Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others March 3, 2008

No one ever feels sorry for fat girls. Not in the sense of “oh, she’s fat, it must be terrible to be so fat and worthless; I bet she has no self-esteem, either.” There are plenty of people who feel bad in that way. I was thinking more along the lines of book covers, the kind where you can tell just by looking at it that something awful and traumatic is going to happen to the heroine, an adolescent mired in a confusing time, on the cusp of being a woman but with childhood still calling her name, or some such nonsense. Best conjectures include an alcoholic/drug-dependent parent, some neighbor boy sharing the first stirrings of puppy love, and whatever skeevy joe ends up raping our fair protagonist. Sometimes judging a book by its cover can save you precious time and energy that could be put into being disgusted by something else. The book jackets always have girls on them, but not usually a full-length shot, maybe just a turned head and limb or two jutting out of the bottom right corner. The photos are artistically blurred; catching the girl in motion, growing into an adult right before our eyes? There’s some sort of juxtaposition between where she was and where she will be; smeary lipstick and a babydoll dress, high heels at the end of legs splayed on a hopscotch court. But all these girls are skinny, and not just skinny in the way girls are before everything they eat suddenly starts to stick, but skinny in a way where you know they’ll grow an ass and boobs without their thighs widening or their stomach softening. None of these book-cover girls are fat unless being fat is a central theme to the book, the same way a character is never gay or black or a part of some minority demographic niche without it being her defining characteristic. If you’re fat, that must be your Problem, the one that wrenches your gut in the middle of the night. In a litany of things that could go wrong in your life, your weight will always be included. You can be beaten and abandoned and raped just like the skinny girls, but it only pushes “fat” to the bottom of the list of things that are wrong with you. No one ever feels sorry for fat girls unless they can use it to make the fat girl feel even worse.