I remember of shopping during my pudgy girlhood was "6X"—any other 6X-ers in the house?) Here's some of what I learned (you can read the whole thing here):

It wasn’t just consumers who were coming up with weird terms to describe ladies of size. Women’s magazines in the 1970s gave style advice to readers who were “chunky,” “bigger,” “broad,” “big-boned,” “heavier,” and “fat.” Even a lifestyle and fashion magazine devoted to plus-size women, Big Beautiful Woman, didn’t embrace the term until after its 1979 launch. By the 1980s the word choices had become a tad more complimentary: “round” and “full-figured” began cropping up, along with “curvy all over,” particularly a favorite in annual June swimsuit roundups.

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Elizabeth Nord, one of the brains behind Plus Size Models Unite, also runs Secrets of Moms Who Dare to Tell All. The blog touches on everything from recipes to handling overcommitment to navigating motherhood in the midst of mean girls. Here she is with tips for you on what to do on those days when you feel utterly blah. Enjoy! (This post originally appeared on Secrets of Moms, but as this child-free blogger can attest, toddlers aren't the only things that can make you feel frazzled...)

Elizabeth, post-frazzle, all fabulous.

I know firsthand what it feels like to transition from feeling frazzled and frumpy to feisty and fabulous! After having our kids, there have been many times when I have felt exhausted, let myself go, or lost my fire. Here are some ways I’ve gone from frazzled and frumpy to feeling feisty, strong, sexy, and fabulous!

• Set boundaries and reclaim yourself. We are busy women trying to balance kids, marriage, friends, careers, domesticity, and personal time. Do not underestimate the power of “you” time. Some of us may feel guilty taking time out for ourselves (I do), but work through it or you will end up burned out and resentful. If you take time for yourself, you will feel refreshed, be a happier mom and wife, and better able to take on the world.

• Throw your shoulders back, pick up your chin, and open up your posture. Yes, do it right now! How does that feel? It feels good! I immediately feel more confident and energetic whenever I extend my arms. If I’m sitting down somewhere and notice that I’m not feeling “on,” I just open up my posture by setting one of my arms on the chair next to me. I swear it works wonders every time!

• Embrace your body right now! I have been really open on both my web sites about the fact that I’m not very well endowed, and I’ve decided–who cares!?! Feeling successful and sexy is not about a cup or dress size; it’s about being confident with who you are right now. I’ve got a lot more going on than my chest size, so I’ve decided to focus on what I do have. That change of attitude has been positively life altering for me!

• Ditch the baggy sweats and frumpy clothes. Get rid of outdated deformed bras and old panties too. I’m not saying you need to wear a low-cut blouse and super short tight skirt to feel sexy. No—I’m saying find something comfortable and classy that accentuates what you love about your body. Have fun with it!

Several years ago, a clothing boutique owner explained to me and showed me what styles would work for my body type. His advice was invaluable. It made me think about my clothing choices and the lines of my silhouette very differently. One of my friends met with a personal stylist at Nordstrom’s and it was an amazing experience for her that had a profound impact on the way she feels about her body. She had not embraced her curves until she learned how to use clothing to flatter her figure. Regardless of what your body type is, you can find the perfect clothing for you!

• Change it up! Find a different route to work, your kids’ school, or when you are running or walking. Try a completely new mani/pedi color or design that you would not normally wear. It’s fun to step away from the usual. Visit a new stylist to get different hairstyle or color ideas. It’s interesting to hear a new stylists ideas, whether it’s dramatic or subtle. I had my eye brows professionally shaped several years ago, and it was an amazing experience. I know it sounds basic, but I didn’t know how to make the most of my features and she did! It made such a difference, and I felt beautiful! If in doubt, go to an expert.

• Eat well. I love food—LOVE it! I’ll eat almost anything. Even though I eat whatever I want, I don’t go crazy because I know I’ll feel like crap if I eat a bunch of chips, burgers, fries, and Hostess Donuts in excess. It zaps my energy and I feel sluggish. I love the way I feel after eating a healthy diverse meal. I’m not saying don’t eat what you want, I’m just saying—moderation is key!

• Go exercise. It could be a walk, run, aerobics, yoga, swimming, dancing, kick boxing, or whatever—get your body moving and get your blood pumping. It’s good for your mind, body, and soul! I always eat better when I am physically active, and I feel way sexier, stronger, and energetic too!

• Laugh often! When I ‘m feeling funky, I know I need to change my perspective and attitude by looking at things from a different angle. Sometimes I call one of my friends, Angela, and say whatever I’m thinking without censor, which usually means me talking crazy talk. Then she joins in with the crazy talk, and we always end up laughing hysterically. It’s hilarious! That always helps to diffuse any negativity I’m feeling. Boxing via the Wii is fun and makes me giggle too, and I burn off the funky energy while I’m playing!

• Be brave! Let your authentic unique personality shine and embrace who you are truly meant to be. Believe in yourself. Take care of yourself. Be fearless. Take charge. Set goals and go after your dreams. With the right mindset, you can succeed, feel great, and accomplish anything!

Please share your ideas. How do you get yourself out of a funk and back on track?

Thoughts on a Word: Graceful

Much like the practice of yoga itself, the blog Anytime Yoga is focused yet expansive, grounded yet flowing. Whether Tori is writing on not using food choices as a moral compass, victim-blaming, the folly of schoolteacher-as-hero, or, of course, yoga, she's sure to do it in an astute, nuanced fashion. I was delighted when she agreed to guest post here, doubly so when she proposed writing on a word that, especially given its classic meaning, we give far too narrow a treatment. Here, her thoughts on graceful:

I'm sitting with my fingertips on my shoulders, arms out like chicken wings, legs tucked neatly to one side. My pink tights and ballet shoes collect dirt from the tile floor. The point of the exercise is to rise from this position to standing without touching our hands down. I'm seven years old and receiving formal, explicit instruction in what it means to be graceful.

The first thing I notice is how it throws off my balance, requiring more strength from my legs and stability from my belly. I didn't expect it to be so much work. Second, I observe that—our attempts at elegance notwithstanding—we look like a bunch of gangly baby giraffes trying to learn the chicken dance. I wonder if everyone puts this much effort in trying to appear graceful.

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The word graceful first appeared in the English language in the mid-15th century. Initially, it simply meant "pleasing" but within a few decades had already shifted to "showing elegance, beauty, and smoothness of form or movement." Its origin is the word grace, which worked its way from the 12th century Anglo-French meaning "divine mercy, favor, virtue" and from the Latin gratia ("favor, charm") and gratus ("pleasing, grateful"). So while some part of grace and graceful were always about being pleasing, the direct association with beauty is something that evolved along the way—more slowly for grace, rather quickly for graceful.

With its current ties to beauty, my conceptualization of graceful includes the baggage packed in with narrow beauty standards. Graceful is long, lean, poised, balanced, flexible. Graceful is smooth arcs and flowing fabrics, curving but not too curvy. When graceful tries new forms or movements with her body, that body falls into place effortlessly, no work required. Graceful is every image I've ever seen in Yoga Journal, online or in print.

For a long time, I wanted to be that depiction of graceful, without recognizing that my desire was at best unrealistic and at worst potentially injurious.

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This is not my pose, I think to myself as my teacher instructs us up into king dancer. It's a standing balance combined with a backbend, and—for it to be physically therapeutic for me—I've got to have just one or the other. In time, I'll learn to play with it as a mental exercise, but I'm not there yet. Right now, all I can call to mind is that in pictures—and as my instructor demonstrates—it's such a refined, graceful pose. I don't think of all the times yogis must fall here, because the times that are publicly recorded are those when they don't.

I wait for the teacher to offer the wall as a prop. Good instructors know about modifications, right? They understand what it's like to be a nervous student who also happens to be elegance challenged?

I want that wall. I want to be told—implicitly if not outright—that it's okay not to be perfectly poised and solid in my movements, that it's okay to value function over beauty of form. She doesn't offer, and no other students in the class turn toward the wall, either. Surely, confidently, every single person enters king dancer unsupported in the center of the room.

So I try it too. I'm uncomfortable, but this is the standard for virtue and acceptance, at least as I perceive it. Surprisingly, I do not have too much of a problem with the balance part, at least compared to what I was expecting. I weeble and wobble but don't fall down. However, in my struggle to stay upright—to keep whatever tenuous grasp on grace that I can still claim—I forget to support my back extension with my abs. When I weeble too far away from my balance point, it's only the muscles of my low back—instead of including my front and oblique abdominals—that pull me back in line. And there's nothing to keep my lumbar vertebrae from grating against one another.

I am graceful; I am beautiful; I hurt for weeks.

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Perhaps, yes, there is something perversely appealing in learning such a fitting life lesson from such a flowing, arcing pose. But perhaps somewhere over the years I've become cognizant of performing grace, just as one might perform gender or perform beauty. That is, of actively working and rehearsing toward a graceful appearance—and being continually aware that there are people (not all people everywhere, but there are people) who are aware that graceful is a standard and who are judging me—maliciously or not, consciously or not—against it.

My mind plays with what might happen if the primary meaning of graceful were still "pleasing." I can't picture what it would mean everywhere, but I think in part, it's why I've taken a small retreat from practicing asana in public, though my current yoga studio is much more accommodating than the one in this anecdote. But no matter how many times I take a less elegant variation, fall out of a balance pose, or even get to standing by touching my hands down to the ground—it's pleasing and graceful and beautiful and freeing to move like I'm the only one watching.

Thoughts on a Word: Mirror

Mirror comes comes Old French mireor (“reflecting glass”), which sprang from earlier French miradoir (exact translation lost) mirer (“look at”) and Latin mirare, miror, and mirari (“to wonder at, admire”). Certainly mirer is the most direct ancestor here; it also gave birth to admire. But let's take it a step further and look at miror, which takes the gentlemanly mirer and proclaims him anemic. Mirer may admire, but miror? To astonish, to marvel at, to be amazed.

For comparison, window springs from the Old Norse for “wind eye”; bowl comes from proto-Germanic “a round vessel”; we get desk from medieval Latin’s version of “table to write on”; table itself is from Latin’s tabula, a board or plank; dresser is from...you get the picture. Terms for other common furnishings and items stem from utility or purpose. So either mirror is the exception because of its extraordinary powers—or it’s in the same boat as the prosaic desk, and those old French folk knew that we can’t help but be astonished and amazed by our own reflection.

