I was skinny once. For about four years, between my freshman year of high school and my freshman year of college, I was skinny. Really skinny, actually. Skinny enough that I could wear just about anything. Skinny enough that my stomach was completely flat. Skinny enough that I got woozy from low blood sugar in between my sparse nonfat meals. Skinny enough that I was, by the beauty standards of our culture, skinny enough.
I stopped being skinny shortly after I started college, when I made the completely conscious decision that I couldn't be both really skinny and get very much out of my education. Being as thin as I was was a project that took most of my time, energy, and concentration. It was a lot like having a part-time job, in fact. Except that I wasn't getting paid to do it.
I worked out five or six times a week and I spent hours each day planning exactly what I would eat and when. My high school class notes all had lists enumerating the fat and calorie counts of my daily food intake running down the margins, but by the time I got to college this was starting to get boring. I stopped obsessing about food, let up on the constant exercise, and over the course of a few years climbed to my present weight.
It was a good decision. Freed of the constant demands of strenuous dieting I found I had a lot more room in my life for everything else. Now, at about 5'7\ and a size 12, I don't think anyone considers me fat. Anyone, that is, except for every single designer, manufacturer and distributor of women's clothing in the United States.
A few months ago I went shopping for a pair of jeans, and came back with nothing but a major case of attitude. The first place I tried was Urban Outfitters on State Street. They had several different styles of pants in the women's section of the store, although none ran bigger than a size 13. This by itself is problematic since something like 50 percent of American women are a size 14 or larger. Nevertheless, I picked up a couple of size 13s and headed for the dressing room, thinking that they'd be little big on me if anything. I couldn't even zip them.
""That's odd,"" I thought, ""perhaps I've put on 15 pounds since this morning, or... hey wait a minute."" I examined the tags again and noticed something that had escaped my attention before. These were not a size 13, these were a size 13 ""junior""'meaning that they were designed for young teens or older children, not adult women (even though adult women are ostensibly Urban Outfitters' target demographic).
""What kind of store caters to women in their late teens and early 20s but carries only children's sizes?"" I wondered as I left in a rage.
However, if I thought I was going to find better at any of the other major chain stores'and where the hell else can you get clothes except for a chain store anymore, short of sewing them yourself'?I was disappointed. From the clothing selection I found available to me, I'm assuming that the CEO's of the Gap, the Limited and Banana Republic are all working with the assumption that each and every American woman is a) 13 years old, b) a size 4 and c) Britney Spears. I am 28 years old. I teach college. I do not want to wear skin-tight turquoise Capri pants and a belly shirt with sequined kittens on it. Not to work. Not ever.
It used to be that you could buy jeans without being made to feel like a freak of nature, but not, apparently, any longer. The cult of anorexia in this country has gotten to the point that, as a woman, you're not only told you're ugly if you're not painfully thin, the greedy capitalist punks who own the Gap won't even deign to sell you a pair of pants. Being marginalized in the mainstream media is one thing. Being refused clothing is quite another. Perhaps the next step for me is being evicted from my apartment, or deported. For now, though, I've taken to shopping in men's clothing stores, and that's been working out just fine.
