by Lindy West
We are expected to keep quiet about the men who prey upon us, as though their predation was our choice, not theirs. We are expected to sit quietly as men debate whether or not the state should be allowed to forcibly use our bodies as incubators. They call us “hosts” and then apologize clumsily, and we are supposed to say thank you? We are expected not to complain as we are diminished, degraded, and discredited.
We are expected to agree (and we comply!) with the paternal admonition that it is irresponsible and hyper-emotional to request one female president after centuries of male ones—because that would be tokenism, antidemocratic and dangerous—as though generations of white male politicians haven’t proven themselves utterly uninterested in caring for the needs of communities to which they do not belong. As though white men’s monopolistic death grip on power in the United States doesn’t belie precisely the kind of “identity politics” they claim to abhor. As though competent, qualified women are so thin on the ground that even a concerted, sincere, large-scale search for one would be a long shot and any resulting candidate a compromise.
When, finally, an inspiring group of women is running for president, we are told to still wring our hands over who is likable, who is feminist enough, who is too feminist, or if nominating a woman is a risk worth taking when the alternative is more Donald Trump. Let’s take another look at Uncle Joe.
When a woman gets angry, the typical response is: She didn’t understand what happened. She misunderstood. She’s bleeding out of her whatever. She shouldn’t have taken all that sexual harassment, or her boss’s hand on her ass, so personally. It was just mixed signals! Locker room talk! She shouldn’t blow it out of proportion. He was raised in a different time—nothing to be angry about. But what was that different time when being treated with zero bodily autonomy was nothing to be angry about, as if all our fathers and grandfathers were sexual predators? They weren’t. Men can choose how they treat us, and this is the world they choose. Frankly, not being angry would be irrational.
Feminism is the collective manifestation of female anger.
Men suppress our anger for a reason. Let’s prove them right.
Magic Isn’t Magic
Not to brag, but in 2015 I wrote a memoir called Shrill, and in 2016 Elizabeth Banks optioned it for television, and in 2017 Aidy Bryant signed on to play me, and in 2018 we actually wrote and shot Shrill, the show, a body-positive half-hour comedy by Hulu (STREAMING NOW!!!!) … and psych, suckers, yes to brag!! But only because this is a very wild thing to happen to a person and an exceedingly unlikely thing to happen at all (especially to me, an only quasisentient body pillow who DVRs Guy’s Grocery Games and whose favorite Dorito flavor is Spicy Sweet Chili—what!?), so it would almost be disrespectful not to brag about it, if you think about it.
Plus, women are conditioned from birth to downplay our intellectual abilities and professional accomplishments so as not to make men feel threatened or emasculated by us and detract from our true purpose, sex decoration, which makes bragging about my TV show in a season when many, many men tried to get TV shows and failed, an #act #of #resistance #AND #I #THINK #WE #CAN #ALL #AGREE #VERY #BRAVE. You’re welcome!
Four years ago, I had nothing but my brain, which is a cursed jelly (?) inside the top of my body that usually just says “Annihilate Doritos” over and over (unless I am asleep, in which case IT YELLS IT) and also makes sure I hold my pee in, usually. With the help of my productivity guru, Bo (full name Bo Ookadvancethatiwouldvehadtopayback), I managed to tame my skull goo long enough to produce an entire book, and now that book is a full fucking television show and I got to hug Daniel Stern because of it. I turned my brain into Daniel Stern in four years! Me! A straight-B student with both the body type and the complexion of one of those German sausages that look like a sausage’s ghost! (They’re called Weisswurst, by the way, a fact I found by googling “name of the pale sausage,” which is also what Lindy means in Dothraki.)