Actually, those old French folk could have just taken the perfectly good Latin word that already existed for mirror: speculum. (Imagine the comedic potential had that happened.) The Italians did just that (specchio), as did the Spanish, Portuguese, and even the Germans (espejo, espelho, and Spiegel, respectively). Speculum also has no-nonsense, utilitarian credentials, springing from specere, or “to look at,” with none of this “astonishment” business coming into play. So why didn’t the French just go with speculum?

Some posit that the Egyptians beat the Romans to France, bringing along mirrors—and their word for them, roughly mau-her—before speculum-waving Romans had a chance to introduce mirrors to the country that would later become known for manufacturing them. That’s one possibility, certainly.

But I prefer to think that France was being a tad more intentional than that. It’s a country that mothered such mirror minds as King Louie XIV and Marie Antoinette (not to mention Jacques Lacan with his mirror stage, and Simone de Beauvoir with her keen eye toward us self-admiring women); its citizens, to the American mind, embody some concepts we associate with mirror-gazing. We American lay-deez adore our French women, not only because we see them as beautiful—plenty of countries are famed for their beautiful women—but because they appear to both blatantly spend time, energy, and money on their appearance, and also appear utterly nonchalant, as though their reputed grace is theirs by birthright. But don’t take the French study of mirrors on my word alone:

It stands to reason that the French, more than other countries, might have understood that the mirror is not solely for looking. Whether admiration and wonderment is an elevated form of looking at ourselves, or a trap that keeps us eternally monitoring our actions even in private moments, to proclaim the mirror to be only a tool for looking—a speculum—would be a tad disingenuous.

Perhaps I haven’t been too far off in referring to the mirror as a divination tool. Historically, alternate uses of mirror include “a crystal used in magic”; indeed, there’s an entire practice of divination via mirrors, catoptromancy (and if anyone knows a practicing catoptromantic, let me know, stat). And, of course, there’s always the verb form of mirror: to mimic, to imitate. We didn’t actually use it to mean to reflect until the 19th century, when Keats put it to use in “Lamia”: He answer’d, bending to her open eyes / Where he was mirror’d small in paradise. In other words, the first time we used mirror to mean reflect, there was not an object, but a human’s eyes, doing the reflecting.

Which, truly, makes sense—especially for those of us who have lopped off those “eyes” by averting our gaze from the mirror. But it also might make sense etymologically: One middle form of mirror is old French miradoir, which, as I mentioned earlier, has been lost. Nobody knows exactly what miradoir means. But in this scholarly debate about the full origin of mirror, a linguist broke down the word into verb forms, “Latin agentive suffixes,” etc., and determined that there’s a good chance that miradoir means not just a thing you look at, but a thing that looks back at you.

Thoughts on a Word: Vainglorious

Sarah Frye Valencius creates clothes that serve as a uniform for the creative mind: “I want to design unfussy, non-body-conscious clothing for women who care about fashion but can’t afford to be distracted by it all day,” she says. Minimizing fuss and maximizing concentration, her work incorporates features like playful pocket and closures, always with an eye toward clean, elegant lines. (You can follow one strain of her style inspiration at French Spy Movie.) Given that one of the goals of my mirror fast is increasing opportunities for reaching a flow state, is it any wonder I’m eager for her work to hit New York? Her ready-to-wear line will debut this fall—but it’s the name of her just-launched custom clothing website, Vainglorious, that prompted me to ask her to do a guest word post.

It’s rare you happen upon the word vainglorious anymore. A tantalizing word, even if its meaning isn’t readily apparent.  There is something in all those vowels, the exotic v, the sexy s, the righteous glory tucked in the middle, that elicits an emotional understanding. The first time I read the word vainglorious  I was compelled to say it aloud. I wanted to feel all those shapes in my mouth—archaic, ornamental, indulgent.

Vainglory is derived from the medieval Latin words vāna (empty) and glōria (boasting).The entry for vainglory in my dusty, trusty, 1936 Webster’s Unabridged reads as follows:

noun. glory, pride or boastfulness that is vain; vanity that is excited by one’s own performances; empty pride; undue elation of mind

Originally, vainglory was part of the Eight Deadly Sins (which were, by the way, gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride) but Pope Gregory the Great found the list a bit redundant, and in the 6th century vainglory got folded into pride. This same pope also shook up the sins’ traditional order of severity, naming the new pride-combo-sin as offense numero uno, for being the greatest crime against love.

So if vainglory is such a dangerous thing, what happened to it? Why isn’t vainglory a word hissed in girls’ locker rooms, or thrown at crowing politicians? It’s as though getting bumped off The Deadlies was the equivalent of becoming a Hollywood has-been, and vainglory went the way of avarice and acedia—so last century.

But that little Latin vāna soldiered on, becoming vain and finding favor with English speakers via Old French.  It maintained its meaning of “empty” until the late 13th century, when it started also being used to describe “conceit”. Did the ostentatious finery of the Baroque period prompt this expansion of vain’s applicability? I wouldn’t be surprised.

The use of vain to describe self-obsession has had impressive staying power over the past 700 years, and it maintains the stigma of sin, even if unofficially. Vain characters rarely go unpunished in western tradition. It’s the driving motivation behind many a storybook villain, most blatantly the Wicked Queen in Snow White.  It was also Madame Bovery’s vanity that had her questing for the fine clothing and jewelry which would be her downfall. My favorite childhood film, Death Becomes Her, features Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn’s comic efforts to stay young and beautiful that leave them literately shattered by movie’s end.

Perhaps the most memorable appearance of vanity in the past fifty years is Carly Simon’s infectious tune “You’re So Vain”, a '70s slander song whose subject's identity has been much speculated on over the years. Simon’s refusal to name names may speak to the staying power of vanity as a slur. It also made it a hit. Pop music has been singing about “you” since its inception, a neat trick that offers the listener a choice of identifying as the singer or the song’s subject. When the Beatles howl “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” you could just as easily imagine singing the lines to your crush, as you could John Lennon singing directly to you, wanting to hold your hand. That’s part of the appeal and discomfort of “You’re So Vain”—if you don’t have a narcissistic someone in mind as you sing along with the radio, it starts to feel like she might be singing about you. An ingenious lyrical maneuver on Simon’s part—she bends the accusation back on itself, trapping you with the line: You probably think this song is about you, don’t you? (Don’t you?)

Maybe Pope Gregory was onto something when he said vainglory and pride were the deadliest of sins. A vain woman is easily more scorned than a lusty Lothario, an angry bus driver, or a slothy college student. It just rubs us the wrong way. When we tease apart those twin sins of pride and vanity, pride is obviously the more forgivable (the proud papa, proud employee, or proud fiancé). The vain are rarely humored like the proud are.

I’d go as far to say that we have a fear of vanity. What else could send our words stumbling when we receive a compliment on our appearance after we put so much effort into it? One of the first feminine acts we teach our girls is how to demure...right after we’ve instructed them on the value of being beautiful. Why are we guarding ourselves so closely against vanity accusations? I think there’s guilt that lies deep in our puritanical bones, for all the hours we spend primping and all the dollars we lay down at the cosmetics counter. We feel guilt for wanting to be beautiful, trying to be beautiful, and the audacity for thinking our efforts might work.

The mind is a clever thing and has no trouble justifying our labors of beauty as “fixing imperfections” rather than conceiving of them as acts of vanity. The latter is a sin but the former is expected of us. It’s perfect pro-American-consumer-Calvinistic behavior—fed by advertisers, reinforced by magazines, handed down from mother to daughter, and passed around like a gossipy note from girl to girl. The scorn of vanity and the contempt of ugliness form a double-edged sword that cuts us however it falls. 

All Is Vanity, C. Allan Gilbert, 1892

It’s fascinating that we live in a culture that expects us to worship the mirror, but not (god forbid) what it reflects. We line up like doomed queens and await the mirror’s judgement. But we aren’t asking “Who’s the fairest?” We are asking “What’s wrong with me?”  And the mirror answers so readily: dark circles, fine lines, large pores, furry brows, zits, yellow teeth, thin lashes, sagging jowls. We know what to look for and we know the correcting products available.  It’s not considered vanity to work on these crimes against beauty; self-hate is your saving grace. But if you dare admire what you see, you are surely damned as Dorian Grey. The only vanity allowed is the table and mirror you sit at. 

Walk the walk, don’t talk the talk. Put on heels, swing your hips, and pucker those lips. Celebrities, the current standard of beauty, are well trained in this dance. When stopped on the red carpet they know exactly how to slide out of questions about their beauty. Just once I want Angelina Jolie to say: “Yeah, I am beautiful and it’s fucking awesome.” And then I want Brad Pitt to say: “Damn straight.” Wouldn’t that be refreshing? I think that’s why I find characters like Amanda from Ugly Betty or Santana from Glee so delicious. I can’t get enough of them. It’s not just their vanity I love, it’s their vainglory.

Of course vainglory extends beyond proclaiming one’s hotness. Its boasting and folly applies to all types of inflated ego and self-promotion or, really, any pursuit of grandeur. Considering we are neck deep in the Internet Age—masters of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblrs, blogs, and experts in self-branding—I think we are ripe for a return of vainglorious to our lexicon.  I also think it’s time we stop beating ourselves up in front of the mirror. If you are going to spend so much time and money on beauty, you might as well take a little pride in it.

And so we are at the beginning again. I saw that beautiful word, vainglorious, boastfully bursting off the page. And I thought: Yes. Perfect. Glorious. This will be the name of my fashion endeavors. Even though my dresses were conceived in the most humble manner, my effort and doubts puncturing the fabric with every stitch, I am proud of the finished product. I’m getting better with each thing I make and I am going for it—going for the glory. And when a woman puts on one of my designs, I hope she is too.

Thoughts on a Word: Pretty

When I first met Mary Duffy, our conversations quickly turned to stuff that could keep me going for hours: What does it mean to be beautiful, or to witness beauty? What does it mean to be a "pretty girl"? Is there such a thing as objective beauty, or does the idea of such a thing remove the essence that makes something beautiful? Many of the ideas from those conversations have found their way onto this blog—and now you get to hear from her, in today's guest post. Mary Duffy lives, bikes, and writes in Philadelphia, and you can follow her on Twitter @maryfduffy.

