no fat chicks? weight and rebellion during a hard-rock adolescence
28 April 2006
below is the paper i presented at the emp pop music conference this year. the one name in it has been changed, but everything else — including my ambivalence about my body image — pretty much remains the same. i’ve disabled comments on this entry, but you can send me an e-mail (maura at maura dot com) if you’d like to share thoughts. thanks.
In theory, thinking about music in terms of how your exterior interacts with it seems ridculous, or at least a bit self-obsessed. Epidermal cells, after all, aren’t equipped with auditory nerves. But what happens when your body is encased in a jiggling, ever-present reminder that your rock and roll fantasy is a few inches out of reach?
My adolescence was one of stark contrasts. On the one side, there was me, a bookworm who didn’t get involved with any boys beyond the level of fantastic crushes. On the other, there were my walls, which were filled with a cadre of leather boys with electric toys who loved to play music dedicated to the lace-clad ladies they loved — you know, the hard rock world.
The idea of sex-free teenage years, despite being the dream for so many of today’s right-wing politicos, seems implausible. Sexual development is inexorably linked with the post-puberty, pre-legal-drinking-age years. Add the borderline-cartoonish sexuality of the Headbanger’s Ball set, epitomized by the lyrics to Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” (“So I mixed up the batter and she licked the beater”) and Kix’s “Girl Money” (“I was heading for heaven when she took the wheel/She took me to the cleaners, she knows how it feels”) to that hormonal stew, and you’ve got a combination that seems like it should explode.
For me, though, the combination of high school, the MTV-peddled idea of a “sexy” girl, and my weight – which tipped the scales at 165 when I was 14 and has since shown no signs of looking back – resulted, indirectly, in my favorite music of high school becoming a true guilty pleasure, because my subconscious was studiously rejecting the idea that my own sexuality might ever look like anything.
Some background. I’ve been dieting, off and on, since I was nine or so, right after the first time a boy got it in his head to hurl “fat” at me as an insult. The road was a bit rocky – it wasn’t until I turned 12 that I realized that Slim-Fast was a mealreplacement, not a supplement – but I was aware enough of my ample curves to know that they needed to be whittled down. I took dancing classes, but didn’t exert myself during gym and played video games, and watched MTV, for fun.
So by the time I got to eighth grade, I was desperate for a way out of conforming to the traditional “teenage girl” trappings of the time – the pegged jeans, the crinkly tracksuit jackets, the shiny white sneakers, the perfectly aligned, scrunchie-held ponytails, the love of New Kids on the Block. In Hicksville, a mostly white, lower-middle-class suburb on Long Island that was best known back then as Billy Joel’s hometown, the ways of doing that – safely, which for me meant no drugs, no graffiti, and keeping up grades that were good enough to not doom me to Nassau Community College – were few and far between.
I chose hard rock. Its luminaries weren’t exactly on the straight and narrow, which meant that even admitting that I liked it was just enough to shock the sensibilities of the teenpop fans who I shared classes with, and who, to me, needed to have their noses thumbed at a little bit. The way the musicians tarted themselves up – complete with makeup, teased hair, and totally coordinated leather outfits – suggested that a fair amount of genderfucking was at play. Plus, the music, with its lighter-raising solos, huge drums, and scream-along choruses, was, you know, fun.
And in high school, even the passive act of fandom is seen as an act; those who are still being driven everywhere by their parents can take passionate stands through the actions of others. Take the day after the 1989 American Music Awards, the year before the ceremony decided to usher in the seven-second delay because of Slash’s drunken acceptance speeches – both of them – containing the word “fuck.” I walked into my history midterm wearing my Guns N’ Roses t-shirt, and as I sat down the girl in front of me turned to me with a pointed look on her face.
“I hope you’re happy with what your band did last night,” she hissed at me.
And I grinned. “Yeah,” I said. “Wasn’t it the most awesome thing?”
I really did think it was great. (I also totally aced the history midterm, even though I’d pissed away my crucial final studying hours in front of the television.) Seizing the national spotlight, then using it to create chaos – that was more than enough for me to believe that brain cells were being used, and used to their proper end. It was certainly more than what the New Kids on the Block and their synchronized dance moves could do.
Of course, at the time I didn’t realize that, despite all their rebel poses and heavy leather, a lot of the bands that I thought I was so bad-ass for liking were, in actuality, marketed to teenage girls like myself in pretty much the exact same way that those loathed boy bands were. On Freaky Trigger, Ned Raggett has argued that Guns N’ Roses, Mach I, was nearly identical in makeup to a boy band – you had the misunderstood, moody frontman (W. Axl Rose), the bad-ass punk (Duff McKagan), the ditzy blonde (Steven Adler). And one of my greatest moments of Hicksville High School civic pride came when our school placed second in a New York metropolitan-area contest for an exclusive Motley Crue concert in New York City. The sponsor of that contest? None other than Z100, the same station that had flogged “Please Don’t Go Girl” and “The Right Stuff” to my classmates.
