the skinny
A few years after I was born,
Nineties Skinny and Purity Culture
Were dumped into a boiling pot by
Church Leaders and Victoria’s Secret,
America’s Next Top Model and Christian Authors and
Stirred together into a bubbling roux
Where girls’ self-esteems went to die.
It was a weird time to become a woman–
Caught between two narrow visions of femininity:
Your body is God’s precious temple,
Holy and not to be a temptation
And
Your body needs to be better so
Every part of you needs to be
t h i n n e r .
At 13, I felt like a bundle of flesh
broken upon assembly
And couldn’t figure out if I was supposed to be more pretty or less pretty—
What is the exact right amount of pretty?—
as if two puzzles had been poured out in front of me and I was trying to
Piece together a me that was both
Perfect and Sexy
and
Innocent and Pure.
I tried—
I really, really did—
Until one day I stepped out of my skin like a wetsuit and
Handed my body over to the ones reaching for it:
The church, the sports, the boys at school, the girls on TV, the future husband, the culture, the God.
I let everyone else decide what looked good and felt good
Because who was I except the naive soul trapped inside
This disgusting coat of
Never-Good-Enough?
I learned to fear
Curves and
Lust and
Cellulite and
Sex and
Fat and
Confidence.
I learned to notice every
Imperfection or
Pimple or
Sin or
Immodesty
In myself
And everyone else.
I didn’t know how to feel comfortable in a body,
Much less love a body
That was such a … problem.
Maybe Purity Culture was trying to
Fight Nineties Skinny by giving us
Something to hold onto besides
Eating disorders and aLL tHe SeX
But it just hung two separate but
Equally impossibly high bars
Over our heads like police batons.
So I want to thank whoever it was
Who decided at some point in the last decade that actually
Bodies are beautiful and positive and OUR OWN,
Who reattached our hearts and minds to our skin,
Took our agency out of the hands of the bodysnatchers
And handed it back
To little girls looking in mirrors
And forty-year-old women
Who didn’t know it was theirs to claim.
This body is mine—
It was only ever mine—
Which shouldn’t be some revolutionary thought
But it is.
And slowly I’m beginning to FEEL myself again
And at some point this body won’t house my soul
But as long as it does
I will make it feel comfortable and welcome and adored.
I will make it feel like a
h o m e .
