Everybody (Else) Is Perfect

by Gabrielle Korn

  “Oh, I’ve seen him in mine before, too,” said Julia, who is—like my aforementioned college friend—someone I loom over.

  Despite our difference in height and weight, my sister and I have grown into the same shape, which has magnified for me the remarkable difference in how we view ourselves and each other. We once tried on the same pair of leather pants, and they stretched identically across our stomachs, each of us insisting that the pants looked great on the other one and awful on us. I could see that they were pulling on us in the same way; I loved the way the material clung to her—I thought it looked sexy, and I was jealous. We both bought the pants and then admitted to each other years later that we got rid of them shortly thereafter.

  A so-called good feminist in today’s world thinks that bodies in their natural state—cellulite, rolls, stretch marks, and all—are perfect. It’s almost like someone forgot to tell us to include ourselves. Or maybe we’re so used to hating the things that we’re suddenly supposed to celebrate that it’s simply easier to start with everyone else. For decades, women’s media discussed our appearance as a problem to be solved, with fashion and beauty being the solution. It’s a simple formula: tell the reader they are doing something wrong, dangle a solution to an issue they didn’t realize they had, make them feel just inferior enough to need an article, and then a product, to fix them. And in the alleged digital feminist revolution of the early 2010s, there was a new layer: insist that the readers are perfect while you make them feel broken. Call them badass babes and then tell them what jeans will flatter their tummies. It was the same old story, just packaged differently.

  Now, though, the stories readers click on the most are the ones that subvert that oh-so-privileged thin/white/straight/cisgender identity. And in fact, the most popular image from my last New York Fashion Week at Nylon was a photo of a black woman with a bedazzled prosthetic leg. It got over six thousand likes within two hours. Young women are so supportive of other people’s differences that I get the chills thinking about it. No matter where my career takes me, my plan is to inundate the world with beautiful differences to celebrate until we all have the strength to turn that support inward, or until it just seeps in like osmosis, counteracting everything we’ve previously absorbed and accepted as true.

  6 Happy Weight

  Like most millennials and Gen Zers, I was taught growing up that commercial beauty standards aren’t realistic. We learned in class about how magazines intentionally altered photos of women, and about the ways the advertising industry lied to us regarding what people should look like in order to incentivize us to spend money. In high school I remember wanting to buy a shirt that said “Fuck Your Beauty Standards,” but my mom wouldn’t let me, not because of the sentiment but because of the word “fuck.” That is to say that I am part of a generation that is well versed in the language of the beauty myth, in the idea that Western feminine beauty ideals rest heavily on heteronormativity, sexism, racism, and misogyny, and that these ideals attempt to distract women with an obsession over our appearances so that we remain second-class citizens. But when it comes to our own lives and what we say to ourselves when no one else is listening, we all still have a long way to go. To paraphrase what one friend said to me—a woman who has a very successful career in finance—we know beauty is a myth, but we still subscribe to it. And another, a queer writer known for brilliant feminist hot takes, said to me that she understands and supports body positivity but only as it applies to other people.

  It’s as though the intellectualizing of body politics isn’t enough to conquer the dominant cultural messaging we’re constantly barraged with. It’s especially not enough when that messaging is validated by real-life personal experiences—like how people talk to you about your body, like the love you receive. It’s one thing to objectively understand that your value is independent of how thin you are, but when people around you still struggle to disentangle thinness from attractiveness, it’s hard to keep in mind.

  In few instances is this more apparent than when we date: there is an urgency to be skinny and fit when single, which is quickly abandoned once a relationship is defined. Just about everyone, myself included, gains weight at the beginning of a relationship. The phenomenon has been fully studied and documented, and a quick google of “happy weight” or “relationship weight” gives you not just a definition but tons and tons of tips for how to avoid it. For me, though, putting on pounds wasn’t just a happy nuisance. It was the fact that I lost weight to get in a relationship in the first place that got me in trouble.

  When you go hungry, you’re telling yourself, simply, that your body doesn’t need food to survive, but the drive to do so is indicative of something larger. In many ways, an eating disorder, or compulsive dieting, or whatever you want to call it, is a metaphor for a suppression of emotional needs, too. Thinness, then, was idealized for me because it represented not having needs—not just nutritional ones but the need for support from other people. As someone who has always been obsessed with the idea of being totally independent, this, in a twisted way, was the embodiment of what I thought the shape of my life was supposed to be.

  It makes a lot of sense when you think about the version of the self that people try to present during courtship: for many, the most attractive others are the ones who appear to need the least from us, which is ultimately a projection about what we might need from them. For a long time, I was afraid to need anything from anyone—so I picked people who had nothing to give me, anyway. I’ve seen my friends do this, too. And how many times have you reined in your own neediness in the beginning so as not to scare someone away? As women there is so much pressure to appear chill, to not catch feelings too soon. Then once you lock it down, it’s safe to express what you need—and, if we’re to continue the metaphor, safe to eat enough. We gain weight in the comfort of a defined relationship, trusting that under those circumstances we can express our full spectrum of needs without scaring someone off.