Based on my experiences in Hollywood with Hollywood people, show business is—to quote Benjamin Franklin—99 percent sushi meetings about stuff that will never happen and 1 percent perspiration. Because it’s hot in Los Angeles. In fact, it was over 100 degrees when I went for my first meeting with Liz—THAT’S WHAT I CALL HER—Banks, and I was manufacturing a truly medical amount of sweat. Liz’s waiting area has those spindly Eames molded fiberglass chairs (probably not even knockoffs) that are terrifying to fat people even though they look like dim sum spoons, and, as I waited, my huge wet ass created a perfect suction over the concave bowl of the chair so that when Liz’s assistant came to get me it went SSSLLLUUUUURRRRRRRP! Which is a great way to start a meeting when you are a fat-ass country mouse begging a movie star to believe in you a millions-of-dollars amount!
But anyway, it worked. So try it, I guess?
The process of writing a television show about your life is strange and in many ways very bad, involving questions such as “Does she fuck him without a condom because she’s stupid or because she hates herself?” and “What season should we have the dad die?” I cannot wholeheartedly recommend it, but if nevertheless you persist, be forewarned that a bulk of your time in the writers’ room will be spent begging the other writers not to include EVERY single humiliating detail about your ex that will imply you’re still thinking about him fifteen years later even though you dredged up that dead memory only because you needed an example of something really really dumb!!! (You will fail, and it will all go in there.)
But also, obviously, making Shrill, a body-positive half-hour comedy by Hulu streaming now, was one of the most magical, lucky, unreal experiences of my life. Not just because working on a set is very fun (it is) and our crew is a circus of warmhearted geniuses dedicated to excellence in all things (they are!) but because I got to make a real fucking TV show about a fat chick with a personality.
When I was doing press for Shrill the book—and even back when I was pitching it, actually—I always told people that I just wanted to write the book that I needed to read when I was 14, 15, 16 … 27, 28, 29 … 37. A book about a fat character you couldn’t help but fall in love with, who had a complex, dynamic life, who had sex and had fun and got to make mistakes that didn’t involve cake pops. When I was pitching the show to production companies and then to networks, I always said, “I want to make a show about a fat woman where at no point does she step on a scale, look down, and sigh.” I got to make that book, and I got to make that show, and literally every day strangers come up to me on the street and tell me it helped, a little or a lot. It helped me, too. That’s an accomplishment. But it’s not the solution.
Just squeezing through the very, very, very narrow doors of Hollywood—an infrastructure built in deep, sick ways around conventional white female beauty—feels like a triumph in itself. I am almost always the fattest person at the meeting. Just my presence changes people’s understanding of the ambition and capability of fat people. I know that my body in the room changes how people talk, which, eventually, may rewire how some of them think. TV executives and agents and managers and actors nod fervently when I say things like “It’s okay to be fat,” partly because they really do want to be good, to move into the future, to help, and maybe even to be free, but it’s also because body positivity sells now. Buying it is one thing; living it is another. (Here’s how you can tell we’re still at the starting line, not the finish: body positivity sells best when it’s skinny white models selling it.) I know what the Hollywood people eat for lunch, that the men eat more than the women, that when it comes to describing the protagonist of my TV series they contort and spasm before saying the word fat, if they can get it out at all. Usually it comes out as “You know … uh … plus … uh … b-b-b-b-b-b-b … uh … b-b-b-b-b-big-bigger … ladies [car peeling out].”
Yes, we got a show onto the air. But visibility isn’t justice.
Visibility didn’t change the fact that when I went to the doctor limping from an ankle injury, she suggested I try “stretching,” then let m
e know that Weight Watchers has an app now. I had to insist on an X-ray, which—after a couple months of limping procrastination on my part (HEY, I HAD A BOOK DUE)—revealed a bone spur stabbing me in my Achilles tendon. “Well, more of a giant bone shelf,” the podiatrist later told me. It will probably need surgery. The stretching had made it worse.
Visibility didn’t help all the fat people who’ve died from bariatric surgery complications or whose cancer symptoms were waved away as side effects of “poor lifestyle.” Ashley Graham wearing a size 12 on the cover of Sports Illustrated does jack shit for women who wear a size 36 and have nothing to wear to a wedding tomorrow. Or, God forbid, need a suit for a last-minute job interview, at which they may be considered lazier and less intelligent because of the size of their bodies.
