Harmonopoly 24: On Fatness, Gender, and Expensive Jeans
There is no such thing as ethical consumption when you're a fat butch looking for jeans that fit
(CW: gender and fatness discussed herein)
HEAD OVER HEELS is back in full swing! We’re the only podcast on the net that has a TV critic AND a women’s wrestling fan talking about everyone’s favorite women’s wrestling dramedy. The only problem so far is that there’s, uh…no wrestling in season 3 of GLOW? But we’re rising to the challenge with incisive commentary, cool guests, and my new quest to prove that Debbie Egan has Big Gay Energy. Sound weird? It is! But I’ll bet you’ll still enjoy it.
SPEAKING OF BIG GAY ENERGY! I am experimenting with turning some of these old newsletters into zines so I can share them with others more easily. For my first pass I collected some of my queer writing together to share with attendees at Hippocamp. Since you already subscribe to the newsletter, you can check it out here for free!
I realized that this newsletter probably needed to include a picture of the jeans I’m panicking about in order to make sense.
A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO, a very expensive brand of clothing that I like did a sample sale in order to raise money for Planned Parenthood, another company I like. Since the price was right and I am in sore need of clothes that fit me comfortably and don’t piss me off, I took the plunge and ordered five new pairs of pants. I had never worn their jeans before, but multiple fat people I know have told me they’re worth the money, so I took a risk. And goddamned if these are not the most comfortable jeans I have ever worn. It feels like angels put them on my bottom. They’re also incredibly flattering! I never want to take them off.
But they cost $100. $100 a piece. That’s one-hundred hand-to-god orders of bargain menu chicken nuggets in exchange for a single item of clothing. Just thinking about it makes my palms sweat.
(They didn’t cost $100 when I bought them! But if you bought them now, they would. Such is the nature of capitalism: arbitrary and unfair.)
If you are not a person in possession of a fat body with particular tastes in clothing, you may not understand why I have a lot of complex feelings about this purchase. So let’s get into it:
First of all, I need you to understand that my body is large enough that I cannot buy things for it in stores. I feel like I need to state this plainly, because when I go on shopping trips with skinnier fats, they always want to go to Old Navy or some shit.
Listen: I CAN’T GO TO OLD NAVY. They don’t have clothes that fit me in their stores. Sure, they will sell them online, because they want my money. But my actual fat ass in the stores, knocking over mannequins and frightening the children? No way. If we are doing brick and mortar shopping, my options are Lane Bryant, Torrid, or the tiny Universal Thread section at Target. So I am going to come out of this dressed like your married aunt, your divorced mid-life-crisis aunt, or your aunt who went on a Target run.
NO THANKS!
To make things more complicated, I try to avoid wearing gendered clothing as much as possible. My preferred style is gently attempted androgyny, quietly uninterested in gender but begrudgingly willing to accept it as a part of my life. I don’t experience gender dysphoria as I understand it, but I still deeply dislike performing femininity. It feels very fake to me, and it makes me uncomfortable. I'm happiest when I look on the outside how I feel on the inside. So I have arrived at a Bartleby the Scrivener approach to gender presentation: I understand that it’s unavoidable to a certain extent, but on the whole, I would prefer not to.
“So what?” you might be thinking to yourself. “Clothing is clothing. You should wear whatever you like! Gender is over! It’s the future now, stupid! Wear your suspenders and bowties and be free!”
A nice thought. Unfortunately I am 5’4, babyfaced, and shaped like a cartoon of a sexy lady tugboat. I am all hips and ass with an afterthought of boobs riding shotgun on my torso. This is how every woman in my family is shaped, so I have never questioned it until now. Changing up the way I dress has made me think about it a lot.
The problem with rejecting gendered clothing is that in the already limited range of clothing I can actually fit into, the vast majority of it is EXTREMELY femme. There’s this sort of unspoken rule that to be a fashionable fat you have to be a femme fat, and if you don’t fit in that mold, you aren’t worth making clothes for. If I buy a shirt from Torrid, it’s probably going to have a peplum and darts and some kind of cutesy pattern, because that is what they think fat women want to buy. And believe me, I love fat femmes, y’all are the best and stupid hot and my number one Tinder super-swipe demographic. But I am not like you, and clothing that is made for you isn’t being made for me. It might fit my body, but it doesn't fit me.
Finding affordable clothes that actually make me look like I want to look is the messy intersection of capitalism, gender, and fatness in my life. I struggle to explain this to my smaller friends, who always counsel me that I can rock the clothes I like if I believe in myself. But belief is not the issue here! I can’t Tinkerbell clap a range of affordable plus-sized androgynous clothing into existence. If that was possible, someone would have beat me to it, and I could be saving my wishes for more important things like invisibility and flight and bringing back Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23 as the lesbian romcom it deserves to be.
I can rock a man’s shirt as long as it’s made for a bigger fella (and I do!) but I have no chance in hell of ever comfortably wearing men’s pants. They are not built to accommodate the junk in my body’s trunk. I’m either swimming in them or I can’t zip them up. Even big-and-tall store stuff doesn’t work for me. Believe me, I’ve tried it. I have extremely limited options when it comes to clothing that works on the lower half of my body. (And please don’t skate in here and recommend your extremely expensive bespoke fatty clothing brand unless you have a coupon code, OK?)
Because of my size and my appearance preferences, I rarely if ever encounter clothing that I actually get to try on before I buy it. As a result, I have to put the same amount of research into purchasing pants that most people put into buying a car. I read the reviews, I talk to people who own the clothing, and if given the chance, I interrogate the company reps themselves. Do people say these are comfortable? Do they get returned frequently, and why? Do you have a version of them that doesn’t have a bow embroidered on the ass? And so on. If I find a likely candidate, I’ll wait till it’s on clearance and buy it, then give it a test run. This is why I have 300 pairs of slightly-different jeggings that I hate, but I digress.
I finally found some pants that do what I need then to do, but at what cost? I feel extraordinarily guilty about having spent this much money on clothing, even clothing that fits me well that I like. But this is how it always is for fat women who want to wear clothing that they actually like. We always have less options, they’re always more expensive, and picking the wrong clothing has real consequences: someone my size is always one candid photo away from People of Wal-Mart mockery or one neck-down inadvertent cameo in an obesity crisis story on the news. Standing out makes it more likely that you’ll get picked on, gonzo photographed, or worse.
(I wrote about one such instance here
. Seriously, if you take pictures of strangers in public without their permission, you’re an asshole and you need to stop.)
It’s a high pressure situation, and I have found one way I can throw money at it to make it go away, so I am inclined to do that. But I feel bad about it, because it shouldn't cost so much in the first place and I shouldn’t have access to more safety than other fat people because I have disposable income. I guess that’s privilege for you!
In closing: I have a pair of Universal Standard jeans now. They are very good jeans. I cannot in good conscience recommend them to you unless they are on clearance, because they are so expensive. But if you’re a fat butch seeking pants that you can cram the bottom of your Hawaiian shirt into without incident, they’ll do the job. The end.