The Good Body

When I was a little girl people used to ask me, What do you want to be when you grow up? Good, I would say. I want to be good. Becoming good was harder than becoming a doctor or an astronaut or a lifeguard. There are tests to pass to become those things—you have to learn dissection or conquer gravity or practice treading water. Becoming good was not like that. It was abstract. It felt completely out of reach. It became the only thing that mattered to me. If I could be good, everything would be all right. I would fit in. I would be popular. I would skip death and go straight to heaven. If you asked me now what this means, to be good, I still don't know exactly. When I was growing up in the fifties, "good" was simply what girls were supposed to be. They were good. They were pretty, perky. They had a blond Clairol wave in their hair. They wore girdles and waist cinchers and pumps. They got married. They looked married. They waited to be given permission. They kept their legs together, even during sex.

In recent years, good girls join the Army. They climb the corporate ladder. They go to the gym. They accessorize. They wear pointy, painful shoes. They wear lipstick if they're lesbians; they wear lipstick if they're not. They don't eat too much. They don't eat at all. They stay perfect. They stay thin.

I could never be good. This feeling of badness lives in every part of my being. Call it anxiety or despair. Call it guilt or shame. It occupies me everywhere. The older, seemingly clearer and wiser I get, the more devious, globalized, and terrorist the badness becomes. I think for many of us—well, for most of us—well, maybe for all of us—there is one particular part of our body where the badness manifests itself, our thighs, our butt, our breasts, our hair, our nose, our little toe. You know what I'm talking about? It doesn't matter where I've been in the world, whether it's Tehran where women are—smashing and remodeling their noses to looks less Iranian, or in Beijing where they are breaking their legs and adding bone to be taller, or in Dallas where they are surgically whittling their feet in order to fit into Manolo Blahniks or Jimmy Choos. Everywhere, the women I meet generally hate one particular part of their bodies. They spend most of their lives fixing it, shrinking it. They have medicine cabinets with products devoted to transforming it. They have closets full of clothes that cover or enhance it. It's as if they've been given their own little country called their body, which they get to tyrannize, clean up, or control while they lose all sight of the world.

What I can't believe is that someone like me, a radical feminist for nearly thirty years, could spend this much time thinking about my stomach. It has become my tormentor, my distractor; it's my most serious committed relationship. It has protruded through my clothes, my confidence, and my ability to work. I've tried to sedate it, educate it, embrace it, and most of all, erase it.

My body will be mine when I'm thin. I will eat a little at a time, small bites. I will vanquish ice cream. I will purge with green juices. I will see chocolate as poison and pasta as a form of self-punishment. I will work not to feel full again. Always moving toward full, approaching full but never really full. I will embrace my emptiness, I will ride it into holy zones. Let me be hungry. Let me starve. Please.

Bread is Satan. I stop eating bread. This is the same as not eating food. Four days in, a scrawny actress friend tells me, "Eve, your stomach has nothing to do with diet." What? "It's the change of life," she says. "All you need is some testosterone." I try to imagine what I would be like, totally bread deprived and shot up with testosterone. "Serial killer" comes to mind.

I realize at night that I am grinding my jaw. It's my hunger for bread. The closest I let myself come is dried bread—pretzels, flatbread, bread sticks. These are the memory of bread, the freeze-dried, sound-bite version of bread. It's crispy. It keeps cracking, particularly pretzels, thousands of pieces breaking inside your mouth. It's a lot to think about, so why the fuck am I still thinking about bread?

I watch Ab Roller infomercials until four A.M. as I eat a bag—no, a family-size bag—of peanut M&M's. I try to buy an Ab Roller by phone but they're really hostile on the 800-"Roll-It-Away" number. They're probably starving, too. They interviewed all these once famous blond women to see if they had better results with the Ab Roller than with sit-ups, crunches, or curls. Of course all of them said yes. All of them were flat flat flat. The next day I bite the bullet, well, at least I bite something, and hire Vernon, a fascistic trainer. Of course, he's totally flat and muscular. He looks at me with pity and punishment. Right away he has me lifting heavy objects. Very heavy. The good news is I'm so fucking sore I can't move my head so I'm unable to see my disgusting stomach anymore.

