Growing up, I developed a special vocabulary to describe my body shape. “Fat” and “obese” were discarded out of hand, primarily because both terms were technically inaccurate and overly descriptive. That extra 15 to 20 pounds that settled around my burgeoning hips and dimpled thighs were annoying but hardly Shakespearean in their tragedy.
Since I was very feminine and cute enough to make grandmothers and elderly nuns smile, I liked to call myself “plump,” “pudgy,” “roundish,” “chubby,” or the adverb-turned-adjective “dieting.”
I have never been the type of person who said that name-calling during adolescence and young adulthood doomed me to a life of self-hating. This might be because I never placed too much value on the way I looked, fully aware that my brain and my humor were my best armor.
That might be why I’m having a huge, yuuuge problem treating Donald Trump as a sadistic beast intent on destroying all the fragile young women in society. There is no question that he is boorish and arrogant, and his view of women seems to have been captured in the amber of the Jurassic Period. There will be people who will read this column and come away with the sense that I am excusing the bullying, mean-spirited attacks on the women Trump has targeted during this campaign, and that could not be further from the truth. The way a man treats the women in his life is a measure of his character, and by that measure, Donald Trump is several floods behind Noah.
But we are not voting for gentleman in chief.
When I look at Trump, I do not see the evil Bluebeard that the media are trying to project. And I suspect that most other women don’t see it either, even the ones who would rather stick flaming spears through their eyes than vote for him. This whole misogyny schtick is effective for Clinton and her cohort because in the year of the woman, we need the grand villain to be the man who called Rosie O’Donnell a fat pig. And since Rosie really is pretty divisive and no one actually likes her, Clinton was forced to find another woman to use as her poster child. She hit the jackpot in former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. Trotting out the mouth-droopingly beautiful Alicia and having her lament the fact that the head of the Miss Universe pageant didn’t want her to look like a linebacker after winning the crown (and taking a lot of his money) has helped cement Trump’s image as a despicable woman-hating beast.
But most of us out here aren’t buying it. Well, some of us are. But the vast majority of the women in the United States really don’t care whether our future president prefers his ladies on the lighter side. We think that the commercial with those fragile little teenage Faberge eggs gazing sadly into mirrors as if their worlds were ending is a sign that Clinton has been reading too many Judy Blume books. We will not necessarily be voting for Trump.
But we are sick and tired of this ridiculous, opportunistic play for our votes as if being a few pounds overweight has turned us into victims of a cruel society. We also find it ironic that Clinton is outraged at the fat shaming of a Venezuelan beauty queen but had no problem whatsoever when Monica Lewinsky was being called all sorts of horrific names a generation ago.
As I recall, “fat” was one of the kinder ones.
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Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer and columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News.