Of course, I’m no fashionista. (In fact, I hear the term “fashionista,” and I automatically think of some heavily highlighted fashion blogger from Ohio pairing a J. Crew sweater with a bebe bracelet and “making it work.”) Although I’ve never been super into clothes, the fact remains: fashion matters—both in how women perceive themselves and in how others see us.
Take men, for instance. They’re visual creatures, we’re constantly told. So we’re expected to dress in a certain “appealing” way to get their attention. No man has ever approached a swamp monster in a floppy hat and said, “Excuse me—you’re hideous, but you look like you might enjoy Madden 17, BBQ, and light nipple play. Can I buy you a steak dinner?”
Unfortunately, because we’re under the influence of both modern media and outdated cultural standards, women’s happiness is often contingent on the amount and type of attention we get from men. I’ve posted thousands of Instagram pictures, some “pretty” and some veering toward the aforementioned swamp monster. When I post a picture of myself walking through an airport at 6 a.m. and some idiot decides to comment that I “look tired,” it saddens me. Not because my feelings are hurt (fuckin’ right I’m tired, I got up at 3 a.m. to fly across the country to stand for two hours) but because my purpose on this earth is to make people laugh, not to turn them on. If men keep putting out such benumbingly stupid observations, at this rate we’re never gonna colonize Mars.
Anyway, back to clothes. Let’s pretend for a second that we are leaving the house and going somewhere non-airport-related. Yes, we are putting a pause on our daily agenda of coffee-sipping, peanut-butter-spoon-licking, Facebook refreshing, and dog-song-singalong-ing to venture out and be great in the world. And during this effort, we might want to look and feel our self-confident, attractive best. Well, prepare for a battle, because if you want to feel good and look great in your clothes, you’re gonna have to fight for it.
Every woman has gone through this in a dressing room. You walk into the store feeling fine, but after a few try-ons and rounds of “Why are these size 8s not fitting me when I’m usually a 6? How am I not able to squeeze my calves into these jeans that are supposed to be, like, 72 percent stretch?” You actually start to feel… uglier. There must be some sort of biochemical Girl Logic reaction caused by incandescent lighting hitting your fat cells, because they actually seem to multiply as you’re trying on jeans. Most of my shopping trips end with exhaustion, depression, and a resigned, “Is there a Sbarro around here?”
No matter how in shape you are—fashion companies will make it clear you are the wrong shape. Your arms are too fat for this type of tank, your legs are too long for these jeans. As a woman, whatever you are, you’re always somehow wrong. There are whole brands out there inadvertently dedicated to letting you know your body type isn’t their body type.
True story: a friend’s sister applied to an Urban Outfitters. She’s nineteen. She’s adorable and a little curvy, but no more than the average college freshman at a big state school. When her application was rejected, she asked the manager why she wasn’t hired because she wanted to improve on anything she could. He told her, “You don’t have the right body type for our brand.”
Look, I get it; if you are selling athletic apparel, you want your “team members” to reflect the image you want your brand to project. But, the last time I checked, you didn’t need 2 percent body fat to hock babydoll dresses left over from 1995, coffee table books about Instagram cats, and bacon-scented candles. Also? There were about a hundred ways he could have rejected her that didn’t involve crushing the self-esteem of a kid just trying to get a retail job. As if girls bigger than size 6 don’t want to buy cute clothes, too. I hope he hangs himself with a graphic tee.
Something else that can make the shopping process more excruciating is a bad saleswoman. If she casually lies that you “look awesome” as she walks past while you’re posing in your pulled silk skort onesie, OR if she’s exponentially hotter than you, run. Do not trust her with your money or your self-esteem. I learned this the hard way recently when I had to buy a dress for an event and found the salesgirl standing around pouting, looking far more beautiful than me. Like, model hot. Not the kind of model your weird college friend pretends to be on Facebook, either—not the kind who sits on vintage cars, does burlesque, and sometimes sells Xanax. No, this salesgirl was 5’9”, 120 pounds, with long blonde hair and wide-set eyes and legs like Karli Kloss and a baby giraffe gave birth to… a baby giraffe. She was a stunning version of a praying mantis.