  A lot of straight women I’ve talked to about happy weight are under the assumption that this isn’t a problem for queer women—that a woman wouldn’t need to try to be skinny to be more attractive to other women. There’s a certain amount of cultural fantasy about what it’s like when there are no men around, as though we exist in a vacuum. If only!

  My senior year of college, when I was fully immersed in a bubble of queer body positivity, I developed a major crush on my boss at Babeland. It had been a few years since I came out, and I’d gained back the weight I’d lost the summer that I started dating Lucy. But despite the activist circle I was running around in, I felt my own shape was bad, and wrong, and I was desperate for her to like me back despite what I saw as my flaws. So falling for her at twenty-one was the gym every day, no carbs / no dairy until she was in my bed. Her name was Avery, and she was twenty-eight. Once she loved me all that effort was quickly replaced by potato chips standing up in the kitchen; vegan chili spooning on the couch; beer sitting on the floor. We talked for hours and snacked on salty things, and the hip bones she’d grabbed on to so tightly started to fade into surprising new pillows perched at my sides. The calculated discipline of constant, mild hunger and sore muscles took a back seat to the magic urgency of the present. It was such a relief.

  Despite our age difference we had a lot in common: radical politics, a love of feminist punk music, earnest enthusiasm for community activism, bad jokes. She met my family and got along with them instantly. Over the next two semesters she gradually moved in with me, and I was the happiest I’d ever been.

  Despite my internship, my prospects for employment were looking pretty grim. I’d applied to over fifty different editorial assistant jobs and didn’t hear back from any of them until someone wrote to me and said, “Sweetie, there’s a typo in your resume.” I was equal parts ambitious and underqualified. I was even turned down for the office manager position that had opened up where I was interning. Finally, it turned out that one of the Feminist Press’s authors, who ran an online
magazine about women’s issues in the basement of the abortion clinic she owned, was looking for an editorial assistant, and I got the job.

  The day before I graduated, my grandma—my dad’s mom—died. By that point she’d had Alzheimer’s for about ten years, and the illness had made her into the sweet old lady she never was when I was growing up. (I first learned about the Holocaust, and survivors, as a kid from my parents as justification for why she said such bizarrely hurtful things to me, like telling me I was ugly to “ward off the evil eye.”) But with dementia she was all high-pitched giggles and childlike wonder—her greatest crime was wandering into a neighbor’s yard to pick flowers. She’d descend into frustrated confusion, but the meanness was gone, as though without her memories there wasn’t anything to be angry about.

  Both my grandparents had been in a nursing home in Boston, about four hours north of where they’d lived in Forest Hills, Queens. They went there a few years after my grandmother got sick because my grandfather, who was going blind, tried to kill himself (he’d lost his sight, she’d lost her mind, “What was there to live for?”). They’d kept their house, though, and when she died that spring, it was empty. It was perfect, if morbid, timing: I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to live in the city on my new starter-job wages. My grandparents’ old house seemed like the perfect solution. My two sisters soon also decided to move in. My parents were happy we’d all be together, and my grandfather was thrilled. He didn’t know I was bringing a girlfriend. At this point he was still asking me why I never had a boyfriend, and my consistent reply was, “What do I need a boyfriend for?”

  We were extremely privileged to have the opportunity to live in NYC so cheaply. The expenses of the house were equivalent to sharing a tiny room in Bushwick (NYC was very different in 2011), but it was a house, in a quiet neighborhood, with my sisters and girlfriend instead of strangers as roommates. Living there right after college is one of the reasons why I was able to spend a few years in assistant roles and freelance writing without taking a side job in the service industry like many people have to do. Entry-level publishing jobs at that point did not pay enough to support a comfortable life in New York without another job or other financial support (I have to assume that most people are on their parents’ payroll while making certain salaries and living in certain neighborhoods, or they have spousal support), which means people who make it in the industry usually come from a certain economic class. It’s gotten better—entry-level jobs where I work now pay nearly twice what they did when I was starting out. It’s still not enough to be super comfortable, but it’s enough to get by. If we hadn’t been able to live there, I’m not sure if I would have become an editor at all.

  So we all moved in, and Avery and I adopted a dog from a local rescue, an elderly five-pound poodle/bichon mix with a sweet little lopsided trot. We named her Kimberly. We were pretty far away from the city and all of our friends, but we were set up for domestic bliss. I had had other girlfriends before—many—but this was the first time I really understood the difference between dating and a serious relationship. It wasn’t just that we did everything together; our lives became intertwined.

  She wanted to get married and have kids, but I insisted I was too young. Even though I was planning on spending the rest of my life with her, I knew there was something inappropriate about getting married right out of college. Gay marriage wasn’t legal yet, anyway, which I was secretly relieved about. It was a built-in reason to put it off. On her thirtieth birthday we got a domestic partnership as a compromise. I wore a short purple lace dress to the courthouse, and Julia took iPhone photos of us in the driveway when we returned. In the photos, we’re holding both Kimberly and the partnership certificate.