The first time I think hard about the word pretty, is a few years ago, when my all-girl old-time band, Gerle Haggard, is working on an Elliott Smith song I picked for us to cover. Something about Smith's song, “Twilight,” has a hint of the southern old-time lyrics I love, and I know it's going to sound great. As we work out the arrangement I sing the first chorus: “She's a pretty thing, she knows everything, but I'm already somebody's baby.” It's that very lyric, “she's a pretty thing,” that has been hinting at the plainspokenness I think translates “Twilight” from indie folk to the old-time genre. “Pretty” in song lyrics may be a feature of my thinking on the subject, whether it's Roy Orbison singing “Pretty Woman” or Sondheim's “Pretty Women” in Sweeney Todd.

What is pretty? Pretty is superficial. Pretty is a judgment we can make in one second. “Yeah, she's pretty” is the tightfisted compliment women dole out when they envy somebody's appearance but can't admit it. Women? Me. It's the compliment I will grudgingly give out when someone asks me what I think of an attractive woman we know. Pretty is not a compliment, it's a concession: She is pretty. 

Pretty was something I envied. I envied women I thought to be easily, instantly attractive, women whose features require no hard work. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but Pretty is easy on the eyes. And despite the titles of the songs, I think of the word pretty, and I hear “girl,” like those psychiatric association tests. “Pretty?” “Girl.” Pretty girls were pretty, and my definition has a hard time escaping the tautology. Pretty: a state of being I could never attain, not being pretty myself. Pretty girls had a kind of surface of perfection that made them impervious to the slings and arrows of adolescence, was how it seemed. Pretty is a word for girls, rather than women.

Who is pretty? And what was a pretty girl in my girlhood? I have in mind an amalgam of many girls in middle and high school. I have an amalgam in mind because I realize the Pretty Girl looked like all the other pretty girls, precisely because she was pretty. 

 

She had lank, honey-blond hair. She wore makeup, and silver spoon rings, preppy clothes. She didn't have those little red dry-skin pimples on her legs, her legs which were not pale, either, but all a very nice even tan. I could never understand how generations of people with ostensibly Northern European ancestry—with last names like Murphy, Bauer, Andersen—managed to breed this crop of girls who could tan so well. I eventually figured out what a tanning bed and bronzer was. Likewise, I couldn't understand why they all had this very odd sort of honey-blond brownish hair, until I figured out that not only women who wanted to cover up gray bought hair dye. 

 

Somewhere in that time period a woman complimented my complexion, and I haven't forgotten it to this day. Which means that prettiness occupied a very big place in my young mind, at least for a while, at least until my slightly older but still young self got preoccupied with whether I was “hot,” or “sexy.” But where does that leave me with pretty, now that I'm not really a girl, and have maybe finally forgiven all the pretty ones for being “pretty.”

Just a couple of weeks after we met, a friend played a different Elliott Smith song for me, “Pretty (Ugly Before).” It's a love song, of course, and in sharing our musical tastes with each other, he played this one for me. The chorus of it goes, “I feel pretty, pretty enough for you / I felt so ugly before, I didn't know what to do.” Shakespeare it's not, but it's as true as pop songs get. Until I heard that, pretty was the purview of some very ordinary teenage queen bees whose names I barely remember today. For Smith, pretty and ugly could be feelings, not congenital conditions. I felt ugly before, too. And how can I forget West Side Story? Sondheim again: I Feel Pretty.

Pretty is a pedestrian kind of beauty, one I can't understand having ever wanted to attain, or couldn't, until I looked up the definition. Flowers are pretty, girls are pretty, and sometimes we speak of something being a pretty story, a pretty picture. Wrapping this piece up, I finally look at what the dictionary says about pretty, and it makes me wished I had looked up the definition back when I wanted the boys to think I was pretty: (adj) Attractive in a delicate way without being truly beautiful or handsome (n) An attractive thing, typically a pleasing but unnecessary accessory. It's easy to be pretty and it's easy to like pretty things, and it's natural to want to be liked by everyone, easily. But I wish someone had reminded me that it also meant “without being truly beautiful or handsome.”

Beauty Blogosphere 5.16.11

The Beheld, like all blogs hosted on Blogger, has been experiencing technical issues—recent posts have disappeared; I'm still hoping/waiting to get them back. In the meantime, please enjoy my usual Friday roundup on this Monday.

And let's kick things off by agreeing to refer to Crystal Renn as a model, not a plus-size model, shall we? Daily News style writer Lindsay Goldwert lays out the history in this piece chronicling Renn's explosive rise as a "plus-size" model: "It's undeniable. The smaller she gets, the more famous she gets. But she can't get too bony—or else she'll lose her former plus-size allure, which made her a star in the first place. So why not put the whole plus-size argument to rest?" If we're ever going to have true body diversity we need to stop thinking women come in two sizes, plus or "straight," as it's called in the modeling world. Hell, even pantyhose comes in three sizes!

What else is going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

From Head...

Locks of lit-love: Snippets of hair from esteemed writers, via The Hairpin, which is absolutely correct when they note that Walt Whitman could've used a deep conditioner.

The day Selma Hayek became a plush toy: "Better still, Hayek circled the table so that each editor could touch her skin." WOW am I glad I'm not a celebrity hawking my own makeup line. (Though all of you are welcome to touch my hair if you wish.)

No more dirty hair: Alexandra Spunt of No More Dirty Looks, one of my shampoo-free compatriots, washed her hair. Egads! Amusing writeup here. 

To Toe...

Cyber pedicure: Now you (well, your six-year-old niece) can put on a pretend pedicure. Okay, I admit I don't get the point of ANY video games, unless it's Tetris on your cell phone for the occasional subway diversion, ahem. But what is the reward of a pedicure that lives in the cloud, not your feet? I mean, I get that girls are supposedly more into elliptical games like The Sims instead of the shoot-kill-race games, but this is just odd.

...And Everything in Between

Stop saying skinnyfat: I've always hated this term but could never quite identify why. Luckily, I didn't have to, because Ragan Chastain did it for us all!

Food as rebellion: Tori at Anytime Yoga puts a fine point on something I've experienced: Knowing that there's a certain cultural power in eating "bad foods" and claiming that power because WE ARE BODY-LOVING FEMINISTS DAMMIT, but internalizing shame about it regardless.

On beauty and acceptance: Interesting post at The Blog of Disquiet on the uses of beauty and the ways we choose to include or exclude the world by the choices we make surrounding beauty and appearance.

"I remember sexy": Brittany Julious at This Recording on sexiness and bodily agency--it's also a nice complement to all the "slut" talk happening around Slutwalk. 

On makeup as a green light: This writer is upset because a man smiled at her when she looked "like crap," and though unless the piece is satire (please?) it's basically a screed of misanthropy, I'm interested in some of her reasoning. "A woman might spend hours, nay, days during any given week with straightening irons, makeup.... For women such as myself, this process is how we prepare, how we ready ourselves to be acknowledged." A slightly maddening take on the way we believe we can control our image--and the dissonance that happens when we find we can't.

More maddening material from excellent sources: This SNL clip on "Tina Fey honoring women writers" was cut from the last time she hosted--and thankfully. It's supposed to be a comment on prizing women's looks about their talents--looking at great female writers and giving crass voiceovr commentary on their looks--but it just comes off as mean. It's "funny" to refer to Liz Lemon as unattractive, because Tina Fey is obviously pretty. The joke falls flat when you're making jokes about talented female writers like Eudora Welty...who look like Eudora Welty.

Beauty inflation: A professor of "Economics of Sex and Love" argues that because we can select the best pics of ourselves to put on online dating sites, that this creates "beauty inflation" in which we price ourselves out of the dating market. Besides the sort of gross leanings here, I call invalid on this theory because most people I know who do online dating put up representatively pretty pictures of themselves, not necessarily the "best" pictures, for fear of letting someone down. No word on whether overuse of "[insert clever headline here]" leads to irony inflation.

The house that beauty built: Johnson & Johnson (Neutrogena, Clean & Clear) heiress buys one of the most expensive townhouses in Manhattan. Its previous owner? Beauty.com founder Roger Barnett.

30 for 30: Fashion blogger Megan at Another Zoe Day's "30 Days to 30" is chronicling the 30 days leading up to her 30th birthday on May 30. Lots of us have turned 30—but she's doing it only weeks after uprooting her cozy expat life in Berlin (with a job, boyfriend, apartment, and routine) and moving to Brooklyn (apartment-less, job-less, boyfriend-less, and craving a greater sense of center as she embarks upon this next decade). It's a neat spin on the "Turn Your Life Around in 30 Days!" type of stories you see in the ladymags, and I'm looking forward to reading more.

Drugstore markup: Drugstores need to mark up their goods; that's how they turn a profit, and I'd rather have a markup on lipstick than on cold medicine. But it also seems like they're literally banking on their ladycustomers being willing to pay whatever they price their goods at, doesn't it?

Splitting hairs: Luckily, the U.S. Justice Department intervenes from time to time to make sure we're not paying more than is strictly necessary, as happened when Unilever (Dove, Suave, Tigi, Pond's, etc.) acquired Alberto VO5. Without antitrust law coming into play, Unilever would have had undue control over bargain shampoo, meaning they could have made them not quite as bargain. Thanks, U.S. Attorney General!

Latina cosmetics leader dies: Mirta de Perales, one of the first Hispanic women to find success in the U.S. cosmetics market, died last week at age 88. Exiled in 1962 from Cuba, where she was wealthy and well-known as a salon owner, with $5 in her purse when she was afraid her business would be seized from her (which is exactly what happened), she started from scratch in Miami as a beautician, eventually becoming a major player in the Puerto Rican and U.S. Latina beauty market.

Thoughts on a Word: Sexy

"What is a sexy woman? Very simple. She is a woman who enjoys sex," wrote a woman whose most famous product many mistakenly blame for our occasionally uneasy relationship with sexy—the godmother of Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown. I'm with her, though: I like sexy. Sexy can be innocent; sexy can be democratic; sexy can be deliberate or unknowing or shared or solo. Sexy has little to do with appearance. It has to do with sex, which most of us can do, and all of us can think about. If I'm feeling terrifically unsexy, I can dance around to The Troggs in my living room wearing a BUtterfield 8-style slip for a 10-minute cure. When I don't feel beautiful, however, the remedy is more elusive.

We started using sexy to merely mean "engrossed in sex" in 1905, a mere four years after the official end of the Victorian era. It inched closer to meaning erotic with its broadening use: Feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman used the term when discussing the "perverse dress practices" of Ourland, the gender-dystopia she created in 1915, placing her among the first to apply the word to how we style ourselves.

