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.

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.

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.