The bad: I was on a boat trip with family and family friends, and one of the drunk older men who was on the boat made a remark about how my boobs were bouncing as we went over some waves. I was like 13, and this man said I needed to "Get those things under control!" or something like that. I was already so insecure about having hit puberty earlier than my friends, and I was taller and bigger than everyone and had big boobs. To have a man call me out like that and suggest that my body was "out of control" was one of the most humiliating things I've ever experienced.
The good: I went to the gym in my apartment building and then walked over to pick up a package at the front desk. I suppose I was looking especially swole since I had just finished my workout. The front desk guy looked up and said, "Whoa, you are SO strong. What have you been doing in there??" I'll never get over how fun it feels to have a man, especially, remark on my physical strength :)
Oh my gosh! That is mortifying! And probably no way to even escape given you were on a boat. Alcohol often played a factor in adults’ comments to me as well since my extended relatives have alcohol abuse problems. I wonder how many comments wouldn’t have been said if alcohol wasn’t involved (I estimate many). It’s so sad because the people saying the comments will likely never remember saying them, but the comments can stick with us forever. You’re so right that when we hear them as young girls, they just hit harder.
I love that good comment! It is really validating when our actual strength is noticed and not just our appearance. I remember years ago when a sweet mutual friend of ours told me very genuinely one time when we were out floating on the river: “you have really nice deltoids”. He was in the medical field and to have someone complement a muscle (using the correct term) and say it kindly (in front of me and my husband) was lovely. I had been working on lifting a lot and doing a lot of push-ups back then, so I was happy it was showing.
I wish I could remember all the good comments people told me, but the bad ones tend to overshadow them in my memories, sadly.
As with so many of your topics/prompts, I could write a book of essays on this one. Body comments, the painful ones at least, burn into memory as indelibly as anything that happens in states of high arousal (in a fight-or-flight sense), much in the way that trauma is etched. Though as trauma goes, this hardly ranks.
First comment: I was a thin, athletic kid, slow to develop and incredibly self-conscious about it, though I gave it little voice. One summer evening I was outside with my parents and the next door neighbors -- a couple I adored, babysat for, borrowed books from, etc.. The husband was talking about meeting his wife very young. "She ran track in high school," he said. Then, nodding his head toward me, "and was about that 'built.'" (As in, flat as a board, not 'built' at all). I shrunk into myself, burning with anger and embarrassment. The conversation moved on.
Thinking on this as an adult, I feel a sense of betrayal, less from the neighbor than my parents. (Great, supportive parents, for the record). I have sons, but in today's world, had someone made a comment on my young daughter's appearance of sexual maturity (or lack thereof), I'd have curtly and coolly interrupted to tell them they were out of line to comment on an adolescent girl's body. Comments like this are far more rare today, thankfully. But that remark was the first time I became aware that people were evaluating me through a lens of sexual attractiveness and availability. I hated it.
The other comment that stands out was a few years later. Senior year of high school. I was a cheerleader with an eating disorder. I had initially been more anorexic, but as I matured and my unfed body started to panic, I gained weight. Nothing extreme, but the swing from underweight to slightly over was brutal, especially in my role as a kind of perky performer, appearing before crowds weekly in skimpy uniforms. There, my shame and failure was exposed, no baggy clothes to hide behind.
One day I overheard one of the sophomore cheerleaders -- one of those enviable types who got boobs while remaining girlishly skinny everywhere else -- talking scornfully about how I'd gained weight. I seethed. She wasn't wrong.
We were never friends, but years later I ran across her at a playground. She'd bypassed college, had kids young. I was a park designer with a degree. In just a few years, her body had turned matronly. Mine, after recovery and more normalized eating, was trim and athletic, a slightly older version of my thin high school self. I felt a sudden sense of (albeit shallow) victory.
When I think on this, it's not the comment she made (rude, but not untrue) but my years-later experience of Schadenfreude that bothers me. As though I'd won -- emerged victorious from a competition she hadn't even entered. And the intensity of the Schadenfreude, the 'now you're fat and I'm not" turnabout, seems so ugly. Unnecessary. Small. It makes me cringe, but is such a window into my head at the time.
I've moved away from that now. I've never had much control over my body size and believe most people don't. If they do seek rigorous control, I feel compassion. and concern. Rigid self-monitoring and restriction is hardly a way to live well. But it's so hard to let go of thought patterns that caught us early.