But in those ninth- and tenth-grade moments, my rebellion was real, if safe – I was still pulling down A’s in most of my classes, and I’d only had a couple of drags on cigarettes and warm beers by the time I hit 15. I hit my stumbling block, though, when my friends’ lives started to become more defined by sex and sexuality – the acceptance of which would constitute a rebellion that proved to be a bridge too far.
When I first cast my lot in with the Headbangers’ Ball crowd, there was one other girl with me. Her name was Beth, and we’d been friends since we were in kindergarden. She was tall and willowy, with long, glossy black hair, and she got out her extra energy by running cross-country. She favored short, tight skirts – she referred to them as her ‘belts’ – and boots that nearly went up to her knees. She feathered her hair, creating two perfect waves that fell over her face. And when she was feeling low, she would deride herself by plucking her leggings out from her long, olive legs and bemoaning how “fat” she felt.
I wanted to be her so bad. But the ‘belts’ were a no-no for me – they barely covered the point where my thighs began to rub together — and most boots would hardly fit over my ample calves. And forget the hair – my frizzy mass of curls, unstylable by even the hottest curling iron and the largest white can of Aqua Net, was untamable. I gave up and let it grow and curl, until it looked like a keyboard player’s.
Every week, we would go shopping at the Tri-County Flea Market. Tri-County, a Long Island institution immortalized in Donna Gaines’ Teenage Wasteland, was filled with vendors selling crappy knock-off clothes and crappier food. It also housed Revolution Rock, a lofted, yet dank stand in the market’s corner that served as my number one source for band t-shirts and Guns N’ Roses bootlegs. At Tri-County, Beth would stock up on stretchy, clingy clothes, while I would buy a couple of shirts and save the rest of my cash for The Gap and its stock of baggy, too-long mens’ jeans.
The funny thing is that my extra poundage afforded me one thing that so many women (and men) wanted – breasts. I was a 36DD by the time I turned 14, but I had little to no idea what to do with that fact. So instead of flaunting it – or anything, for that matter – I hid, under layers of minimizer bras and t-shirts and work shirts and denim and hair, as my friends revealed more. Sure, I had a black lace bra, complete with boob-hoisting underwires, but the likelihood of anyone seeing it – or me letting anyone see underneath it – was remote.
As I covered up more and more, I took on more traditionally “masculine” music-appreciation habits. In my solitary moments, I took to playing frontman in my tiny, Metal-Edge-pullout-covered bedroom, singing odes to hot ladies and their even hotter thighs into my mirror. But outwardly, I picked up a record-collecting bug, and its flames were fanned by the record store next door to my part-time job, which gave me a two-dollar discount on all its used CDs and broke the street date rules for cruicial releases like Skid Row’s Slave to the Grind. I taped Headbanger’s Ball every week, and watched the last half-hour like a hawk, because I was constantly on the lookout for the best new bands. I devoured rock magazines, always in search of the most offbeat factoid. I became entrenched in the theory of music, apppreciating the technique of players like Nuno Bettencourt and Dave Mustaine instead of the sultry pout of guys like Kelly Nickels (Beth’s favorite). I saw myself as the voice of reason, the bellwether of ‘good’ taste. (I was inadvertently prepping myself for my rock-critic future, too.)
And I was sublimating any physical desires I had into food. Even though it was the sort of shitty, suburban-teenager slop that would make my digestive system churn were I to eat it now – Chicken McNuggets, Entenmann’s donuts, nachos from the 7-Eleven, gobs of cannoli cream from my bakery job – back then, I gorged, tantalizing my tastebuds until I felt like I was going to be sick. I wouldn’t have to convince anyone else to give me pleasure; I was fine on my own.
It was probably inevitable that my female friends – by now, our circle had grown, thanks to our regular visits to Revolution Rock – became more alien to me with each passing day. They would pass notes to me that were filled with tales of sneaking out to meet their boyfriends and hopping 10pm trains into the city – on Sunday night! – to party at the Limelight, where they would sip pink drinks, then come back on the last train and get in late to school on Monday. They would procure fake IDs so they could see bands play the “16 to rock, 21 to roll” clubs that dotted the New York metropolitan area.
I wasn’t really interested in going on any of these adventures — except, perhaps, procuring the fake ID, but only to see shows by bands whose records I’d memorized at home. The club scene as my friends described it to me, with its late-night Long Island Rail Road trips and dark, smoky light – seemed absolutely terrifying. Especially because I had no “cute” clothes, and no capacity to even be “cute” as my friends described it; deep down, I knew that at the club I would be rejected, or worse, passed off and left to fend for myself in Penn Station at 2 a.m.
