On Lena Dunham’s jiggly bits, and why you should be talking about them

I’m not really good at trends. I tend to jump on the bandwagon just before it gets a flat, crashes, and burns. Case in point: I’m finally embracing the ombre hair trend now that it’s no longer cool (seriously guys, why did no one tell me this, omg). I’m notoriously bad at keeping on top of TV trends, and generally only get invested in shows after they’ve been around for at least five seasons and/or just before they get canned.

So there was already a big hype surrounding HBO’s Girls before I even sat down to watch the first episode last month. And for that reason, I was more than a little determined not to like it. But, much to my chagrin, it had me from the very first scene. Because it is cheaper to be included on the family cell phone plan, okay? And my parents should be grateful that I’m not a heroin addict. I found myself relating to this group of girls that I really had nothing in common with, and I was loving it.

Until I saw what can’t be unseen. Lena Dunham. Naked. And, much to my embarrassment, I had an immediate, knee-jerk reaction.

I cringed.

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I cringed! Cellulite – ew! Touching thighs – gross! Boobs that sag – WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?

I realized that I had never seen a body like this on TV before. Here’s a girl who looks nothing like the women whose breasts and asses usually grace my television screen. But what was most shocking about Lena Dunham’s naked body was how unabashedly she was showing it in all its glory, badly lit and without being airbrushed. Why isn’t she embarrassed by how her boobs are going to look in that sext? Why isn’t she making excuses for that roll of fat on her stomach? It’s not actually okay for her to look like that, is it? I was mortified by this response, because it’snot the reaction a well-educated feminist should be having. But I realized that I was being as hard on Lena’s body as I am on my own.

And that’s when it hit me that this was the first time I had seen a body in mainstream media that even remotely resembled my own. The first time. In 26 years. Just think about that.

That’s not to say that “fuller-figured” women aren’t being represented on TV or in movies. But the “chubby” girl as an archetype generally serves a single function in her particular plot: to be the “chubby” girl. She’s often apologetic about her appearance, and/or self-deprecating, and/or defensively caustic. Her dialogue, the way she perceives herself, and the way others view her all emphasize her physicality, and more often than not, one of her purposes is to be the foil of the “skinny” girls that surround her. This makes room for a conflation of the female body and the comedic grotesque that is nowhere more clear than in Rex Reed's now infamous review of Melissa McCarthy’s performance in Identity Thief. While he lampoons the movie on the whole, Reed is particularly scathing in his personal attack on McCarthy, and centres much of his criticism on her physicality: in his words, McCarthy is little more than “a gimmick comedian who has devoted her short career to being obese and obnoxious with equal success.”

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McCarthy’s not only irritating, she’s fat and irritating. How dare she. And she isn’t just obese. She’s “tractor-sized.” A “humongous creep.” A “female hippo.” Jesus, Rex. Tell us how you really feel. But while Reed’s review was rightly attacked as little more than a brutal and offensive piece of fat-shaming, his characterization of McCarthy isn’t unprecedented. While McCarthy may indeed be a wildly successful, Oscar-nominated actress, it’s hard to deny that the majority of her roles centre on and draw attention to her obesity. For better or worse, she has carved out a niche as one of Hollywood’s few plus-sized actresses. As a result, her body has become a crucial component of her character.

So in many ways, Lena Dunham isn’t doing anything revolutionary, since Hannah’s “chubbiness” is one of the characteristics that defines her in both her eyes and the eyes of her friends and family. Think of her standing on the sidewalk yelling about how hard it’s been for her to be 13 pounds overweight her entire life. Think of Adam playing with and joking about her belly fat post coitus. (A warning to my boyfriend: if you ever do this to me, I will seriously punch you in the teeth, for real.)

But the thing is: I don’t “relate” to Melissa McCarthy anymore than I “relate” to Angelina Jolie. While I appreciate the fact that she has (deliberately or otherwise) shaken up Hollywood’s body politics, her body doesn’t speak to or for mine in any way. Sure, I can definitely believe that she’s a woman who has worn a pair of Spanx or two in her day, and sure I can commiserate with her stories of undergarment malfunctions (that interview with Ellen? HILARIOUS, by the way). But ultimately her body is just the opposite extreme of the emaciated forms that have been glorified for far too long in Western media, and is equally alienating for many female viewers.