I'm walking—actually, I'm limping—down a New York City street, and I catch a glimpse of this blond, pointy-breasted, raisin-a-day-stomached smiling girl on the cover of Cosmo magazine. She is there every minute, somewhere in the world, smiling down on me, on all of us. She's omnipresent. She's the American Dream, my personal nightmare. Pumped straight from the publishing power plant into the bloodstream of our culture and neurosis. She is multiplying on every cover. She was passed through my mother's milk and so I don't even know that I'm contaminated. I just want to be like her. I want to be Barbie. And it doesn't matter that if I were anatomically structured like Barbie I would be unable to walk and would be forced to crawl on all fours. Don't get me wrong, I'm my own perpetrator, I'm my own victim. I pick up the magazines. No, no, no. It's the possibility of being skinny good that keeps me buying. Oh, God, I discover a Starbucks maple walnut scone expanding in me, creeping out. Flabby age leaking through the cracks. Big Macs, French fries, Pizza Land, four helpings, can't stop. My stomach is chicken wings, dipping butter, fried shrimp, fried zucchini, fried ice cream, fried dumplings, fried anything, fried right. My stomach is America. I want to drown in the cement. There's obviously something I'm just not getting. I am going to go and find the woman who thought this up. Maybe if I listen carefully, she'll reveal the secret.

(Doing sit-ups) . . . seven, eight, nine—Eve dear, come in, pussycat. . . . ninety-nine, one hundred. (Stops sit-ups) I'm multitasking. I do ten sit-ups for every shot. Do you like her? (Referring to slides) She's the December cover—we're going rounder for the Christmas season. We're desperate for the feeling of holiday fullness and cheer.

Eighty years old, one hundred sit-ups twice a day, I'm down to ninety pounds. Another ten years, I'll be down to nothing. But even then I won't feel beautiful. I accept this terrible condition. It's driven me to be disciplined and successful.

Through Cosmo I've been able to help women everywhere.

I've been able to help everyone but me. Ironic. Come on in, Eve, let's get cozy. Help yourself to some pumpkin seeds, dear, they're toasted. Energy. That's the closest I ever come to cooking. I never did get the nurture gene.

My mother never saw me. She saw acne. She took me to the doctor twice a week for five years. He opened, postuled, and squeezed my face. He left it battered. He would keep an X-ray machine on my face, five minutes at a time. This was long before we knew about X rays. He burned the bottom layer off my face. After the appointments we would drive around, my mother and I. She would cry, I would cry. "How can I be a happy person, Helen?" she would say. "Your sister is in a wheelchair with polio. Your father is dead. And you, Helen, you have acne." When I was ten, my friend Elizabeth was swinging from the tree. She fell and everyone came and made a huge fuss over her. I told this to my mother and she said, "Of course: Elizabeth's pretty. People make a fuss over girls who are pretty. That's why you, you will need brains."

(Doing sit-ups again) Don't get things fixed, Eve. Don't do it. (Stops sit-ups) If you do, another thing always breaks down. I had my eyes done when I was forty. I thought that would do. But no. Tried it again when I was fifty-six. First full face-lift at sixty-three. Second at sixty-seven. Third at seventy-three. I'm desperate for another, but there's no skin left on my face. Yesterday they took some fat out of my backside and they shot it into my cheeks. I think even you would approve, Eve. I am recycling. My shrink thinks I'm still doing this for my mother, Cleo's gone almost twenty years. Can you imagine, I'm still doing this for her? I never had a daughter. But if I did have a daughter, I would tell her she was beautiful and lovely every minute. If she asked, "Helen"—oh God, she wouldn't say Helen, she's not my assistant. If she said, "Mother, am I as pretty as Brooke Shields?" I'd have to do a little hedging. "You're not classic," I'd say. "But you're beautiful in your way, dear." Eve, I would really have to practice this. One thing I never had to practice was sex. I took to it like a duck to water. It's been a good week. My husband and I had sex two days in a row. Not bad for eighty. My husband, he's feisty, always has been. The crazy thing is he's always thought I was beautiful, but of course that doesn't count, I mean, he loves me. (Suddenly snapping her fingers, moving things along) Enzio, it's Christmas, but this isn't charity. Move it along. I'm ready for the Mrs. Santa thong shot.

Thanks for sharing. . . . I'm so depressed. In Helen's world, Mrs. Santa lives in Iceland and she's wearing a thong and I bet she looks hot in it. Even Rudolph probably has a hard-on. In Eve's world, I run into a friend on the street. She's strangely enthusiastic, pointing at my stomach.

"Eve, congratulations! For you, I bet it's a little warrior girl."

Copyright © 2004 by Eve Ensler