With this early semi-endorsement from a feminist, then, it's no surprise that from its inception, sexy has been used unisexily, describing men as well as women. Etymologists point to Rudolph Valentino as the first person to be described as sexy, in 1923. Women still took the lead, naturally—but looking at literary sexys from the first half of the century, sexy people were still relatively rare. References to sexy things abound during this era: questions (Vanity Fair, 1930), books (The Nation, 1908), eau de toilette (Consumer Reports, 1940), cartoons (Finance, 1947), plays (H.L. Mencken on Noel Coward, 1928), voices (Billboard, 1943), dreams (Psychoanalytic Review, 1919), films (New Outlook, 1924, and songs (The Unitarian Register, 1938).

For more pictures of the world's first sexy person,
check out this beautiful photo book, curated by Donna Hill.

Still, sexy people popped up now and again, notably in the works of authors Myron Brinig (1941, describing a man) and Meyer Levin (1933, describing a woman). Even Gertrude Stein was described as sexy in The New Yorker in 1936—but these three are some of the only literary instances I found of sexy being used to describe individual people, not situations or things; the common thread here is that all are Jewish Americans. Which makes sense: Generally speaking, sex itself is treated more liberally in Jewish culture than in Christianity. After all, rabbis may marry, priests cannot; Talmudic literature endorses marriage while frowning upon celibacy, whereas until relatively recently, Christian marriage was viewed as a sort of second-best option to celibacy ("Renounce marriage and imitate the angels" wrote John of Damascus—or, hey, imitate Jesus, the original bachelor). It only makes sense, then, that the application of sexy to people might have originally gained traction from Jewish culture.

Sexy may have been the verbal word on the street, though, because critic Gilbert Seldes sure came down hard upon sexy in 1950's "The Great Audience," his takedown of the Hollywood Production Code. "The word commonly used in describing movies and movie actresses is sexy; the word commonly used to describe living people of strong sexual enterprise is passionate. Since the movies are forbidden to display sensuality, sexy is a proper adjective; it implies an as-if state, not an actual one," he writes. "Sexy refers to the superficial and the immature aspects of the relations between men and women, to the apparatus of seduction and not to the pains or pleasures if seduction succeeds; to provocation, not to satisfaction." It's a fair point—more chat, less kiss!—but from a contemporary view this is amusing, given that the Code yielded material we now reference as incredibly passionate, if veiled. (Sleeper car in North by Northwest, anyone?)

"Only one bed...that's a good omen, don't you think?"

It's around here, then, that sexy might have begun to lose its plot—it hasn't unraveled completely, but I'd argue it may be inching toward misappropriation. Like many a word with potential for a generous application, sexy often takes on a narrowed meaning. (You will not be shocked to learn that a Google image search for sexy brings up a bevy of big-breasted white women in bikinis.) So Allyson's take on sexy at the excellent style blog Decoding Dress rings uncomfortably true. She examines sexy through the lens of Plato's Forms: What the essence of sexy is versus what our senses tell us are reasonable approximations of sexy. By seizing the essence of sexy—which is, after all, sex—instead of its avatars, one is able to have agency over sexiness, which explains the realization Allyson comes to about her presence as a woman who felt sexy in a particular outfit: "[The connection between feeling aroused and having an appearance that arouses another] is about power. The man who whistled at me, my spouse, and any other observer who experienced arousal were the objects of that power. My own experience of feeling sexy was that of being power's subject, the wielder of power [emphasis mine]. That power connects our experiences and is, in fact, the substance of them; without the power to arouse, sexy isn't happening." I've argued here before that the power of pretty is a false power, but Allyson successfully illustrates here how appearance can subvert the traditional subject/object relationship. In other words: A miniskirt, worn with the right intention, can be powerful.

Which brings us to the second half of the 20th century, and Helen Gurley Brown. The chapter "How to Be Sexy" in Sex and the Single Girl is part concrete advice ("Being able to sit very still is sexy") and part democracy of the sort I champion (see introduction). Her take on sexy is notable because Cosmopolitan was instrumental in making sexiness seem both normal and compulsory for women. (I once went to hear Cosmopolitan editor Kate White speak about coverlines, during which she addressed two of my personal favorites: "Sexy Sex" and "Erotic Sex.)

Cosmo's in/famous sex tips generated alongside tips on being sexy, which led to the now-ubiquitous sexy tips in the unlikeliest of places. We now know how to be sexy doing yoga, getting cancer, designing websites, becoming a better Christian (why let Gertrude Stein have all the fun?), motorcycling, visiting New York, upping your FICO score, knitting, being a dog, and being the daughter to a former presidential candidate.

Of course, Dirty Sexy Politics has little to do with sex (I hope/assume; I haven't read it), which begs the question of our contemporary application of sexy to things that have nothing to do with sex. Once sexy became the norm, its scope expanded indiscriminately: A 1970 issue of the journal Nuclear Industry "introduces tough, non-sexy questions about nuclear power," and everything pretty much went out the window from there. Sexy began to mean anything generally appealing; Webster's now recognizes it as such.

I have no problem with this, except: The more we continue to divorce sexy from sex, the further we stray from its essence—or, as Plato-via-Allyson writes, its Form. Instead of broadening sexy when we apply it to McCaindom or nuclear power, we narrow its application to people. Just as Paris Hilton's rendering of hot has made me turn away from the word and see it as the province of the tanned and hairless when it needn't be (as commenter Nine recently wrote on my "hot" entry, "I find the word pretty egalitarian in terms of not being tied to mainstream beauty standards"), the more we make sexy meaningless, the more we allow it to become seized by those who lay the loudest, splashiest claim to it. When Victoria's Secret hinges a campaign on issuing an annual list of "What Is Sexy," we push sexy further away from its essence and more toward its signals. Then, suddenly, instead of anyone being able to be sexy, we have to qualify certain people as "ugly sexy" (or "Sexy Ugly," if you're Lady Gaga), not plain old sexy. People like Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Sandra Bernhard, Steve Buscemi, all of whom made Nerve's list of the uglysexiest people around: These are some downright sexy people, folks, even if they're not what we think of as pretty (though in my estimation they're hardly ugly). Why do we need the nasty little qualifier of ugly?

Don't get me wrong—I'm glad that we have a term for people whose magnetism and inner heat, not their perfectly crafted features, is what draws us to them. It's just that we had a perfectly good word already.

Thoughts on a Word: Foxy

Foxy is assertive, even aggressive, maybe ready to run her claws down your back. Foxy is canine, vulpine; foxy is active, not passive. You can't quite trust a foxy lady; she's cunning, sly, a trickster, and she might just outfox you. Silver foxes aside, chances are that if you are foxy, you are a woman. More specifically, you are—ooh! a foxy lady.

Women are usually likened to cats, not dogs; from pussycats to cougars, the idea is that coy feline elusion is in keeping with the supposed essence of woman. Still, we choose a member of the Canidae family—the fox—to describe women. We like woman-as-fox so much that we assign both sexes of the Vulpes genus to her: She is both fox and vixen. Both connote a sexy trickster, but the vixen is less playful than her male counterpart, more apt to bite than to merely wink. Foxy is the only way we can refer to a woman as a dog and not be out to wound her.

We started using foxy just before the turn of the 20th century; its first recorded use is in 1895 as African American slang, though it jumped the color line in the early 1900s. It's notable that it took Americans to describe women as foxes: For centuries, cultures around the world had hinged their myths on quick-witted, cunning foxes, and much early American culture sprang from people who then hunted foxes just for kicks. But once we started using foxy, we didn't look back. It became widespread in the 1940s—curiously enough, at a time when women were wearing foxes around their shoulders—but is most associated with the 1970s. Yet it lingered beyond that: A study of top slang terms at the University of North Carolina from 1972 to 1993 reveals foxy as one of the top 40 slang words used. Its enduring appeal may be a testament to Pam Grier's blaxsploitation template Foxy Brown (1974)—or, more likely, to that perennial college-dorm favorite, Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady."

From the first psychedelic twinge of that off-kilter note, we know that Hendrix, not the foxy lady, is the predator. Its plodding, mid-tempo guitar riff tells us he's not exactly in a hurry to come get her, even as the lyrics indicate that she is soon to be possessed. She may be a wild animal—but he knows she's just a cute little heartbreaker, a sweet little lovemaker. In the end, the foxy lady isn't a fox at all, or if she is, her cunning wit is no match for this bigger, badder wolf. He's coming to get her—and what's more, when we listen to the creeping, aggressive discord that creates the song's magic, we're rooting for him to win. After all, he won't do her no harm, right? Carmen Borrero, a girlfriend who required stitches after Hendrix hit her with a bottle, and Kathy Etchingham, who endured a beating from Hendrix with the handset of a public telephone, might disagree.

We like foxy because of its mix of sly power and potential to be captured, if only you're quick enough. Foxy implies a certain amount of action, even aggression, from the person labeled as such. Foxy cannot be icy blonde or a next-door innocent; foxy knows there's a hint of musk about her. At the same time, it's no accident that we call women foxy and not wolfy—a fox might even bite you, but she won't do that much damage. Foxy gives us a knowing, smoldering trickster, not a domineering destroyer. And we return the favor to foxes: High-class Brits of yore aside, we didn't really shoot foxes. We preferred to trap them.

Foxy is a bit quaint now; even Megan Fox yields a surprisingly anemic number of puns in the press, while Michael J. Fox adopted a false middle initial in 1980 in part because of the inevitable headlines his real name, Michael Andrew Fox, could invite. We have Foxy Brown, of course, but even her handle is a callback to the 1974 film. Foxy gives us a retro appeal of an era that too many Americans remember for us to fetishize the way we do the old Hollywood broads, dames, and bombshells. In fact, I'd bet that many women known as cougars were, once upon a time, merely foxy ladies. And unlike the fox, the cougar is a bit too powerful—a bit too moneyed, a bit too sophisticated—for even someone with the prowess Jimi Hendrix to simply come get.

Thoughts on a Word: Hot

Hot is tanned, free of body hair, and in a miniskirt. Hot likes to party, and we know better than to take hot too seriously. Hot is younger than most; Google will find 24 million hot women for you, but 31 million hot girls. Hot is purchased, packaged, and with a firm price. Hot is a series of illusions; you may wake up with the mantle of hot, but you weren't born that way. Hot is Miami. Hot is Venice Beach. Hot is JWoww.