It’s the awkward middle group that’s being ignored. The girls who certainly aren’t obese, but who probably have a hard time finding a flattering pair of pants. The mes and the Lena Dunhams of the world. We’re the ones who are still virtually unrepresented. So I can’t help but think that Lena Dunham is very consciously using her body not only to challenge mainstream perceptions of beauty and sexiness, but also to challenge ideas of what is “acceptable” to show in film and televison.

It’s probably not surprising, then, that Dunham’s dimply arse conjured up a veritable shit storm of negative feedback from the show’s critics. And most of the show’s reviewers do tend to slip in some comment on Dunham’s less than goddess-like form, whether it’s pertinent to their review or not. For Andrea Peyser, Girls is little more than “Sex and the City – for ugly people” headlined by “a fat chick named Hannah.” In Linda Stasi's review for The New York Post website, Dunham’s “blobby body” similarly takes the front seat: “It’s not every day in the TV world of anorexic actresses with fake boobs that a woman with giant thighs, a sloppy backside and small breasts is compelled to show it all. It’s a boon for the out-of-shape and perhaps a giant economic loss for high end gyms, especially in Brooklyn.”

Feminists unite!

And then there’s Howard Stern, who’s clearly in a position to criticize others’ looks: “[Dunham is] a little fat girl who kinda looks like Jonah Hill and she keeps taking her clothes off…good for her. It’s really hard for little fat chicks to get anything going.” (Dunham's response to this asininity confirms my suspicion that we could probably be friends.)

The general theme here is disgust, and a certain sense of “how dare she.” It’s bad enough that Dunham is brandishing her “sloppy backside” across our TV and computer screens, but it’s the fact that she’s completely unapologetic about doing so that’s just too much. And what about all that SEX she’s managing to have?! UGH.

It’s an infuriatingly problematic response, but while part of me wishes we were accepting enough to not even bat an eyelash at Dunham’s body, the other part is really glad she’s making people so uncomfortable. That “blobby body” is shocking to us because with each dimple and pimple, it’s subverting the images of the female body that the media had force-fed us and told us is sexy and acceptable. Hannah isn’t an ideal role model in many ways, but each time she strips off, girls like me, that long-neglected middle group, are finally seeing someone onscreen with whom they identify and in whose self-confidence they can take stock. While Dunham’s obvious talent for acting, directing, and writing shouldn’t go uncelebrated, one of her most important contributions to the industry is having inspired this dialogue about body image. Having provided an alternative to the sanitized bodies we generally see in the media. Having shown what a gloriously average female body looks like. And having suggested that it’s okay for it to look that way. It’s a dialogue we desperately need to be having.

Another dialogue we need to be having? How completely unhygienic Adam’s apartment looks and how Hannah should not be walking around it barefoot, let alone romping in his sheets. Run, girl. Run and get a tetanus shot.

On legacies (or: Telling my grandkids what they should think of me)

My grandfather turned 90 at the end of January. We celebrated by throwing him a big party.

This probably conjures up a very specific image in your mind. Namely of a feeble, wheelchair-bound, largely incoherent old man drooling on himself while his children and grandchildren--somewhat condescendingly--sing Happy Birthday to him while trying to force feed him cake.

But you've obviously never met my poppy.

My poppy is part leprechaun, part Greek god. He drives his car every day. He cooks all his own meals. His singing voice booms louder than the rest of the congregation at church services. He would win in a dance off. He has better skin than I do. He's an incredibly rad dude, and as I (literally) waltzed around my packed living room with him at his party, I couldn't help but feel incredibly lucky, not only because I've been blessed with an awesome man as my grandfather, but also because I've been given so much time to spend and make memories with him.

As part of my birthday gift to him, I pieced together a massive sideshow of old and recent pictures and video messages from family members, set to some of his favourite songs. It was incredible to sift through a lifetime of photographs, many depicting my grandfather as the adorable little white-haired man I've always known him to be, but some showing him at moments in his life I've never witnessed - as a fiancé, a young father, or a five-foot tall Adonis with impressively red chest hair.