Visibility didn’t help me at all the public events I’ve done where I’ve walked onstage—to talk about being fat—and discovered that the chairs were too narrow. Or all the photo shoots I’ve showed up to—to publicize my book or TV show about being fat—and discovered that none of the clothes fit, even if I’d sent my measurements months in advance. Visibility didn’t help me find a dress to wear to the premiere of my TV show about being fat—which is about being fat—and it didn’t help our wardrobe department find cute, fashion-forward looks for Aidy to wear on the show. They custom-made almost all of her clothes.
Yeah, I’m a witch and I’m hunting you, and so on, but catching you doesn’t liberate fat people any more than trapping one fox makes chickens immortal. This kind of witchcraft, unfortunately, isn’t magic.
One of the things you are asked to do to promote a television show is attend an event called the TCAs (Television Critics of America), an annual three-week conference during which networks present their new lineups to journalists from across the country. The idea, as I understand it (caveat: I DON’T) is to give critics who don’t live in LA or New York “access to talent”—i.e., imprison the staff of the Cleveland Scene in a hotel for three weeks and beat them about the head and neck with Topher Grace twelve to thirteen hours per day. In 2019, the event was at the Langham Huntington Pasadena, a sprawling daytime soap set where you need a cartographer, a boatswain, and a boatswain’s mate to find your room, they still have a landline next to the toilet, and dim sum costs fif-tee-hayght-doll-hairs. It is the best place I have ever been.
There were eight of us on the panel to present Shrill: Aidy, Liz, me, Ali Rushfield (our show runner), and four cast members: Lolly Adefope, John Cameron Mitchell, Ian Owens, and Luka Jones. Our panel was thirty minutes long (which would be tight for a panel of one person, let alone eight, six of whom are actors), followed by a portion literally called “scrum,” during which, TCA handlers explained, the reporters would be allowed to run at us and yell anything they liked. Alluring!
That morning, I flew a little too close to the sun with the snooze button and had to jog to hair and makeup. On the way, I rounded a corner and discovered the pee-drinking survivalist Bear Grylls perched on a mahogany side table like a little wood elf. I tossed him an acorn, and he granted me one wish (A THOUSAND MORE WISHES, BITCH!), and I slid into the greenroom just in time to watch George Clooney eat a breakfast burrito. He looks like shit in person, by the way. Repulsive. A true hog. Dr. Ruth was in the makeup chair next to mine. We held hands. (We didn’t.)
The journalists—maybe two hundred of them—sat at long banquet tables in a dim hotel ballroom, clacking away at their laptops. We were warned in advance that the crowd would be “chilly” and not to expect them to laugh at any of our jokes. We took the stage. They did not look up.
The first few questions covered the usual ground—”Why do you choose to use the word fat?” “How is the show different from the book?”—and we answered them with as much flair as we could in a largely silent room. Then a certain contingent of journalists took the wheel and steered us off the road and into an ideological culvert from which none of us would ever escape.
I believe the first to broach the topic was a Frenchman in the back. “Uh, Ee-leez-eh-beyth, yeu arh seuh be-yeuteh-fehll, uh, tell meee, why weuld yeu be drhown teu eh preh-dzhect lehk zees?”
The implication was pretty clear. Elizabeth. You are hot! Why would you give a shit about zees cochons gros?
Elizabeth fielded the question with poise and patience, explaining that the book resonated with her for many reasons and that any woman working in Hollywood has to deal with coercive expectations placed on her body. She told a story about her first-ever meeting with a Hollywood agent: “He told me I needed to get a boob job. I did not get a boob job, and I decided that I was going to be happy and comfortable with who I was.”
Liz tried to steer the conversation away from her body, talking about her ambitions as a director and her determination to create the kinds of roles for women—telling women’s stories—that she’d always wanted to play. Another man had a follow-up question about the boob job.
An older woman raised her hand and essentially rephrased the Frenchman: “But Elizabeth! You’re gorgeous! You’ve always been gorgeous! What could possibly interest you in a story like this?”
Then there were what felt like several more decades of variations on the question of Elizabeth’s hot body.
