The sisterhood of body bullshit

We've come a long way, baby.

Aug 15, 2024

Body Type brings you insights, essays, and guidance about body image and body culture from me, an independent journalist who has been through big body changes and worked inside the wild world of the fitness industry. Please subscribe to support me and get a few posts a month. A paid subscription means you’re essentially tipping me for my work while I build this community (this is a side gig!), and I’m very grateful.

Let me explain how I got here.

There’s drama1 going on about the new Blake Lively movie, It Ends With Us, based on the book I will definitely not read now that I know the main character, a florist, is named Lily Blossom Bloom2. I’m not following the fuss, but I’ve seen chatter about Blake Lively’s acting chops and choices of roles in its midst.

“Has she ever been in anything good?” sneers the commentariat.

Listen. She’s pretty good in The Town. She wore this merkin on her head3 in whatever The Rhythm Section is, so she tried.

“You know what Olivier says: ‘Let the wig do the work.’”

In Savages, she says of one of the men she’s sleeping with, a military veteran: “He didn’t have orgasms. He had wargasms,” and someone needs to be tried at The Hague for that, but fine. A Simple Favor is high camp and she’s killing it in her little Mr. Monopoly suits, so fine. I asked my husband if the “science”4 in The Age of Adaline had any legitimacy and saw divorce flash before his chemical engineer eyes, but Harrison Ford was in it, so it’s fine. Her performance history is a bit of a mixed bag, I’ll grant you.

Blake Lively was also one of the four leads of the two The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movies, and while I can’t say she was the best in them — that honor goes to America Ferrera in this devastating scene; “Barbie” monologue who? Lifetime Achievement Oscar when? — the discussion reminded me of the movies and the books that came before them.

I adored the Pants books as a teenager. The first one came out in 20015, so I probably read it when I was 13-14. The next ones came out in 2003, 2005, and 2007, so I had my nose buried in a Pants books throughout high school, when I was roughly the same age as the protagonists and experiencing similar things. I didn’t have a tortured romance with a Greek heartthrob or my soccer coach. I didn’t befriend a girl with terminal cancer or have a mom who died by suicide6. But I had best girlfriends and summer ennui and the growing pains of a young woman.

A couple week ago, I re-read the books. I wondered how they’d make me feel some 20 years later. Maybe it’s the forgiving haze of my nostalgia, but I think they hold up well. The goofy conceit of the series — “magic” pants! — and the cover design with its Curlz MT-ass font, betray what is otherwise a well-considered meditation on friendship, family, young love, and growing up7. Its seriousness and depth surprised me. I was moved to highlight sentences at several points. It does what good young adult fiction does — treats its readers and characters like they’re real people who grapple with deeper issues than their parents and everyone else give them credit for. I liked spending a few weeks of my mid-30s summer diving back into a world I inhabited summers long ago. It reacquainted me with a distant, but maybe not as a distant as I thought, version of myself.

The body stuff, though. Oof.

I bought the series on Kindle, so I could go back and search for words. A search for the word “fat” in the first four books returns 39 results. Some of those are more innocuous — one of the girls’ “rules” for the Traveling Pants is that they must never think “I am fat” while wearing them, which, OK — but here are some others:

“[A side character approaches] with stunning speed for a person on the fat side of fat.”
“Lydia, your wedding dress makes your arms look fat.”
“She had a blanket of fat on her body/Her body wasn’t willing to incorporate the extra fat.”
“Greta Randolph was overweight, and the fat was distributed clumsily around her upper body.”
“There was a word for this. It started with an h. It not only indicated you were a horrible waste of a person but also somehow seemed to indicate that you were fat.”8
“[A character] wrinkled her nose in displeasure. She had a very fat second cousin named Angela.”
“She could easily picture the fat-faced bursar at school.”
Author Ann Brashares, in a Q&A following one of the books: “I have this odd idea that success will mean that brownies won’t make you fat …”
“[The pants] she was wearing made her feel particularly fat.”
“Also, she was scared she was too fat.”

For the characters Bridget and Carmen, their “pull themselves out of depression and get back to their former glory” moments are illustrated by them losing 15 and 17 pounds, respectively, and fitting back into the Traveling Pants that they outgrew at one point.9

In the fifth book I only just learned existed, Sisterhood Everlasting, published in 2011, there’s a passage about Carmen, who famously had this outburst in the first movie:

@primevideoca Tell 'em Carmen 👏🗣️ #AmericaFerrera #SisterhoodOfTheTravelingPants

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“… he’d made a reservation at either a good or a trendy restaurant, where she would be able to eat barely anything, because she’d eaten a sandwich for lunch and hadn’t had time to go to the gym. You didn’t stay a size 0 by eating lunch and dinner, not if you had an ass like hers.”

