“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving, hysterical, naked...”
-Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

No jokes to start this week. Can’t do it. Too upset.

I have found some pretty bizarre things researching these columns every week, all the way from discovering the weight loss religion Cosmotarianism in Week 3’s column to finding out that soap laced with potassium chloride—the main chemical used in a lethal injection—used to be sold as a weight-loss product in the 30’s. But nothing, NOTHING comes close to discovering the Pro-Ana community.

I can’t even classify this under the “Great Moments In The Insane Crap...” heading. It’s too disgusting and tragic. Pro-Ana is a loose name for a proliferation of internet sites glamorizing anorexia. Users and organizers of the sites share important information, like how to lie to your doctor about how much food you eat, arrange crash diet competitions, sell blue bracelets in the manner of Lance Armstrong (would that be LiveWeak, I wonder), and post pictures of emaciated celebrities and fashion models as ‘thinspiration.’

Because apparently having a midsection like a drumhead stretched over a 7-point buck rack is the epitome of female achievement to the organizers of these websites, and they can think of nothing better than compounding the already crippling insecurity of teenage girls. This has honestly made me sick. One of the reasons I originally resisted a column on fitness was that I think there’s too much cultural paranoia about body image in America already. I eventually made peace with the idea by deciding that if I did write about weight loss, I’d do it from the perspective of someone who was already confident in their appearance.

But once upon a time, I was a teenager too, and there’s nothing like a little jaunt down the uglier back alleys of memory lane to remind me how hard-won that confidence was. The first time I remember being insecure about my weight was around age eight. I had decided that summer that I was going to be a famous actress, and my parents duly enrolled me in some kind of youth theater camp. The teacher was a failed actress herself, all leather and lemon juice, and I think she hated children. At any rate, she was the first person I remember sniffing at me telling her how world-renowned I was going to be and saying, “I doubt it. You’re too fat.”

Of course it was about her insecurities, but I didn’t doubt it was true. It’s amazing how little it takes to connect success and value with weight in the mind of a little girl. Even today, eighteen years later, I’m still not completely sure that connection is broken.
I had my high school yearbook on my bookshelf in college, and if any of my college friends ever looked at it they’d usually ask, in a bemused voice, “was there something in the water where you went to high school?” Because with startlingly few exceptions, my entire graduating class was gorgeous. Most of the girls were from wealthy families, they had diamond earrings and blonde hair and drove S-classes and come seventh period the cafeteria bathroom smelled like yellow bile and whatever they’d served for lunch that day. Our class president was briefly hospitalized with anorexia, and some of the girls would have their watches set to beep when it was time to take their diet pills. I never participated in the insanity because I never understood it.

Not because I was so secure; far from it. But because I would have crawled over broken glass to be as beautiful as they were, and couldn’t fathom why they didn’t see it. It’s ridiculous, it’s wrongheaded, and half of me was always aware of that. Another thing that helped was that I always had reinforcement for mental accomplishments—people praising me for my intelligence. I was always something; I was the smart one. I helped the pretty girls with their homework; they went out with the boys I liked but was too shy to approach. It didn’t make me value myself as a woman any higher, but it kept me, I think, from the whirlpool of self-doubt that sucks in a lot of teenagers—that if they’re not pretty they’re nothing.

I never crash dieted, I never suffered from an eating disorder; but I sometimes I don’t think it’s possible to make it through an American high school today while maintaining well-ordered eating. I definitely don’t think throwing away half your lunch every day, saving your Oreos or Swedish fish to eat on the roof or in the bathroom stall where no one would see you, or making pasta at 2 in the morning and hiding the half-empty noodle boxes in the back of the pantry—all of which I’ve done—counts.  

A few weeks ago I was visiting my parents, and my mom showed me a picture of me and my date the night of the senior prom. We’re standing in front of my old house, along with my grandfather; they’re both looking at the camera and I’m looking at my feet. I was almost speechless as that evening came back to me in astonishing clarity; not an hour before that picture was taken I was sobbing in the bathroom because of how horrible I looked. The funny part is I was about thirty pounds lighter then than I am now, when I actually do like my appearance.

Look. Up under my smirky headshot is a picture of my body, all 58 inches and 154 pounds of it. Some angles are better, some outfits are more flattering, but by and large that’s the form I present to the world every day. That body has been with me for 26 years of adventures, privations and flat-out misbegotten enterprises. It’s enjoyed many substances, some delicious, some strange and a few not strictly legal. It’s saved a Girl Scout from drowning, jumped off a 60-foot coral reef in the Ligurian Sea and climbed the five highest mountains in Wales. It’s walked out of two car crashes, carried all my scars, been the canvas of tattoo artists and an object of fascination for some improbably handsome men. It can swim a pool lap in under two minutes, eke out House of the Rising Sun on acoustic guitar, drink a football player under the table and on one shining Friday afternoon in 1997 hit the secondary end boss on Soul Caliber using only a single quarter. It’s been cut, burned, bits of it broken, undeservedly despised, and yet we’re still together. In 2009 it’s going to graduate with a master’s degree from Boston University, someday it will stand on the peak of Mount Fuji in Japan, and...who knows? Maybe even bear children.

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with what jeans size it wears. This is what hurts me when I hear friends and loved ones talk about how they hate looking in the mirror, or read about thirteen-year-olds using the internet to develop eating disorders. Because all the things those poor people are hoping will happen, on that magical day they wake up and are all of a sudden not fat anymore, that they’ll all of a sudden like themselves and all the good things they don’t think they deserve now will come to pass...they have to come first. And no one’s telling them that; they’re too busy marketing Hoodia and bleating on CNN about the public health crisis of American obesity.

You know what’s a crisis? The fact that 35% of American teenagers admit to having gone to a pro-Ana website. Anthropologists acknowledge what is known as a culture-bound disorder; that’s a psychological disorder which manifests out of circumstances people from other places in the world can’t even acknowledge as symptoms. I find it hard to believe that, in places in the world where people don’t have basic economic or social opportunities, wearing a size 12 carries the same social stigma it had in my high school, where most of us had everything given to us.

For the last twenty-five years, women have outnumbered men in American higher education. Women’s total earning power is still significantly lower. And, starting in some cases as young as eight years old, women are told their worth is determined by an unattainable standard of beauty, and trinkets and palliatives are flung at them so that they’ll spend money chasing an ideal only a small percentage of them are even genetically capable of achieving. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that so many women, confronting this, develop unhealthy habits and never truly like themselves.

 If I have any hope in writing this column, it’s that when you read about this occasionally difficult and nervewracking process of weight loss, you can laugh at it. At the silly behavior we all undergo in the pursuit of ‘beauty,’ in the idiotic excesses of self-loathing some in pop culture would have us take as gospel, and more importantly at how trivial a matter it really is. Because it is. Being slender is nothing compared to being happy. Or sly, or witty, or loved, or sexy, or powerful, or fulfilled, or all the wonderful things you can be when you start seeing your own superhero in the mirror.

I am the Incredible Shrinking Woman. And even if I wasn’t shrinking, I’d still be an incredible woman.