Two years ago, I looked very different to how I do today.
Not better. Not worse. Just different.
As a result of some medication I was taking at the time, I gained a significant amount of weight – a side effect I was entirely unphased by, despite other people routinely letting me know how much it mattered to them.
From thinly veiled nutrition “advice” when I was at my largest, to gushing compliments over the completely incidental weight loss that resulted from eventually tapering off the medication, I became anesthetized to well-meaning friends and strangers constantly remarking on the way I looked.
The most illuminating comments came from men on the internet.
Men who trolled me seemed to take a new kind of delight in the opportunity to point out an already undeniable truth: my body had changed.
“Wow, you’ve really let yourself go” and “Get back to the gym”, they wrote, week after week, as though breaking new ground – punctuating their disgust with the assertion I wasn’t qualified to write about sex because they didn’t deem me sexually palatable.
“It’d take a slab of beer and a dozen shots to turn you into a 4/10 … so who the hell is asking you for sex advice?” a man wrote.
As my dress size crept upwards, their fixation on it only seemed to intensify.
“Either you’re getting chubby or your hairstyle makes you look chubby … unsure … take care of yourself,” one man commented, going on to provide advice on how I could make myself “camera friendly”.
Another was so affected by my weight gain, he made a 35-minute YouTube video about it, insisting I was “eating too many doughnuts” on account of being an “angry feminist”. (The video has since been removed by YouTube.)
Swimming beneath these diatribes was the implicit message my work and opinions couldn’t be taken seriously while I was in a larger body. That anything critical I had to say could be written off as a consequence of being bitter at failing to be attractive.
And lurking just under that, was the insidious directive that, in order to be valid to men, I needed to be thin.
Like most women, this was an idea I grew up having repeated to me so many times, I came to take it as fact.
It never needed to be explicitly said; I merely had to open a magazine, view an ad, or walk down a supermarket aisle to be confronted with images and products that promised practicing a religion of sacrifice, hunger and obsessive body scrutiny would pay off in being seen as worthy and beautiful.
This relentless message resulted in an eating disorder in my early twenties, and a lifelong struggle with my relationship with food – experiences ubiquitous to women and girls who buy the promise that thinness will free us (propaganda that’s so pervasive, some research suggests most girls have been on a diet by age 10).
Except, of course, it doesn’t.
Off medication, when my appetite had restabilized and my body returned to its usual size (genetically slim, from a family of slim people, not via any kind of “hard work” or “sacrifice”), the script from which men looked to ridicule me was flipped.
These days, male trolls favor calling me “too thin”, “sickly” and “old” (one even went as far as to say “you have the body of an ice addict”).
A recent comment from a disgruntled male reader, who wrote under a post of mine, “Shocking that you get laid while looking like a skinny old hag”, best confirms what many women have at some point suspected: there is no point at which our bodies, or our appearances, will ever be acceptable.
Certainly not by patriarchal beauty standards.
Because patriarchy isn’t interested in what body size women are.
It’s a system designed to remind us no matter how thin, fat, curvy, young, old or conventionally “beautiful” we are, we will never be enough. It ensures we feel worthless and are consequently more desperate, and grateful, for any small scrap of attention or sexual validation a man will bestow on us.
This is why the goalposts continue to move each time we near them.
Even women who appear to tick off the patriarchy’s impossibly exhaustive and unforgiving list of beauty and body ideals – women with great genetics and access to the best cosmetic surgeons, personal chefs and trainers – still aren’t immune to its attacks.
They’re regularly on the receiving end of being told they look “fake”, “overdone”, or that they’re vapid; threatened their “looks will fade” (the implication being they’ll be worthless to men once this happens).
Perhaps this all sounds a little depressing. Infuriating, even. But I find it incredibly emancipating.
And it’s not because I’m gay. Even straight women should take heart at the knowledge that for some men – largely the ones who don’t view women as equals, but as decorative objects adorning the shelves of the halls they walk through – you will never be enough.
That’s not a prison sentence; it’s a Get Out Of Jail Free card.
Sacrificing your enjoyment of food and dedicating your existence to renovating your appearance and mercilessly picking yourself apart in front of the mirror won’t qualify you for entry into their world, anyway.
It will, however, distract you from stepping into your power and living unapologetically on your own terms – an idea that threatens and terrifies men like this (also, incidentally, the reason they’re obsessed with tearing self-confident women down).
Women aren’t born hating our bodies. We learn to, via a culture that profits from our disenfranchisement and a diet industry run by men dedicated to upholding it (the CEOs of Noom, Slimfast, MyFitnessPal and Jenny Craig are all – you guessed it – men).
And this is actually great news. Because it means we can unlearn it, too.
