Everybody (Else) Is Perfect

by Gabrielle Korn

  At a party in the middle of a recent NYFW, I ran into an acquaintance who is an editor at another magazine. In coded words, we both admitted to feeling totally traumatized by having to watch skinny models walk runways all day, every day. She said, “I was just starting to feel okay with having flesh,” and we both laughed, a little bit sadly. I thought it was such a beautiful way to put it, because, really, when you try to lose weight, that’s what you’re battling: your own flesh.

  When I got home, I headed right for my bed. I was tired from the evening of fabulous events, but more than that, I was exhausted on an existential level from a lifetime of trying to survive in a world that seemed hell-bent on keeping women small, figuratively and literally. I felt like I’d been paying a toll to be successful, and that toll was taken from my body, draining me under the pretense of making me more powerful. And I was ready to take my power back.

  9 Entitled Millennial

  As a kid I didn’t really have celebrity crushes, until Bright Eyes.

  Conor Oberst in 2003–2007 embodied a kind of tortured androgyny that I found myself unreasonably drawn to. Formally a pretty levelheaded high schooler, I was suddenly ripping out pages of magazines, entranced by the way his T-shirt clung to his hip bones, dreaming of my hands in his asymmetrical hair. I don’t think I ever actually fantasized about having sex with him; it was a very innocent daydream that mostly involved kissing and spooning and sharing clothes. I learned how to play early Bright Eyes songs on the guitar, the ones from the late ’90s when he’s barely a teenager recording songs about girls in his bedroom on an 8-track. I bought an 8-track. Later Bright Eyes albums became more lush with instruments, more generous with harmonies, overall more sophisticated, and I imagined myself evolving alongside him. I trusted completely that if only we could meet, he’d feel the same way.

  In 2005 he released two albums at once: I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, which was catchy and folksy and romantic and heartbreaking, and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, which was dark and dancy and sexy. I was a sophomore in high school, and my life was positively transformed by these two records; in an overwrought, melodramatic way I felt seen by their duality, by the way they sounded so different but both contained pain and secrecy, truth and longing. I got his haircut, long bangs in the front and cropped short in the back. My best friend and I got tickets to see him play at Webster Hall, an eighteen-plus show, and somehow snuck in. He played Digital Ash all the way through, backlit so that he was just a thin glowing outline, even though we were in front leaning against the stage. The next show I went to was at a venue called City Hall, way more civilized with stadium seating, and he played songs from I’m Wide Awake while wearing a cowboy hat, all the lights on.

  “You’re looking skinny like a model with your eyes all painted black,” he sang in a slightly off-key whisper, not to me but also not not to me.

  Years went by. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, when I started sleeping with my roommate and my whole world was turning upside down and inside out, a friend claimed to have met Conor Oberst at a bar. We sat around the dorm kitchen smoking pot out of a hookah as she regaled us with the story. Apparently there was a dive on St. Mark’s Place right near Tompkins Square Park that he was known to frequent, though how everyone knew that except me was unclear. At any rate, she’d gone with the hope of catching a glimpse of him. She said Oberst had not only been there but bought her a drink, and then another, and then another, and then when she’d tried to leave, he became pushy and aggressive, she remembered. “He was a total asshole!” she said. By then my fandom had simmered, but it was still disappointing to hear that the shy, almost feminine man whose shaky voice had been the soundtrack to my adolescence was nothing but another jerk.

  Years later still, a commenter on xoJane, Joanie Faircloth of North Carolina, would accuse him of raping her when she was sixteen. Conor Oberst, who had sung anti-Bush songs in the early 2000s on late-night cable TV and in general been a beacon of male redeemability for emo-feminist teen girls everywhere, was suddenly tainted with controversy.

  He ended up suing Joanie for libel, which was very obviously totally outrageous and offensive: he was trying to silence her. I wrote about it and was contacted directly by his publicist, who said that in the trial everything would be cleared up. There was never a trial, though. Joanie issued a public apology retracting her accusation, and Conor released a statement accepting it. The story was used in the media as an example of how one person’s internet comments can affect someone’s entire reputation—a cautionary tale about false accusations.

  In hindsight, his angst, which he was known for, was always out of proportion to his privilege, but I had trusted it blindly. And there were other indie musicians I’d felt similarly about; when I was a senior in high school, at an indie rock show at the now-defunct Sound Fix Records in Williamsburg, the lead singer grabbed me from the front row and pulled me onstage, holding me tightly in his sweaty arms while he sang “Memories” by Leonard Cohen into my face:

  I walked up to the tallest and the blondest girl

  I said, look, you don’t know me now, but very soon you will

  So won’t you let me see

  I said won’t you let me see

  I said won’t you let me see

  Your naked body?

  After the last word, he cast me back into the crowd. Hearing the story the next day, my parents were horrified. It took me nearly a decade to empathize with their reaction. It was a thrilling moment, but I also know an adult man probably wouldn’t get away with doing that to a teenager today. There are certain male figures we were just told to believe in, to trust. Our rock gods. Our politicians. Our medical professionals. A cornerstone of reaching adult womanhood is realizing that this is a myth—that men, no matter what their profession or how deeply their work speaks to you, can be dangerous.