I have to fight here to not simply spew against hot. But my distaste for the word shines through: To me, it represents a crude packaging of the spark that might give a person the "heat" from which our use of hot should derive. Hot removes its opposite—cold—leaving us lopsided, with no yin to balance out the yang that hot thrusts upon us. And is it any surprise that yin's energy—if you believe in this hippie eastern chi stuff—is the cool, lunar feminine, whereas yang's dry heat is associated with masculinity?

It's not a stretch to imagine that with the terminology of heat being applied to everything from temperament (1100s), food (1540s), scent (1600s), jazz (1912), and radioactivity (1940s), that hot might have been loosely applied to women throughout the ages. Indeed, hot has applied to our physical passions since the 1590s, and my beloved 1894 Webster's gives "Lustful; lewd" as one of its definitions.

When America was on the brink of the (supposed) sexual revolution, heat cropped up frequently in film titles—but it was still being used to describe a situation, not a woman. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958, though the play was published in 1955), The Long, Hot Summer (1958), and Some Like It Hot (1959) clustered around the precipice of revolution, and it seems unlikely that this was a coincidence (Some Like It Hot's working title was Not Tonight, Josephine). And we weren't quite ready to take the plunge into woman-as-heat: Too Hot to Handle (1960), starring Jayne Mansfield, who had been on loan to a British company when she became too hot to handle in the States, had to be released in the U.S. as Playgirl After Dark. But beginning in the 1960s, we took the plunge to explicitly calling women hot: Hot-Blooded Woman (1965) rode the sexploitation wave, followed by a flurry of ambiguously titled films whose packaging made it clear that hot references the woman, not what's outside. The Hot Box (1972) remains a jewel in the crown of women-in-prison flicks (after—what else?—Caged Heat); Running Hot and Hot Moves (both 1984) maintained the surveillance of hot women.

Then, of course, came Paris Hilton, with her 2005 trademarking (literally) of "That's hot." She wasn't speaking only of women, of course; it seemed to be a catch-all phrase that could apply to anything from shoes to lip balm to the Middle East. Yet her lyrengeal, lackadaisical utterance of "That's hot" clearly contained anything but passion, leaving only Hilton's self-presentation as a branding of hotness. In a sort of airy philosophical way I'd like to declare her turnaround of "That's hot"—shifting the focus from herself to the world around her—as a reclamation of hot. In truth, however, Hilton is far too savvy of a marketer to have chosen that terminology without being keenly aware of its reflexive effect upon her image. Hilton's tanned, dyed, refurbished appearance epitomizes hot and its machinations. By being a distant yet explicitly available persona, she illustrates the trap of hot: It's not that you'll get burned if you come too close; it's that you might see that you're looking at a Yule Log DVD, not a live fire.

Hot should be synonymous with sexy, yet it's not. Sexy should be more blatant, more crude, more vulgar—it mentions s-e-x!—but the plastic quality hot connotes makes sexy seem its authentic, primal alternative. Hot gets to the core of objectification: A woman is not intrinsically hot; instead, the viewer becomes heated upon seeing her and attributes his own reaction to her essence. She becomes hot once seen through his eyes, not before. The yin and yang again: Men and women alike describe women as beautiful. But when we speak of her as hot, we understand that her hotness exists only in the context of being seen by others; it's knowing that she will be viewed that makes her hot. She is not hot at home, by herself, doing laundry or dozing or dancing, even as she might be pretty or beautiful. Nothing can exist in a vacuum: not sound, color, smell, or temperature. In physics and in the public sphere alike, nothing can be hot in a vacuum. It requires energy—yours, the viewer's—in order to exist.

Thoughts on a Word: Lovely

Lovely is mild yet vibrant; a melody, not a symphony. Lovely has grace but not quite elegance; elegance distances us from the subject, loveliness draws us in. Lovely is enjoyable. Lovely is pleasant. Lovely is nice. Lovely is a pretty face with an unmistakably chipped tooth. Lovely would not exist without love.

I've been described as lovely, and chances are you have too. Because unlike beautiful, pretty, cute, striking, and so on, lovely is safe: It is clearly an endorsement, but whether it’s an endorsement of the person’s spirit or their appearance is left up in the air. Even as we champion “inner beauty,” we need the inner to distinguish it from that other kind of beauty—the kind that when spoken of as beauty alone, with no qualifying words, we understand to be external.

Stevie Wonder sang of his daughter in “Isn’t She Lovely”; we describe infants as beautiful all the time, but as an overt love song to a child, lovely becomes a word that both cannot be argued with (some babies are weird-looking, after all) and one that removes any possible inappropriacy. It’s a compliment, but a desexualized one; years ago, I was walking down the street when a man started walking alongside me serenading me with this song. This would be an unremarkable, if over-the-top, street encounter were it not for the fact that I was holding hands with my then-boyfriend: My troubadour was looking for an unassailable compliment (and a tip), one that would allow him to admire a woman without bringing out any possessive tendencies in her companion. Lovely was no accident there. Nor is it happenstance that Sarah Jessica Parker’s fragrance bears that name. She’s an actress known for her verve, charm, and talent, not necessarily her beauty; lovely stakes her claim—and the claim of anyone hoping to share her essence—in the territory of the perhaps-pretty yet certainly-appealing.

Its very versatility lends itself to overapplication, even sarcasm. I might say a lunch date has been lovely when I’ve had a truly delightful time with my dining partner; I might say the same if I felt slightly uncomfortable—headachy, not feeling social, stressed, whatever—but want to use a not-untruthful word to describe the time I spent with someone I enjoy enough to schedule a lunch with. Oxford English Dictionary notes this comparatively weakened use of lovely going back as far as 1614, and also notes its use as an intensifier: "Feel my Johnson's Baby Powder—isn't it lovely and downy and soft?" says a 1937 ad in American Home. The baby powder isn't lovely, of course; it needs the support of the other, more exact adjectives, before lovely has any actual meaning. 

Lovely can temper one's sentiment, making it clear that there’s something that’s held back—lovely carries no exuberance, even as delight may spark its use. Of lovely, Merriam-Webster goes on record with “Lovely is close to beautiful but applies to a narrower range of emotional excitation”; thus beauty trumps even love in its abilities to arouse. With its tempered usage, lovely to mean lowly becomes a particularly Anglo-Saxon-inspired form of sarcasm: It would be too easy to turn around a stronger adjective to mean its opposite. But the very restraint of lovely lends itself to a contained sarcasm. “A dispute arose between these two lovelies [street-sweepers] as to who was entitled to the gutter” appeared in a Pennsylvania newspaper in 1876; more than a century later, young British artist Stephen Johnson, who specializes in “designing items of no physical use-value,” created his “Now Isn’t That Lovely” series of junk-store kitsch.  

Yet the literal root of lovely is, after all, love. When used at its most straightforward, there’s an implied emotional connection to lovely that may or may not be there with beautiful or pretty. Beauty provokes emotion, to be sure, but emotion provokes lovely even in beauty’s absence: Are you able to look into the eyes of an un-pretty person you’re fond of and not see some small loveliness? To call someone lovely is to utter a wish for mutuality: If I find you lovely, there's a subdued, miniature ball of love somewhere in there. And what fun is it to play ball alone?

Thoughts on Three Words: Obese, Anorexic, Fat

My eyes are so keen on eating disorder talk that I mistakenly thought our culture had been talking about eating disorders with increased frequency. Oxford English Dictionary proves me wrong: Mentions of the word anorexia in the English canon have stayed fairly steady over the past decade. Unsurprisingly, though, we've been talking about obesity more than we used to:

The entire entry at OED is worth reading, and it prompts a few thoughts on my end:

1) We love anorexia riffs. Obesity, not so much.

OED notes that even though anorexia was dwarfed in mentions by obesity, during this time period the number of "spinoff" words based on anorexia was manifold. Obesity gave us diabesity and globesity (which I'd never heard of until this article); anorexia, on the other hand, gave us orthorexia, tanorexia, manorexia, permorexia, bleachorexia, bigorexia, and bridorexia. Some of these are terms that may be adopted into legitimate medical language; orthorexia (obsession with a healthy diet) and permorexia (chronic dieting), though not widely used by the medical community, would both fall under the umbrella of ED-NOS, or eating disorder not otherwise specified. Some are a misunderstanding of eating disorders: Men can be anorexics, making manorexia superfluous, even a mockery of men who wrestle with an eating disorder. Others co-opt medical language to create a problem where there isn't any: I'm sure there are people who are obsessed with whitening their teeth, but it's not a disorder, is it?

Why the casual co-opting of anorexia while leaving obesity alone? It's not like we as a culture shy away from poking fun at fat people. I think it's because even as our culture pities the anorexic, we're also more eager to identify with her—and diminish her. Developing an acute case of "bridorexia" sounds better than developing "bridesity," though certainly it's not unheard of for women to gain weight before their wedding from stress-related overeating. We may cluck at the former, but we ignore or shame the latter; we can't glamourize it with a sweet little suffix. A better term for tanorexia might be willful path to melanoma, but tanorexia is adorable and sort of harmless. As seriously as we take anorexia, we're also eager to belittle it by making it seem as optional as teeth-whitening. We affix the -orexia because that signals that it's a compulsion—but a cute, girlish compulsion. It's the -ette, -ina, and -trix of disease suffixes.

2) Our bodily attentions are fickle.

Notice when mentions of both obesity and anorexia dropped? Right around when the stock market did. This makes sense, of course—the economy was in crisis, and frankly it felt more important to focus on what was happening with the S&P 500 than with our bodies. (In an oddly refreshing twist, I remember losing my job in October 2008 and suddenly realizing that after a week of mourning, freaking out, and drinking, for the first time since 1983 I'd gone seven days without giving the size of my body a single thought.) But it also points to how much "obesity crisis" reporting boils down to a trend piece. I'd wager that, ironically, eating disordered behavior—both the kind that results in obesity, and the kind that results in anorexia—increased during this time, as stress of any kind is a primary trigger for eating disorders.

3) Obesity comes in His & Hers colors.

