In the summer of 1993, two of my friends took me out for a bachelorette night a month before my wedding. The night ended in the early morning at an all-night bakery in the North End section of Boston. The street was so quiet when we walked into the bakery that I could hear a conversation of a few men on the sidewalk a few buildings down from us. “Look at the one with the long hair” one said, clearly meaning me. “She’s got a fat ass!” said another. I went cold, leaned back and looked down the street. “She heard you!” My friends hustled me inside the bakery. When we got into the car shortly after, I burst into tears. I had just lost 30 lbs for the wedding and it seemed like those men made the whole endeavor pointless. It’s no surprise that since then, I’ve thought of many blistering comebacks. Many. Blistering. Comebacks. But thinking of after-the-fact comebacks gives only fleeting satisfaction. After all, comebacks don’t address the most important question: why did I care so much?
My story isn’t new or the worst. And that wasn’t the only time my body was commented upon by some stranger (and not always men – a few times women asked my unpregnant self when my baby was due). Those voices stay in your head and wear on you.
When I was a young romance reader in the 1980’s, I didn’t pay much attention to what the heroines looked like because I was more interested in how the plot progressed. Having a baby was a total game-changer. Both my husband and I worked full-time, and juggling work with a baby took everything we had. I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to think about my looks. It wasn’t until my younger son was four that I took a look in the mirror and, well…yikes! I was overweight, my hair was graying and I didn’t feel at all good about myself. Those voices in my head, which had been pushed aside by my babies and career, moved front and center. I couldn’t help but see the magazines located at grocery store checkout lines gushing how various women celebrities lost their baby weight right away after giving birth. Those magazines seemed more mocking than entertaining when I was standing in the check-out line day after day (because I couldn’t get my act together to do a weekly shop) wearing kid-stained clothes with a shopping cart loaded with diapers, chicken nuggets (for my sons) and mocha-chocolate chip muffins (for me). And don’t tell me – I already know that celebrities have people who cook for them and work out with them. But that’s little comfort for us regular women – particularly since our bodies are frequently assessed and compared to celebrity bodies and are always found lacking. I began to carve a little time for myself to go to the gym and the hairdresser, but it’s tough to do regularly when you don’t have any time to begin with. There was, however, always time to listen to those voices that caused me to feel bad about myself.
It was about this time I read Eloisa James’s Pleasure for Pleasure. Our heroine, Josie, is too curvy to pull off popular 1818 Regency fashion. She wears a corset that covers her from her collarbone to her hips and her dresses won’t fit her unless she’s wearing it. Our hero, the Earl of Mayne, is a sophisticated womanizer quite a few years older than Josie, who is weary of the London ton seduction scene. Josie has a dismal start to her debut in the marriage market. She attains the nickname the “Scottish Sausage” because of the corset situation and not surprisingly, doesn’t achieve much popularity with men. Her confidence is pretty low until two things happen: the first is that she confides in Mayne about her insecurity and he shows her how to walk with sultry confidence, which she isn’t able to do until (of course) they share a searing kiss and she feels sensual for the first time. The second is that she gets a new modiste, who designs gowns that flatter her body instead of fighting it. Clothes feature prominently in James’s books. She lovingly describes Regency fashion, and all her heroines have a distinct fashion style. Josie’s burgeoning body confidence is grounded in large part on how good she feels in her new gowns. Circumstances require Josie and Mayne marry to save her reputation – seduction follows – and it is here, where James’s describes how Mayne sees Josie’s body and how Josie comes to see herself that I found inspiration. He sees her as “warm and sensual and delicious”. When he traces the curve of her hip, she “understood for the first time how a man might want to sink into softness”. It sounds so corny, but deep down inside, it doesn’t feel corny. Many novels extol the “curvy girl” but descriptions usually begin and end with the word “curves” – he loves her curves, he desires her curves, he wants to touch her curves. I, for one, need more than that. I want to be delicious!
