Yesterday I bought a pair of Levi’s with tummy control. It was a milestone. And a defeat.

You know all those commercials about “belly fat?” And maybe you say to yourself, Ew, what a slob, I wouldn’t let that happen to me!

But after a certain age, your tummy appears out of nowhere. You used to worry about your thighs or something, but you never gave a thought to your tummy. When you look down and realize you’re on your way to becoming a sumo wrestler, it’s too late.

So now I still wear the same size but it isn’t the same. I hate it. I can’t wear a fitted t shirt or everyone will know. At home, I can sit on the couch and mourn the rolls of flab, resigned to the fact that they aren’t going anywhere. I perk up at the new ads about Cool Sculpting, a procedure that promises to freeze and evaporate your tummy fat.  If only! I think it would be worth a few thousand to have a  flat stomach again.

And yet, how could you do that, knowing there are starving refugees living in tents without anything? Your flat stomach would be a sin against humanity. So instead of sinning against humanity, I went to try on the new Levi’s.

Sure enough, they hold your tummy in, with an extra layer of something. They look just like regular skinny jeans. Whereas those Not Your Daughter’s jeans are cut for elephants and are super unflattering. I bought the new Levi’s, even though I was horrified that they cost $98. Ninety-eight dollars may be a transgression verging on sin, especially given the stacks of jeans in my closet.

Later at home, I tried on my new jeans. I noticed that they smelled funny. Not funny, but awful. An awful chemical smell that I couldn’t quite identify. So I took off the tags and hand-washed them in cold water. Then I rinsed them with Downy. Then I put them in a warm dryer. When I took them out, they still smelled awful.

I asked my husband to smell them, even though he hates being ordered to smell things. He thought he smelled cleaning fluid.

I’m going to exchange the jeans, unless all the tummy-control Levi’s smell like cleaning fluid, as a punishment for my vanity. Maybe I am double cursed with a tummy roll AND a heightened sensitivity to smell. (see hyperosmia.) But what’s a person supposed to do? Just go around like that and embrace the aging process?

I reject the aging process. I would rather cut off my head than have grey hair. I don’t want to get flappy arms. I don’t want to deal with it at all.

Have you seen Elon Musk’s mother in her new ads for Cover Girl? She’s got the white crew-cut and the dark lipstick, and she smugly declares in her murderous South African accent:

They say at a certain age, you just stop caring. I wonder what age that is.

Complaining about Maye Musk to my sister, who hadn’t seen the ads, I showed her some pictures on my phone and noted that she’s 69 years old. My sister exclaimed, “Is that all? She looks much older!”

I felt a bit better about my tummy fat. I guess as long as I have Elon’s mother, I can carry on. But I still want the jeans.

You’re getting ready to go to a Halloween party and you’re going as Axl Rose. You’ve got your bandanna on and a t-shirt and you’re struggling to get your leather pants zipped up.

They fit okay a couple of years ago when you wore them to a Thanksgiving dinner where you brought a hand-crafted turkey centerpiece made out of Popsicle sticks and colored paper. But now you feel like a bursting leather sausage. So you say, Fuck this, and you go find your other leather pants, the looser ones, but the waist is tight and the rest is too big.

So now you don’t even want to be Axl. Fuck him and fuck everything. You’re a fat whale with no reason to live. None. You have reached a precipice; you should take your leather pants and jump off it. Or if not a precipice, then a milestone. The one where you turn your back on leather pants and relax in a cotton floral housecoat, your legs mapped with varicose veins and your swollen feel stuffed into slipper socks with the non-skid soles.

You can go around like that old lady in a (trigger warning!) Woody Allen film croaking “I was once a great beauty” to anyone who’ll listen.

But then you pull yourself together. You have to go to the party. Your partner is going as Slash. You’ve RSVP’d. So you decide to default to (trigger warning!) Slutty Axl. As long as you have fishnets you can be Slutty Anything. So you put on the fishnet tights and find the tartan skirt you promised to send to a friend in her 20s because Grandma Schoolgirl is just not your preferred self-image, even for Halloween.

Now you’ve pulled it out. So to speak. You still feel a little tragic. You had to compromise, and you know that you’re a pregnant-looking orca but at least now you can wear lipstick and mascara, Because Slut. You jab the mascara in your eye but still valiantly walk out the door on time.

