Body Talk

by Kelly Jensen

  It was the chin hair that made me feel embarrassed and ashamed and worried about what people might think of me.

  I would never have known if you didn’t say something just now, my friend said to me. Both about the hair and the worry.

  Her voice was sincere, and I knew she wasn’t lying, because she never once turned to watch me as I performed my tweezer ritual. We didn’t go deeper into that conversation, but the next morning, I spent a little less time plucking my hair at her kitchen window, and the day after, even less time still.

  It took another year for me to tell my doctor I wanted to get off the birth control. For all it was doing to help my skin look great, the hormones in the pills made me less well in other parts of my physical and mental health. I swung from mood to mood between breaths and struggled with painful headaches and cramps prior to my period; these were things I’d never experienced before toying with my body’s natural hormonal composition. While forgoing birth control isn’t an option for all who struggle with PCOS, it was an option for me, and it was one I realized I needed to take. The symptom-by-symptom method of managing the illness was too much work and made the things about my body that functioned fine do exactly the opposite.

  My skin is still clear, and my chin hair still grows in every day.

  I regularly think about the woman who dyed her chin hairs. The picture she shared on that forum I found nearly ten years before showed a close-up of the green hairs, which had grown out from prickly shards to softer, baby-fine strands. She noted how hard it was at first to make peace with this part of herself, but when she did, she realized that if people were going to stare, she would make it worth their while—and hers. She wondered if someday her chin hair would be long enough for her to make tiny little braids.

  I’m not that comfortable with my own chin hair, and I’m not sure I’ll ever stop thinking about the sharp black hairs that poke up every day. But what I have done is stopped making preparations for my daily ritual and stopped worrying about how my face might look in the morning.

  Instead, I look myself in the mirror every day. I pay attention to my eyes, noticing when they’re more blue than their normal green. To my eyebrows and how I’d like to shape them. To my lips and the Cupid’s bow made to rock red lipstick. To the spray of freckles across my skin and the larger ones that stand out. To the way my jaw changes shape depending upon the time of the month and how hydrated I am. To the pink flush on my cheeks, if I’ve spent any time outside in the sun recently.

  If someone wants to stare at the chin hairs I missed or skipped or ignored, I can only hope that they’re staring at those things, too.

  They all help to make up who I am.

  How and why do tattoos stay on our skin?

  Whether or not you have or want a tattoo, the mechanics behind them are fascinating. Tattoos, done either by machine or by hand, are made by needles that pierce the epidermis (the outer layer of skin). The epidermis is constantly shedding and is replaced by more skin cells from deeper within that layer.

  Tattoo needles enter the second skin layer, called the dermis. This layer of skin contains things like your blood vessels, hair follicles, and glands. Because tattoo needles damage the dermis, the body responds by sending white blood cells to heal the wound. But since the ink pigment is too big to be absorbed by the white blood cells, it stays on that layer of skin permanently. This means that it becomes a part of your skin, and it’s subject to the same sorts of things your skin is: stretching, shrinking, wrinkling, and more.

  Removing tattoos is possible, though it’s far more challenging than getting one. Removal involves a laser that homes in on a single pigment and breaks it up; this allows white blood cells to perform their normal duty of flushing out foreign elements from the body. It might take several treatment sessions to rid the body of all the ink pigment, and even after several sessions, the tattoo may not be removed entirely.

  Visible Scar Club

  by D. M. Moehrle

  1. Adults are too polite. Kids, still growing their sense of what the world is supposed to look like, notice any deviation. They always ask, What happened to you? What happened to your face?

  When I was a kid, other kids asked me this relentlessly. We moved over and over again throughout my childhood, so I got to answer the question on every new playground, in every new cafeteria. To be scarred on your face is to be visibly and irrevocably separated from the norm in a way that is impossible to hide and that draws eyes in—or, at least, that’s how I have felt.

  The strangest feeling is when someone doesn’t ask directly—when I hear, somewhere behind me, a small voice asking, “What happened to her face?”

  2. “Do you want to know,” the Joker asks, “how I got my scars?”

  3. Now that I’m an adult, my friends tell me the scars are hardly visible. But that is not what bothers me. What I struggle with is that even though people say they don’t notice, I notice my difference every day in every reflective surface. There isn’t a day that passes when I don’t look, pause, feel grotesque, feel alone, feel invisible, or feel something regarding my facial scars. The human eye always seeks out what is different. My eyes see the marks on my face where I was mauled by a dog before I was old enough to remember.

  It’s not what people like to hear. They want a story of survival and preternatural bravery. They want anyone who has such a visible indicator of their past to be a poster child.

  4. In movies and books, scars denote men who are villains and women who are victims. Sometimes writers flip the script—the tragic male hero with his “horrible” scars, the evil female character whose scars indicate her untrustworthiness. In 2017’s Wonder Woman, the female-led superhero movie I’d been waiting years for, the villain is Dr. Isabel Maru, also known as Dr. Poison. She wears a half mask to cover what we later see are significant scars on her jaw. In interviews, the actress who played Dr. Maru, Elena Anaya, spoke of the possibility that her character’s injuries were a result of self-experimentation. In the middle of a movie apparently about female empowerment, one of the villains is a woman defined by her disfigurement. Her scars are shorthand for her evil.