James often spotlights women who aren’t traditionally beautiful – and it’s not just the curvy ones who are celebrated. In The Ugly Duchess, Theodora, an heiress, overhears comments that she looks like a boy. Helene, the Duchess heroine of Your Wicked Ways is very slender and initially describes herself as being like a board, “all flat and dried up”. In Fool for Love, petite Henrietta catches the eye of the elegant and gorgeous Simon Darby even though she is deemed unmarriageable due to a hip injury from her childhood that causes her to limp and draw the erroneous conclusion that she can’t bear children. When the men in these stories fall for these women, they see the “imperfections” as attractive characteristics that set their woman apart from others: curves are luscious, a slender body makes others seem over fleshy, a permanent injury becomes an erogenous zone. Her body is uniquely his and he treats it like a prized possession. That’s some heady stuff. The word “delicious” is used a lot and it’s the perfect word choice to describe someone who is completely irresistible. Who wouldn’t want to be seen this way?
It would incredibly awkward for me if I asked my husband directly if he saw my curves as delicious. Just thinking about it makes me wince – I can see him absolutely agreeing that of course I’m delicious because…well, he’d have to agree or risk hurting my feelings – and at the same time he’d be wondering why I would use a word to describe myself that’s usually attributed to food. But a while ago, I started thinking Eloisa James-style in the morning, when, just as we’re beginning to wake up, he usually rolls over and throws his arm around my waist. I started thinking that he is cozying up to me because my body is soft and inviting. I would let myself feel satisfaction for a moment and I would have an inkling of feeling…a little delicious. And I began to realize that my body dysmorphia blinded me to these small moments, like when he’d come up behind me and grab my waist or kiss the back of my neck. For all I know, he feels the same as an Eloisa James hero about me, but since she isn’t writing his lines, I’ve missed the cues. I’ve tried to be more aware of these moments and turn them into a narrative where I am the focus of his desire. It helps create that delicious feeling, but my success rate is not perfect, after all, I have years of negativity cemented in my mind.
In Pleasure for Pleasure, Josie’s sisters, who love her dearly, lose patience with how she sees herself. Her sister Tess snaps, “You are not fat…I am tired of hearing that, and I’m tired of seeing in your eyes that you’re thinking it”. My friends, always supportive of me, won’t hear of my views of myself without showering me with compliments. However, they don’t break through and I’ve stopped talking about it because it gets to be embarrassing. I know from my own experience how it can be frustrating to see someone you care about stuck in a negative loop. Josie, however, begins to transcend her loop when she marries Mayne, and then begins to see her body for what it can do and how it makes her feel as opposed to what it might look like to someone else. She also becomes free to assert her own thoughts and ideas to him (particularly about his horse racing stables, a topic she has studied her whole life). This is classic James – all of her “imperfect” heroines break out of their negative body loops when their deeper connection to someone else shakes loose their limited views of themselves, and they see they are more than just a body that is criticized by others. They give new value to their strengths of character, such as their work ethic, courage or judiciousness, and realize that their bodies are just one part of a whole person. Their body negativity diminishes because it just doesn’t matter that much anymore. In the course of my life, I lost that. Real life, with its family, job and money obligations, overtook my ability to indulge in meaningful insight and I got caught up in that whirlpool of drudgery. Now, I hear in me a voice like Josie’s sister Tess, snapping that she’s tired of it and tired of seeing me thinking that my body is not enough. I’m going to turn up the volume on that voice and turn down the volume of those other voices that have plagued me over the years and then I’m going to listen to it. I figure that when I get out of my head, I’ll get out of my negative loop. I’m going to focus more on how I feel about myself rather than on how I perceive my looks are viewed by other people. I’m going to think about my own character strengths and how they have contributed to who I am today: I have a great career where I work hard. I have a strong marriage and together we raised two terrific young men. I play guitar. I write. I am delicious.