Loving a Larger Woman
by Bruce Guberman
I'll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.
She was out on a bike ride, and I was home watching football, leafing through the magazines on her coffee table, when I found her Weight Watchers folder -- a palm-sized folio with notations for what she'd eaten, and when, and what she planned to eat next, and whether she'd been drinking her eight glasses of water a day. There was her name. Her identification number. And her weight, which I am too much of a gentleman to reveal here. Suffice it to say that the number shocked me.
I knew that C. was a big girl. Certainly bigger than any of the women I'd seen on TV, bouncing in bathing suits or drifting, reedlike, through sitcoms and medical dramas. Definitely bigger than any of the women I'd ever dated before.
What, I thought scornfully. Both of them?
I never thought of myself as a chubby chaser. But when I met C., I fell for her wit, her laugh, her sparkling eyes. Her body, I decided, was something I could learn to live with.
Her shoulders were as broad as mine, her hands were almost as big, and from her breasts to her belly, from her hips down the slope of her thighs, she was all sweet curves and warm welcome. Holding her felt like a safe haven. It felt like coming home.
But being out with her didn't feel nearly as comfortable. Maybe it was the way I'd absorbed society's expectations, its dictates of what men are supposed to want and how women are supposed to appear. More likely, it was the way she had. C. was a dedicated foot soldier in the body wars. At five foot ten inches, with a linebacker's build and a weight that would have put her right at home on a pro football team's roster, C. couldn't make herself invisible.
But I know that if it were possible, if all the slouching and slumping and shapeless black jumpers could have erased her from the physical world, she would have gone in an instant. She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft.
As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn't matter, I knew that to her it did. I was just one voice, and the world's voice was louder. I could feel her shame like a palpable thing, walking beside us on the street, crouched down between us in a movie theater, coiled up and waiting for someone to say what to her was the dirtiest word in the world: fat.
And I knew it wasn't paranoia. You hear, over and over, how fat is the last acceptable prejudice, that fat people are the only safe targets in our politically correct world. Date a queen-sized woman and you'll find out how true it is. You'll see the way people look at her, and look at you for being with her. You'll try to buy her lingerie for Valentine's Day and realize the sizes stop before she starts. Every time you go out to eat you'll watch her agonize, balancing what she wants against what she'll let herself have, what she'll let herself have against what she'll be seen eating in public.
And what she'll let herself say.
I remember when the Monica Lewinsky story broke and C., a newspaper reporter, wrote a passionate defense of the White House intern who'd been betrayed by Linda Tripp in Washington, and betrayed even worse by her friends in Beverly Hills, who were busily selling their high-school memories of Monica to Inside Edition and People magazine. After her article was printed, C. got lots of hate mail, including one letter from a guy who began: "I can tell by what you wrote that you are overweight and that nobody loves you." And it was that letter -- that word -- that bothered her more than anything else anyone said. It seemed that if it were true -- the "overweight" part -- then the "nobody loves you" part would have to be true as well. As if being Lewinsky-esque was worse than being a betrayer, or even someone who was dumb. As if being fat were somehow a crime.
Loving a larger woman is an act of courage in this world, and maybe it's even an act of futility. Because, in loving C., I knew I was loving someone who didn't believe that she herself was worthy of anyone's love.
And now that it's over, I don't know where to direct my anger and my sorrow. At a world that made her feel the way she did about her body -- no, herself -- and whether she was desirable. At C., for not being strong enough to overcome what the world told her. Or at myself, for not loving C. enough to make her believe in herself.
I wept straight through Celebrity Weddings, slumped on the floor in front of the couch, tears rolling off my chin and soaking my shirt as one tissue-thin supermodel after another said "I do." I cried for Bruce, who had understood me far more than I'd given him credit for and maybe had loved me more than I'd deserved. He could have been everything I'd wanted, everything I'd hoped for. He could have been my husband. And I'd chucked it.
