An entire cottage industry of humor — or, more accurately, “humor” — has sprung up around the following apocryphal sequence of events: woman emerges from dressing room, bathroom, or other outfitting alcove; woman strikes pose for man; woman asks man if she “looks fat”; man quickly lies that she looks beautiful, regardless of her actual appearance, so as not to have his cause of death listed as “airborne Steve Madden platform.” So many variations on the do-I-look-fat theme has Western culture seen in the last fifty years, from stand-up routines to incorporation in commercials for sneakers, that said theme threatens to replace leaving-the-seat-up “comedy” as the Polaris of the Most Annoying Observational Humor galaxy.

Not having enough time to write a novel on the subject, I will leave aside for the moment the myriad ways in which do-I-look-fat humor irritates me on a sexual-politics level in favor of filing a practical objection — namely, that I have never asked a man whether I look fat, and neither has any other woman I know. Why not? Well, first of all, as my grandmother used to tell me when I asked if I couldn’t stay up just a few minutes later, “Don’t ask a question you don’t want the answer to.” I would never ask anyone, man or woman, friend or foe, whether I look fat. I don’t want to hear “yeah, you kind of do.” I don’t want to hear “well…no. God, no!” but see “well…yes. God, yes! I mean, you know, sorry” in their eyes. And that brings me to my second point: I know full well when I look fat. More importantly, I know that I don’t look fat, exactly, anyway; I just don’t think I look…quite right. My top feels like it’s cutting me across the bust, or my butt feels like it looks too…I don’t know…lifty or something. So that’s what I ask, and when I ask, I want to know the truth. Don’t give me that “what butt?” business and then let me go out of the house all…you know…lifty in the butt. Because I can’t get away with a lifty butt, and I don’t want to try. But I’ve never understood why other women wouldn’t just ask, “Okay, the belt? Too much belly, right? It’s, like, pulling,” and why men wouldn’t think it over for a moment and then say, “Well, it’s really the buckle, because it doesn’t lie flat, so…yeah, maybe not that belt.” Perhaps it’s the years of girls’ school that have honed my ability to imply that a friend looks, um, sort of bad, while at the same time reassuring her that the clothing’s to blame and not her shape — and it’s usually the truth. I mean, a woman with sloping shoulders shouldn’t wear a boatneck. That’s not anyone’s fault; that’s just a fact. But if a woman doesn’t want to hear that her butt looks fat (or a lie to the effect that it doesn’t), she shouldn’t ask, “Does my butt look fat?” She should wave her arms around near her ass and ask, “These pants…there’s just something wrong with my butt here,” and the discerning friend or husband can help to identify the problem and then gracefully blame the cut of the pants.

With that said, it’s a wonderful moment when a friendship reaches that point where I can come out of my dressing area, wearing a new pair of pants and a “no, right?” expression on my face, and gesture vaguely in the direction of my wonderfulness and ask, “So. Toe?” and my friend can squinch up his or her face and say solemnly, “Well, it’s more like the implication of toe,” and we all know that camel toe is like political impropriety in that the mere appearance is enough to damn you, so I head back into the dressing area and strip off the offending pants. This, people, is why we need friends in this world. We need them to hang out with on weekends, we need them to hand us tissues when our hearts have broken, we need them to go with us to movies for no other reason than that they contain Barry Pepper, but most of all we need them to look us over in the dressing room at Old Navy and observe neutrally, “Those pants. Short-waisted. You? Not short-waisted.”

Friends can also get us to explore new horizons in personal fashion. Wing Chun should really look into a second career as a shopping advisor, because she really has a gift for it. Here’s how she works her magic when I come out of a dressing room on Queen Street, arms akimbo, looking mildly alarmed:

“Aw, that looks so cute!”
“But I’m kind of big to be working ‘cute,’ don’t you think?”
“No, it looks great! Turn around. [watching] Hmm.”
“What ‘hmm’?”
“Well, the mirror’s –”
“Oh god, that’s BACK FAT! Oh my god. Oh. My god. Get this contraption off of me! Oh Jesus, where’s my dressing room?”
“Will you calm — ow!”
“Sorry. You just need to stand, like, right behind me until I get back into –”
“Oh, for cripes sake, it’s not back fat, and that is my toe.”
“‘It’s not back fat’? It’s fat, and it’s on my back! Stand closer.”
“Okay, you’re on my toe here, walk faster!”
“I can’t believe I thought this looked good.”
“Look, you had — ow — you had your back arched and your shoulder blade just pushed down on something, so if you’d stand normally, it would look fine. And ow.”
“Yeah, it pushed down on back fat. Go get the scissors from the guy at the counter, I’m going to kill myself.”
“How about you try a larger size, and if that doesn’t work out, then you kill yourself?”
“Well, all right.”
“Here.”
“So?”
“Okay, I don’t know what happened to the cut between a large and an extra-large, but…”
“But I get a perm and wear this and I fit right in at softball camp.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
“Are you still going to kill yourself?”
“Yep, right after I try on that purple thing.”
“What purple thing?”
“You know, the thing, the purple one. Ohhh…kay. You know, there’s something I don’t love about this.”
“It fits you really nicely. But there’s something, you’re right.”
“Do you think it’s too purple?”
“Yes. Wait, no. It’s not that it’s too purple, exactly, but somehow the purple is…”
“Wrong?”
“No…”
“Bad with my complexion?”
“No…”
“Because it is.”
“You can wear jewel tones, what are you talking about?”
“But this isn’t jewelly, this is crayony, and also, from the side I look all mashed-potato around the hips.”
“Ooh…yeah, I didn’t notice that before. What’s with the crappy waistband?”
“That. Is bulging. Fuck this.”
“Killing yourself?”
“Still two pairs of pants in here.”
“Okay, let me know. Which pants, again?”
“Well, I’ve got these shiny hip-hugger-type dealies, and then I’ve got these hard denim floods. Oh, gross.”
“Let’s see.”
“I’d really rather not.”
“Just come out.”
“Okay, but…okay.”
“Oh. Oh, dear.”
“See, I told you. I could just yank a tube sock over my hips and get the same effect. And a lot more easily, too.”
“And spend less money.”
“I mean, there’s hugging the hips, and then there’s this.”
“They’d look fine if they allowed you to have an ass.”
“They’d look fine if I didn’t allow myself to have an ass, but that’s not the world we live in.”
“Nor should we. Heeeey, those look wonderful!”
“You think so?”
“Oh, yeah! Turn around.”
“Do I have to? Because…last time?”
“You won’t have back fat. You don’t have back fat.”
“But what about how my love handles –”
“Turn around.”
“Okay.”
“Nope, they look great. How do they feel?”
“They feel fine. But you don’t think they’re a little too…light-attracting?”
“No, they’re great. I think you should get them.”
“They’re awfully shiny.”
“What’s wrong with shiny?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it, I just –”
“You’ll regret not getting them.”
“You don’t think they’re a little too bargain-basement-Hilton-sisters meets college-educated-skate-rat?”
“I don’t. First of all, they’re not light blue. Second of all, they’re not flared enough. It’s more of a publicist-on-a-second-date look, but without the baguette purse.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“And it matches your messenger bag!”
“Yeah, it does. So, okay. Not too light-attracting?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“And my fat isn’t fluffing over the back?”
“It totally isn’t.”
“Lying doesn’t help anyone.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Okay. So what happened with the sweater?”
“Please.”
“Oh, I hate that.”
“So they don’t make it –”
“Well, they do, but then it’s a caftan.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too. But I got socks.”

I would like to take a moment to thank my friends for the thousands of permutations of the above conversation through which they have suffered over the years. “Well, do you want a trampy look? Because it looks good, but it looks, you know, trampy. Not that you’re trampy. Unless you want to be. Trampy? You know?” “I don’t know about the blue, but the thing is, I really don’t know about the green.” “Well, it’s leave the pants, or it’s buy new boots. And I don’t want to tell you how to live, but I’d leave the pants.” “Would you really? Be tugging at it all night? Because it looks fine. Then again, you’re standing up right now.” On the other hand, I’ve spent just as many hours reassuring people that they can “go clingy,” warning that once they’ve committed to the pleats they can’t go back, remarking dispassionately that kicky is good but toned-down kicky is even better, intoning that “there’s tiiiight…and then there’s skin-tight…but now we’ve entered…a grey area.”

That’s part of what makes friends so valuable. Friends tell you things you need to hear. Friends give you a heads-up about the crabmeat fiber stuck between your teeth, friends scream at you not to call your ex when you’ve had six beers, and friends furrow their brows and say, “Did Ray Charles sew that? Because it’s somehow making your ankles look like planks, and you have great ankles.” So, straight women of the world, if you think you look fat, either change clothes or give the guy something to work with. Nobody knows what to do with “do I look fat?” But “I think I look pumpkin-shaped at the moment. Your thoughts?” provides a jumping-off point. It opens a dialogue. It’s something he can work with.

Lands End’s Virtual Model helps out at two in the morning.
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