All the Lives I Want
Page 2
I went from small to smaller in the year 2013, after having spent the two years prior hopping between average and the bigger side of little. I have a clear memory of reading Shape magazine’s Britney Spears cover story that summer in a nail salon and realizing that for the first time since I became aware of Britney existing, I weighed substantially less than her. The subheadline claimed that Britney was “fitter and more fabulous than ever” before detailing her workout routine.1 That same year, RadarOnline published a slideshow of female celebrities and their weights, some estimated by fitness experts and several culled from a website called Whattheyreallyweigh.com, presumably owned and operated by a deeply happy human being.
But the most frequent place these numbers appear is on the covers of magazines during the annual shame parade that tabloids put famous women through during the summer. The headlines are always some variation of “The Best and Worst Bikini Bodies of the Summer!” The graininess of the collection of candid photos of celebrities at the beach betrays that these images were taken from afar and likely without the knowledge or consent of the celebrity therein. The result is that the featured celebrities are often in the middle of play or halfway through speaking a sentence in these images. Their mouths appear agape and their chins doubled up. And these lists are always incomplete, of course. Not every celebrity goes to the beach during the summer, and certainly not all of them are captured by photographers when they do. But the high volume of celebrities living by the coast in Los Angeles makes the list reasonably robust. And though these images are not taken with their consent, there is always an element of intent written into the copy that surrounds them. Unlike the Victoria’s Secret catalog, these images were not posed, and they presumably went largely untouched by the wands of Photoshop, but intentionality is breathed into each picture. Thin and shapely women are always said to be “flaunting” or “showing off” their bikini bodies by simply appearing in public. Those who don’t fit within the narrow definition of perfection in a given year are “letting it all hang out.” A private citizen might be able to take legal action against the offending photographers and the publications that hire them for the privacy violation, but being an entertainer generally means the forfeiture of such an option. Theirs are public figures in every sense of the word.
I rarely purchase these magazines. It is not because I am ashamed of my predilection for gawking at famous flesh but because I feel it would draw attention to my own body. I fear that looking at other bodies would magnify the existence of mine, making me somehow more material than I had been before. But when they were available in the piles of reading materials at nail salons, I would pick them up and feign defeat at the selection, as if I were positively beleaguered by some duty to read it. At drugstores with self-service kiosks where the magazines are situated directly next to the machines, I would pick up a copy and swipe the bar code across the scanner in one motion. Once I had the tasteless contraband in my hands, I skipped directly to the section of the magazine where the selections for the “best” bikini bodies were printed. I marveled at how symmetry of muscle and bone in the legs could be as striking as symmetry in the face. I wondered how abdomens could be exercised to so precise a point that they were completely flat but showed no visible muscle definition that might masculinize the effect even slightly.
There are a handful of mainstays that one can expect to find in these magazines year in and year out. Charlize Theron and Jessica Biel both make regular appearances among the best in bikini bodies. Their relentless athleticism makes their bodies appear free of the cellulite that plagues 90 percent of adult women, as beauty magazines are always quick to remind us when we seek out cures for this blight. There are other celebrities who remain in constant rotation on either side of the list because they have gained and lost weight. Nicole Richie was despised for having the audacity to appear on television and not hate herself when she was heavier, as she was later despised for losing a dramatic amount of weight. Jessica Simpson incurred similar wrath for her flagrant refusal to stay thin while gestating a human.
Jessica Simpson was the least famous third of a trifecta whose bodies I grew up gazing at alongside an American public that was absolutely rabid for opportunities to scrutinize them. The other two were Christina Aguilera and the legendary Miss Britney Spears, of course. These women came into public life as girls, barely out of puberty and eager to please a public that demanded they be pleasant or face extreme consequences. It was Britney’s famous midriff that led the charge of sexualized teen pop stars into lives in the late 1990s with “… Baby One More Time,” an anthem that remains nonsensical nearly twenty years after its debut while its accompanying video grows more iconic. Christina entered the public consciousness singing, “My body’s saying ‘Let’s go,’ but my heart is saying, ‘No,’” on the hit “Genie in a Bottle.” Whether it was prescience or accident that a pop star’s heart would be considered separate from her body, I am not sure. Then there was Jessica Simpson, who emerged at the tail end of the 1990s as the wholesome response to Christina and Britney but whose own father famously told GQ in 2004, “Jessica never tries to be sexy. She just is sexy. If you put her in a T-shirt or you put her in a bustier, she’s sexy in both. She’s got double D’s! You can’t cover those suckers up!”2 But while Christina and Jessica have been given opportunities to respond gracefully to their detractors, there seems to be no rest for the body of Britney.
It was Britney whose performance of “Oops!… I Did It Again” at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards made history, when the only thing that could upstage the rhinestone-studded nude pants and bustier she wore was the incredible fitness of the body that wore it. I recall watching the VMAs and envying the tautness and smooth tan of her figure, then envying her twice over when boys at school the next day recalled its perfection. More than once that day, a boy declared, “Her body is insane.” It was an apt description: Maintaining that particular ratio of muscle tone to fat while retaining some level of feminine curves requires round-the-clock diligence, an obsessive single-mindedness, and a kind of madness that I have little confidence these boys knew or cared about.
When Britney married young and began having children, her weight gains and losses became a sport that has not since receded from the public imagination. After Britney’s second son was born in 2006, People published a workout and diet regimen that she was allegedly adhering to in order to lose her pregnancy weight; however, this was unsubstantiated by Britney or anyone on her team. People then had the audacity to shame her for its rigor. The regimen involved the standard fare of “secrets” that are not secret at all: six small meals in lieu of three hardy ones, cardiovascular exercise, and removal of white flour and processed sugar. Before launching into the piece, there is the benevolent caveat: “The last thing a brand new mom should be concerned about is weight loss. This is the time to take care of your baby and yourself. The weight will come off later. Even celebrities whose job it is to look good should keep this in mind. Your baby will only be a baby once.” It takes just one sentence for the writer to go off script. The narrative goes from a focus on new mothers taking care of themselves to revealing that this is actually all about a neglected infant whose mother resides in one of the world’s most frequently dissected bodies. “We are worried about the message that this sends to new moms, that it’s safe to exercise like this following a birth and that this kind of weight loss in a short period of time is normal,” they write, judgment oozing from so brief an admonition.3
It is common to say that “the years were unkind” to a person, but in the case of Britney Spears, it is irresponsible to blame nonsentient time for unkindness when there was a wealth of people being unkind to her. From her harrowing breakdown to her ongoing weight struggles, the tabloids do not relent and do not forget. In the lower-brow selection of tabloids that report on the weight of celebrities, one statement that follows women struggling with their weight around more than any other is “She got her body back.” Here you’ll find near-constant Br
itney coverage. But barring any transcendent out-of-body experiences, these women were never separated from their bodies. They’ve occupied them across various weights. This phrase is not about a woman getting back something she lost as much as it is about our approval that she has returned to something we want her to be. What is meant by this phrase is “We got her body back.” We got the body we felt entitled to. In the case of Britney, that is the impossibly lean and limber body of a teenage girl, a body that was enthusiastically characterized as “insane.”
The public consumption of Britney did not stop at her figure. The media and those of us who consumed it were obsessed with her sexualities, with a particularly pathological focus on her claim to be a virgin. Though Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit most crudely detailed exactly how she was not a virgin on The Howard Stern Show, even the most sophisticated critics couldn’t help but indulge in Britney hymen mythology. A profile of Britney by Chuck Klosterman that appeared in Esquire in 2003 is now downright painful to read. In it, not a single song or album name from her catalog appears, while no less than seven references are made to the fact that she was not wearing pants at the photo shoot where they met to interview. It is a labored but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to make the case that Britney is “not so much a person as she is an idea, and the idea is this: you can want everything, so long as you get nothing.” Obviously, “Britney is the naughtiest good girl of all time.” But what makes her so different from previous incarnations of jailbait purity—Tiffany, Brooke Shields, Annette Funicello, et alia—is her “abject unwillingness to recognize that this paradox exists at all.” He recounts asking her why she dresses provocatively, noting her present attire reveals “three inches of her inner thigh, her entire abdomen, and enough cleavage to choke a musk ox,” but not reminding readers that they’re at a photo shoot that doesn’t involve pants. It is a cloying interview where she protests at his questions about her feelings about starring in men’s sexual fantasies but he pushes her on it anyway, dissatisfied with her refusal to be salacious.4 Britney does not own the truth about her own feelings, nor does she own her own body from this vantage point, because the public mistakes their all-consuming need for Britney as her desire to be consumed this way.
For the first several years of my adult-sized life, I was an American size 4. It is a size that sounds small but means average and felt huge, especially among peers whose size 0s casually hung off them throughout college. Though my envy migrated from teen pop stars to couture models, the specters of Britney’s former perfection and her fall from grace remained in my periphery. It still does. When I shrank to size 0 and later a 00 and then to a 000 when J.Crew introduced the size in 2014, I looked at all of these famous bodies with a different set of eyes, both literally and figuratively. My already large hazel eyes had been made more prominent on a face lacking fat, where they protruded more hungrily and took up more real estate. Figuratively, I look at the bodies that were considered so perfect and realize the precariousness of that perfection as I struggle to maintain a size that is attractively delicate without being repulsively bony.