I found myself wondering what my grandfather was like at my age. I wonder how he envisioned his life turning out. What his favourite pastimes were. How he went about wooing my grandmother. Whether he and I would have gotten along.

We so often forget that our parents and grandparents exist beyond our very narrow conceptions of them.

I desperately hope that my relationship with my future grandkids is comparable to mine and my grandfather's. So to those future grand kids: I really hope you exist somewhere down the road, and I dedicate this entry to you. I’ve probably become very tired and jaded and forgetful. I bet I talk to myself and constantly complain about my physical ailments. Apologies. Please know that I was once young, and coherent(ish), and (somewhat) less cranky, and that we probably could have been friends:

• Nanny drank a lot of beer in her day.
• In a similar vein, Nanny was a pretty great drunk. She usually didn't get sloppy or out of hand - alcohol just amped up her sense of humour and destroyed what little social filter she had when sober.
• Nanny wasted a lot of time resenting her hair and buying products to fix it.
• Nanny knows what it's like to be pain-in-your-guts, warm-in-your-pants in love.
• Nanny had a pretty nasty sense of humour. She liked to make people laugh and generally succeeded by a) making fun of others, and/or b) voicing acerbic observations that no one else wanted to voice.
• Nanny found her greatest joy in singing. She also used to play guitar, but her fingers are probably too arthritic to do that anymore.
•  Nanny was generally considered to have a pretty respectable rack. She referenced it more than was acceptable in polite conversation.
• Your great grandparents and great-great-grandparents were pretty awesome people, and Nanny like them a lot. Nanny's poppy could yodel. Her grandmother drove a VW bus in the 1960s. Her dad built a 1980 Mini from the ground up. Her mom shared her wicked sense of humour, but was infinitely more glamorous than Nanny and never left the house without a full face of makeup.
• Nanny used to regularly drive around town in her car, singing show tunes loudly.
• Nanny was once reprimanded by a woman in a New York City bathroom.
• Nanny once had pretty wicked road rage. Ironically, she's probably the source of others' road rage now.
• Nanny had a potty mouth.
• Nanny started going grey at 12. Hopefully she has accepted this reality of her body and has finally embraced her silver tresses.
• When Nanny was your age, an acceptable way to spend an evening with friends was to go dancing and drinking at a bar. Nanny hated this activity with the fire of a thousand suns, and would generally pass these evenings pretending to have a good time while silently judging her peers. The music was loud, the drinks were overpriced, the people were gross, and Nanny would rarely get through the evening without getting covered in someone else's beer. She desperately hopes that these evenings are never romanticized as The Good Old Days.
• Nanny never met a pizza, pasta, or turkey dinner she didn't like.
• Nanny spent way too much money on lipstick she never used.
• When Nanny was young, it cost her $10 to get into a movie and the better part of $70 to fill up her car. A fancy coffee could cost over $5. She refused to believe that these prices will ever been considered anything other than atrociously expensive.   
• Nanny spent the first half of her twenties feeling pretty lost and directionless. She'd love to commiserate with you over cookies and a cup of tea if you feel that way, too. She's pretty confident you're going to come out the other end of your apathy.

 (Nanny hopes she overcame this apathy, and isn’t currently living in a carboard box, as she long feared.)

On Spanx and why they are not—contrary to popular belief—magical creations from a mystical land

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Ahhh...liberating.

There are so many moments in my life when I want to take my fellow woman under my wing. To the girl with the lipstick on her front teeth - please let me discretely indicate that you need to check a mirror. To the girl stumbling around downtown in the seven-inch stilettos that only marginally fit - let us go shop the Naturalizer website together. To the girl who insists on writinggg Facebookkk postsss likeeee thisss - actually, no. I don't want to be your friend.

But this New Year's Eve sent my "helper" instincts (which usually lie abysmally dormant) into high gear. This year, we decided to forgo our usual house party by dressing up and going dancing. As I stood by our table, nursing an overpriced drink and donning festive headgear that was going to leave me picking glitter out of my hair for the next week, I felt the sudden urge to scream at my fellow party goers:

GIRLS. SPANX. YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

See, Spanx are meant to supplement what your own body naturally has going on. Unless that dress fits you without any underpinnings, put it back on the hanger and back that mother up. Those Spanx have not magically caused you to drop fifteen pounds. (Celebrity endorsers will try to convince you that this will, in fact, happen. Those people sit on a throne of lies.) Oh, and I know you're wearing a pair because they're peeking out from under your dress. Because they've tricked you into buying a dress that's too small for you.