  A lot of really wonderful things happened in our partnership. We took trips to new places, we worked together to rehabilitate Kimberly, and we continued to do activism together, organizing the NYC Dyke March and hosting events at our house. We had our own private relationship language, things no one else would understand. We supported each other through deaths on both sides of our families. We were best friends.

  And for a while, that was enough for me. But… I was so young when we started dating. I’d overestimated my readiness for something so serious, mistaking my college escapades for actual experience. Meanwhile, she’d had her entire twenties to date people and figure out what she wanted and needed. I had no idea on either front.

  Because of the age difference, our friends were all in different life places, too, and we spent summers going to her friends’ weddings and then, soon after, baby showers. I was welcomed into these major life events with open arms, but the result was that I never really got to feel like I was in my early twenties. I never got to be directionless, or question my own future. I felt pressure to know what I wanted from life, when the truth was that I had no idea. I was pretending to be on par with people in their early thirties, which in hindsight I so clearly wasn’t. While my peers were out getting wasted and making mistakes, I was meeting babies. I was growing resentful without realizing why.

  I also had this feeling like we were perpetually just waiting for the next hard thing to pass before we could enjoy our lives. She just needed to quit her job or start a new one or go back to school or get past someone’s stressful wedding or funeral; we just needed to move or get a new car or go on vacation, and then after that we could be happy. At some point I realized the common denominator wasn’t the events themselves, but the way we were approaching them: there was always something on the horizon preventing us from being able to be okay, and once that event happened, there would be another. I was hardly ever in the moment. We were living for a future that would never come to fruition.

  But the thing that broke me was that she stopped wanting to be physically intimate. No reason fully articulated but that she just didn’t want to. When I tried to talk to her about it, she reacted with defensiveness and would lash out. I was already coming from such a hurt place in these confrontations that it was easy for her to make me cry. She told me that my disappointment about sex stressed her out and made her want to do it even less. I wondered if maybe it was an age-difference thing, and I also wondered if maybe I was just deeply unattractive.

  I needed to be intimate to feel connected to her, but there was no room to express it. So as a frantic solution I stopped eating meals again, as though I didn’t need anything at all. I went to bed earlier and earlier, usually alone. My stomach flattened out again, legs became insect-like, even elbows became somehow sharper. I was hungry for her affection but also for my own sense of joy and fulfillment. I tried to re-create the manic thinness of our courtship, when the air was so heavy with sexual tension I couldn’t eat. It didn’t make a difference, but it was something I could control, unlike her desire for me, which I didn’t realize actually had nothing to do with the shape of my body.

  Once, I told her that I’d given up carbs so she’d be attracted to me again, and she told me not to blame that behavior on her. We’d never talked about my fluctuating weight before.

  “Don’t you think it’s problematic that you need sex to feel good about yourself?” she said another time, not really a question but an accusation. All our communication about the issue started to take the same shape. I’d pretend to not need anything and hold my feelings in until I couldn’t anymore, and then I’d blurt something out; she’d say I was being dramatic or something else hurtful and unrelated; I’d cry; she’d get annoyed at me for crying. This went on for years. It didn’t occur to me to leave. I simply thought, This is what my life is going to be.

  In early 2013 I started working at Refinery29 and suddenly had a very demanding job with which to busy myself. My commute from Forest Hills to downtown Manhattan was about an hour and a half, so I was rarely home. I was grateful for the long hours and the work I’d usually always need to finish up at home; it was a welcome distraction and I threw myself into it completely.

  I knew that Avery was proud of my success and admired me for it,
but it was also a source of tension; she was going back to school to finish her degree in economics, so our lives started going in very different directions. When I went to Nylon a year and a half later, my schedule filled up even more with networking events, and that created further conflict: during one terrible fight in particular she revealed a worry that I’d rather do drugs with my “new Nylon friends” than spend time with her. (For the record, I’ve never done anything like that, but it was indicative of her worst fears about what my life was turning into—and maybe a reflection of how distant I was being. In the blank space where open communication should have been, it was easy to think the worst.)

  Four years after we moved into his old house, my grandfather died, and our relationship was dying, too. We’d lost the ability to communicate with each other, and I felt completely and totally alone, even though we shared space and friends and had become like family. My older sister’s boyfriend drove the four of us up to Boston for the funeral. In the back seat Avery squeezed my hand and with a face full of tears she whispered, “Try to remember that you love me, okay?”

  Driving back from his memorial service in a torrential downpour, we got rear-ended on the highway. My neck snapped backward and forward, and I had the feeling I was being jolted awake from a deep sleep. I reentered my body as the car leapt forward, suddenly aware of the pain I’d been ignoring, no longer able to hide from it.

  Most women grow up learning that real relationships are hard. But for me that mantra had become an excuse to remain unhappy. Love takes work, but we weren’t doing the work required to maintain a long-term relationship. We were avoiding it, until the issues got bigger and bigger. Sex, of course, wasn’t the real issue but a symptom of a larger incompatibility, and I’d let my resentment become like a third person in the room. It was turning me into someone I hated: mean, impatient, withholding. I had felt so sad for so long that it became unsustainable and was replaced by anger and numbness. I felt no motivation to try to save the relationship. It was over.