It makes me sad to think there must be wonderful comments and moments from my past I don't remember because I was so focused on body size, eating behaviors, and my belief in thinness as a dictator of self worth. Such a waste of energy and attention.
Wow, thank you so much for this comment. Your point about your schadenfreude really hits, because I wouldn't be surprised if many of us have felt the same -- like in some small moment, we "won" against another woman in this twisted competition we all feel we've been entered in, but really we're all playing a losing game. I think of that idea that your first thought is what you've been conditioned to think, your next (or later) thought is who you are now. You dislike that you had that unkind thought, and I think that shows real growth.
As @Kim Warren said above, many of us could write books about this one - including myself. What a good question, though! As a pre-pubescent child, I was considered “chubby,” during those awkward years of about 4th-6th grade. I remember so many comments made during those years (many from adults!). One that just came to mind happened in 5th grade. I was at school and my class was all playing at recess on the playground. We had a very fun male teacher who always joined us in playing and rarely stood around and just supervised. We were playing tag or some running game of sorts and I don’t remember how it came up, but we started talking about ourselves as babies. I said I was born a preemie baby and only weighed 3 pounds when I was born, a story that has been repeated many times in my family. This teacher, one I looked up to and thought was so great, said, “well, you’ve certainly caught up, haven’t you!” I remember freezing a little bit, not sure whether to laugh or not because he was always making jokes. But then everyone kept playing and the moment passed. I realized in later years he wasn’t as great as I thought (for lots of reasons), but at the time, I thought he was so cool and that comment shocked me. I realized that other people viewed me as large and I was mortified.
Man, 5th grade. That's what I mean about the comments we get when we're young sticking with us. That's a time in our lives when we're trying to figure out wtf is going on with our own crazy, changing bodies, and to have someone else levy their judgements or observations against them is so confusing and scary. And especially for a body comment to come from a teacher, my god. Ugh. I've been the recipient of lots of comments like that when I was younger, too, so I get where you're coming from <3
It wasn’t things said to me but things I read as a kid that still mess with me.
There was a Seventeen Magazine confessional article written by a girl who had to, ahem, develop a persona of being funny because she was larger than a size 9- “the cut-off for being considered attractive”. But don’t worry- she lost weight and wanted to let her preteen audience know that now she can crack jokes while wearing a bikini.
There was the Home Ec book in which a girl mentioned that at 115 lbs, “her grandfather had always called her pleasantly plump’”- a sentiment that actually feels even more fucked now than when I read it.
I’ve tried to hunt down both of these texts to prove that I’m not crazy. No lick. But this summer, I DID track down a copy of the book “Autopsy” by Milton Helpern, a trashy paperback I stole from my parents and read at a far-too-young age. In a chapter about a gruesome pre-Roe “abortion-gone-wrong”, he wrote, “She was very much overweight, at one hundred and fifty pounds to her five feet one height. Maybe it was this plumpness that concealed from her family the fact that she was 5 months into a pregnancy…”
Even though, as a 40 year old grown ass woman, I know these things to be twisted and untrue… they still make me feel awful about myself.
I can remember so many similar examples of things like this. Characters talking about their clothing sizes or weights and it being a huge problem, and those sizes/weights were way lower than mine. When I was in college and the TV show "Girls" came out, the character Hannah (whose complications with her non-thin body are woven throughout the narrative) goes to the doctor and is shown to weigh 140-something pounds and Hannah's miffed that the doctor "weighed her with her shoes on," as if to say the weight is too high. I'm sure I easily weighed 20 pounds more than that when I saw the episode, and I felt so weird about it, especially because so much of the reaction to that show was people flipping out about how "fat" and "gross" Lena Dunham was.
I also remember in "Father of the Bride 2" (I think, when both the mother and the daughter are pregnant together), there's a scene where the dad is joking around pretending to be an announcer at a boxing match, so he's talking about the two women like they're fighters and announcing their weights. So he says something like "Weighing in at 130-something..." or maybe even less, for both of them, and at this point in the movie they're both like 8 months pregnant. Even as a teenager I remember thinking that was wild. While it's of course possible that a very small woman could get to only that size in her pregnancy and be completely healthy, it's an example of how in pop culture at the time, a woman's weight being higher than like 120 would only ever happen because she was super pregnant. It always stuck with me.
