Chapter Six: Becoming A Mean Girl: The Power of Thinness
The iconic film Mean Girls came out the summer before my senior in high school, which also happened to be when my eating disorder started getting really out of control. I know the message of that wise story — and I’m not being sarcastic, Mean Girls really is a brilliant analysis of the strange creature known as the high school girl — is that there’s no upside to being a mean girl. I know that we’re supposed to empathize with Cady and that Regina is supposed to be the villain who redeems herself in the end. But that’s not what I took away from the movie.
When I saw Mean Girls for the first time during my senior year — and subsequently the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth times — the message that burrowed into my head, gut, and soul was that being thin and beautiful meant having power.
There’s no denying the fact that Regina George had all the power in her high school world. Yes, it was easily taken from her because power through fear and manipulation is easy to lose, but that doesn’t change the fact that she had all the power. And interestingly enough, she lost her power when her body changed. When she was no longer a size 3, when she couldn’t fit into anything but her tracksuit, when she started breaking out and putting her hair in messy ponytails, she lost her power.
Yes, I understood that the message was supposed to be that being a mean girl has consequences, that it alienates and hurts people who then lash out and everyone gets hurt in the end. But I also understood that Regina’s thinness and her beauty gave her power and she lost that power when she lost her body.
Of course, this reinforced the narrative that was already deeply embedded in my psyche — that becoming thin would make me powerful and give me access to a world that had always denied me admission because of my fatness. And I would love to be able to say that I learned that being thin isn’t the answer, that personality and values are more important than looks, that being a mean girl has awful consequences.
But that’s not my truth. My truth is that thinness did give me the power and access I was craving. Thinness did, in fact, change my life.
I’d spent the majority of my teenaged years being ignored at best, bullied at worst. I certainly didn’t have a Carrie level high school experience. Luckily, more often than not, I was ignored. Though I did endure what I consider to be a normal amount of fatphobic bullying (isn’t it so sad that there’s a normal amount?), for the most part, my peers looked right through me. I didn’t matter enough in the big picture of high school to warrant much attention.
Until I started losing weight.
My weight had been like an invisibility cloak, and with every pound I lost, the cloak slipped off a bit further. People started to notice me as I walked down the halls. Guys started to check me out. Girls started to say hi. I even started getting compliments on my outfits, which had changed drastically during my senior year.
My weight loss and my newfound Mean Girls obsession led me to ditch the Hot Topic goth gear that had gotten me through my first few years of high school and trade it out for tight, low-rise jeans, curve-hugging tanks and graphic tees, and even a few skirts. I started spending actual time on my hair and makeup each morning. I fussed over my outfits. Over the length of my senior year, I gradually transformed from Janice Ian to Regina George. I became a plastic.
And the thinner I got, the more plastic I became. The local plastics started paying attention to me — not so much that I became a bonafide popular girl, but enough that it conferred a bit of status. Guy friends I’d had for years started flirting with me. Strangers said nice things about me and held doors for me. Basically, people treated me like a completely different person just because my body had changed.
I started to feel the power of being thin and pretty and white, and I started to use it to my advantage. I started to use my appearance as currency to get what I wanted, to feel the way I wanted. And it was remarkably successful. I was amazed by all the things people were willing to say and do for a pretty, thin, white girl.
When I went to college the next year, I showed up in a brand new place, where no one knew I’d ever been fat, as a pretty, thin, white girl. And the power that gave me was intoxicating. I was in with the popular kids from day one. I got invited to all the parties. I got hit on everywhere I went. People paid attention to me, people saw me.
I really wish this wasn’t the case. I really wish that my entire experience didn’t change just because my body did. But it’s the truth.
I know now that this is because fatphobia is so deeply rooted in our society that it impacts every single person’s experience, especially female-identifying people. But back then, I truly believed that being thin made me a better person, that being thin made me more worthy. And that reaffirmed my decision to do whatever I needed to do to be thin.