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This excerpt from Jennifer Weiner’s novel “Good in Bed” highlights the pressures every woman feels at one point, or many points in her life. It exemplifies the need for feminist intervention, the need for women to begin to see themselves as their own individual essence, instead of what society tells them their essence needs to be.
In the section above, the audience lays eyes upon the article Cannie Shapiro’s ex-boyfriend has written about her. Calling his once-upon-a-time lover by the discreet initial, “C.” Bruce begins hacking away at a daunting description of Cannie. Bruce claims, “Her shoulders were as broad as mine, her hands were almost as big, and from her breasts to her belly, from her hips down the slope of her thighs, she was all sweet curves and warm welcome” (Weiner). Now this strikes the average modern reader as unnatural; a girlfriend physically as large as her boyfriend? Why, that’s preposterous! A woman should be smaller than her significant other for numerous reasons, it’s pleasing to the eye, it makes the man feel more masculine, and the woman more feminine. If every man only dated, married, loved a woman who was smaller than himself, “it would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity” (De Beauvoir). If a woman isn’t feminine, is she still a woman? If a woman has rounded hips and full cheeks, is she still a woman? The character Bruce might say so, as long as he isn’t in public.
In this case, both Bruce and Cannie suffer from the weight of public expectations. The reader gets the sense that, “the attitude of defiance of many American women proves that they are haunted by a sense of their femininity” (De Beauvoir). Cannie had to “agonize, balancing what she [wanted] against what [she'd] let herself have, what [she'd] let herself have against what [she'd] be seen eating in public” (Weiner). This weight struggle wasn’t a simple diet to drop five pounds, for Cannie, and many women in society today, weight and image are constant battles that consume every thought and every second of the day. Cannie was haunted by her lack of femininity, and her lack of control to comply with the rules of femininity or to reject the weight struggle completely.
The pressure that a woman endures to be an acceptable weight is so intense that she can no longer separate herself from the number on the scale. Her value has been sewn to that number, sealed to it by surgical tools and super glue. Thus, “the ideal of slenderness, then, and the diet and exercise regimens that have become inseparable from it offer the illusion of meeting, through the body, the contradictory demands of the contemporary ideology of femininity” (Bordo 2246). Because Cannie has yet to meet these demands of ultimate femininity and thinness, she will not believe what anyone else has to say. Society has the last word, and in this case society says “fat.” Despite the fact that Bruce used to tell Cannie that she was beautiful, that what the world said she ought to look like wasn’t a part of his criteria, he could never change her mind.
In this article, Bruce takes on the role of the victim, claiming that, “loving a larger woman is an act of courage in this world, and maybe it's even an act of futility” (Weiner). In this way, Bruce is able to play his nice guy role claiming that he loved the way Cannie looked, and that it was society who ruined their relationship, while maintaining power in the no longer existing relationship through his playing of the victim role; he decided to engage in the futile act of loving a larger woman. Bruce “shows a certain duplicity of altitude which is painfully lacerating to women; they are willing on the whole to accept women as a fellow being, an equal; but they still require her to remain the inessential” (De Beauvoir 1272).
Once Cannie reads this article in its entirety, she begins to see herself as even more inferior due to her lack of this man. “He could have been my husband. And I’d chucked it” (Weiner). Cannie feels like she needs this man to complete her, because who else in this vast world could love a heavier-than-seen-on-T.V. woman, besides Bruce? Cannie was already empty based on her lack of femininity. She has been “told not that femininity is a false entity, but that the women concerned with it are not feminine” (De Beauvoir 1265). After reading this article, Cannie has been reduced to the absolute negation of a woman: she is not attractive in the way society wants her to be, and she lost the one man who could ever truly love her.
Works Cited
Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2001. Print.
De Beauvoir, Simone. “From The Second Sex.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2001. Print.
Weiner, Jennifer. "Good in Bed" a Novel. New York: Pocket, 2001. Print.
De Beauvoir, Simone. "The Second Sex, Woman as Other." Web. 9 Aug. 2010.http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm
