Shrill
Page 3
Yeah, personally I hate my period and think it’s annoying and gross, but it’s not more gross than anything else that comes out of a human body. It’s not more gross than feces, urine, pus, bile, vomit, or the grossest bodily fluid of them all—in my mother’s professional opinion—phlegm. And yet we are not horrified every time we go to the bathroom. We do not stigmatize people with stomach flu. The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny.
This is just a wacky idea I had, but maybe it’s not a coincidence that, in a country where half the population’s normal reproductive functions are stigmatized, American uterus-and vagina-havers are still fighting tooth and nail to have those same reproductive systems fully covered by the health insurance that we pay for. Maybe periods wouldn’t be so frightening if we didn’t refer to them as “red tide” or “shark week” or any other euphemism that evokes neurotoxicity or dismemberment. Maybe if we didn’t perpetuate the idea that vaginas are disgusting garbage dumps, government officials wouldn’t think of vagina care as literally throwing money away. Maybe if girls felt free to talk about their periods in shouts instead of whispers, as loudly in mixed company as in libraries full of moms, boys wouldn’t grow up thinking that vaginas are disgusting and mysterious either. Maybe those parts would seem like things worth taking care of. Maybe women would go to the doctor more. Maybe fewer women would die of cervical and uterine cancer. Maybe everyone would have better sex. Maybe women would finally be considered fully formed human beings, instead of off-brand men with defective genitals.
Maybe I wouldn’t have had to grow up feeling like a strip of wax paper was the only “person” who understood me.
I don’t remember how I got over it. Just time, I guess. I just waited. Eventually I moved from pads to tampons, and eventually I moved from tampons with applicators to the kind of tampons that you just poke up there with your finger, and eventually I was able to ask a female friend for a tampon without dying inside, and eventually I was able to have a tampon fall out of my purse on a crowded bus and not construct an elaborate ruse to frame the woman next to me, and now I’m just a normal adult with a husband she’s not afraid to send to the store for o.b. super-pluses. Ta-daaaah.
The truth is, my discomfort with my period didn’t have anything to do with the thing itself (though, to any teenage girls reading this: yes, it is gross; yes, it hurts; no, it’s not the end of the world; yes, sometimes it gets on your pants; no, nobody will remember)—it was just part of the lifelong, pervasive alienation from my body that every woman absorbs to some extent. Your body is never yours. Your body is your enemy. Your body is gross. Your body is wrong. Your body is broken. Your body isn’t what men like. Your body is less important than a fetus. Your body should be “perfect” or it should be hidden.
Yeah, well, my name is Lindy West and I’m fat and I bleed out of my hole sometimes. My body is mine now. Kotex understands.
How to Stop Being Shy in Eighteen Easy Steps
Don’t trust anyone who promises you a new life. Pick-up artists, lifestyle gurus, pyramid-scheme face cream evangelists, Weight Watchers coaches: These people make their living off of your failures. If their products lived up to their promise, they’d be out of a job. That doesn’t make the self-help economy inherently sinister or their offerings wholly worthless—it doesn’t mean you can’t drop five pounds by eating Greek yogurt under the nurturing wing of a woman named Tanya, or lose your virginity thanks to the sage advice of an Uber driver in aviator goggles, or help your cousin’s sister-in-law earn her February bonus while adequately moisturizing your face for $24.99—we are all simply trying to get by, after all. It’s just that, sadly, there are no magic bullets.* Real change is slow, hard, and imperceptible. It resists deconstruction.
Likewise, lives don’t actually have coherent, linear story arcs, but if I had to retroactively tease one essential narrative out of mine, it’d be my transformation from a terror-stricken mouse-person to an unflappable human vuvuzela. I wasn’t shy in a cute, normal way as a kid—I was a full-blown Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle plant-radishes-in-my-ears-and-leave-me-in-the-care-of-an-impudent-parrot situation. I was clinically shy. Once, in the first grade, I peed my pants in class because I was too scared to ask the teacher if I could go to the bathroom. When the class bully noticed the puddle between my feet, I pointed at a water pitcher on the other side of the room and whispered that it had spilled. Just in one small, discrete pool under my chair. And also on my sock. And also the pitcher was filled with urine for some reason. Public schools, am I right? (Pretty sure he bought it.)