“You know,” Liz said eventually, “this was not the most interesting thing to me about this project and Lindy’s book.” Both the book and the show are about reproductive rights, women’s challenges in the workplace, and family, love, and friendship, and we’d actually succeeded in making a relatively radical piece of feminist art and bringing it into the mainstream, and here was a room full of people who had watched the show, and all they could think about was how much bigger and less desirable my body and Aidy’s body were than Liz’s.
Elizabeth Banks is the most successful female director of all time. She’s the thirtieth-highest-grossing actor of all time and the ninth-highest-grossing female actor of all time. She runs a company. We had literally just made a show about exactly this kind of monomaniacal reductionism.
Elizabeth, if you had gotten that boob job, would you have played with them? And could you describe what that might have been like?
Elizabeth! It seems odd that you’d choose this project rather than one where a beautiful woman takes doodies on fat people. Could you speak to that?
Then all two hundred journalists rushed the stage to ask Liz questions about Charlie’s Angels. I spent the rest of the day doing interviews with female journalists, each of whom apologized extravagantly about the latter part of the Q and A. It made me sad when I realized my genuine response: In the moment, those questions had barely even registered. I’ve been asked worse.
The society this culture created is well fortified. A few creepy men losing their jobs, a few women managing to clamber to the top—those things matter, but they don’t actually change how people think and behave on a large scale. Fuck, they don’t even change how people think and behave on a small scale toward those individual men and women.
The hardest truth to swallow isn’t that this cultural moment—the reckoning, the witches are coming, the last straw—is not a finish line but that there may be no finish line at all. Maybe we will have to fight forever. So be it. I have a thousand wishes.
The World Is Good and Worth Fighting For
You know that exquisite love you have for a person or a place? For me it’s my husband, Ahamefule, my best friend, vibrating with ideas and brilliantly talented, a talent once in a generation and on the brink of everyone knowing it, wise and principled, who is so annoying, who can lift a piano, who can lift me.
If we are walking from one place to another and we pass anything crotch height—say, a fire hydrant—Ahamefule pretends not to see it, walks right into it, and goes “HOHHHHHHHHHHHH” like it hit him in the nuts. We fight once a year. He is sensitive in the morning, so I am careful not to talk about bills until after 10:00 a.m., which makes for a quiet sort of dawn ritual: we wake up with the sun or because I am snoring, and we lie in bed for as long as
we can and we talk about only good stuff.
I also love my place, the Pacific Northwest, Seattle, the Olympic Peninsula, in whatever complex capacity stolen Klallam, Skokomish, and Duwamish land can be “mine.” When I am home, I can feel the decades of my mother and father’s lives, separate and together, the ground shaped by their feet, my understanding of the city shaped by the old family stories:
Late 1940s, my father, on his paper route in Madrona, when there’s an earthquake and a woman runs into the street, fully nude from the bath, screaming.
Early 1960s, my mother, second youngest of seven, flying out the door of their sardine-packed house at 55th and 12th, racing south on Roosevelt for some private peace at the library that’s still there on 50th. A decade later, same neighborhood, she’s living alone, long blond hair, and Ted Bundy murders a girl down the block in that cruel way men can take your streets from you.
Early 1950s, my father living in a storefront on 34th Ave S—it’s the Hi Spot now—with a pack of young dudes; he plays piano in a cocktail lounge downtown seven nights a week. Mid-1970s, my mother standing on top of Mount St. Helens, which she climbed, a summit that doesn’t exist anymore, a place that’s gone—or it’s dust and vapor now, maybe some of it is in Japan, some in Egypt, some still sifting down through the Atlantic. Same era, my father, husky, big black beard, leather briefcase, commuting on the ferry from Bainbridge Island, striding up Columbia or Cherry or James to the ad agency, wherever it was, probably greeting every person he passed; he knew everyone, and the city was small.
My dad is gone now and so is that Seattle, but walking in the places he walked, puffing up the same hills, turning the same corners, I feel him in the ridges and grooves of my city—we are close, superimposed, separated only by time, and what’s that? This is the only religion that I can relate to.