You get to the party and have a drink, feeling your self-hatred fade away like a dream as you behold a girl dressed like Mia from Pulp Fiction, with a bloody nose and a giant syringe sticking out of her chest.

Facebook has responded to a petition by eliminating the status option of ‘feeling fat.’

If only I’d known about this option! And now it’s gone, thanks to political correctness.

The Change.org petition said this:

Did you know that Facebook lets you tell all your friends just how much you hate your body?

Uh-oh, body hatred! Make it stop!

And this:

Having these word choices completely normalizes using derogatory descriptive terms in the place of real feelings. How can a person feel ‘fat’ or ‘ugly’ when these aren’t actually feelings?” …What’s worse is that these adjectives are judgmental and forced on us by society to make women (and increasingly men) feel negatively about their otherwise healthy bodies!

Well, Facebook is sorry and never again will it allow us to fat-shame our own selves. Here’s the Facebook statement:

We’ve heard from our community that listing “feeling fat” as an option for status updates could reinforce negative body image, particularly for people struggling with eating disorders. So we’re going to remove “feeling fat” from the list of options. We’ll continue to listen to feedback as we think about ways to help people express themselves on Facebook.

I’m going to call bullshit on this and I don’t expect a single person to agree with me. But still, this is a disturbing trend. It’s not good to censor feelings, and fat is indeed a feeling, no matter what any petition says.

I feel fat RIGHT NOW. I’m not actually fat but I feel fat. I also feel guilty much of the time. I feel depressed most days and often angry, too. Naming these feelings  actually makes me  feel better. I know that I don’t need to live in denial, that self-expression is healthy and liberating.

Positivity is nice but shouldn’t be enforced by word police. Fat-shaming is a big deal at the moment but it’s a made-up problem created by scolds, overly sensitive crybabies who think Everyone Is Beautiful even though we’re not all beautiful.

At the same time experts are urging people to talk about mental illness to dispel the stigma, Facebook is now telling us we can’t confess to feeling fat.

Fuckers. Fascists. Fat-phobic fascist fuckers.

P.S. You can’t ‘feel ugly’ anymore on Facebook, either. Because, I don’t know, it’s mean to people struggling with ugliness issues.

When I’m not thinking about death, I’m thinking about my fat thighs. My brain bounces between the two subjects like a ping-pong ball. I hate these preoccupations but I feel helpless against the tyranny of my depression. Obviously, I am looking for a new medication.

Fat thighs have always been one of my deepest, most elemental dreads. Fat thighs are loaded with significance for me, all negative. They represent weakness of the worst sort, a moral and aesthetic crime. It means being Female, in the most self-loathing and sexist definition of the word. God knows how this started, but my father hated fat and he hated women, so we might not need Einstein to figure it out. Years ago, I would cringe at the line from Master Song by Leonard Cohen:

and your thighs are a ruin, you want too much
let’s say you came back some time too soon

Leonard Cohen may have been talking about Mary Magdalene but I still take it personally.

How many women hate their thighs? I know the number is vast and most of you didn’t know my father. If you hate your thighs, can you recall the genesis of the hatred?

When I sit down, I see my thighs spread outward like a sea of blubber. I whine and complain and apologize to my husband for my fat thighs. He has demonstrated again and again his reverence for my thighs, but I feel they are a blight verging on deformity.

Out in the Fact-based Community, my thighs are probably slimmer than average but that has no bearing on my problem.  Fat Thighs are a state of mind, a state of being, a Feminist Issue, and a way to externalize anxiety and shame.

Plus, I can’t go out wearing shorts, even though it’s been a trillion degrees all summer and my house has become an Indian sweat lodge.

Thoughts, advice, insults, anyone?

I wanted this dress by Yeojin Bae for months, and miraculously it went on sale at Matches. It’s the most perfect dress I’ve ever owned. The workmanship is exquisite! It makes me look fat but you can’t have everything.

Here, below, is how it’s supposed to look. I may not be 19 but I do own a big fake deer head!

In any case, this is your big chance to compliment my dress. Enough   compliments and I may consider modeling my new Ann Demeulemeestereester jacket from Yoox.   It just arrived and it’s a winner.