And before you accuse me of ranting from atop my pedestal, let me state for the record: I own Spanx. I have worn Spanx. I feel that little bit more confident when the lower half of my body is tightly bound in industrial strength Lycra. This last point sits uneasily with my inner feminist. And believe me, I question why I invested in a pair of Spanx every time I suffer the ignominy of contorting my body into unnatural shapes to squeeze my limbs into a tube of spandex. Or when I'm navigating the intricacies of peeing through a hole in the crotch of my nylons. (This isn't too much information, people. THIS IS REAL LIFE.)

But as I was watching the endless parade of girls in too-tight dresses strut past me, wrestling with and clearly uncomfortable in their clothes, I wasn't judging them for wearing Spanx (although the very existence of supportive undergarments obviously speaks to a cultural obsession with "perfecting" women's bodies that is problematic and disturbing). On the contrary, it would completely hypocritical of me to condemn Spanx—in fact, I was wearing a pair under my dress as I walked across the stage to accept my Master's degree. How's that for feminism. And I'm certainly not trying to start a dialogue on how we should love our bodies, flaws and all. Because that conversation has been had. And, quite frankly, no one seems to be listening.

What amazes me about Spanx is that they completely distort their wearers' perceptions of their bodies in a way that other beauty products do not. All beauty products hinge on the implicit suggestion that there are things "wrong" with women's bodies that require "fixing." But the majority of these products, whether they be makeup, or hair dye, or high heels, are visible. They're obvious. They make no bones about their existence. You're not fooling anyone into thinking that your lips are actually that red. Or that your hair has zero flyaways. Or that your cheeks are naturally and perfectly flushed. All. The. Time.

The thing about Spanx is that they're supposed to be a secret. No one's supposed to know you're wearing them. They're what's going on behind (underneath?) the scenes, hiding that cellulite that you're not supposed to have, either. I think it's because they're invisible to the outside world that so many women become completely blind to the realities (notice I’m not using the word “shortcomings”) of their own bodies the minute they don a pair of Spanx. Far too many women—especially in the 18-29 age range, it seems—are buying clothes that blatantly don't fit their bodies in the hopes that a pair (or two) of Spanx will be the solution. I've heard this conversation though dressing room walls. I've had it with my own friends.

Too many women have ceased dressing for their bodies and are instead dressing for the bodies promised by their undergarments.

Of course, a lot of it has to do with marketing. You know what drives me absolutely mental? Using girls who look like this to sell a product designed to keep wayward fat in place:

Because let me tell you one thing right now, Spanx. That girl right there? She is not your target audience. I can practically see her hip bones through her girdle, for Chrissakes.

This is not an entry about shaming women, or their bodies, or what they choose to put on those bodies. But please, girls—get to know your bodies (...that phrase was creepy in my head and is no less creepy in print). Get to know what suits you. Get to know what doesn't. I, for instance, know that no amount of Spanx binding is going to make me look good in a pair of tight white pants. And (because I'm not living in 1985), I'm okay with that. There's nothing wrong with being a size 00 (yes, that’s a real thing) or 16 or 67. But if you're going to try to improve the look of your body by binding it in Spanx, at least hold up your end of the deal and BUY CLOTHES THAT FIT YOU in the first place. I don't want to give you the impression that I spent New Year's Eve silently judging the physical shortcomings of my female peers. I wasn't looking at these women thinking "why in the name of God did she wear that dress?" No, I spent New Year's Eve pitying these women, thinking "why in the name of God did that miserable soul think she was going to be comfortable in that dress?"