Getting into lifting and understanding how much muscle has an effect on weight, and how different bodies can be because of different body compositions, really helped me think differently about this. There's no world in which I'd even entertain the notion of being some of the weights I wanted to be when I was a teen, because it would take me losing so much of the muscle I've built over the years.
Ooo boy yes this is a question. There’s definitely been comments that have stung and stuck with me throughout my life. I think body acceptance/positive movements, becoming aware of diet culture, and continuing to do body acceptance work has helped shake those for the most part.
More recently, the comment that stuck with me was made by a friend. He made a comment a few years back about another friend gaining weight. So when I gained some weight, I could picture him saying the same negative things about me. But like a commenter said above, people don’t really comment on bodies much anymore. Which is amazing!!
Along with that, as I’ve been on a fitness and nutrition kick for the last two years, I’ve been thinking about the fact that people comment on bodies a lot less. And how one of the motivations for me lifting weights has been to get comments on how I look, ideally looking more muscular. Someone telling me I look strong is the dream. I’m still trying to figure out what to do with that part of my motivation for lifting. And I have fully committed to not saying anything about anyone else’s body. So just let it go right? Probably should just let it go
I totallyyyy get what you're saying. I think two things can be true -- we can know that body comments can be really damaging when done wrong, and also be humans who are visual beings in an image-obsessed society who appreciate a nice comment about our looks! When you get into lifting, it is SO affirming to feel like you appreciate your body for looking strong rather than emaciated, so of course you might desire that someone else see that, too. I don't think that's *bad*, I just think it can't be the main reason you lift (or do anything), and it doesn't sound like it is.
This is sort of not a comment about my body and yet also a comment about it, but in college somebody I was friendly with apparently said (when I was not around) something like "I'm not attracted to Barbara McClay but I'd like to get her naked because I can't tell what shape she is under her clothes." I don't think it made me feel bad… it just made me feel weird? but I've certainly never forgotten it lol.
I had a friend who would talk about other women like this. It was nasty. She has mellowed out a lot and we are still friends but it’s remains upsetting and I will eventually have to have The Hard Talk with her about how her catty remarks, despite being long ago, make me feel like shit.
Mine:
The bad: I was on a boat trip with family and family friends, and one of the drunk older men who was on the boat made a remark about how my boobs were bouncing as we went over some waves. I was like 13, and this man said I needed to "Get those things under control!" or something like that. I was already so insecure about having hit puberty earlier than my friends, and I was taller and bigger than everyone and had big boobs. To have a man call me out like that and suggest that my body was "out of control" was one of the most humiliating things I've ever experienced.
The good: I went to the gym in my apartment building and then walked over to pick up a package at the front desk. I suppose I was looking especially swole since I had just finished my workout. The front desk guy looked up and said, "Whoa, you are SO strong. What have you been doing in there??" I'll never get over how fun it feels to have a man, especially, remark on my physical strength :)
Oh my gosh! That is mortifying! And probably no way to even escape given you were on a boat. Alcohol often played a factor in adults’ comments to me as well since my extended relatives have alcohol abuse problems. I wonder how many comments wouldn’t have been said if alcohol wasn’t involved (I estimate many). It’s so sad because the people saying the comments will likely never remember saying them, but the comments can stick with us forever. You’re so right that when we hear them as young girls, they just hit harder.
I love that good comment! It is really validating when our actual strength is noticed and not just our appearance. I remember years ago when a sweet mutual friend of ours told me very genuinely one time when we were out floating on the river: “you have really nice deltoids”. He was in the medical field and to have someone complement a muscle (using the correct term) and say it kindly (in front of me and my husband) was lovely. I had been working on lifting a lot and doing a lot of push-ups back then, so I was happy it was showing.
I wish I could remember all the good comments people told me, but the bad ones tend to overshadow them in my memories, sadly.
As with so many of your topics/prompts, I could write a book of essays on this one. Body comments, the painful ones at least, burn into memory as indelibly as anything that happens in states of high arousal (in a fight-or-flight sense), much in the way that trauma is etched. Though as trauma goes, this hardly ranks.
First comment: I was a thin, athletic kid, slow to develop and incredibly self-conscious about it, though I gave it little voice. One summer evening I was outside with my parents and the next door neighbors -- a couple I adored, babysat for, borrowed books from, etc.. The husband was talking about meeting his wife very young. "She ran track in high school," he said. Then, nodding his head toward me, "and was about that 'built.'" (As in, flat as a board, not 'built' at all). I shrunk into myself, burning with anger and embarrassment. The conversation moved on.
