The weight of it
A body image origin story (and a pair of leather trousers)
Note:
This is the first in an ongoing series of essays exploring body image — where it begins, how it’s shaped, and the myriad ways it infiltrates our lives.
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When I was 21 and had been living in London for about a year, I began hanging out with a woman called Nikki. She was the girlfriend of a guy in our large friendship group and we had taken to partying together at weekends. She was raucous and loud, the first to turn the music up and jump on a table, or to suggest shots at the bar. As a fellow wild child, I took an instant liking to her. The two of us got up to mischief together, doing silly things like stealing traffic cones and using them as megaphones as we stumbled home, or covering for each other as we did drunken pees down side alleys.
Nikki was great fun…until she wasn’t.
Things took a slightly darker turn when she became obsessed with dieting and losing weight. It was the year 2000 and the cult of thinness was inescapable, with Nikki one of its most devoted followers. On our hungover days, when we slobbed on the sofa together eating takeaway chips and binging crap telly, I watched as she flicked through piles of women’s magazines, including the then-ubiquitous Heat. This particular rag was renowned for its front covers featuring celebrities in bikinis, a tiny patch of thigh cellulite zoomed in on and circled in red beside headlines like ‘Porky Patsy lets it all hang out on the beach!’ Patsy being a UK size 6 with nary a scrap of fat on her.
These magazines held no interest for me and so I didn’t buy them, but I still came across them, of course. It was unavoidable. They were at friends’ houses, hair salons, in waiting rooms, and on newsstands everywhere. It disturbed me that such magazines existed, frankly, and I was utterly perplexed that otherwise intelligent, kind, take-no-shit women would willingly pay money to ingest the sexist hatred they spewed. Nikki was enthralled though, a morbid mixture of curiosity and survival instinct fueling her fascination, in the same way people rubberneck when they drive past a car crash. I can only assume that, despite the horror she must have felt on some level, her need to avoid the same fate overrode everything else.
For the most part I was able to ignore Nikki’s preoccupation with her weight, never participating in or encouraging her tirades about how fat she was (she wasn’t). But then, for whatever reason, she decided that my silence wasn’t enough -- I must join her. Whether it was because she didn’t want me to befall the same fatty fate she was so worried about or whether she was incredulous that I didn’t seem to care, I don’t know. But she was the first person to ever make me feel bad about my body and the way in which she did it is ingrained in my memory like chisel marks on stone.
That evening was her boyfriend’s birthday party, held at a pub we frequented regularly. My husband and I were late arriving because we’d been busy moving all our belongings to a new flat that day. I remember pawing through boxes looking for my going out clothes and settling on a pair of snug black trousers, low heeled boots, and a sparkly top. I felt good about myself when I left the house, confident in my usual style: never revealing or overdressed but slightly sexy with a casual vibe.
When we stepped inside the pub and spotted our friends, Nikki ran straight over to us, squealing. I knew immediately from her glassy eyes and unsteady gait that she was already wasted, having undoubtedly pre-gamed at home. She leaned in way too close and said ‘Oh my goddddd, you look great! Come with me to the bathroom’.
Before I could respond she was dragging me by the arm towards the back of the pub. I looked helplessly at my husband and shrugged, indicating that he should get me a drink at the bar while I dealt with Drunk Nikki. I assumed she just wanted company while she peed or to catch me up on some gossip that had occurred before we arrived.
But as we entered the empty women’s bathroom, she turned to me and said very seriously, ‘How have you done it?’
‘Done what?’
‘Lost so much weight.’
‘What? I haven’t lost any weight,’ I responded, bemused.
‘You have! Don’t pretend with me, I can tell. How did you do it, which diet?’
‘I’m telling you, I haven’t lost any weight and I haven’t been dieting. I wore this outfit a month ago and it fits exactly the same,’ I said.
I thought the only explanation was that she’d let ‘beer vision’ affect her perception and that she’d snap out of it when she realised she was wrong.
‘Well, I don’t believe you,’ she said smugly, her eyes less glazed and more piercing now. ‘You were chubby before and now I bet you’d fit into these trousers’ she said, gesturing towards the tight black leather encasing her slim thighs.
My head swirled with confusion, anger, shame, and pity for her all at once. Before I could get any words out or figure out how to respond, Nikki darted into a cubicle and began removing her shoes and trousers with the door wide open.
‘What the hell are you doing, Nikki?’ I asked her, growing more irritated and also concerned at her erratic behaviour.
‘Try these on,’ she said, throwing the trousers she’d finally wrestled off at me. ‘I guarantee they’ll fit you now.’ She said all of this cheerily, as if I should be flattered and pleased.
‘You’re batshit and you’re drunk. I’m not trying on your fucking trousers’ I seethed, throwing them back at her.
‘Oh come on, don’t be upset!’ she whined, a faux-hurt expression on her face. ‘Us chubby girls have to stick together, it’s not like we have loads to lose. I just wanted you to realise that if you can lose weight without even trying, think how much you’d lose if you tried a little harder.’
And there it was. That was the accusation being leveled at me. My crime was not being fat, it was that I wasn’t actively trying to shrink my body. I understood at that moment that my disinterest in thinness and beauty was, in her eyes, a betrayal of some kind. Who was I to think I was okay as I was?
For someone so desperately unhappy with herself, my nonchalance must have felt like an insult, one she needed to hurl back at me. She aimed for the soft underbelly of every young woman’s insecurity, knowing she would wound me there. I thought of all the scathing things I could say, all the well-reasoned points I could make about her behaviour before realising it would be futile. She was too drunk, too far gone, too consumed by self-loathing. Leaving her half-dressed and open-mouthed, I turned and walked out.
Though I tried to put Nikki’s antics out of my mind, ignoring her completely when she returned and slunk to the other side of the room, my mood was ruined, the night irretrievable. After two drinks I told my husband I was tired from the move and wanted to leave. In the taxi on the way home I thought about telling him what Nikki had said to me but a new voice -- not quite mine, not yet -- piped up unhelpfully. ‘What if you are ‘chubby’ and the look on his face tells you that he agrees with her? What if she’s right and you need to lose weight or should care more about being a smaller size?’ Deciding that I’d be too devastated and embarrassed if I saw even a flicker of agreement cross his face, I filed the memory under ‘Do not open’ and locked it away.
Over the next couple of months I distanced myself from Nikki, offering only polite smiles when we crossed paths at larger gatherings. I looked for signs of regret in her eyes, but she never met my gaze. Some part of her must have known she’d crossed a line, but whether it was pride or obliviousness that kept her from apologising, I’ll never know. Instead, she doubled down on her drinking, getting more out of control each time she went out. Quietly, I said goodbye to our friendship.
Nikki and her boyfriend broke up a short time later and she disappeared from our group altogether, but her words stayed with me much longer. They seeped into my subconscious just like the Heat magazine covers did, just like the fat jokes as punchlines on sitcoms did, just like men, the media, and society dissecting and scrutinizing our bodies as if they were not our own did. And though I tried to erase the shame Nikki had transferred onto me, the mark it left was indelible.
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I had a friend named Kelly in college that did things like this and even though she transferred to a different school after our freshman year, the damage was done. I had a full blown eating disorder by sophomore year. I also had another friend, my best friend from high school, who developed an eating disorder in college and I used to look for her pictures on FB every day, using them as fuel for my own ED. The body image stuff is like a highly contagious disease that spreads like wildfire.