The Oxford English Dictionary graph got me thinking about the relatively sudden shift from fat as an appearance issue to obesity as a health issue. I see the relatively recent emphasis on body size as a marker of health—as opposed to simply a marker of hot-or-not—as being designed in part to create a fact-based path to reprimand heavy people for their size. There's no doubt in my mind that this is gendered: We as a culture love to examine women's bodies, and having a "legitimate" reason to do so—I'm just worried about your health, honey—gives us carte blanche. Look at the incidence of the term "fat women" and "obese women" as opposed to "fat men" and "obese men", as charted through uses in all Google Books published between 1950 and 2008:

If this were truly a case of reconsidering the term fat, or of the heightened cases of the medical term obesity (which only means "excessively fat," after all), or of a shift in the way that we report and record these terms, the charts would look roughly similar for both sexes. But they don't: We suddenly found a lot more "obese" women to write about (she-besity?) compared to steady numbers of "fat" women, whereas in the mid-'80s, we started writing about "fat men" and "obese men" as if they were one and the same.

Regardless of how you feel about the term fat—or obese, big, heavy, plus, zaftig, or slender, trim, thin, or skinny—data like this points to how what we're describing with these terms often isn't really a body at all. We're judging our fears and desires alongside the target's shape and size; we're evaluating our cultural attachments to bodies, not the bodies themselves. Once we're able to step back and see that, I'm guessing we'll be one step closer to not judging one another's bodies at all.

Thoughts on a Word: Bombshell

 

A bombshell can devastate you, literally taking away your life in the blink of a (possibly mascaraed) eye. A bombshell is manufactured, created, manmade: It cannot, by definition, be natural; it cannot exist without there being a greater purpose behind its existence. A bombshell surrounds the nucleus of a bomb, which holds the potential for the real damage. A bombshell, once the bomb has gone off, shatters easily; a bombshell becomes shrapnel, beside the point, irrelevant. A bombshell obscures what lays inside: If you peer inside the bombshell, you may see a Little Boy, or a Fat Man—or a dud entirely.

We first used "bombshell" to describe not a thing but a woman in the 1930s. Its use increased in the midst of early WWII jitters; American Thesaurus of Slang first recorded it in 1942. We wanted to maintain America's status as the premier manufacturer of the bombshell so much that we merged our two bombshells, painting the word Gilda (after Rita Hayworth's 1946 bombshell role) on the first nuclear bomb to be tested after WWII. Then, of course, came Marilyn Monroe, who holds the title of America's Preeminent Bombshell in perpetuity. 

The bombshell is most useful as a vessel for our collective anxieties, and the bigger our anxieties of literal explosions become, the emptier the lady bombshell must be. Who, after all, was taken more seriously: Jean Harlow, the original bombshell, whose 1933 Bombshell came out before the idea of the atomic bomb had even been patented—or Marilyn Monroe, whose infamous rendition of "Happy Birthday" to JFK was sung the same year as the Cuban Missile Crisis?

A bombshell encases the true threat: the bomb itself. When we label a woman a bombshell, it's unclear if we're trying to say that she might explode any minute, or if that she's merely a package for what could turn out to be a dud. Are we imbuing her with ersatz power by making her an explosive vagina dentata, or are we implying that once you take the smallest of hammers to its fragile shell, the bombshell will fall apart? "In the end, the bombshell is the one who remained the fool," writes Stephanie Smith in Household Words: Bloomers, Sucker, Bombshell, Scab, Nigger, Cyber. "The bombshell may be as volatile as 'the bouquet of a fireworks display'…but she's also just a joke. We all know that a bombshell is just a 'fat cheesy slut' [as Monica Lewinsky was described, along with bombshell] because that's just plain old common sense." And the bombshell herself may be fully aware of this perceived emptiness. Of a nightmare she had while studying with Lee Strasberg, Marilyn Monroe wrote, "Strasberg to cut me open…to bring myself back to life…and there is absolutely nothing there…the patient existing of complete emptiness." The bleached hair, the painted-on beauty mark, the rhinoplasty, the unnatural posture and voice: We all take bombshell and artifice to go hand-in-hand, but when we patent something as a prototype, as we did with Marilyn-as-bombshell, we ensure that we cannot see it as anything more complex, or more potent. When I engaged in my bombshell experiment, I wanted to believe that the bombshell was an object manufactured from an alloy of lipstick, false eyelashes, and a cascade of curls—and that beneath that shell lay something bubbling and explosive. Something nuclear. Had I thought more seriously about the term bombshell before deciding to use that as a public hook for my little experiment, I may not have used the term at all: Not only did it turn out to set readers up for an image of perfection instead of an image consisting of distinct signals, I now understand that the term is definitively no longer seen as a shell for anything explosive, but as a shell for absolutely nothing.

That is, if we even know what the term is supposed to mean anymore. Generation X- and Y-ers never seriously feared bombs. Our anxieties are more disparate: We may fear shell-less bombs, sure—dirty bombs, airplane bombs; that is, bombs without any one distinct form—but we also fear climate change, and unemployment, and overpopulation, and running out of Social Security, and Facebook, and BPAs, and fertility, and why are the bees dying? We have no one collective vessel any longer. We fear—and now, tragically, we witness—nuclear meltdowns, not nuclear bombs.

The bombshell, then, is a relic. More than ever, she is a caricature, usually hearkening back to old Hollywood—but without one collective fear-vessel, even our definition of the woman-as-bombshell morphs. She may, according to Google Images, now be rockabilly, or tattooed, or a Victoria's Secret model. She may be a bodybuilder, or a pornographic actress, or literally a cartoon. She can be anything, really, as long as it's clear that she's trying. We have lost the bomb, so we've lost the unilateral bombshell. Do we wish to resurrect her?

Thoughts on a Word: Attractive

Attractive is the base level. It is a series of facts, opt-ins or opt-outs: attractive is tidy, inoffensive, general. Attractive is a matching purse and a fresh haircut. Attractive is the safe zone, a step away from beautiful or alluring or even pretty; attractive is a way of speaking about one's looks without revealing vanity or arrogance. Attractive is a quiet, inexact mimicry of some of the traditional, lasting hallmarks of beauty—symmetry, proportion—accepting them where we're graced with them, deflecting or accepting or shifting where we're not. You cannot argue with attractive.

"I wouldn't say that, but yes, I'm attractive" or something similar is the #1 answer I've received when asking interviewees if they think they're beautiful. That's not to say there's no overlap between attractive and beautiful, but rather that beauty is about something we can't necessarily control, whereas attractive is more about showing that you're playing ball than it is about any particular effect or feature. "Anybody can make themselves attractive with a little effort," says one of my interviewees. "We all know what makes someone attractive or not attractive, and it's something that all of us can attain," says another. Beauty can range from oligarchy to plutocracy to even anarchy, if we're each our own pilot nations shapeshifting into beautiful depending on our mood, the light, our neighbors, whether we're in love, combustions of time, place, and genetics. Attractive is a democracy.

It's odd, though: attraction, even more than beauty, is subjective. I can't choose who I'm attracted to any more than I can choose whether I like the taste of Vegemite. It's a pull that's undeniable, even when we're talking about a strictly platonic relationship—we've all suffered from a lack of attraction, meeting people we really, truly, genuinely like and have a lot in common with but never really click with, right? And we've all met someone we shouldn't want to be closer with but yearn for anyway, right? We can control how loud we allow attraction to speak, but the fact of it, on some level, is out of our hands.

Yet we choose a word based on this unpredictable, indefinable chemistry—or is it physics?—to serve as our safe word, our base line, our beauty democracy. We choose a word that, at its heart, is about pheromones and sex as a way of discussing a sort of neutered beauty. Or is it that with attractive we're simply saying that, at its base level, an attractive person has the ability to attract, even if it's not the speaker whom s/he is attracting? Is that where the democratic connotation of attractive comes in?

I'm not arguing that we redefine attractive: We need a safe word. We need attractive both for its gracious ability to let us talk about beauty and appearance while managing to deflect inevitable accusations of conceit, and for its potential for magnetism. I simply wish for us to consider its source, consider its democracy, and consider it not as a lesser-than form of beauty but rather a tool we can use to examine something as complex and elusive as beauty, and a tool we can use to excavate what it is we're really after.

Championing Jane Eyre

Kate at Eat the Damn Cake meditates here on the word plain. My favorite part is this:

Personally, I don’t believe in plainness. I don’t think it exists. I’ve never seen a person who looked plain. And I refuse to allow people to be rendered invisible and meaningless by their appearances. How can you have a face and be plain?

In my interviews with women, the word itself has come up quite a bit (in the transcripts, not in what I've published), but I've noted that the word only comes up when the speaker is talking about other people. "I have friends who think they're plain," "Somebody might be what you might call plain"—that sort of thing.

You know what word hasn't come up? Ugly. Except in one distinct context: When the speaker is saying what they're not. "I mean, I know I'm not ugly or anything," "I don't think you'd look at me and say I'm ugly," and so on.

It's an interesting contrast: People like to say that women are critical of one another, but the women I've spoken to (who, granted, are self-selected) have been very hesitant to suggest that another woman could be a word that's as ugly as, well, ugly. It suggests a sort of aggression, a sort of personality disorder in addition to any lack of physical graces. Plain, on the other hand, seems somehow kinder, even though, as Kate points out, it means that "you're not even fascinatingly strange looking." But it suggests someone who may have a strong moral character, someone whose features are assembled as one would expect.

I'm not sure what to make of why women are more eager to apply it to themselves as a contrast point of what they're not. I'm guessing that it's because by setting up a contrast of how they think they look, setting up an aggressive standard like ugly sounds less conceited than something more neutral like plain. Saying you're "not ugly" could mean that you conceive of yourself as being plain, or as being pretty or beautiful or striking or whatever—but it leaves it up to the listener to think on it, without being specific, which is interesting because ugly is a pretty specific word.

"Not plain" means that you acknowledge that you're—I dunno, decorated? The very notion of the word plain and how it's used in older books is more of someone who hasn't been graced with the features of what our society traditionally considered beautiful—that you haven't been "decorated" not by your own hand, but by the powers that be.

 Clearly a certain art director never read the book.

I'll be honest: I dislike the word too, for the reasons Kate enumerates, but honestly I'd rather be called plain than ugly. It fits into that whole notion of thinking of myself as low-key, leaving whatever beauty someone might find in me up to the other person, not my own actual features or what I've done with them. And let's not forget that there's a whole subsection of romance novels devoted to "plain" heroines. There's something deeply appealing about the notion that "plain" women, by virtue of their charm, charisma, kindness, vitality, or other virtues, can become beautiful—physically beautiful, not only full of what we refer to as "inner beauty." We want to champion that heroine, and we feel more virtuous in doing so, because we're all so attached to beauty that we feel as though we're automatically rooting for the underdog.

