very pretty
content notes: size, weight, disordered eating; race, class, healthcare; shame, death; honestly probably don't read this at all
I recently attended a literary event, pressed against the wall right next to a world-famous essayist while Ryan O'Connell read aloud from his book Inspiration Porn. In one passage from his "slut diaries," a hookup had assured him he was "actually very handsome," "you should know that," "no matter what anyone else says."
I was beyond mortified by how hard I cried—harder than I had at the earlier readings, poetry and fiction and memoir, that were more explicitly about social justice and collective action, about empathy. This particular reading had felt like a sneak attack, an emotional ambush. I hoped the famous essayist had not noticed. I worried what she might think about being trapped next to some idiotic, vain, middle-aged white lady with fucked-up priorities.
A couple years ago or more, a little man—slight of build, even childlike, with a cropped tee and a Barbie collection and a bimbo fetish—robbed me. He had picked me out of a crowd. He'd started bullying me, loudly. I was fat and disgusting, and I stank, he'd said.
He ended up at our table, which was the first mistake. I saw him eyeing my day-old iPhone. We agreed to share an Uber home. He pretended to pass out in the Uber; my iPhone was already in his pocket by then. Panicked that he was really unconscious and in danger (and equally concerned about my perfect 5-star passenger rating), I convinced the Uber driver to help me carry the little man into my building. I tucked him into bed. He finished robbing me while I was asleep.
I didn't report this, mainly because I'd elaborately created the circumstances for the theft myself. From a replacement phone, I watched my fancy new stolen iPhone criss-cross Los Angeles. Finally I remotely erased it, surrendering the phone to its new owner.
I remember how badly I'd wanted the man, who considered himself a survivor, to know that the world wasn't cruel, that you don't have to make your heart hard, that it isn't a clear-cut case of winners and losers, victims and victimizers. That's loser thinking, the man must've thought to himself. Which of us learned a lesson?
A friend of mine was horrified by this story. This shit! It was the exact shit her dad used to do: he'd make terrible decisions in favor of terrible people, at the expense of his own family's safety. He'd had no instinct for self-preservation, no common sense, no loyalty to the people he supposedly loved. Her father had betrayed her over and over again, always endangering her, always making his daughter the very least of his big, compassionate, bleeding heart's priorities.
Anyway, I'd gone into a Wells Fargo branch the next day, hoping to have my bank card reissued. The bank teller couldn't do it; I'd have to go online. I sighed. I gathered my belongings and prepared to leave the teller's window.
"But you're very pretty," he said.
Startled, I turned and stared at him.
"Thanks," I said. I tried to sound warm. A consolation prize for my troubles! How nice.
"You're very pretty." See? You might be fat, but I can perceive your beauty. Not like everyone else in the world, who obviously don't look twice, who glance past your silhouette and just assume you're ugly. See? I'm different. I see you clearly. You should feel grateful to me, indebted to me, because of the rare, clear vision I have.
The morning of the literary event, I'd rolled over in bed and turned on a lamp, trying and failing to remember the name of the Black woman who'd been toured and exhibited by white men in the 19th century because of her shape. After her death she had been cut into pieces, displayed in pieces. I grabbed my phone and typed "Saartje" into a search engine. Yes, Sarah Baartman, that was her name.
People assume I've been overweight all my life—for whatever reason, they can't imagine a thin person becoming fat—so I must be used to unsolicited comments on my appearance. Maybe that's true? My adoptive mother, who was born in the early 1930s and who was a psychological casualty of Diet Culture, worried about my weight constantly. She was projecting her own terror onto me, but she framed it as concern for my emotional well-being: "I just don't think you can be happy at that size." I was wearing a size 8. My cup size was "nearly-A." My biological mother was thin. My biological dad had been thin, too, but he'd also been bulimic.
Sensing that I had the type of frame that would someday pile on weight—that I had the propensity for weight gain—my boyfriend, my first love, had dragged me to the gym. "Britney Spears has the type of body that wants to gain weight," he would tell me. "Look how hard she has to work." He was into bodybuilding. He tried to teach me how to exercise without bulking up. The problem, for him, was my naturally big butt: after our first meeting, my boyfriend's stepfather had joked about it to him. The joke had been racist. How embarrassing that must've been, for my boyfriend. How kind he was to've shared the comment with me later.
My weight gain was subtle at first, then rapid. I had just started a public-facing job, so my weight gain had a captive online audience. The audience noticed it, discussed it amongst themselves at length on a messageboard. My adoptive mom finally stopped commenting on my size, now that I was a lost cause.
Concerned, I took myself to a doctor for the first time. He asked me to touch my toes. I did.
"Wow," the doctor said, "I didn't think you'd be able to do that."
In the months before my wedding, I limited myself to 1000 calories a day. My weight exploded for the second time. Less than a week before the event, a tailor ripped my dress apart at the seams, adding panels of fabric to accommodate.
My grandmother declined to attend the wedding. There were a variety of reasons for her absence; the principal reason was, she'd gained weight over the years, did not want me to see her. I felt great grief over this. She was punishing me over her own sense of shame.
Conveniently, I'd failed to observe that I'd done the exact same thing—had long avoided people I purported to care about because I did not want them to see me. Anyway, within a couple of weeks of the wedding, my grandmother passed away. She'd fallen asleep reading a book.
Years later, I was sharing a cigarette outside an airport with a stranger, an older woman. She was from England—they always are—when she suddenly hit me with "you're really very pretty."
"Oh, uh, thanks," I said. Here it comes.
She'd recently been on holiday, she said, to some island or another. What a grand time she'd had. She talked about the curvy women—W.O.C.—on the beach.
"You should go there," she said to me. "People would think you're beautiful."
I have no idea what expression was on my face. Was she telling me to leave the country? In order to be pretty? And! She had found a way to be racist about it!
"Uhh," I said, probably squashing out my cigarette. "My husband thinks I'm beautiful, and he's... he's here."
A lot of people can't imagine any worse fate befalling them than gaining weight. I have read the books; I am aware that fatphobia is rooted in racism. Getting fat means people will treat you the way they already treat other people. That is the threat.
Lately my TikTok F.Y.P. algorithm has been, for no apparent reason, serving me videos and short skits about Japanese culture. In Japan—or so I've repeatedly been informed against my will—people will act shy around genuinely beautiful people, only saying "wow, you're so pretty" to people they perceive as aesthetically tragic. Then there is "nanpa," a type of cheap pick-up game, often targeting less-desirable people as a gag. It's truly quaint that people believe the U.S. is nothing like Japan.
Before beginning his reading, Ryan O'Connell raised his hand and asked the audience, "Who here identifies as a slut!" A lot of hands went up, accompanied by little shrieks of delight. But as the reading continued—if I can see you, maybe you can see me, too—I began to realize, oh, no, perhaps I've been a slut all along: relying on other people to witness me, to reflect me, to tell me who I am. I clamped one hand over my mouth to stifle my sobs.
After the event, I was agitated. O'Connell's work had been, after all, a sneak attack. I hadn't been prepared.
"When you're thin," I said to my friend, "you can choose when to be visible and when to blend in. But when your body takes up more space..." My friend's face looked grim.
I started talking about institutionalized medical negligence—sexism, racism, ableism, sizeism, classism—and the way doctors in Central Florida had seemed to assume I couldn't pay for healthcare. In Los Angeles, I said, weight maybe isn't quite as big a deal: people can usually accept, at least cognitively, that thinness is not a prerequisite for the majority of jobs. But in the rest of the U.S., thinness is the ultimate class marker. If you were able to pay for medical care, many doctors reason, you'd also be thin. Why would you go on being fat if you ever could afford to not be?
I was already spiraling when my friend muttered I was "very pretty" and then the whole conversation cratered.
Now we were both outraged. "I am putting down a boundary," she said, "and I should've said something earlier." She clarified: although her body is normative by U.S. standards, she is from a country where her current size is considered unacceptable. She was trembling as she said this.
Yes, of course. It makes 'going home' feel dangerous. Of course she couldn't discuss this with me.
And then, too, the goalposts are always shifting: the aim is to stop people from feeling safe in their own bodies anywhere, ever.
For a few months TikTok had very insistently advertised a website called EuroDate to me. It was an interesting thought. But I sensed I'd feel big and obvious and hulking in Europe, too. Where can I ever go to feel safe? The real goal, obviously, is to feel safe with my own self, no matter where I physically end up. But sometimes this goal still feels so far away from me.
"Don't you have anyone else to talk to about this?" my friend asked me.
I considered it. I flipped through an address book in my mind. "No," I said out loud, surprised and distraught.