  As feminists, we fight to make the world safer for ourselves and each other. We’re taught to reclaim our time, to take what has been stolen from us. A big part of that is physical: our bodily safety, our access to spaces, the space we take up. It’s all connected. Thinking about the role the patriarchy plays in eating disorders, then, is a total mindfuck. Here we are, successful, smart women, feminists, perfectionists, usually, trying to be as small as possible.

  But is it smallness we’re chasing, or is it something else entirely? In Eating in the Light of the Moon, Dr. Anita Johnson references a societal imbalance of the masculine and feminine as the root of female disordered eating. Taught to value the masculine traits of linear productivity, rationality, and financial success, modern Western culture shuns traits of the divine feminine: emotion, intuition, relationships. Keenly aware of this loss but unable to pinpoint exactly what it’s a loss of, there’s a certain kind of woman who mistakes the emotional hunger for a literal one. She fills this void, then, with an obsessive fixation on food and, subsequently, tries to control the shape of her body, the dips and curves that mark it biologically female in a world that prioritizes masculinity.

  This is so common that an obsession with weight loss is considered a pretty standard part of being a woman. Most of us don’t call it an eating disorder. And maybe it’s not always one. There’s a notable difference between disordered eating and an eating disorder. But still: We say we’re too busy to have lunch, or too tired to eat breakfast. Or we’re just really into wellness right now and are trying Whole30, or are doing a juice cleanse, or a raw vegan diet. We’re flushing out the toxins, we’re cutting out dairy and carbs and alcohol; we heard something about nightshade vegetables and inflammation so we no longer eat anything red. We tie it to events: Fashion Week, wedding season, summer. The end result is the same: we take up less and less physical space. Sometimes it feels like the aesthetic goal is to be as tiny as possible without disappearing entirely—otherwise known as dying.

  A friend with a similar diagnostic history once said to me that at her worst, she knew her anorexia could kill her, but she didn’t care so l
ong as she died skinny. When you’re diagnosed with an eating disorder, you learn a lot about what it would take to kill you. Eating below seven hundred calories per day, for example, is when your body starts to shut down. Even if you don’t literally starve to death, you’re setting yourself up for fatal disease down the line. Like a heart attack.

  Hence, after the blood test results from my first visit came back, my doctor wrote me a prescription to get an EKG. She said that because of how much weight I’d lost, she had to make sure I didn’t have heart disease. I went alone in the middle of the workday. I always went to these appointments alone, embarrassed and not wanting to burden anyone with the situation that I felt I had created.

  I went to an urgent care clinic that just happened to have an EKG machine. I didn’t make an appointment. A young man took me in the back and sat at a computer while asking me routine intake questions about my medical history. It had been a very long time since I’d seen a male medical professional of any kind; all of my doctors were women. But I tried to trust it. It was 2017. It would be fine.

  But it wasn’t: After asking me if I was sexually active (I was), he gave me a weird lingering look and asked me if I had a boyfriend or a husband. He continued to stare when I clarified that I was gay, and then he told me to take all my clothes off for the test. He left while I did so, and then came back. I’d hastily tried to tie the gown over my chest, which made him laugh, a condescending scoff. He untied it and started attaching sensors to my bare torso.

  I’d learn later that you don’t have to be naked to get an EKG. Patients can keep their gowns on; in fact, they usually do, with whoever is administering the test moving the gown around in order to fix the sensors on.

  He told me to lie still. Placing the sensors around my bare chest, he loomed over me and asked, “So, do you ever date guys?”

  I said, “Why is that relevant?”

  He said, sounding annoyed, “It’s not. I’m just curious.” And then he said, “How long have you been with your girlfriend?”

  I said, “A few months, but I’m still not sure why that is relevant to this.”

  He reminded me to lie still. While he ran the EKG machine, a hot tear slid sideways out of my left eye. I was mortified but didn’t really have the words for why. I said nothing when he finished, waited until he was fully out of the room before shakily getting up and getting dressed. A woman came in with the results, and before she could tell me that everything looked fine, I blurted out what had just happened, beginning to cry. Her eyes grew wide, but the rest of her face remained neutral, hard to read. “I’m sorry that happened,” she said, and promised to tell her supervisor. Embarrassed and unsure what else to do, I fled, just about diving into a cab.

  A few minutes later my phone rang. It was the manager of the clinic calling to tell me it had all been a misunderstanding: the man operating the EKG had only meant to finish getting my medical history, she said. He was supposed to do it at the computer but to save time had completed the questions during the test. “Are you trying to tell me that on your intake form, it says, ‘Do you ever date guys?’ ” I shouted into the phone. She repeated, patronizingly, that it was all a misunderstanding. She told me she had daughters, and she understood why I could have misinterpreted his intentions. I said, “It was sexual harassment, and I think you know that.” She said she would call me back.

  My EKG results had been normal, but my experience wasn’t: in addition to his manipulating me into being unnecessarily naked, the line of questioning was, clearly, not procedure. He kept his job, though. Meanwhile the clinic promised to implement sensitivity training for all employees, to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. I had been a sacrificial lamb.