Rosie Molinary, Author, Charlotte, NC

I came across the book Beautiful You serendipitously, one of a few stray review copies at a magazine where I worked at the time. I’ve read plenty of “you go, girl!” works designed to increase self-acceptance, but what sets Beautiful You apart is its day-by-day actionability. Day 50: “Ask others to define beauty.” Day 192: “Lift weights.” Day 268: “Give flowers.” Some exercises launch enormous mental projects, of course (Day 114: “Let go”), but the book is a concrete, meditative guide to getting at the root of what makes so many women feel not-so-great about their appearance. 

Its author, Rosie Molinary, also penned Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina; in addition, she’s a speaker, teacher, activist, and mother. Her own stories shine through in Beautiful You; by the time we actually spoke, I felt as though I were hearing a familiar, generous voice, one as mellifluous as her words (but with the faintest Carolina twang). We talked about the beauty of the unattainable, the reason Latinas get a disproportionate amount of plastic surgery, and why to get a professional bra fitting. In her own words:   

On the “Latina Mystique”

One of the things that has been emphasized over the years with beauty is searching for the unattainable. When I was growing up, there weren’t any Latinas in the media, so there wasn’t something anybody could consider to search for. The unattainable we were searching for was being tall, thin, and blonde. But in the last 10 years, there have been Latinas more prominently in the media—which, for those who aren’t tan or dark or what’s often called “exotic,” has created a craving for that. We covet beauty as what we literally can’t attain. 

I wrote Hijas in my early 30s, and I was talking to women in their late teens and early to mid-20s about Latinas in the media. When I was 18, if I said to someone I was Puerto Rican, they’d say, “Puerto what?” I grew up in South Carolina, and there weren’t other Latinas around. So I thought these women were going to say that it was so much easier to come of age now when there were Latinas in the media—and that ended up not being the reaction at all. Instead, they talked about how it created a really hard standard for them. I was getting “Puerto what?”, but fast-forward to young women now, and if they say they’re Puerto Rican and happen to be Afro-Latina, so they’re black Puerto Rican, people are like, “Why don’t you look like Jennifer Lopez?” Because in the media there’s a bit of a poster girl for each country. You’re Mexican, it’s Salma Hayek; you’ve got Jennifer Lopez for Puerto Rico, Eva Mendes for Cuba. If you’re African American, there’s not just one African American actress to compare you to; if you’re white, there’s not just one white woman to be compared to. 

On the Pain and Effort of Beauty

Something I didn’t know before researching Hijas was that Latinas get the most plastic surgery of any subgroup in the U.S., which is interesting because Latinas are not the wealthiest minority in the U.S. There’s a lot of discretionary dollars being spent on something that seems optional for someone who doesn’t have a lot of discretionary dollars. I talked about this with the head of plastic surgery at the University of Kentucky, who happens to be Latin American. And he said—I’m paraphrasing—that Latina women are aware that beauty takes effort, and that it’s not painless. He said something along the lines of: When I have a client come in from any background that’s not Latina, it’s 50/50 as to whether they’re going to get the surgery. But if I have somebody who’s Latina who’s already made this appointment with me for a consultation, there is nothing I’m going to tell them about the pain or recovery that will talk them out of it. Latina women are ultimately always aware that beauty is a sacrifice.

The other interesting thing he said was that he felt Latina women were more willing to own up to the effort. You might run into a woman of a non-Latina background and say she looks great, and she’ll say, “Oh, I just threw myself together this morning,” like it’s this effortless perfection. But if you run into a Latina woman and say, “You look really nice,” her reaction will be, “Oh, thanks! I worked overtime to buy this dress, I’ve got on this girdle, it took me three hours to get my hair like this.” She’ll own up to the effort, because part of it is wanting people to know they thought this event warranted that effort and respect. I see some truth in that. 

On Knowing But Not Believing

When I interviewed women for Hijas, I asked what they thought was beautiful. And to a person, they would say: confidence, being kind, helping others, loving others. In general, no one said anything physical in their definition of beauty! Then I would ask, “Do you consider yourself beautiful?” and they would say, “Who, me? Oh, no, no, I’m not beautiful.” Now, 30 minutes earlier, they were talking to me about how passionate they were as a schoolteacher, or how much they championed their younger sister. There were all these earlier references that indicated to me they matched their definition of beauty. I would lay this out to them, and I had several women after our conversations—I probably interviewed 100 women and 12 to 15 e-mailed me later about this—say, “It was significant to me that you pointed out the inconsistency in how I view myself and how I view others.” 

Women are raised to be demure and to deflect. And we aren’t really allowed to be gracious about ourselves. Often we’re raised not to just be good girls; we translate that into being perfect girls. So it’s not okay for us to judge ourselves on these gracious standards that we give others—we need to be higher than that standard. And it’s paralyzing, because what can happen is that we believe that if some aspect of our physicality changes, then we’ll finally be happy. And the truth is, a negative body image isn’t only about how you feel about your body. It’s rooted in so much more, and unless you deal with those things, you’re going to be unhappy no matter how long your hair or how much you weigh. 

But there’s a comfortable storyline in existing in what you’ve always believed. You know how it’s going to play out, you know what it means you can do, what you can’t do. All the choices are clear. So what happens when someone says—and this isn’t exactly what I’m saying, but it’s a part of it—if you feel bad about yourself, you’re making a choice to feel bad about yourself. What I’m inviting you to do is not make that choice anymore. Then all of the answers can be different, and how do those things play out? And that’s hard, because it’s the unknown. But it’s also ultimately the most satisfying place you can land.

On the “Beautiful You” Exercises

There aren’t that many appearance-oriented things that are important to me. But I do have some exercises in Beautiful You that are appearance-oriented. [Examples: Visit a makeup artist, get a professional bra fitting, get a haircut.] For some women those things reflect self-care, and that’s been part of the volition of some women—increased disposable income and what to do with that. I didn’t want to leave out those women from the Beautiful You journey. And I have my moments too—I had my first professional adult bra fitting a few years ago, and it made a significant difference in how my clothes felt. It had a really positive effect on me, and I hadn’t expected that; I just needed a bra and this woman came in and was like, “You need to try this,” and I was like, “Oh my god, that is what I need to try!” There are areas where we could use somebody who knows a little bit more than we do.  

That said, I don’t think that every single day is a fit for every single woman. I think it’s okay to make the book a choose-your-own-adventure book. But I think it’s important that if you’re particularly resistant to something that you do it, because there’s a reason you’re resistant to it, and you can get a bit of insight. 

On Day 73: “Use Something You’ve Been Saving for a Special Occasion”

I have this beautiful, expensive purse. I didn’t feel my behaviors warranted such a beautiful or expensive piece in my life—I’d literally used it twice. And finally one day I looked at it in this little bag gathering dust, and was like, “This is the most absurd thing. I have this beautiful thing...in my closet.” What’s the point of having a nice thing if you’re not going to enjoy it? Too often we deny ourselves pleasure. And part of recognizing beauty is experiencing pleasure. Sometimes pleasure is as simple as taking something out to enjoy that you don’t typically let yourself enjoy. What was that about, with my purse? Why was I punishing myself? Why wasn’t I worth it? Now I don’t take it out if it’s raining, but if I’m wearing certain outfits I am rocking that bag. 

On Her Definition of Beauty in 25 Words or Less

Giving and experiencing love. I think I have 21 words left? But that's it for me.

Sarah, 29, Designer, San Francisco

I met Sarah online, at a feminist discussion board. So even before I’d met her in person, I knew her to be thoughtful, clear-minded, clever, and, well, fun—as fun as a person can be when everything she says is in 12-point Helvetica. When we did finally meet in person, I immediately got the impression that if she liked you, she would not only implicitly be on your side, but would act as though it had always been that way and couldn’t possibly be any other.

Her sense of play extends to her self-presentation and fashion: On any given day, Sarah’s look might conjure Weimar Berlin, prairie dust bowl, or Paris student riots. So evocative of other times and places are her varied looks that you might not immediately notice that her physical attributes would read like a model booker’s dream list—tall, slim frame; blonde hair; lush, even features—and in fact she did model for a short time. She agreed to share her thoughts on opting in and out of beauty, her erstwhile modeling career, and expectations and judgments of beautiful women. In her own words:


On Choice Words
To say someone is beautiful, and to mean it, is a powerful statement. Truth, poetry, nature—these things are beautiful. Beauty is something that touches you on a very basic level. When I think of pretty I think of effort. Pretty is made. For example, if you put on bright red lipstick, pretty is the word you'll get from people. Cute and adorable are my least favorite adjectives. There is something backhanded to them, something a shade belittling. Puppies and babies are cute, possibly shoes—but not women. It's a word people use when they do not particularly value the described as equal to them.

I hate when men use compliments as way of introduction—it makes me flare up with anger. I don’t think it should be acceptable for a stranger to comment on your physicality. It feels like they are bestowing a judgment on you and you are expected to be grateful. I want to say, “So what?” I feel like they are putting me in a tricky position where I am forced to have a reaction—a reaction that will also be judged—to walk between bitch and narcissist and coquette. My reaction is usually a cross between annoyed and skeptical. It should be noted, that I rarely feel this way when it comes from a woman—perhaps because I feel there is a tinge of positive sisterhood spirit in the comment. A well-placed and heartfelt compliment between women can sometimes feel subversive.


On Her Beauty Routine
At this point in my life, I almost feel as though beauty is something I can opt in or out of, and I choose to opt in by engaging in routine. The benefit of this is feeling as though I have control over the face I present; the flip side is that if I leave the house without engaging in the full routine, I feel uncomfortably overexposed or even ugly.

Having a routine is fun about five days of the week. I do take enjoyment from the process and the artistry, but sometimes I feel trapped by it and annoyed with the time investment. It's gotten to the point—and I am completely ashamed of this—that I don't like to leave the house bare-faced. Putting on makeup can be used to enhance beauty, but lately I feel I’m using it more as a disguise. There is a double standard operating here. When I look at other women, I find myself most engaged by natural looking faces and hair—the less makeup the better.

I've heard men comment negatively on women catching their reflection in windows, and that kind of misinterpretation of vanity annoys me. For instance: At minimum, I'm usually wearing foundation, eyeliner, and mascara. Sometimes I wear loud lipstick, blush, eyebrow pencil, and fake lashes—all depending on my mood. Sometimes I tease my hair up into a big ’60s pouf (Bump-Its are for amateurs). None of these things are natural. They are constantly at risk of running, smearing, caking, marking my teeth, being uneven, deflating, etc. And despite these femme trappings, I am not a delicate woman; I sweat, run, push, dance, eat, imbibe, kiss. When I catch my reflection I’m just trying to make sure that everything is still mostly in place. I prefer to avoid the “Did I get it? How about now?” conversation about lipstick on my teeth.