  5. The older I get, the less comfortable I feel speaking in absolutes. Saying things like “Everyone wants to be beautiful.” I have no right to speak for everyone. Similarly, I can’t speak for everyone with a facial difference. What I know is that beauty is particularly prized in our society and that those of us with facial differences rarely meet the criteria for beauty.

  I felt bad when I was a teen and realized that I would never be a model, not due to height (though I am short!) or body type (though I’m not thin enough to be a traditional model!), but because of my face. Never mind that I didn’t aspire to be a model. The inability to choose that career path if I’d wanted to made me sad. I wanted all the choices to be mine, and I didn’t want a choice removed because of something that had happened to me, something I couldn’t help. Believe me, I know how that sounds.

  The teasing and the staring never got to me. The lack of choice left me wondering what might have happened, if only.

  6. And then there are the objects of pity. In books like Wonder, written by a woman without a facial difference who was inspired by her son gawking at a stranger (a book that later became a movie starring an actor with no facial difference in a large amount of prosthetics), the person with the facial difference doesn’t matter except in terms of what they might represent to the “normal.” The poster child. These pieces of entertainment ask us, Isn’t it brave to be alive while looking so grotesque? Don’t the disfigured have so much to teach us after all?

  Mask was the movie of my era, a grittier and more realistic story about a real boy named Rocky Dennis, whose face was distorted by a rare condition. Mask, with a bravura performance from Cher as Rocky’s drug-addicted, biker-gang-member mother, shied away from the after-school-special stereotypes but still tried to convey the same messages as
all the other inspirational movies about people “overcoming” differences: don’t judge people on their appearance, people with disabilities are inspirational, and everyone should aspire to live in the moment.

  Mine is not a story of inspiration. I’m not here to make people feel better about themselves. I don’t live in the moment. I’m just getting through life, like everyone else.

  7. It’s easy for me to go about my day as a supposedly average person. I enjoy privileges as a cis white woman, and aside from the scars, I have no visible disability. Still, I instinctively look at the camera with my “good side.” Or I put my chin in my hand to cover the scar on my jaw. I want to be unmarked. I want to forget.

  A desire to be beautiful is what makes us diet, wear makeup, get surgery, hide away, expose ourselves. We work at the business of beauty. We try our hardest. We want to look in the mirror and see the version of ourselves that will stop traffic, stop time, stop the feeling that we aren’t good enough from welling up inside. But in most cases it seems like beauty isn’t a choice. People are born with certain features, and some features go in and out of fashion. Things can be accentuated, exaggerated. But the widest range of us are just—average. It’s what makes us hunger to look at beauty and want it so badly for ourselves. I feel locked out from being truly beautiful, and that makes me feel both ridiculous and incredibly human.

  8. The opening sequence of Mommie Dearest, a film that is a cult classic, a camp masterpiece, a horror-drama, and a tragedy all in one, shows us Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford torturing herself for beauty. She scrubs her face with boiling water, then plunges it into a bowl of ice. She applies creams and serums. Throughout the film, Joan is haunted by the awareness that she is growing older and, in her mind, less attractive. Without her beauty, who is she? Just a child abuser who can’t force the world to conform to her need for control and order. Without our looks, do we have anything to offer the world? Joan didn’t think so, and she grew more and more angry and twisted as a result.

  We all have ugliness inside us—that much I’m comfortable saying as an absolute. Envy, pride, anger. We’ve been trained by the media to expect people’s exteriors to reflect their interiors, but in real life they rarely do. If you looked at the scars on my face and pegged me as a comic book villain, you’d be wrong—I don’t have any plans to destroy Gotham.

  9. Here’s something inspirational: it turns out most people are too wrapped up in themselves to notice you. My friend with a facial port-wine stain would often try to cover it with makeup, until they gradually realized few people noticed it in the first place. When the Joker takes off his makeup and disguises himself as a policeman in The Dark Knight, no one recognizes him despite the visible scars on either side of his mouth. At a certain point, the kind of person who will stare at your differences is the same kind of person who stares at wheelchairs and crutches, babies having too much fun, elderly people moving slowly, and anything else they deem outside the norm—as if that weren’t subjective, as if they define what is and isn’t right in the world.

  10. These days, when a child stares at me, when I hear the faint “What happened to her face,” I ignore the embarrassed parent, look directly at the child, and tell them I was bitten by a dog as a kid, but I’m OK now.

  I can see them digesting this information, taking in a new fact about the world and putting it in their brain for later. I can’t tell them to be kinder or to be unafraid or to react a certain way when they see visible differences; I can only let them see me and my normalcy, and hope they take that out into the world with them.

  Marked at Birth by Libby VanderPloeg

  You’ve likely heard the terms body positivity and fat positivity.

