That’s what I overheard Sunday night as I walked my dog down Austin’s famed Sixth Street, a row of tacky bars and live music joints catering to the never-ending crop of University of Texas students where the girls wear last season’s Juicy Couture knock-offs and the guys puke on your shoes.
I wish I could say I hadn’t heard it before.
I wish I could say it was completely untrue.
Now, before you jump all over me, of course it isn’t true. Fat chicks don’t “always” do anything and if we did, I can imagine a lot of things that would come before bumping uglies with some déclassé spray gel enthusiast whose parents may, strictly speaking, share more genetic material than usually considered acceptable in polite society.
I get it. I do. I know that positive male attention can be hard to come by when you’re a big girl, and I know that we can have some pretty serious self-esteem issues. It’s easy to get beaten down when everywhere you look you’re being told you are unworthy. Unworthy of wearing these clothes, of dating that man, of getting what you want out of life. See, only people who work hard deserve good things, and if you really worked hard, you wouldn’t still be fat, would you?
So you go out looking cute –or as cute as you’re going to get– and you meet a guy. Maybe he tells you he likes a girl “with a little meat on her bones” and maybe he trash talks skinny chicks –an ex-girlfriend who was “like a skeleton”– just enough to make you feel a little better about the way your butt spreads across the barstool. And even though you suspect he’s a player and not really your type, you sigh and remind yourself how long it’s been since a man has shown interest in you and made you feel really desirable.
So what happens next?
If you’re me at 22, you end up in the back of a classic Coupe DeVille (black with kid grey interior) doing the sort of disreputable but impressively acrobatic activities that cause you to think “hmm, if I ever want to run for office I’ll probably need to get this guy killed” and when you get home you feel great because even though he’s not Prince Charming, he’s a guy! and he likes you! Not just for your brains or your personality, but for your body, too, and it’s so damn NICE.
Until it isn’t.
Because he doesn’t call, and when you call him he tells you that he’s “not really ready for a relationship” and then slyly suggests some sort of friends-with-benefits situation. “Let’s just see where it goes” he says, and now you’re back at zero.
Or maybe a little worse than zero, because you’ve been delivered that “unworthy” message, loud and clear again and so a little more self-esteem gets chipped away again and it starts all over again.
Listen. I’m not going to tell you what to do with your lady parts. I figure you grew ‘em, you can manage ‘em, but if there’s one bit of wisdom that I can impart it’s this: you cannot screw your way to self-worth. We’re always going to be told we’re not good enough. Either because we’re fat or because we’re women or because we just live in a culture where –at least at the time of writing– being a marketing executive is not punishable by death.
So let’s refocus. Let’s learn to love our own bodies, to seduce our own senses, the book at the bottom of the page can show you some tricks, others you’ll learn in your own time. There are a million cures for low self-esteem but –I promise– none of them are delivered by injection.
Mama Gena’s guide to the Womanly Arts.