  This was April 2017. Just six months later, in October, Harvey Weinstein would be accused of sexual misconduct by nearly eighty women, and #MeToo would begin trending on Twitter, turning into a movement. In January 2018, Larry Nassar would be sentenced to 175 years in prison for decades of sexual misconduct while working as the doctor for the USA Gymnastics team. And in October 2018, in glaring defiance to the progress of the #MeToo movement, Brett Kavanaugh would become the second man accused of sexual misconduct to join the Supreme Court. It’s hard to imagine what the repercussions would have been for my EKG tech if he’d stripped me naked and interrogated me about my sexuality on an exam table just a few months later. I’d like to think it would be more than mandatory sensitivity training, but who knows?

  Like most people, I have dozens of stories about times men, and a few women, have treated me in a way that can be categorized as sexual misconduct. This was far from the worst one. But it was the first time someone who was actually supposed to be helping me did it. I had sought the help of a stranger and been met with predatory behavior, and then, when he was called out for it, he somehow persuaded his supervisor to try to gaslight me. I was already well versed in the language of abuse, so I was able to identify it immediately and hold my ground. I wondered about the young woman who Conor Oberst sued for libel. I felt like I couldn’t trust anyone with my body. Certainly not the men who worked at this healthcare clinic in Midtown. Not even, really, the doctor who had sent me there in the first place, even though I liked and respected her.

  As a teenager, not all my role models were indie dudes. Alongside my Conor Oberst shrine was a picture of Karen O, the lead singer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, triumphantly spitting beer from the stage over a mosh pit. I pored over Bitch by Elizabeth Wurtzel, underlining and dog-earing. I listened to Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill on repeat. I loved Camera Obscura and Feist and Azure Ray and the way their voices sounded mysterious and soft and powerful all at the same time (and, yes, the culture I had access to in the early 2000s was very white). I read Feministing.com, a blog started in 2004 that is largely credited with making feminism cool on the internet. My guitar case had a sticker that said “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” I had a T-shirt that said “Keep your laws off my body,” with a drawing of handcuffs, which got me sent to the principal’s office.

  Abstractly, being a strong feminist to me meant being in control of my body. But it wasn’t until I was an adult that I fully understood what that meant. When I lost weight, I wasn’t in control of my body—not really. It was a false sense of ownership. I was still following a rule created for me by patriarchy: be as small as possible. In order to protect myself and restore my agency, I needed to liberate myself from the definition of worth that had loomed over my entire life.

  * * *

  One morning in the spring of 2018, about a year later, I was bringing Kimberly back to Avery on the subway, because yes, we still do that. It was around noon in the middle of the week, and I was on a semicrowded downtown R, Kimberly in her carrier on my lap, which was unzipped so that she could rest her little paws and face on my arm. The train stopped between stations, and the doors between cars opened; a young white man in dirty, ripped clothes burst through them and began pacing up and down the car, asking people for money. When no one gave him any, he pointed to a cut on his forehead from which he was bleeding quite profusely and began screaming a story filled with racial slurs about a man who had allegedly hit him.

  He stopped in front of me and said, “I could ruin your day so easily, and you wouldn’t even care what happened to me.” I wordlessly pulled Kimberly closer to me, staring straight ahead, beyond him. He said, “You’re so fucking entitled.” And then he said, “Your dog has a better life than I do.” I pretended to not hear him. He moved on to the other end of the car, harassing other people. When the train stopped at the next station, he ran by me, wiping blood from his forehead onto Kimberly, who was fast asleep in my arms.

  It was my stop, too. No one would make eye contact with me. As I exited the train, I noticed there was a man talking to the train conductor through the window. He had been on a different car but had witnessed a similar incident with the same man. I walked up to them and presented my bloody poodle. I said, “He wiped his blood all over my dog.”
The train conductor said, “What would you like me to do?” And then started the engine and left. Out of the corner of my eye I suddenly noticed that the man in question was sitting on the benches, hood pulled up, watching me.

  I hurried to the top of the steps, desperate to be above ground. When I got to the top, I heard footsteps behind me, and there he was, in my face, shouting, grabbing my arms. I had my phone in my hands and he jumped on me, saying, “I’m going to take your fucking phone,” trying to pry my fingers open (mind you, I was also holding Kimberly). I started screaming at the top of my lungs. A woman came running over, shouting too. He scratched my chest, ripping my shirt open, and ran away.

  I had to clamp a hand over my mouth to stop screaming. The woman, who I suddenly realized was very young, said, “Sweetie, who was that? Was that your boyfriend?”

  I said, “I have no idea who that was,” and started to sob. I was shaking violently. I think she hugged me, but I’m not sure. She said, “Hold on,” and then she made a phone call, telling the person on the phone she was going to be late for her job interview because she just saw a woman get attacked. I said, “Oh my god, no, please go to your job interview.” She told me she was a nurse. She had long acrylic nails and a comforting Long Island accent. I loved her. I insisted she leave, that I was fine. She walked me to the nearest bodega, where with trembling hands I called 911, and then I texted Avery that she had to come meet me.