I have been called “perfect” far more often when I am below a healthy body weight than when I am at a normal one. I have heard and read the word “insane” to compliment my body and am driven mad by it. I have heard my body referred to as a “buffet of bones” and a “little rib buffet” by two very different men. The idea of being actual meat is at once thrilling and infuriating: Being eaten bears the promise of no longer existing physically at all. It is when I am caught up in these feelings that young Britney is instructive. Though it was the 2000 performance at the VMAs that cemented Britney’s body in my mind as the most aspirational, a perhaps more famous display of her figure was on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1999. She was a rising teen sensation giving what seem to be safe, canned answers about ambition and music in her childhood home, but there is a single moment that feels especially off script. In response to questions about romantic rumors, her reply is printed as “‘I have,’ she says, ‘no feelings at all.’”5 I read those italics and see the heart of the story, the crack in her voice well before she cracked. It is a well-rehearsed girl who has been all but mandated to be consumed without biting back, not to cause a fuss so that people will fuss over her. It is a sad surrender but one that makes her queen in the country of popular culture. I wonder now if she knew just how heavy that would feel.
Run the World
Amber Rose in the Great Stripper Imaginary
OH, I LIKE TO DANCE to everything!” is a lie I’ve told many times but that I regretted telling only once. It was a canned response I’d give to men in VIP rooms as they edged closer to asking personal questions. We would be halfway into a conversation that I wanted desperately out of, often about a shrill and unreasonable wife at home (she was likely neither) or a half-formed treatise about how he understood the complexities of my emotional labor and erotic capital (he definitely understood neither). A new song on the speakers was a welcome reprieve from indulging this nonsense to change the subject to topics more favorable to maintaining my composure. The undiscerning but somehow charming musical tastes of the impossibly buoyant persona I inhabited in those darkened rooms was such a subject. There was no way to talk more substantively about the music playing in the club without betraying that I was thinking about these songs not as external units of sound to be consumed but as stories to inhabit more perfectly.
I would halt a moment and shift my eyes upward, that strange human habit whereby we think we can look in the direction of surround sound to better recognize melodies whose names elude us. “Oh my god, I love this song!” I would declare, conjuring enthusiasm and changing to a position less conducive to his sharing untoward or uninteresting secrets. It would be impolite for him to completely redirect the conversation back to his tale of domestic adversity and so he would attempt to direct it back to me, asking my favorite song to dance to. “Oh, I like to dance to everything!” I would report with a shrug and a grin. I would wrap my legs tighter around his middle, lean toward his body, and refuse eye contact, not as a matter of detachment but because my focus was now elsewhere, on the song I purported to love so much.
In October 2014, I told this lie to the DJ at a strip club in midtown Manhattan. The declaration was less an exclamation point than a shrugging politeness for which there is no punctuation. I was about to audition for their night shift. It was a reluctant and defeated return. It always is for me. In August, my ex had launched a brief but terrifying scorched-earth policy against me and my reputation. The social worker with whom I’d spoken told me that it was possible he would show up at the club where I worked in order to humiliate me and instructed me not to go in to work if I could avoid it. I stayed home from a few shifts, he fortunately left the state. I just never went back. It was the fourth time in my stripping career when I was truly convinced that this was it, my last night was really behind me.
Then I found myself with a $900 prescription to fill and no insurance to soften the blow. I have fallen victim to memory lapses during manic episodes that make me think I can live without antipsychotic medications, but I was blessed to be in a depressive state at the time. Another winter approached and I was sad to stubbornly be living the life into which I was born. I felt death lingering near the ends of my own fingertips. And with an in-box full of rejections and silence from the seven hundred jobs for which I had applied in the previous year, I knew that the shortest distance between me and $900 was the length of a hot-pink nylon-and-spandex minidress covering a quarter of my body.
And because it is my custom to present myself to managers as relentlessly, foolishly cheerful at club auditions, I told the DJ that I liked to dance to everything with a shrug and a grin, aware that the manager was still within earshot. An audition generally consists of two songs: the first with the dress on and the second with the dress half off. Even when it is just an audition, management does not like to interrupt the otherwise ongoing show, and so auditioners are called to the stage
by their performer names as if they already work at the club. “Lane, can I get Lane to the main stage?” he overinflected into his microphone. I dutifully climbed the three steps on the side of the stage and helped down the girl who had just finished, as is customary if she is clearly struggling with the height of her shoes and the cash haphazardly tucked into her G-string and you’re not a total fucking bitch. I held the pole in preparation.
I recognized the first few chords immediately and swayed briefly to the familiar guitar curlicue, but I was certain the song had been played by accident and would be corrected immediately. Guitar strings buzzing gave way to a synthetic arpeggio, however, and it became clear that the DJ had every intention of playing this song. A voice emerged from the stale air to say, “Welcome to your life / There’s no turning back,” as if reciting from my own punitive internal monologue. The song was “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears, an anthemic pop song that has occupied countless minds for hours on end with its catchiness and inspired approximately zero erections with its massive dearth of sexual references.
“Help me make the most of freedom and of pleasure / Nothing ever lasts forever / Everybody wants to rule the world.” I heard the lyrics with a pitiless clarity and took notice of musical elements that I had never been in the custom of detecting. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” contains not one but two guitar solos, for example. And while there are plenty of guitar solos that one can strip to, Tears for Fears is not responsible for any of them.