Eventually, I realized that I hadn’t convinced myself that fat was okay and decided to turn things around. I went on a serious diet and the pounds began to melt away. Once people started to notice my weight loss and compliment me, however, Kelly wasn’t there anymore. She’d simply stopped talking to me; I was a traitor to the cause of the big girls. Instead of being happy for the positive change I had made in my life, Kelly gave herself over to jealousy and anger because I could no longer be her “fat friend.” On the spectrum of life changes, weight loss, even dramatic weight loss, is pretty low. If even that was enough to demolish our friendship, how strong could it have been? Don’t we rely on our friends to stand by us through thick or thin, heavy or slim?
A constant throughout my friendship with Kelly was the self-criticizing rituals portrayed in Mean Girls. What do we look for when we indulge in verbal masochism? Why do we expect our friends to join in with us? By putting ourselves down, I suppose, we’re really fishing for compliments. Any woman who’s spent time in a group of females knows that when one friend says, “My thighs are too fat,” this is really a prompt for someone else to insist, “No, they’re not!” Is a compliment by negation truly a compliment? Do we really believe that compliment enough for it to be any comfort at all? And is the dignity lost in grubbing that compliment from a friend worth any self-esteem boost it might actually have?
Of course, another accepted response to the thighs remark is, “You’re worried about your thighs? Look at mine!” We offer this response to our insecure friend to make her feel that she’s not alone, that we all suffer from self-esteem issues, and that if her thighs are “fat,” there are at least some thighs out there that she can call “fatter.” The effect of this self-deprecating response to insecurities is actually to pump up one friend’s self-esteem at the cost of another’s. It emphasizes the competition that underlies any heterosexual female friendship: which of us is more attractive to men? Though we may think we further the cause of female empowerment with girls’ nights, shopping trips, and lunchtime chats, the physical absence of men does not necessarily take their influence out of the equation.
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