On Modeling
I was 20 years old, claiming to be 18 at the insistence of the photographer who "discovered" me and wanted me to have a longer shelf life. I did it just to see if I could. I suppose I was looking for the usual things—money, validation. I stopped after about six months because I found it tedious. The two words that immediately come to mind are cold and bored because of all the time you spend waiting around on the shoot. I hated the rules and dietary restrictions. Also, I was working in Boston and I quickly came to the opinion that if these photographers/stylists/makeup artists were any good, they'd be in New York. It was frustrating to watch people compose shots or pull outfits and feel like I could do it better. It all came to a head when I had to decide if I wanted to try out a summer in New York, staying at a models' apartment. I realized that it would just be more of the same, so I bailed.

I was also looking for perspective. I didn't trust the image I saw in the mirror and I didn't trust the (nice) things people around me would say, so I was hoping these "professionals" would be able to finally give it to me straight. I've since come to understand that beauty is incredibly subjective, and that there are no “experts.”

I didn't feel beautiful when I was modeling. I felt my strength as a model was my height—I’m six feet tall—and when I was working I only saw my body as a tool. Nothing could have been less sexy or glamorous. I would work really hard on a shoot and get so excited to see the photos, only to be disappointed. It was still me. Me with makeup, in a dress, limbs in impossible positions—but still me. There wasn't transformation. I was left feeling the exact same way, because I was the exact same person.

I find it disheartening that the public seems to view modeling as an ideal way to make money. I say this because when I tell strangers that I have no interest in modeling, they act like I am putting something to waste—as though if you meet certain physical qualifications, you would be a fool not to cash in on them. Do we have to sell everything?


On Having Blonde Hair vs. Being “The Blonde”
The people I found beautiful [as an adolescent] did not look like me. Specifically, they were darker, more severe. My own face, in contrast, I found boring. When friends or boys found me attractive, I chalked it up to a difference of opinion. By my own assessment, there was nothing overtly wrong with me, but there was nothing really great either. I felt like I defaulted into a certain beauty ideal, but in my heart I believed that I didn't particularly excel at that either. Yes, I was: tall, thin, fair, with long blonde hair, and blue eyes. But these are just words. They sound good, but they hold no intrinsic value. Blonde is not more beautiful than brunette. Tall is not more beautiful than short. But these words represent certain touchstones of beauty and we are taught that they have value. It’s a checklist and if you check off enough of them people will grant you a certain beauty status. It was always hard to take stock in the attention I got for the way I looked. I never bought into Barbie. Those blonde amazons of my childhood—Christie Brinkley, Elle McPherson, Claudia Schiffer—held no interest for me.

The disconnect between what I think is attractive, and what I’ve gotten attention for, can be hard to reconcile. It’s like being good at soccer when all you want in the world is to be a ballerina. I know that I can use my looks to seduce—I don't mean that exclusively in a sexual way. I can dress a certain way, put on makeup, style my hair, and make a stir when I walk into a room. But it feels like a sleight of hand. Where I succeed, the effect is more than the sum of its parts only in other people's heads. The imagination fills in the gaps.

It’s hard to untangle the subject of beauty from perception and expectation. In regards to perception, there are: the ways we perceive ourselves, the way we perceive others, and the question of how we are perceived by others. Which perception holds the most value for you and influences the choices you make? For me it breaks down like this: When I look into the mirror, I find my own reflection boring. When I think of beautiful woman—I’ll use a celebrity, since they exist in our shared consciousness—I think of Anna Karina. If I believe the compliments that people give me, then I can conclude that some people think I am beautiful. When I wake up in the morning, I'm faced with bridging those gaps—between how I think I look, how I wish I looked, and how other people perceive me to look. I’m never going to be Anna Karina, but I do have the option to play into other people’s perception of beauty. But, to be complicit in perpetuating something that feels like a lie, and somehow expect to come out of it with healthy self-esteem is asking your brain to execute some fairly complicated gymnastics.

Expectation is another beast. Let me use this example: Think of all the gossip websites and magazines that turn a buck on publishing unflattering, candid photos of celebrities. The beauty of celebrities is at least as much artifice as genetics, and though I think most of us realize this, we take pleasure in these revelations—these failures to meet expectation.  This perception (there’s that word again!) of expectation has affected my daily routine. I don't feel comfortable leaving the house without makeup anymore. I hate this. I don't hate putting on makeup; I hate the shackles of the need. I know I can hold my own on non-physical attributes: I am smart, curious, and can make people laugh. Surely, if you just met me, and I had made no physical effort, you wouldn't think badly of me. The need lies somewhere in this murky business of expectation.

There’s a 1962 television interview Anna Karina that’s been on my mind. In it, the reporter starts needling Karina about the way she looks. It’s hard not to feel sorry for her as she squirms under the camera’s relentless stare. You can tell she desperately wishes the interviewer would just move on to a new topic. For me, it illustrates this twisted desire to get beautiful women to just admit they know they are beautiful. But I don't imagine anyone being able to have such a simple and absolutist view of something so subjective and in constant flux, complicated by expectation and endlessly confounded by perception.

Riding the F Train

My first bit of unwanted attention in 2011 came last night—happy new year!—from a stranger on the subway. Transcript as follows: "Hey, fatty. Fat fat. Fat booty, fat pussy, I see your fat underneath your clothes, you're fat, I see it. Fat fat fat fat fat."

There was only one other person in the subway car, and the perpetrator had earlier made a point of yelling across the car that "as long as you're with me, you're 100% safe" (perfectly standard behavior for a man who isn't a threat, right?), so I knew not to escalate the situation. At the next stop, I waited until the train doors were already open before striding toward the door, so that he would be less likely to follow me out. He didn't, and that was that.

Except it wasn't. I had no idea how to internally react, even if externally I handled it just fine. My first words to myself were of self-assurance, even if now I wish I could say they were of something closer to anger. The immediate thought process: 1) This is a crazy source, not a trustworthy one; 2) You were sitting down and wearing baggy clothes so he couldn't tell what you looked like anyway; 3) You are well within recommended height-weight guidelines and are emphatically not fat.

This is all fine and good for not allowing myself to use a stranger's comments as an excuse to spiral into disordered eating ("I need 2,100 calories a day to fulfull my body's energy needs--but the dude on the Q train said I was fat, so no breakfast for me, mkay thanks!"). But the fact that my first thought was not upset but reminding myself that I wasn't fat--as if his assault would have been justified if I were--made me think about the power of that word as an admonishment for existing.

That man wasn't yelling at me because of my weight; he was yelling at me because it was New Year's Day and here he was, drunk or high on the subway, skin weathered by years of hard work, unclean, unshaven, and alone, and here is this woman about his age whose hair is in a French twist and who seems like a nice friendly girl because she hasn't had a day's hard work in her life, look at that fair skin, and is that fucking glitter on her eyelids, and she had damn well better learn her place. And whether he consciously knew it or not, he chose to put me in my place with the #1 word that is anathema to women in our culture: fat.

The F-word is anathema because we let it be anathema. We let that word become the biggest insult a woman can hear--I know plenty of women who might doubt their intellect, but none of them cower from the word dumb as they do from fat, even when the former is a greater fear than the latter.

I'm already conscious of trying not to attach negative judgment to the word--if a woman complains to me of being fat, my response, verbatim, is usually "I'm not going to hear that." It doesn't matter if the speaker is overweight. It's a lose-lose scenario, but part of why it's exactly that is because if I were to say, "Okay, you're fat," I would feel like I were telling someone she was all of the things that our culture mistakenly associates with that word--even though I don't believe those things myself. I'm just as unable to truly divorce the word fat from all of its illegitimate siblings--like lazy, poor, uneducated, damaged, self-hating, unprofessional, not to mention ugly, asexual, and unattractive--as the believers who came up with those associations in the first place.

All this is retrofitted reasoning, however. Fat activism was not on my mind in the moment. On top of my self-assurances of being not-fat was a foggy awareness that I was supposed to be having exactly this reaction. I called a friend after I left the subway, and as the words tumbled out of my mouth I found myself becoming more hysterical than I'd initially felt--my voice rose in pitch, the rumblings of indignation changed to a tightly wound self-pity. My friend said, among other things, "That's crazy; you're not fat," and while that was what I wanted to hear, I also felt frustrated that it was what I wanted to hear. It wasn't safe in that moment to say anything back to that man, but I hated that even after he was out of sight, my trembling self-doubt gave him exactly what he wanted.

I was playing the part of the wounded, insecure woman; the supporting role would go to the angry, outraged feminist. But the fact is, both of those were roles; truthfully, I just felt muddled. The word fat is so loaded that I couldn't sort out my authentic reaction to hearing it used as an assault weapon pointed directly at me. Yes, I did immediately reassure myself that I wasn't fat (and I'm not proud of this reaction), but I assure myself of that literally dozens of times a day (which I'm not proud of either). I never really felt angry or outraged or scared; instead, I felt nervous before he said it and numbed thereafter.

What I wish could happen, to me and anyone who hears that word used as a weapon--whether it's as friendly fire from a well-intentioned but misguided family member ("If only you'd lose a few pounds," a mother says), as training tactics ("Melt off that ugly fat! Feel the calorie burn!" yells the Spinning instructor), or as a plain old attack from a sad loner on the subway--is not numbness but neutrality. To react as if one heard not "You're fat" but "Your feet are a size 9! Size 9 size 9 size 9!"--a statement of fact that is either truthful or isn't, and if it isn't can be dismissed with no questions, and if it is true, is a matter between you and your doctor.

I've spent a lot of time trying to recognize that I don't need to artificially manipulate my weight, and I've been somewhat successful at that. And I've spent a lot of time trying to accept my body even in the places where it truly is chubby--recognizing that my little beer belly is the result of a lot of good fun and isn't something I'd trade in for a smaller belt. And I've spent just as much time questioning why it all matters. What I haven't done yet is truly try to not let that word--the fat word--have any sort of stigma within my own mind. And maybe my muddled reaction is testament to being farther along in that than I recognize; I don't know. I want to stop being afraid of not just adipose tissue, but the word itself. Those three little letters carry too much weight.