Just a few decades later, here I am: the Ethel Merman of online fart disclosure. I now get yelled at and made fun of for a living—my two greatest fears rendered utterly toothless, and, even better, monetized. Women ask me: “How did you find your voice? How can I find mine?” and I desperately want to help, but the truth is, I don’t know. I used to hate myself; eventually, I didn’t anymore. I used to be shy; eventually, I made my living by talking too much.
Every human being is a wet, gassy katamari of triumphs, traumas, scars, coping mechanisms, parental baggage, weird stuff you saw on the Internet too young, pressure from your grandma to take over the bodega when what you really want to do is dance, and all the other fertilizer that makes a smear of DNA grow into a fully formed toxic avenger. Everyone is different, and advice is a game of chance. Why would what changed me change you? How do I know how I changed anyway? And how do you know when you’re finished, when you’re finally you? How do you clock that moment? Is a pupa a caterpillar or a butterfly?*
It’s flattering to believe that we transform ourselves through a set of personal tangibles: Steely resolve and the gentle forbearance of a mysterious young widow who wandered in off the moor, but reality is almost always more mundane. Necessity. Luck. Boredom. Exhaustion. Time. Willpower is real, but it needs the right conditions to thrive.
I can tell you my specifics, though. I can tell you the stepping-stones that I remember along the path from quiet to loud—the moments when I died inside, and then realized that I wasn’t actually dead, and then died inside a little bit less the next time, until now, when my wedding photo with the caption “FAT AS HELL” was on the motherfucking cover of a print newspaper in England (where Mr. Darcy could see it!!!!!!!!), and my only reaction was a self–high five.
Maybe, if you follow these steps to the letter, you’ll end up here too.
Step One: Shoplift One Bean
I was four years old, following my mother around the grocery store. She stopped near the bulk dry goods, and I stuck my hand deep into a bin of beans, cool and smooth. I thought the beans were cute—white with black freckles, like maybe you could plant one and grow a Dalmatian—and there were so many of them, one wouldn’t be missed. When we got home, I showed my mother my prize. To my surprise, she was mad at me. It’s just one bean, I said. It’s not stealing.
“What if everyone who came to the grocery store took ‘just one bean’? How many beans would the grocery store have left?”
This was an incomplete story problem. How many beans were in the bin? How many people go to the grocery store? How often do they restock the beans? I was going to need some more information.
Instead, she jumped straight to the answer: zero more beans. If everyone took just one bean, beans would go extinct and I would tell my grandchildren about the time I ate a Crunchwrap Supreme with the same hushed reverence my dad used when talking about riding the now-extinct Los Angeles Railway from Glendale all the way to Santa Monica. Oh my god, I realized. She was going to make me RETURN THE BEAN.
We drove (drove! wasted fossil fuels! we fight wars over those!) back to the store. The teenager mopping the meat section looked up at us.
“Can I help you?”
“My daughter has something she’d like to tell you.”
I proffered my Dalmatian egg, rigid with terror and barely audible. “I took this. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, uh,” he said, glancing at what was, unmistakably, just some fucki
ng bean, “it’s okay. It’s not a big deal.”
“No,” my mom corrected. “She needs to learn.” I don’t know what would constitute adequate compensation for being forcibly dragged into a small child’s object lesson about accountability and theft while you were just trying to finish your blood mopping so you could make it to Amber’s house party later, but $4.25 an hour wasn’t it. He played along anyway.
“Oh. Um. Thanks for being honest? Don’t do it again.”
“I won’t,” I whispered. And I never did.*
Step Two: Accidentally Make Fun of Your Mom’s Friend’s Barren Womb
Third grade. My mom’s friend spread her arms for a hug: “Come here, sweetie!” Hopped up on my latest vocab test, I gasped in mock horror, “Are you STERILE!?”
