At 16 years old, the crowning achievement of my life was getting a boyfriend. And it wasn’t because I was ever so smitten. I mean, he was a sweet boy with a cute flop of black hair. But I wanted the idea of a boyfriend way more than I ever wanted a living, breathing partner.
And that was all because I was fat. I still am, but being a fat teen in the mid-aughts was a particularly crappy experience. Whatever fat activism existed at the time hadn’t filtered down to my little world. I didn’t yet have an Instagram feed full of fatshionistas, or the ability to see Lizzo rock a gloriously tiny bikini. I didn’t even know what a damn Rubens was. I just knew the basic shit we teach everyone about fatness: that it is bad and undesirable. Therefore, I was bad and undesirable.So when I got a boyfriend, long before my thinner friends got boyfriends of their own, I wasn’t just going through the motions of a teenage rite of passage. Honey, I had ascended. I was no longer the sad, lonely fat friend. I was the friend with a boyfriend. I had beaten the big fat odds and secured the affections of A Real Live Boy. And pop culture had taught me a boyfriend was the only way to prove my self-worth.
Pop culture had taught me a boyfriend was the only way to prove my self-worth.
If there was one fat girl on TV I recall most vividly from the time, it was Terri (Christina Schmidt) from Degrassi: The Next Generation. Most of her storylines revolve around being rejected by the boys she likes and struggling with her self-esteem. The show finally cuts poor Terri a break when she becomes a plus-size model, which earns her some confidence, but ultimately the fat girl can’t win. When Terri gets her own first boyfriend, he eventually knocks her onto a slab of concrete, landing her in a coma with brain damage, before he commits a school shooting. After that, her character just kind of disappears.
I suppose the show was attempting to teach teens a lesson about the warning signs of abuse. But why did the fat girl have to be the victim? All my teenage brain took away from Terri’s plotline was that a fat girl shouldn’t hope for much. Any confidence she can muster must be sanctioned by the gaze of some boy, and that boy will be a disappointment at best — or an abuser at worst. Is that all we can hope for? Is that all we deserve?
Thankfully my own teenage boyfriend was kind, and having him by my side made me feel like one of the lucky ones. Never mind that I was a closeted baby dyke or that I basically zoned out every time he touched me. He was still a boy who liked me — liked me enough to touch me, even. I felt like I’d won.
Fat representation over the years truly hasn’t gotten much better, which is why I was so excited for Hulu’s adaptation of Shrill when the first season premiered last year. I had devoured Lindy West’s memoir when it was published in 2016, thrilled to be reading the words of a woman who, like me, knows what it means to navigate the world in a fat body. (I couldn’t relate to certain aspects of her narrative, but that’s to be expected with personal stories.)
The show, which returned for a second season last month, generally does a commendable job adapting West’s story to that of its protagonist, Annie, played by the very charming Aidy Bryant. But there’s still one big element of the show I can’t get on board with, and he’s a baby in a man’s body named Ryan.
We’re first introduced to Ryan (Luka Jones) as the guy Annie’s hooking up with, even though he hides her from his roommates and makes her leave through the back door — presumably because he’s embarrassed about her size. And it’s not like Ryan is such a catch himself. He’s relatively unkempt, has the emotional maturity of a tween, and struggles to hold down a job. Meanwhile, we see Annie as a growing fireball of tenacity and confidence, working at an alt-weekly, chasing her dreams, and finding her voice.