I just wanted to watch her try on clothes! And she was so nice. The more I joked and the more she laughed, the more beautiful she got, and the more I felt like the ugly court jester trying on leggings to please her majesty! She kept bringing me “cool” outfits that ended up making me feel unattractive and out of date. “Try this! It’s a sleeveless turtleneck dress with a zipper up the front.” A whole zipper running up the front? Did we get this from a Body Glove trunk show? No? OK, what time should I meet the other “gals” at Cache?
When she laughed, a beautiful white dove flew from her mouth. “It’s all about attitude, girl,” she beamed. I was like, “Cool! But my attitude would improve if I didn’t have the most beautiful mantis-like woman trying to style me like I’m fifty and ‘getting back on the dating scene.’” I left and bought some new makeup instead. And maybe some Chick-fil-a.
In some ways, the biggest enemy modern women face is fashion (or the Girl Logic whispering in our ears that we should try to partake in it). OK fine—maybe rape, murder, cancer, heart disease, and domestic violence come first—THEN all that bullshit you see everywhere from your favorite magazines, to Instagram posts, websites, and your local mall mannequins. Regardless, it feels an awful lot like the fashion and beauty industry’s sole purpose is to make us crave a lifestyle we don’t have and make us hate our bodies in the process. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I firmly believe those industries thrive solely on women’s insecurities.
That said, turning to celebrities like the Kardashians for fashion or beauty inspiration makes zero sense—even THEY don’t look like that. Hyperplumped lips, padded butts, breasts pouring out of everything.… When and how did our Girl Logic start insisting that we need to stack up to walking, talking sex dolls? You may be wondering if, by saying this, I am shaming women who naturally look like them. My answer is no, because let’s be honest—“real” women who look like the Kardashians are few and far between. Am I contradicting myself from that page in the first chapter where I said I was OK with plastic surgery? Nope. My personal take on surgery is if it’s a corrective procedure that will help you feel more confident in who you are, do it. But… NOT if it makes you resemble a breathing blow-up doll with lips that look like a huge wet vagina.
I mean, when it comes to overly enhanced lips and asses, I just don’t believe women are doing it “for themselves”—I think it’s so men will get hard when they look at them. Are women merely capitalizing on their sexual power over men? Maybe. But then we should be honest about that. It’s not like there’s a woman out there who claims, “When I flew Spirit Air the seats were so hard, my butt did nothing to cushion my tailbone; but after I got these butt implants, well, I was flyin’ high! What a practical, and not at all sexual, medical procedure!” But, at the end of the day, who cares, right? Let women do what they want. No one wants to look or feel old, but maybe the inevitability of age wouldn’t be such a crushing blow if we stopped blaming women for aging in the first place. I mean, Jennifer Aniston is over forty-seven years old, and tabloids only recently stopped accusing her of being pregnant. Do the fucking math, people.
Having a big butt, of course, is something that’s been celebrated in black culture and demonized in white culture. If a black guy told me I had a fat ass, I’d know it was a compliment. If a white guy said it, I’d know it was an insult. That actually happened to me at a bakery in New York. (I even have an Instagram video of it!) I was with a friend, debating my friend’s assertion t
hat “even the sexiest woman isn’t sexy all the time.” (I disagreed because I know Sofia Vergara is sexy all the time. I don’t have surveillance footage to prove it. Yet.) There was a Puerto Rican woman behind the counter, so I flipped the camera on her and said, “What about you, do you think a woman can be sexy all the time?” She replied, “You’re a white girl with a fat ass; I think you can be whatever the hell you wanna be.” Totally inappropriate way to talk to a customer, but I knew she meant it as a compliment. Guess what? Big butts are in style and, white girls? You can try, but black girls (and Latina girls and Armenian girls) beat us on this front. Now most of us are doomed to watch from the sidelines, ass-less. Frankly, given the amount that black women have been discounted in our society, I think this is more than fair.