I grew bored and alienated. I’d been drawn to this music because of its’ practicers external gestures of rebellion, and because I thought crossing social mores while wearing a shit-eating grin was the “smart” thing to do – but the more I was drawn into the social aspects of this music, and the more people I met and drama I heard about, the more I felt like I didn’t fit in. To take a cover line from an early issue of The Baffler, I was dealing with a very “alternative to what?” situation – especially when I thought about being a woman in “the scene.”
While the casual misogyny of rock as a whole was just a little more cuddly back then – I remember wondering why Erik Turner, of Warrant, was sticking out his tongue between two of his fingers on the wall of my bedroom at least once a week – women were ultimately expected to behave according to traditional gender roles. They were in charge of supporting the men through fan club-organizing, mash-note-writing (Gerri Miller, the editor of Metal Edge and the epitome of what I wanted to be when I grew up, was a prime example of this), singing backup and so on..
And hard rock – particularly because of its prominence in what could be referred to as the adolescent years of MTV – epitomized the idea of the male gaze. Men were doing the singing, the rhapsodizing, the bitching, and the soloing. Women were the objects of desire and derision; the ones who spoke without being spoken to first were few and far between. (Lita Ford, with her bad-ass guitar playing and commands to kiss her deadly, sort of serves as the exception to this rule.)
“Commercial hard-rock musicians, almost to a man, are interested in thighs,” John Leland said in a 1989 New York Times review of Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood and Aerosmith’s Pump. Leland followed up that statement, though, with the thought that “any kind of thighs” would do; anyone who lived through that time, though, knows that thighs like mine, which bulged out and made the fabric of my pants swish as I walked, were probably not among the pairs that were revered by the men who grinned at me from my wall.
After all, “Fucked a fat chick to get a free meal or some clothes” is one of the standard “10 Questions” asked of up-and-coming bands on Metal Sludge, the infamous site that tracks the current doings of some of hard rock’s biggest stars and those who are still trying to keep the genre alive. (On other parts of the site, a helpful definition of “fat chick” is offered – it encompasses the realm of women who are “over 150 pounds, unless [they’re] 5’10” or taller”).
The answers, which range from “no, that’s disgusting” to “Damn, I was supposed to get some free food?” are unsurprising in their casual derision of the “fat” girl. She is seen, thanks to her perceived inability to control herself (if she could, she would have concentrated on *being* the cherry pie, not helping herself to the second slice), as an ultimately needy being, hence the food and clothing mythically offered in exchange for sexual attention. And while the sex act, and being sexual in the first place, is naturally tied up in need, the percieved source of the fat girl’s “needs” are seen as being completely dependent on *acceptance* more than personal satisfaction. In a sense, this question supposes that sleeping with a fat girl is a triumph of not one, but two sorts; not only did they manage to get off, they did a favor for the person they slept with. Queen may have said that fat bottomed girls make the rockin’ world go around, but is it only because they’re so desperate to be thought of as sexual that they’ll dole out meals, clothes, and other barter items?
It’s been 16 ½ years since my first concert – Motley Crue and Warrant at Nassau Coliseum – and I’m still what you might call “voluptuous,” but I can have a conversation with a man that isn’t only about guitar solos, and I’m no longer a virgin. I’m still trying to process the confusing, isolated experiences that I had during what I refer to, in shorthand, as my Long Island metal adolescence. Even though it wasn’t, for the most part. Sure, I had the records, but I couldn’t live that life to the fullest at all.
I got out of Hicksville for college, where I took women’s studies classes and learned the theories behind why I felt so awkward while singing along with “turn around, bitch, I’ve got a use for you.” I sold off a good chunk of my high school CD collection (the better to pay for those Harriet 7-inches). But after college, once I acquired an income and half.com came along, I reacquired a good chunk of the songs that made up my high school soundtrack. I still love its power choruses and huge guitar solos; when my fiance and I first started dating, we would drive around the Pennsylvania suburbs listening to mix tapes I’d made in ninth and tenth grade. I’d watch I-95 go by and sing along to songs like Electric Boys’ “All Lips N’ Hips,” a song I especially liked because of its perceived celebration of the zaftig.
Yeah, I still sing along with my favorite tracks of yesteryear. And I’ve seen various incarnations of L.A. Guns three times in the past few years. But do I sing along and pump my fist with my old, chipped mix-tapes because of their songs’ cartoonish depiction of the male-female world, or in spite of it? That, as I learned from writing and rewriting this paper’s conclusion, is still up for debate. But I now have a handle on why I drew myself to this music in the first place – I wanted to take charge and redefine the outsider feeling of being a young woman who couldn’t shop in the juniors’ section– and even though I, in that moment, failed in what I’d set out to do, having had the experiences, and the records, that got me to this dais is something that I now treasure.