A League of Their Own is a classic family comedy that mines the age-old question: What if women… could do things? Specifically, the women of A League of Their Own are doing baseball, and Marla Hooch is the most baseball-doingest woman of them all! She can hit homies and run bases and throw the ball far, all while maintaining a positive attitude and dodging jets of Tom Hanks’s hot urine! The only problem is that she is not max bangable like the other baseball women—she has a jukebox-like body and makes turtle-face any time she is addressed—which, if you think about it, makes her not that good at baseball after all. Fortunately, at the end, she meets a man who is ALSO a jukebox turtle-face, and they get married in a condescending-ass ceremony that’s like “Awwwww, look, the uglies thinks it’s people!” (Presumably they also like each other’s personali—What? Doesn’t matter? Quarantine the less attractive? ’K!!!) The thing about Marla Hooch is that the actress who plays her is just a totally nice-looking regular woman. I always think of this thing Rachel Dratch said in her memoir: “I am offered solely the parts that I like to refer to as The Unfuckables. In reality, if you saw me walking down the street, you wouldn’t point at me and recoil and throw up and hide behind a shrub.” Hollywood’s beauty standards are so wacko that they trick you into thinking anyone who isn’t Geena Davis is literally a toilet.
The Neighbor with the Arm Flab from The Adventures of Pete & Pete
Big Pete and Little Pete spent an entire episode fixated on the jiggling of an elderly neighbor’s arm fat. Next, I didn’t wear a tank top for twenty years.
Ursula the Sea Witch
The whole thing with Ariel’s voice and Prince Ambien Overdose is just an act of civil disobedience. What Ursula really wants is to bring down the regime of King Triton* so she and her eel bros don’t have to live in a dank hole tending their garden of misery slime for the rest of their lives. It’s the same thing with The Lion King—why should the hyenas have a shitty life? History is written by the victors, so forgive me if I don’t trust some P90X sea king’s smear campaign against the radical fatty in the next grotto.
Morla the Aged One from The NeverEnding Story
A depressed turtle who’s so fat and dirty, people literally get her confused with a mountain.
Auntie Shrew
I guess it’s forgivable that one of the secondary antagonists of The Secret of NIMH is a shrieking shrew of a woman who is also a literal shrew named Auntie Shrew, because the hero of the movie is also a lady and she is strong and brave. But, like, seriously? Auntie Shrew? Thanks for giving her a pinwheel of snaggle-fangs to go with the cornucopia of misogynist stereotypes she calls a personality.
Mrs. Potts
Question: How come, when they turn back into humans at the end of Beauty and the Beast, Chip is a four-year-old boy, but his mother, Mrs. Potts, is like 107? Perhaps you’re thinking, “Lindy, you are remembering it wrong. That kindly, white-haired, snowman-shaped Mrs. Doubtfire situation must be Chip’s grandmother.” Not so, champ! She’s his mom. Look it up. She gave birth to him four years ago. Also, where the hell is Chip’s dad? Could you imagine being a 103-year-old single mom?
As soon you become a mother, apparently, you are instantly interchangeable with the oldest woman in the world, and/or sixteen ounces of boiling brown water with a hat on it. Take a sec and contrast Mrs. Potts’s literally spherical body with the cut-diamond abs of King Triton, father of seven.
The Trunchbull from Matilda
Sure, the Trunchbull is a bitter, intractable, sadistic she-monster who doesn’t even feel a shred of fat solidarity with Bruce Bogtrotter (seriously, Trunch?), but can you imagine being the Trunchbull? And growing up with Miss Effing Honey? The world is not kind to big, ugly women. Sometimes bitterness is the only defense.
That’s it.
Taken in aggregate, here is what I learned in my childhood about my personal and professional potential:
I could not claim any sexual agency unless I forced myself upon a genteel frog; or unless, as part of a jewel caper, I was trying to seduce a base, horny fool such as a working-class rhinoceros; and if I insisted on broadcasting my sexuality anyway, I would be exiled to a sea cave to live eternally in a dank garden of worms, hoping that a gullible hot chick might come along once in a while so I could grift her out of her sexy voice. Even in those rare scenarios, my sexuality would still be a joke, an oddity, or a menace. I could potentially find chaste, comical romance, provided I located a chubby simpleton who looked suspiciously like myself without a hair bow, and the rest of humanity would breathe a secret sigh of relief that the two of us were removing ourselves from the broader gene pool. Or I could succumb to the lifetime of grinding pain and resentment and transform into a hideous beast who makes herself feel better by locking helpless children in the knife closet.
Mother or monster. Okay, little girl—choose.
Bones
I’ve always been a great big person. In the months after I was born, the doctor was so alarmed by the circumference of my head that she insisted my parents bring me back, over and over, to be weighed and measured and held up for scrutiny next to the “normal” babies. My head was “off the charts,” she said. Science literally had not produced a chart expansive enough to account for my monster dome. “Off the charts” became a West family joke over the years—I always deflected, saying it was because of my giant brain—but I absorbed the message nonetheless. I was too big, from birth. Abnormally big. Medical-anomaly big. Unchartably big.
There were people-sized people, and then there was me.
So, what do you do when you’re too big, in a world where bigness is cast not only as aesthetically objectionable, but also as a moral failing? You fold yourself up like origami, you make yourself smaller in other ways, you take up less space with your personality, since you can’t with your body. You diet. You starve, you run till you taste blood in your throat, you count out your almonds, you try to buy back your humanity with pounds of flesh.
I got good at being small early on—socially, if not physically. In public, until I was eight, I would speak only to my mother, and even then, only in whispers, pressing my face into her leg. I retreated into fantasy novels, movies, computer games, and, eventually, comedy—places where I could feel safe, assume any personality, fit into any space. I preferred tracing to drawing. Drawing was too bold an act of creation, too presumptuous.
In third grade I was at a birthday party with a bunch of friends, playing in the backyard, and someone suggested we line up in two groups—the girls who were over one hundred pounds and the girls who were still under. There were only two of us in the fat group. We all looked at each other, not sure what to do next. No one was quite sophisticated enough to make a value judgment based on size yet, but we knew it meant something.