Anyway, back to shopping. Chronically envisioning—and shopping for—a fantasy life that isn’t yours is, again, all about indulging your Girl Logic. It happens to me, too. Just this morning I saw an ad with a sullen model wearing untied Doc Martens and a black choker and I thought, quite seriously, “Maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up in the ’90s and finally get to be the lead singer in that punk band I never started because my mom was always there for me.”
Of course, Girl Logic isn’t all bad when it comes to clothes. Sometimes your GL can nudge you to take a risk with your style, like a cat eye or fishnets! And lo and behold, sometimes that risk pays off. For instance, I remember having to get dressed once for a women’s comedy event. Now, knowing the room would be filled with women, my GL kicked in. I couldn’t dress sexy. First of all, why? I was (A) doing stand-up and (B) doing it in front of a room of women; who was I trying to turn on? Women all want acceptance and sisterhood, sure, but that doesn’t mean we’re above scrutinizing each other’s bodies and the outfits on them. Would there be some women there who might love me more if I wore a skimpy tank top and tight jeans? Maybe. But I didn’t want to take the chance and be written off for dressing too sexy or, worse, have anyone be distracted from my words.
So I asked my neighbor Bonnie to help me shop. She’s a mother and a casting director. She’s older than me, and she’s been living in Hollywood twenty years longer than I have. She picked out a pair of Alexander Wang gaucho pants. As a creature with muscular legs, I’ve had bad experiences with anything that stops at my ankle; that just makes my legs look thicker and shorter. My GL whispered that I must stay the hell away from those gaucho pants, given the trauma of my prior ankle-pants experiences. Bonnie told me to shut up and try them on. To this day, they are the best pair of pants I own. Why should I not allow myself to wear an entire subset of pants simply for fear of not looking like a leggy model, which I could never look like in the first place, no matter what type of pants I am wearing? EMBRACE THE HAUNCH!
Anyway, I did the show, looked amazing, and felt… expensive. Then, a couple months later on the Tonight Show, I fully regressed and wore a dress so tight it actually cut my armpits. Whatever, live and learn. I also want to note that I love trashy clothes: cutoff shorts, leg warmers, mesh tops, Lycra miniskirts, fingerless gloves, thigh-high socks, full-length mesh body stockings—obviously I can’t wear this garbage without looking like I’m going to an ’80s-themed rave, but I see these items in windows, and, for a brief second, my GL fantasizes about a world where I can wear all this junk and still maintain my dignity.
All our false fashion beliefs kinda make sense, though, “If you build it, they will come,” right? For women, it’s “If you wear this, it WILL HAPPEN.” Who among us hasn’t spotted some sexy, ridiculous mesh body stocking or something and immediately been flooded with images of the perfect Saturday night flashing on an endless loop through their brain: late-night make-out sessions, tapas without bloating, drinks without puking, dancing without sweating—a night that obviously wouldn’t come to pass if this one magic top weren’t in the equation? Women routinely buy clothes for events that haven’t happened yet: vacations that aren’t planned, red carpets they haven’t been invited to. That’s Girl Logic for you. We shop for perceived inevitabilities: unnamed future fashiony funerals, awards shows, flashy polo-game fund-raisers in the Hamptons. (“Oh! Good thing I bought navy jeans, riding boots, and an Anne Fontaine fitted white blouse for just such an occasion!”) I once bought a pair of five-inch cork wedge sandals just in case I wanted to look like a circa-2000 Steve Madden cartoon at a beach party that I hadn’t been invited to. YET.
I don’t delude myself, though—high heels and ridiculous wedges are worn for one reason alone: to make women look thinner, taller, and hotter to dudes. Duh. I mean, men like big tits, right? So women get breast implants, push-up bras, boob bronzers, the list goes on. And please don’t tell me getting implants was something you “did for yourself.” Highlights, nose jobs, breast implants, tans… no one would bother with any of that stuff if they lived alone in a forest. That’s why all girls love raggedy old sweatpants, T-shirts, and “home clothes”—they’re cozy, comfy, and easy, and we wear them in secrecy when we’re not worried about impressing anyone (or when we’ve been dating someone long enough).
