Yesterday, two different guys approached me on campus to ask, “What happened?” I.e.: what insane chain of events had happened for me to transform from “shredded to the bone” to “bulking up” in the matter of a few months? They approached me within hours of each other. Unsolicited and without hesitation to inform me that I (as if I had yet to realize!)was gaining weight.
The first guy found me in the gym to ask if I was a bodybuilding competitor in her off-season. Acceptable question. Normal, even, given the environment. But then he kept going. “Because you used to be uber-lean and now, I don’t want to say you’re getting bulky, but you definitely look like you are gaining muscle and eating good.” He said this as if delivering news that was previously a secret, as if we were confronting something that was one-of-a-kind.
The second guy caught me off guard. He took a seat beside me on Cross Campus, and we started to chat. Before I left, he took his shot. “I just have to ask, do you compete? This time last year, you were . . . well . . . different. Why the change?” He went on to say that he liked this new look. That I was healthier, muscular, and well-built. To both men, I stood there giggling: why do you care? what a weird question? Genuinely, even comically, why did they have to share an opinion on a stranger’s weight?
Through these interactions, which happen more often than I’d like to admit, I have noticed a few things. First, I seem to be some sort of weight-gain celebrity. I’ll take it! And I’ll wear the crown with pride. Second, it seems odd that when I was smaller, nobody said anything about my weight. I moved through the gym and went to class and sat on benches outside and everything was fine; I was unbothered, and my life seemed to go untouched. The moment my body changed, though, the moment I picked up the fork and ate double what the football team does, I suddenly became a subject of public interest. I took up more room. This signaled that I became an object of conversation and a thing that begged people to weigh in on.
What is most peculiar is that these comments seem to only come from guys. These comments I receive are not meant to hurt or belittle, but they do succeed at instilling a little creeping voice within me, a voice that, after a while, will exist all on its own to be a reminder of the discomfort my body causes others.
For men, it seems that body size is not simply aesthetics. Its power, territory, and a calculation of masculinity. When a woman does what men brag about all the time—gets bigger, stronger, holds more physical space—she seems to short-circuit something in the male brain. These comments I receive are not really about me, nor my body. They are about much more than that; they are about the social objectification of a body. My body began to represent a disruption to a hierarchy that, somehow, at some point, was invented.
No one woke up one random morning and decided that women gaining weight should be a threat to male masculinity. No woman randomly wondered how to destabilize social order and flip the male brain on its head. This embodiment of power is rooted in the fact that a woman who is large, strong, solid, and untouchable by social rejection challenges a historical story about who is meant to be big and who is meant to stay small.
There is a version of me who is angry at these comments, wanting to make snarky remarks. More than anything, I am just unsure of what they wanted me to say. Did they want an apology? A genuine explanation? A fifteen-minute PowerPoint briefing with trajectories of my body weight? At the end of the day, I can’t seem to understand why I should owe anyone an explanation. Bodies change. They just do. Mine did. It will again, and I’m sure yours will too. Still, I am somehow expected to have a moral explanation for my body. I am meant to make you feel more comfortable with my uncomfortable weight gain.
I have no harsh feelings towards the two men who approached me yesterday. In fact, I hope they enjoyed our fruitful conversation. Just to let them know, I do not really need an assessment of what I used to look like in comparison to what I currently look like. In fact, I was there. I know what I used to look like. I’d like to believe that they were not making these comments on my body just to make a comment. I’d like to think that they are part of a larger story, one that a woman’s body has remained a public object, subject to assessment and male judgment. Many men seem to still be convinced that a changing female body requires explanation, that it is an issue worth addressing rather than a fact to simply be observed, cataloged, and forgotten about.
