I went to a fancy, expensive, private, 4-year art college, so I’ve sat through many Art History lectures. One lesson I remember more than any other. The professor clicked to a slide of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water. Because we were all educated and pretentious young women, the class immediately spouted off The Thing everyone says about Frank Lloyd Wright in general, and Falling Water in particular: Wright seamlessly integrated his buildings into the surrounding natural landscape.
The professor paused. Silence stretched. We looked at the slide. Finally she said, “Did he?”
That was my $500 per credit hour, “The Emperor Has No Clothes” moment. Just because everyone repeats the same factoid doesn’t make it true. It may contain a kernel of truth, or not. Maybe it was a popular fact, but now disproven. Maybe it was never true, but since history is written by the victors, it’s the only version we know.
How many times have you Googled something, and found nothing but hundreds of links to exactly the same, not exactly correct, information? It happens to me so frequently now that I’m hoping the next giant killer gets here soon with a better search engine. My most recent example: “The Venus of Willendorf.” Let’s start with her name. “Venus” is a gross anachronism, by tens of thousands of years. But she’s been saddled with that inaccuracy since she was dug up in 1908, and corrections to her name made in the past 40 years haven’t made a dent in search results.
It’s not the name that bothers me. It’s that One Thing we all know about the sculpture: she’s a fertility goddess, obviously, because of her “exaggerated” breasts, stomach, and hips. Clearly, the sculpture is about pregnancy and birth. Just Google it! You’ll see! Hundreds of identical hits, all telling you the same thing.
Please insert dramatic pause, while I leave the slide on the screen.
Is she pregnant? Are her breasts, stomach, and hips exaggerated? Because, my mirror says otherwise.
I’ve been a “small fat” for most of my life. There was a period in my 30s, when I “ate right and exercised” and was not plus size for the first and only time. I am the shape I am. I have always been this shape, although menopause has added more weight to my stomach. For the brief time that I was skinny, I still had large breasts and thighs. I could walk into any store and buy any clothing I wanted, but still: my breasts and thighs were several sizes larger than my waist. I was skinny, but somehow I was still shaped wrong. Maybe I wasn’t doing enough cardio. Too much cardio? More Pilates? More Yoga? Less weight training? I was inundated with advice for how to make my body right.
Trying to be ever-thinner and the right shape made me absolutely miserable. Eventually, suicidal ideation got me to a good therapist, and now, while I can’t say I love my body, I’m not trying to force it to become something it can never be. Recently, looking at my stomach, my breasts, my thighs, I had the thought, “I look like the Venus of Willendorf.” I don’t really. He hips are bigger, my legs are longer. I have feet and a face. But the overall shape, especially the shape of her breasts and stomach, mirror my own. In that moment I realized: I have always existed. My body. This shape. It isn’t new, and it’s not a result of GMO foods or a sedentary lifestyle. It simply is what some women look like, and have always looked like, for as long as humans have existed.
This realization sent me down the “Venus of Willendorf” rabbit hole. Reading link after link about her obvious pregnancy, I got kinda pissed. She simply does not look pregnant. I’ve seen pregnant bodies, and that’s not what they look like. On the other hand, she is exactly what I look like, and I have never carried a baby to term or given birth. The Woman of Willendorf was a crone, not a mother. Sure. She may have also been a mother, we can never know. But she looks more like a post-menopausal woman than a young woman at the peak of her fecundity. In order to accept that she is some sort of idealized fertility goddess, we need to agree that the sculptor accurately shaped the pendulous breasts, larger stomach, and wide hips common to older women, but decided to skip the front-protruding baby belly often seen on pregnant people. I’ll admit to not being a pregnancy expert, and (thanks to a quick Google!) I now know that all pregnant bellies look different. Some can be low and wide, as depicted in the sculpture. I can’t say, definitively, that she is not a fertility talisman. I can say, definitively, that I didn’t look like her until after 50, and now I do.
In this new world of Ozempic, which is more or less the same fat-phobic world I have always lived in, but with a twist, I’m seeing my body pathologized in a new way. Now, it’s not my fault that I’m fat. It isn’t my lack of willpower, or my affection for cheese. It’s a disease, for which I can take a drug! Which, leads to the inevitable question, why am I *not* taking this drug? I am a rich, white, fat woman with health insurance and a skinny Primary Care Physician. How hard do you think it would be for me to get Ozempic, if I told my doctor I was concerned about diabetes? Would I even need to go that far? I could simply point to my BMI, for which there are a whole list of medical billing codes. Even with a shortage of the drug, I’ll bet I could be injecting my first dose the day after tomorrow.
I don’t blame any fat person for making that choice. It is easier to buy clothing when you’re thin. You don’t need to worry about random chairs, and you can endure the cheap seats in the back of the plane. It is easier to get hired when you’re thin. You can eliminate one source of bias from your life. It’s a rational choice, but it’s not my choice.
My age, my wealth, my marital status, all afford me the privilege to be fat. I don’t need to interview for a job, and I hope never to have to date again. If it weren’t for the unrelenting cultural pressure and systemic biases favoring thinness, I could just exist within this shape and not give it another thought. Unfortunately, as I think of posting this essay, I wonder if I’m opening myself up to abuse. Fat is a neutral adjective, like tall or brunette, but it is also a slur. I am aware every day that I am fat, and that some people judge me critically because of my weight. It helps when I remember that there is really nothing wrong with me. Bodies have always come in all shapes and sizes, and my particular shape and size has always existed.