I thought “sterile” meant “germ-free.” Turns out, it also means that your uterus doesn’t work anymore because you’re old and/or the victim of some authoritarian eugenics program. She quipped something dry and perfect like, “that I can’t remember.” Everyone laughed at me and I hid in a small cupboard for one year.
Step Three: Do a Mediocre Oral Presentation on Thelonious Monk
When you grow up with a four-hundred-year-old jazz dad instead of the three-hundred-year-old rock ’n’ roll dads all your friends have, sometimes your cultural references are weird and anachronistic. For my seventh-grade Language Arts class, we had to do a fifteen-minute oral presentation on the black artist of our choice, and while 99 percent of kids were like “Whitney Houston!” or “Denzel Washington!” I was all, “Pioneering jazz iconoclast Thelonious Monk, a-doy.” Which is actually a pretty cool pick, in retrospect—and even at the time was not inherently embarrassing—but, nevertheless, an oral presentation violated my “never speak audibly to anyone but my mom’s leg” policy, so I spent the week leading up to the event in a shivering flop sweat.
As I sat in the back of the class, waiting for my name to be called and trying not to lose consciousness, a wave of sudden, intellectualized calm washed over me—a tipping point so unanticipated that it still feels a hair supernatural. I looked to my left at the kid who’d been carrying around a “pet” light bulb since kindergarten. I looked to my right at the girl I’d once watched eat an entire tube of ChapStick for “lunch dessert.” What the fuck was I scared of again? These people? It made no sense. Talking in front of people is the same as any other kind of talking, I realized—and anyway, do you know who’s more intimidating than a bunch of booger-encrusted seventh graders? MY MOM. I talked to her all the time. I could do this.
I went up and did my presentation and I wasn’t scared at all and the only thing that happened was that people were bored because seventh graders don’t care about Thelonious Monk.
Step Four: Get a Show Dog
Mozart was a Tibetan terrier, a fairly uncommon breed—too big to be hilarious but too small to be useful—designed to sit on a mountain and keep a monk company. He had long, white fur, Crohn’s disease, and the personality of an Elliott Smith song. We got him when I was in eighth grade, from a woman named Linda, with the caveat that she be allowed to continue showing and breeding him indefinitely. We were forbidden to cut his hair or tamper with his testicles. He was allergic to all common proteins, so my mom would buy whole rabbits from the butcher and cook up mounds of rabbit meat for the dog. For breakfast he had scrambled eggs.
“Hey, Mom, can I have some scrambled eggs?”
“You know how to cook. Mozart doesn’t.”
At least one weekend a month, Linda would come pick up Sunwind Se-Aires Rinpoche (his show name, in case you thought I wasn’t dead fucking serious) and bring him back a few days later covered in ribbons. More often than not, we’d go to the dog show too and cheer him on, and Linda would prod me to become a junior handler.* I thought about it. I really did. A couple of times I even pawed wistfully through pantsuits in the basement of the mall. But there are some lines you just can’t cross.
Step Five: Join a Choir with Uniforms that Look Like Menopausal Genie Costumes
Okay, so it was these massive palazzo pants—like polyester JNCO jeans—with a long-sleeved velour shirt, a teal cummerbund, and a felt vest festooned with paisley appliques and rhinestones. The overall effect was “mother-of-the-bride at a genie wedding who hot-glue-gunned her outfit in the parking lot of a Hobby Lobby.”
I was in this choir for ten years.*
Step Six: Watch Trainspotting with Your Parents
Contrary to all of your body’s survival instincts, this is not, in fact, fatal.
Step Seven: Read High Fantasy on the School Bus
Oh, you think you’re a badass for leaving the book jacket on Half-Blood Prince? You think it makes you a “total nerd” because you’re trying to get through A Clash of Kings before the next season of Game of Thrones comes out? Try reading Robert Jordan on the bus in 1997 with your bass clarinet case wedged between your legs while wearing a Microsoft Bob promotional T-shirt your dad brought home from work. Then try losing your virginity.
Step Eight: Break a Heel on the Stairs in Your College’s Humanities Building and Fall Down So Everyone Sees Your Underpants
You know what’s a liberating thing to figure out? Everyone’s butt looks basically how you think it looks.