Thinking on this as an adult, I feel a sense of betrayal, less from the neighbor than my parents. (Great, supportive parents, for the record). I have sons, but in today's world, had someone made a comment on my young daughter's appearance of sexual maturity (or lack thereof), I'd have curtly and coolly interrupted to tell them they were out of line to comment on an adolescent girl's body. Comments like this are far more rare today, thankfully. But that remark was the first time I became aware that people were evaluating me through a lens of sexual attractiveness and availability. I hated it.
The other comment that stands out was a few years later. Senior year of high school. I was a cheerleader with an eating disorder. I had initially been more anorexic, but as I matured and my unfed body started to panic, I gained weight. Nothing extreme, but the swing from underweight to slightly over was brutal, especially in my role as a kind of perky performer, appearing before crowds weekly in skimpy uniforms. There, my shame and failure was exposed, no baggy clothes to hide behind.
One day I overheard one of the sophomore cheerleaders -- one of those enviable types who got boobs while remaining girlishly skinny everywhere else -- talking scornfully about how I'd gained weight. I seethed. She wasn't wrong.
We were never friends, but years later I ran across her at a playground. She'd bypassed college, had kids young. I was a park designer with a degree. In just a few years, her body had turned matronly. Mine, after recovery and more normalized eating, was trim and athletic, a slightly older version of my thin high school self. I felt a sudden sense of (albeit shallow) victory.
When I think on this, it's not the comment she made (rude, but not untrue) but my years-later experience of Schadenfreude that bothers me. As though I'd won -- emerged victorious from a competition she hadn't even entered. And the intensity of the Schadenfreude, the 'now you're fat and I'm not" turnabout, seems so ugly. Unnecessary. Small. It makes me cringe, but is such a window into my head at the time.
I've moved away from that now. I've never had much control over my body size and believe most people don't. If they do seek rigorous control, I feel compassion. and concern. Rigid self-monitoring and restriction is hardly a way to live well. But it's so hard to let go of thought patterns that caught us early.
It makes me sad to think there must be wonderful comments and moments from my past I don't remember because I was so focused on body size, eating behaviors, and my belief in thinness as a dictator of self worth. Such a waste of energy and attention.
Wow, thank you so much for this comment. Your point about your schadenfreude really hits, because I wouldn't be surprised if many of us have felt the same -- like in some small moment, we "won" against another woman in this twisted competition we all feel we've been entered in, but really we're all playing a losing game. I think of that idea that your first thought is what you've been conditioned to think, your next (or later) thought is who you are now. You dislike that you had that unkind thought, and I think that shows real growth.
As @Kim Warren said above, many of us could write books about this one - including myself. What a good question, though! As a pre-pubescent child, I was considered “chubby,” during those awkward years of about 4th-6th grade. I remember so many comments made during those years (many from adults!). One that just came to mind happened in 5th grade. I was at school and my class was all playing at recess on the playground. We had a very fun male teacher who always joined us in playing and rarely stood around and just supervised. We were playing tag or some running game of sorts and I don’t remember how it came up, but we started talking about ourselves as babies. I said I was born a preemie baby and only weighed 3 pounds when I was born, a story that has been repeated many times in my family. This teacher, one I looked up to and thought was so great, said, “well, you’ve certainly caught up, haven’t you!” I remember freezing a little bit, not sure whether to laugh or not because he was always making jokes. But then everyone kept playing and the moment passed. I realized in later years he wasn’t as great as I thought (for lots of reasons), but at the time, I thought he was so cool and that comment shocked me. I realized that other people viewed me as large and I was mortified.
Man, 5th grade. That's what I mean about the comments we get when we're young sticking with us. That's a time in our lives when we're trying to figure out wtf is going on with our own crazy, changing bodies, and to have someone else levy their judgements or observations against them is so confusing and scary. And especially for a body comment to come from a teacher, my god. Ugh. I've been the recipient of lots of comments like that when I was younger, too, so I get where you're coming from <3
It wasn’t things said to me but things I read as a kid that still mess with me.
There was a Seventeen Magazine confessional article written by a girl who had to, ahem, develop a persona of being funny because she was larger than a size 9- “the cut-off for being considered attractive”. But don’t worry- she lost weight and wanted to let her preteen audience know that now she can crack jokes while wearing a bikini.
There was the Home Ec book in which a girl mentioned that at 115 lbs, “her grandfather had always called her pleasantly plump’”- a sentiment that actually feels even more fucked now than when I read it.
I’ve tried to hunt down both of these texts to prove that I’m not crazy. No lick. But this summer, I DID track down a copy of the book “Autopsy” by Milton Helpern, a trashy paperback I stole from my parents and read at a far-too-young age. In a chapter about a gruesome pre-Roe “abortion-gone-wrong”, he wrote, “She was very much overweight, at one hundred and fifty pounds to her five feet one height. Maybe it was this plumpness that concealed from her family the fact that she was 5 months into a pregnancy…”
Even though, as a 40 year old grown ass woman, I know these things to be twisted and untrue… they still make me feel awful about myself.
I can remember so many similar examples of things like this. Characters talking about their clothing sizes or weights and it being a huge problem, and those sizes/weights were way lower than mine. When I was in college and the TV show "Girls" came out, the character Hannah (whose complications with her non-thin body are woven throughout the narrative) goes to the doctor and is shown to weigh 140-something pounds and Hannah's miffed that the doctor "weighed her with her shoes on," as if to say the weight is too high. I'm sure I easily weighed 20 pounds more than that when I saw the episode, and I felt so weird about it, especially because so much of the reaction to that show was people flipping out about how "fat" and "gross" Lena Dunham was.
I also remember in "Father of the Bride 2" (I think, when both the mother and the daughter are pregnant together), there's a scene where the dad is joking around pretending to be an announcer at a boxing match, so he's talking about the two women like they're fighters and announcing their weights. So he says something like "Weighing in at 130-something..." or maybe even less, for both of them, and at this point in the movie they're both like 8 months pregnant. Even as a teenager I remember thinking that was wild. While it's of course possible that a very small woman could get to only that size in her pregnancy and be completely healthy, it's an example of how in pop culture at the time, a woman's weight being higher than like 120 would only ever happen because she was super pregnant. It always stuck with me.
Getting into lifting and understanding how much muscle has an effect on weight, and how different bodies can be because of different body compositions, really helped me think differently about this. There's no world in which I'd even entertain the notion of being some of the weights I wanted to be when I was a teen, because it would take me losing so much of the muscle I've built over the years.
Ooo boy yes this is a question. There’s definitely been comments that have stung and stuck with me throughout my life. I think body acceptance/positive movements, becoming aware of diet culture, and continuing to do body acceptance work has helped shake those for the most part.
More recently, the comment that stuck with me was made by a friend. He made a comment a few years back about another friend gaining weight. So when I gained some weight, I could picture him saying the same negative things about me. But like a commenter said above, people don’t really comment on bodies much anymore. Which is amazing!!
Along with that, as I’ve been on a fitness and nutrition kick for the last two years, I’ve been thinking about the fact that people comment on bodies a lot less. And how one of the motivations for me lifting weights has been to get comments on how I look, ideally looking more muscular. Someone telling me I look strong is the dream. I’m still trying to figure out what to do with that part of my motivation for lifting. And I have fully committed to not saying anything about anyone else’s body. So just let it go right? Probably should just let it go
I totallyyyy get what you're saying. I think two things can be true -- we can know that body comments can be really damaging when done wrong, and also be humans who are visual beings in an image-obsessed society who appreciate a nice comment about our looks! When you get into lifting, it is SO affirming to feel like you appreciate your body for looking strong rather than emaciated, so of course you might desire that someone else see that, too. I don't think that's *bad*, I just think it can't be the main reason you lift (or do anything), and it doesn't sound like it is.
I wrote about this a little here: https://bodytype.substack.com/p/the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-of-weight
Yes! You get it!
This is sort of not a comment about my body and yet also a comment about it, but in college somebody I was friendly with apparently said (when I was not around) something like "I'm not attracted to Barbara McClay but I'd like to get her naked because I can't tell what shape she is under her clothes." I don't think it made me feel bad… it just made me feel weird? but I've certainly never forgotten it lol.
I had a friend who would talk about other women like this. It was nasty. She has mellowed out a lot and we are still friends but it’s remains upsetting and I will eventually have to have The Hard Talk with her about how her catty remarks, despite being long ago, make me feel like shit.
An adult man told 12-year-old me, “You have nice legs, just like your mother.” 🫠