  You’ve also likely heard how important it is to love your body, no matter the shape or size. But hearing these things and believing them are different. It can be confusing and downright challenging, especially because our culture prizes a specific set of (often unattainable) race- and gender-specific physical attributes.

  There is certainly value in loving your body. And there is absolutely value in discussing, expressing, and celebrating your body shape and size. But getting to the point of accepting your body as it is takes work, and some days it’s easier than others.

  This section digs deep into the various shapes a body can take, as well as what it means to grapple with contradicting emotions and messages about loving—or not loving—what your body looks like.

  FIFTY SWIMSUITS

  by Julie Murphy

  Fat people love being in water. It’s science.

  OK, well, you shouldn’t actually quote me on that. But I can say with absolute certainty that every single fat person I know loves swimming and being in the water. The social aspects of going swimming, however, can be a totally different story.

  Having been a fat kid, I fondly remember the magical time in my life when I was too young to care about what I looked like in a swimsuit. I spent countless hours in pools, running through sprinklers, and even splashing around in a refreshing summer rain in my swimsuit.

  Anything that could potentially involve water was top priority for this little chunky girl. I wasn’t concerned with how I had to wiggle around to get swimsuits over my tummy or how the selection of swimsuits for bigger girls was limited in color and design. I only cared that I could get my tush down the Slip ’N Slide or could cannonball into the deep end with the rest of them.

  And then something happened. My sister grew out of her leopard-print rainbow swimsuit and passed it down to me. To my four- or five-year-old eyes, this was a sacred moment. I’d coveted this particular swimsuit for years, and finally, the leopard-print rainbow torch would be passed on to me. It was the coolest swimsuit I’d ever owned, and I was in love. I felt like a freaking Olsen twin. For the first time in my life, I felt cool and maybe even a little bit dangerous. I felt elegant too, like a ballerina or a gymnast. I pranced around our house in that swimsuit year-round until the day I outgrew it, which came way too soon.

  As my body became drastically different from those of my peers, I quickly turned into the girl who showed up at pool parties and “forgot” to bring her swimsuit. Friends’ moms would offer to loan me something of theirs or shorts and T-shirts belonging to dads or older brothers, but not only was I unable to bring myself to get into a pool in front of other people, I also could not admit why that was. If I told my friends I was scared of them seeing my body, they might know I was fat, and if they knew I was fat, they’d all reject me forever, right? (What is it about clothing that makes us think no one could possibly imagine what’s hiding underneath? Trust me. No one who has ever interacted with me in my entire life has looked at me and thought, Hmm, I bet there’s a thin woman hiding underneath that dress. I know that now, of course, but hey, I never said logic was my strong suit throughout adolescence.) And so I spent much of middle school and high school (in Texas!) with my Lane Bryant jeans (which, I swear to God, came up to my boobs) rolled up to the knees and my feet in the pool while all my classmates and friends dived and splashed around me.

  My swimsuit anxiety continued on into my early twenties, but a few times here and there I allowed myself the mercy of saying “Fuck it” and raced in and out of a pool before anyone could see my cottage cheese thighs. I wore T-shirts every once in a while, even though they weighed me down in the water and did nothing to hide my legs, the part of my body I was most ashamed of. I remember lying in bed as a teenager and praying for smooth legs. I could live with being fat if only I could have smooth legs, free of cellulite. That, I believed, would change everything. Like I’d have the perfect legs and suddenly my whole life would fall into place, because obviously the only thing standing between me and my wildest dreams were my chunky thighs.

  Two things changed for me in my midtwenties: (1) I slowly realized that hating my body allowed the patriarchy to control me (I hated my body, but I hated authority even more), and (2) I began working for plus-size ret
ailers and was inundated with fat bodies every day. FAT. PEOPLE. EVERYWHERE. Fat people on ad campaigns. Mannequins shaped like fat people. Fat people in fitting rooms, asking for help with zippers or bra measurements or opinions. Fat coworkers.

  At first, I felt really disgusted by other fat people. I thought maybe I knew something they didn’t. I knew the truth: that fatness was a temporary state, and any effort to try to make myself comfortable or—gasp!—happy was a Band-Aid on a very fat problem. I cringed at the sight of other people’s rolls and bulges. But exposure therapy is real, y’all! And the more fat people I saw, the more normalized fat bodies became to me. Not just normalized, but glorified! Suddenly, I was finding fat people attractive and interesting and even enviable. Not only had the patriarchy taught me to despise my own body, but it had done so by putting only a very specific type of body on a pedestal: white and thin. Television, movies, magazines. They’d all sold me the same lie, and I’d bought into it for way too long.

  I hesitate to say I’ve learned to love my body. Loving my body is a new challenge every day, and sometimes I succeed, while other times I don’t. But since I’ve been making a conscious effort to love my body, I’ve had the great fortune of reintroducing myself to so many things I loved as a child that were taken from me as I grew up. Those things range from exercise to travel to selfies to food and beyond, but the thing that brings me some of my truest joy is purchasing swimwear.