Because Spanx are lying to you about your bodies, friends. They're making you believe that you're smaller than you actually are. And when you think you're smaller than you actually are, you buy clothes that don't fit you. And when you buy clothes that don't fit you, you end up spending New Year's Eve wearing a dress that's gradually cutting off the blood supply to your extremities. Spanx claims that its mission is "to help women feel great about themselves and their potential." But it's hard to look particularly empowered when you spend your entire evening fishing your dress out of your buttcrack.

So here's what I say to you, Spanx. Sure you made me look a bit trimmer under my convocation gown. But you're also perpetuating a culture where it's not only okay for women to constantly want to alter their bodies, but also to wear clothes that DO NOT FIT their bodies. It's when we wear clothes that do not fit us that we want to alter our bodies. See the abusive cycle of self loathing you're contributing to?

Power panties, indeed.

On re-learning to write

I haven't made a New Year's resolution in a long time. Several years ago, in an attempt to prove--if to no one but myself--that I actually am in control of my life, I haphazardly resolved to floss more regularly. That happened to be the year I got my first cavity. So we can all conclude how successful I was in keeping that promise to myself. This blog was born out of a New Year's resolution to keep my writing skills from falling into disuse following the completion of my MA. It wasn't made until the New Year in question was already a week old.

I feel as though this project was doomed to fail right from its tardy beginnings.

Now that I've lent myself to the powerful first impression that I am an apathetic procrastinator with questionable oral health, let me assure you that neither of these characteristics could be further from the truth. My dentist regularly compliments my teeth. More pertinently, I've seriously thought about starting a blog for months, but have always let my own fears of inadequacy keep me from writing that fateful first entry. "Is my writing entertaining?" I wondered. "Will people actually read this stuff?" I mused. Do I have enough original thoughts to sustain a blog past its initial honeymoon phase?

It's probably for similar reasons that I haven't kept a personal journal since I started university. For the last seven years, I've made a career (and I really do think that a committed student, unpaid and downtrodden though she may be, can consider academia her "career") out of writing, but, ironically, my graduate degree has, in many ways, made me a less assured writer. Sure, I produced a thesis. Sure, I've gotten my material published. Sure, I could write you an essay examining Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection vis-à-vis sexually monstrous male characters in Gothic literature. (To my eternal credit, I actually did write this essay. It will provide proof of my youthful sapience when I am old, senile, and drooling on myself in some nursing home.) But the idea of sitting down to write with absolutely nothing but my own musings to guide me is a new and scary undertaking. I think this is mostly because my degrees taught me to be so hard on myself as a writer. For me, writing has, for a long time, been something to be scrutinized, challenged, and ultimately rewritten. Moreover, it was something that was so often completed with some ulterior motive in mind: to impress a particularly formidable prof; to satisfy a degree requirement; to earn that all-important scholarship. Writing for writing's sake has become a foreign concept to me.

I've found myself in a strange and distant land.

So if you've made it this far, congratulations: you're now part of a moment in history. I have no idea what is going to fill these metaphorical pages, but thus begins my pitiful attempt to stake out what my beloved Miss Austen would term my own "little bit...of ivory."¹ May it make you think and chuckle, and may it always be grammatically pristine.

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1 I'd like to think Jane Austen and I were BFFLs in a past life. She is the focus of much of my scholarly work; without her, my blog would be titleless; and I can't imagine that I won't write a blog entry about her in the future. In an 1816 letter to her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, she compares the limitations of her authorial scope to the vastness of his:

By the bye, my dear E., I am quite concerned for the loss your mother mentions in her letter. Two chapters and a half to be missing is monstrous! It is well that I have not been at Steventon lately, and therefore cannot be suspected of purloining them: two strong twigs and a half towards a nest of my own would have been something. I do not think, however, that any theft of that sort would be really very useful to me. What should I do with your strong, manly, vigorous sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?

The "little bit...of ivory" refers to the literal ivory pages of the diary on which she wrote. Imagine penning one of the greatest English novels in a Moleskine notebook. Now imagine penning one of the greatest English novels in one of these bad boys:

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Ivory notebooks were a more convenient medium than ink and paper, because the writer could jot his or her notes in pencil and then easily erase them. Of course, one can also read a lot into the implied feminine frivolity and impermanence Austen associates with her own writing in comparison to her nephew's "manly…variety and glow." But that’s a different blog entry for a different day.^↩