Back to boobs now. Any girl who was “blessed” with large ones at an early age can tell you: there will never, ever, be anything out there for you when it comes to dressing that chest, and sometimes it’ll feel like absolutely no one understands your painful plight because you have something everyone else seems to want.
By age fifteen, I was a 32DD. And BTW, it’s utterly useless to have that much boob at that age. No boy knows what to do with them (not that any boy was touching them), no clothes fit right, and they just get in the way during sports. While all my friends were running around in perky B-cup floral bras from Victoria’s Secret or Abercrombie, my mom was hauling me across town to a jarringly well-lit old-lady store called Loretta’s Intimate Apparel. (The name Loretta alone confirmed that it was run by someone old; no woman has been named Loretta since, like, 1947.) Said shop was for necessities, not heart-patterned bralettes with words like “spanky beast” printed on them, like my friends had. (OK, they didn’t say “spanky beast,” but they had, like, kissy-marks and “XOXO,” which is pretty gross for a child to wear on her boobs.) But… no fun bras for me. No. We were at LORETTA’S SUPER SERIOUS INTIMATE MOTHAFUCKING NO FUN ZONE, and playtime was over!
While my friends with A-cups got to prance around in their adorable underthings, I was busy being fastened into triple back hooks and padded shoulder straps that I can only assume were meant for a work mule pulling an apple cart. I was a teenager, so my chest stayed up on its own, but guess what? These bras weren’t made with youth or sexuality in mind, and these parachute harnesses weren’t meant to be seen by a man, ever. These were bras meant to be worn by your squatty widowed grandma from the old country as she washed turnips in a bucket.
But there the fifteen-year-old me stood, at an age when I wanted to speak to my mother less than I ever have before or since, let alone stand there mute while she and some sixty-five-year-old Russian saleswoman manually scooped each of my breasts into its personal tit hammock as I attempted to pretend an outside party wasn’t touching my private parts. “See, it should make you feel supported and secure.” But… it was a bra, not a financial plan! I did not feel secure!
As a big-boobed woman, button-up shirts are also a long-standing issue that make clothes-shopping excruciating. When your chest is big, sometimes you just feel… BIG. Naked it looks fine, but any attempt to shroud your chest with even the slightest fold of extra material just leaves you feeling like a pregnant linebacker. Even in a “minimizer bra”—yes, boys, there are bras designed with the sole purpose of making women’s boobs look smaller—I always felt like I was wearing shoulder pads on my tits.
In my early twenties, with money of my own, to spend on any garbage I pleased, I sought refuge at Frederick’s of Hollywood, a store for… hookers. Hookers and women who once did some light hooking but are now married to men who still need them to look like legit hookers. The bras are for show, made for huge fake boobs with straps made of
something tenuous like one strand of Nerds Rope. Did I need a red sateen bra with flokati cups and little devil’s pitchfork appliques sewn onto the straps? No. But compared to the oatmeal-colored straightjacket I’d been accustomed to, it was the most beautiful thing in the world.
Now let’s discuss another body part that makes it difficult for many women to feel remotely comfortable setting foot in a mainstream clothing store: thighs. OK, this is the last time I will mention them, for real. Anyone who follows my comedy (and has, uh, read this book up to here) knows I don’t like mine but I accept them, sort of. I firmly believe a lack of sinewy thigh encasing a long femur has stopped me from reaching every one of my goals. OK, maybe just when it comes to fashion.
Pick up any women’s magazine when summer rolls around, and you’re sure to find a horrific chart purporting to tell you what sort of bathing suit best fits your body type. Without fail, the model they’ll use to represent the “curvy” body will be 5’9” and 120 pounds, sporting a modest one-piece. This provides ample fodder for your Girl Logic to either embrace one-pieces for the rest of your life—“Hey, if it works on her, it’ll totally fly on me even though I weigh approximately seventy-five more pounds and find running on a beach while laughing impossible”—or it leaves you thinking, “That is not what I look like in a swimsuit. The world is dark and empty. I’m wearing shorts in the pool. And the shower. And the bathtub. Forever.”
Girl Logic Page 5