2011 was my last year of college. That’s when the girls I knew wouldn’t eat all day if they were going out drinking that night. Then they’d black out. These were indeed the rules by which we were meant to live.

It comes as no surprise that books from the early-to-mid aughts, especially those targeted at women and girls, are positively dripping in overt fatphobia. I’m sounding no alarms here that haven’t been sounded many times over. Plus, I’ve written before that it often feels like people point out how twisted body culture was for reasons that are a little more personal than we’d like to admit:

“I see [posts] every three days about how insane it was that Bridget Jones and the ‘chubby’ lady (Natalie) from ‘Love Actually’ were considered fat — yes, early aughts body culture was fucked, but behind these posts is the desire to litigate whether we would be considered fat, too, and we probably need to analyze that anxiety.
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It’s personal for me, too — when I read these books in which a 5’10” All-American soccer star is suddenly invisible to everyone around her because she gains a measly 15 pounds10, I can’t help but remember just how invisible I was as a teen who probably couldn’t have gotten the Traveling Pants past my calves, no matter how magic they ostensibly were. In the early 2000s, Pants Magic was unlikely to cover any size past 8 or so.

So, I don’t intend to whip out a piece of media from that time and show you how twisted it was, how it’s no wonder we felt so tormented about our bodies. You already know. What I intend to do is express some optimism, because these books made me feel that our body culture has come quite a long way from even 13 years ago.

What struck me most during my reread is just how casually and, I don’t know, pointlessly the above instances of fatphobia are folded into the narrative — not that fatphobia does or should have a “point,” but consider another book that came out in 2001, for example: Bridget Jones Diary. People forget that even though Bridget is utterly obsessed with her weight and trying to lose it, her neurosis serves a purpose and drives the plot: She doesn’t think anyone can love her until she loses weight, but then someone does. Her friends roast her for being so weird about her weight all the time. She goes to great lengths to lose weight quickly and when she does, her friends tell her she’s gone too far. Bridget is characterized as foolish for fearing any weight over 130-something pounds.

But in the Pants books, what is the point of a throwaway line about a fat cousin? Of the bursar at school having a fat face? Of a character’s cruel observation about her beloved grandmother’s body? There is none. This was simply the water we were all swimming in — a writer would just as casually drop a heinous reference to a body as they would any other mundane thing in the text. I can’t be sure because it was one hundred and ten years ago, but I have no memory of being all that hurt by this fatphobia the first time I read these books, and I was fat then. It only bums me out now because I’ve evolved in my own thoughts and feelings about bodies. I know better now. At the time it was more like: “Well, yeah. Fat is bad. I’m bad. What else is new?” I notice it now because it’s shocking. It’s shocking because times have changed. Just a little, but they’ve changed.

I think it’s crucial to point out all the potentially harmful, scary shit that’s still going on in our body culture. The pro-ana content among Gen Z-ers on social media. The starvation diets peddled by unlicensed scammers posing as “wellness experts.” The renewed mainstream focus on losing weight at any cost driven in part by new weight loss drugs abused by people who don’t need them. Yes, let’s talk about all of it. Let’s talk about the fatphobia and bias that still lurks in the nooks and crannies of our culture despite our best efforts. Let’s try to reject it as we’re able and hold ourselves to a different set of values and set a different example for those who will come after us.

At the same time, though, I don’t want to lose sight of tiny victories. It means something that mainstream YA books would not have passages like the above among their pages without people raising hell. It means something that the author of a wildly popular series wouldn’t talk about her definition of success being that brownies don’t make you fat without a “What the fuck?” response on BookTok. It means something that any author at all attuned to the zeitgeist and their impressionable audience would not include a passage about how you can’t each lunch and dinner and stay a size zero.

Whether that’s because people really do feel differently now or they’re just trying to be politically correct or whatever, I really don’t care — I care that some teenage girl won’t read this shit and get any ideas. Maybe my expectations and standards are low, but this cultural change happening in only the past 15-ish years is remarkable to me, because no such changes happened in the first two-plus decades of my life. I will take these crumbs of progress because they feel rare as red beryl11 sometimes. I can’t effectively write about body culture without giving credit where it’s due.

I said these books reacquainted me with a distant version of myself. I remember her, but I don’t live in that world anymore. The books also nudged me to look around at the world now, what I think now, who I am now. I react to body bullshit differently than I would have a decade or so ago — even if I still harbor some of it because it was ingrained in me — and so does everyone I care to spend time with. I’m willing to bet that anyone reading this newsletter would react similarly. That means something. Almost 6,000 people here would read those passages and not accept it as the water they swim in but reject it as the poison they’ll no longer swallow. That means something. At least to me it does.

The sisterhood of body bullshit

We've come a long way, baby.

The era of beauty standard brain rot

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