Step Nine: Taco the Back Wheel of Your Tiny Friend’s Tiny Bicycle in Amsterdam
I TOLD HER IT WOULDN’T WORK.
Step Ten: Neglect to Tell the Heavy Metal Doofus You Lose Your Virginity to that It’s Your First Time and Then Bleed All Over His Bed
“Okay, but, having your bed anointed with virgin’s blood is like the most metal thing ever, right?”
“You should go.”
Step Eleven: Ignore Several Weeks of Voicemails from Your Landlord
This was back when you had to actually physically call a phone number and type in a code to retrieve your own voicemails, which means I literally never did it. Too bad I missed the heads-up that my landlord would be touring my apartment with two appraisers from the insurance company just as I stepped out of the shower fully nude and singing “Just Around the Riverbend” from the soundtrack of Disney’s Pocahontas! YOU’RE WELCOME FOR THE BONERS, INSURANCE APPRAISERS.
Step Twelve: Have Sex that Is Not Silent and Still
On November 17, 2010, I received this e-mail from my handsome, gay apartment manager:
Hi Lindy,
Sorry to have to be the bearer of this type of complaint, but it is what it is, and we’re both adults.
I have had complaints from tenants regarding “sex noise” coming from your apartment, really late at night. The complaints are about creaking and vocalizations late at night (3am).
Thanks,
[REDACTED]
Well, I am a dead body now, so problem solved.
Step Thirteen: Tip Over a Picnic Table While Eating a Domino’s Personal Pan Pizza in the Press Area of a Music Festival
A music festival is a kind of collective hangover in which people who are cooler than you compete to win a special kind of lanyard so they can get into a special tent with unlimited free Gardetto’s. The only food available to the non-lanyarded hoi polloi is expensive garbage dispensed resentfully from a shack, which is how I found myself, in 2010, sitting alone at a picnic table in the press area of the Sasquatch! Music Festival, sweatily consuming a $45 Domino’s pepperoni personal pan pizza and a Diet Pepsi and hoping nobody noticed me.
Someone was interviewing the band YACHT at the next table, and I was sort of dispassionately staring at my phone, pretending like my friends were texting me even though they weren’t because I think they were all back in the free Gardetto’s area playing VIP four-square with Santigold or something probably. I watched the woman from YACHT do her interview for a few minutes before I remembered that we’d gone to college together, where, even before experimental pop fame, she’d been an untouchably cool and talented human lanyard who was also beautiful and nice. I chewed my oily pork puck.
A little gust of wind picked up and blew m
y Domino’s napkin off the picnic table and onto the ground. No big deal. I leaned over, nonchalantly, to pick it up. Gotta have a napkin! Can’t be a fat lady eating pizza with red pig-grease all over my face! Unfortunately, due to my intense preoccupation with not drawing attention to myself while eating a Domino’s personal pepperoni pan pizza in public at a music festival while fat, I misjudged the flimsy plastic picnic table’s center of gravity.
When I leaned over to grab the napkin, the table leaned over too.
I fell in the dirt. The pizza fell on top of me. The Diet Pepsi tipped over and glugged out all over my dress. The table fell on top of the Pepsi on top of the pizza on top of me. The napkin fluttered away. EVERYONE LOOKED AT ME. The music journalists looked at me. The band YACHT looked at me. In an attempt at damage control, I yelled, “I’m really drunk, so it’s okay!” which wasn’t even true, but apparently it’s better to be drunk at ten in the morning than it is to be a human being who weighs something? All that anxiety about trying not to be a gross, gluttonous fat lady eating a “bad” food in public, and I wound up being the fat lady who was so excited about pizza that she threw herself to the ground and rolled around in it like a dog with a raccoon carcass. Nailed it.
Step Fourteen: Get Hired to Write a Press Release for the Band Spoon, Then Write Something So Weird and Unusable that the Band Spoon Quietly Sends You a Check and Never Speaks to You Again and Hires Someone Normal to Write a Real Press Release
Here is the actual full text that I actually emailed to Britt Daniel of the band Spoon: