I Threw Out My Shapewear

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Title card with pink floral border and soft pink background reading “I Threw Out My Shapewear” by Jackie Pick.

I threw out my shapewear.

I’d amassed quite a collection. Spanx. Flexees. Wacoal. Expensive. Off-brand. Bargain brand. Spandex. Bone-in. Rib-eye.

We’re told shapewear makes clothes look better. That’s the line, right?

Entire industries are devoted to convincing us that the female human body contains an unacceptable number of female-human-body-shaped features. 

Their solution was to invent body-squishing devices that relocate flesh to less politically sensitive regions of the body. This is called “smoothing” or “controlling.”

Interesting. “Controlling” implies some sort of unruliness or criminal element. And what exactly are we smoothing here? Evidence? Evidence we have bodies? Evidence we’ve eaten lunch? Evidence that time and gravity remain undefeated?

Look, humans invent stupid things all the time. Cryptocurrency. Television shows about buying storage lockers. Truck nuts. Why, I myself own several pairs of Crocs.

Invention isn’t the problem. Consensus is. Somebody looked at a human body and said, “You know what would improve this? Compression!” and the rest of society said, “Go on.”

It’s me. I’m the rest of society. I knew what they were doing. I knew what they were selling. I knew my organs had committed no crimes. Yet there I was, handing over money so a spandex torture tube could persuade me I looked a little better.

This pressure didn’t come from some shadowy shapewear enforcement agency hiding in the bushes. I’d simply internalized that I needed to apologize for existing in three dimensions, all in the name of making my clothes look better.

I understood the game and kept playing it, unforced.

Close-up of shapewear packaging listing benefits including “airbrushed look,” “super tummy-toning,” “slims hips, thighs & rear,” and “boosted confidence.”

When did comfort become incompatible with looking nice? And when did taking up space become incompatible with looking nice? I’m thinking circa Garden of Eden, plus or minus a few days. (If you’re actually interested in the history of why women have been vacuum-sealing themselves into uncomfortable garments for centuries, there is an impressive amount of scholarship available on the subject.) 

A few years ago, I attended a semi-formal event after spending most of the week recovering from food poisoning. Bolstered by Gatorade and feeling better, I decided to go. I also decided not to wear shapewear. Nobody was paying that much attention to how I looked anyway, right? Aren’t there countless articles insisting that everyone is too self-absorbed to notice other people? Countless life coaches telling us people only study your body if you’re on a catwalk or participating in some sort of performance art involving nudity and Nutella?

(FYI, Nudity and Nutella is now the title of my memoir. You may not use it.)

At some point during the evening, someone who knew I’d been ill gave me the ol’ up-and-down and said, “I know you were sick, but it works for you.”

BUT IT WORKS FOR YOU. 

I’d lost maybe three pounds. Three. Not even enough for my driver’s license to no longer be lying about my height. Three pounds.

I’ve held on to that comment for years. Three pounds had apparently crossed the threshold of noticeability. I hate that someone noticed and I hate that I cared that they noticed.

We are so accustomed to treating women’s bodies as decorative that suffering gets mistaken for a beauty regimen.

The old stories are full of this. Girls shrinking. Girls sleeping. Girls trapped in towers. Girls folded into boxes and coffins and tiny acceptable shapes. The reward, always, is approval. The reward is never freedom until The End.

An ancient bargain. Suffer, and perhaps we will call you beautiful. Starve, and perhaps we will approve. Shrink, and perhaps we will love you.

I have come to distrust every story that asks a woman to vanish in order to win.

(And by the way, I do not recommend food poisoning as part of any plan, especially a plan to appear in public. Zero stars. Not even stars. Black holes. FIVE BLACK HOLES.)

Still, I kept and used the shapewear. I wanted what it promised and I also knew better.

In the last few months I’ve attended roughly twenty events. I did not look meaningfully different when I wore  shapewear, but I was much less comfortable.

Shapewear is supposedly about confidence. Shapewear has never given me confidence. It has given me information – mostly detailed, real-time updates regarding the location of my pancreas.

Clothing tag for shapewear labeled “Solutions for All-Over Confidence,” with color-coded categories including tummy, bottom, and all-over solutions.

I carried three children in my body, two of them simultaneously. That my midsection is softer and more convex than a granite countertop is a perfectly reasonable consequence. The rest of me ain’t exactly hewn from marble either. Such are the terms and conditions of living the life I live.

Look, wear what you’re going to wear. Spanx yourself or don’t. But I’ve reached the point where my comfort is not a moral failure and my breathing is not laziness and my getting (un)dressed should not require the jaws of life. I’m not on this earth to make my clothes look better. 

My body has done the astonishing work of keeping me alive despite the vast number of vegetables I’ve not eaten. It is well past time for it to be free. 

I threw out my shapewear. I don’t give a flying Flexee.

Monster Songs and Other Survival Manuals: What I Read May 2026

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graphic titled “Monster Songs and Other Survival Manuals: What I Read May 2026” with book covers for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Grendel’s Mother, Feminasty, and A Far Cry from Kensington on a bright green background.

The fact that I managed to read anything in May is clap-worthy. Not that clap. Regular clap. Keep it moving and behave yourself.

It’s been busy, is what I mean. So I, like anyone who read anything in May, deserve some sort of award. Not a major award. Just a tasteful certificate or a tasty pan pizza. Perhaps a small parade. Nothing extravagant, one small horse or large dog dragging me around town in a red wagon. Maybe we can be joined by a tuba player. Or maybe the dog can play the tuba while the horse drags me around. Look, I’ll sort out the logistics and report back.

And yet I ended up with a stack of books so good that I stopped treating reading like a little end-of-day reward and started ignoring actual responsibilities to read. Sorry to anyone who sent me an email, a text, a carrier pigeon, smoke signals, or did a cool semaphore flag routine in my backyard. I thought you were my parade and I was waiting for the tuba-playing dog.

These books were master classes on surviving broken systems. We’ve got intergalactic bureaucracy, Anglo-Saxon blood feuds, London publishing politics, and feminist rage. Basically, four very different ways of telling us that most systems are badly designed, the people running them are usually the least suited to the task, and women disproportionately suffer. Shocking.

This month’s reading was a refreshing reminder that humanity has, across centuries and galaxies, remained remarkably consistent and disappointing. Fertile ground for brilliant storytelling.

Which is all just to say, here are the books I finished this month:

  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  • Grendel’s Mother by Susan Signe Morrison
  • Feminasty by Erin Gibson
  • A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark

Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

This book is absolutely ridiculous. I am obsessed with it.

Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy explains the universe using a towel, a depressed robot, and several increasingly terrible planning committees. It’s a madcap extravaganza about space, improbability, bureaucracy, bad timing, excellent timing, strange people, and one bewildered Englishman.

(continued here)

Grendel’s Mother by Susan Signe Morrison

You know the story. Big guy. Great hair probably. Sword. Mead hall full of dudes named something like Hrothgar son of Skullthumper, son of Other Skullthumper. Monster attacks. Hero flexes. History gets written by whichever man survives long enough to hire a bard. Classic.

But Susan Signe Morrison’s Grendel’s Mother walks straight into that testosterone-soaked corpse pile, picks up the narrative by its ankle, and drags it screaming into the deep water where it belongs.

This is, technically speaking, a retelling of Beowulf, which is itself a very old story about men hitting things with swords while suffering from what historians professionally refer to as “an absolutely catastrophic inability to process emotions.” Traditionally, the poem’s second monster, Grendel’s mother, is presented as a sort of swamp-adjacent horror woman lurking beneath a lake waiting to avenge her son, which everyone agrees is terribly unreasonable behavior, unlike, say, razing villages or hacking each other apart in ceremonial blood feuds.

(continued here)

Feminasty: The Complicated Woman’s Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death by Erin Gibson

Feminasty: The Complicated Woman's Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death

Erin Gibson’s Feminasty is a rage-song for the girls carrying keys between their knuckles.

It is sharp, furious, and profane. Thank God. Misogyny is not something women should have to discuss in a soft voice while reassuring everyone nearby that we’re still nice. Fortunately, Gibson has no interest in making patriarchy feel comfortable or palatable. There’s no “Now, to be fair…” or “Not all men” panic disclaimer tucked into the corners.

(continued here)

A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark

Set in 1950s London, A Far Cry from Kensington follows Mrs. Hawkins, a wartime widow working in publishing amid cliques, office politics, anonymous letters, fraud, paranoia, terrible writers, love affairs, blackmail, and other sinister and morally ugly behaviors. It is all tea trays and landladies and little typed notes, but underneath the upholstery there are wolves gnawing bones.

(continued here)

And there be the May reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! Read any good books lately?

May: No Reason and All the Reasons

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May is here again. This is the true end of the year. May is supposed to be spring but it’s actually harvest season. We see what has survived and what has grown. We cull what we can. We return year after year to witness the fact that time has continued to move.

Every year I’m surprised, although I own and use a calendar. Several, in fact. Still, I’m flattened by the rush of endings and the gatherings stacked atop one another. Cut off one celebration and two grow back in its place, fastening ever more ceremonies around your neck like beautiful cursed jewelry.

May gathers up loose threads with brassy pomp and circumstance before summer upheaval arrives with its wet bathing suits.

May is a complete disaster, is what I’m saying. Just look at the inside of my car if you need proof. My Toyota is a rolling evidence locker. A midden heap.

The rest of you, though? You look great. Hydrated and moisturized while you’re winding down, as it were. I salute you. May your linen pants remain crisp and your drinks be as lemon-wedged as you wish.

Me? I’m choking down noises that sound like a 1987 Buick trying to merge while going uphill.

I’m not cute enough to be winding down. May is about endings. Lasts and finals. All I can do is listen to one of my sons tell me that by the time he leaves for college, 90% of our time together is done. I’m not checking that math, thanks, because I’m busy remembering carrying him in after he fell asleep in the car, all dead weight and impossible trust

At night I collapse onto the couch so dramatically that heretofore missing objects launch out of my bra upon impact. Bobby pins, receipts, Cheez-Its, Chapsticks with missing caps. I am not proud of this, but leave it here for future historians who may appreciate the data.

I almost just typed, “Still, I love this time of year.” But I don’t. I mean, I recognize the ache of it, even if it knocks the wind out of me. I recognize that sense of subjective slow motion when something is ending. I recognize that my children have become themselves gradually, then all at once. That they have developed complex, glorious, kind lives, and I get to celebrate and make banana bread for them. No-reason banana bread. All-the-reasons banana bread.

Mostly though, it’s because I’m overbuying bananas these days. They darken as we rush to and from events. I always think we’re a household that will eat many bananas. We are not. We are a household that transforms bananas via neglect into baked goods.

We recently played Jackbox as a family. The prompt was “What is the name of a horse you wouldn’t bet on?” I answered “Last Place Monty,” which got me an appreciative snort from the kids, a noise I will cherish, to some extent. One child answered, “Beefs Wellington.” That won. The next day he wandered into the kitchen and lamented, “I should have gone with ‘Thelonius Glue, Sr.’”

There are entire sections of motherhood no one adequately explains beforehand, including the fact that one day your children may become funnier than you, and that you will feel a piercing gratitude for that.

Every week I begin my planning journal by writing “Do not waste your precious timing giving a single crap about what anyone thinks of you.” This is excellent advice that is fundamentally incompatible with motherhood. There are a few people whose opinions matter to me. My husband. My kids. The dog who watches all of us in case we sneeze weirdly and he needs to retreat. The cashier who sells me bananas when he absolutely should know better at this point.

Loving these people (not the cashier. Ok, maybe the cashier. Hey, Jerry.) requires presence, vigilance, mood-monitoring, remembering who needs new shoes and what size, and who suddenly likes bananas again.

And every May, no matter how tired we are or what strange treasures are embedded in my underthings or in the Toyota’s backseat, we all somehow find our way home. Banana bread. Better versions of jokes. It’s some holy version of “WTF.”