List No. 096

BODY PARTS FOR WHICH I AM GRATEFUL

Tina Fey

2011

American comedian Tina Fey first made a name for herself as a writer and performer on Saturday Night Live, a stint that began in the mid-1990s. However, it was for her television show 30 Rock, which she created in 2006, that she won the affections of many millions and countless awards. These two lists – one of women’s supposed deficiencies, the other of the body parts for which she is grateful – were written by Fey and printed in her 2011 memoir, Bossypants.

At any given moment on planet Earth, a woman is buying a product to correct one of the following “deficiencies”:

• big pores

• oily T-zone

• cankles

• fivehead

• lunch lady arms

• nipples too big

• nipples too small

• breasts too big

• breasts too small

• one breast bigger than the other

• one breast smaller than the other (How are those two different things? I don’t know.)

• nasal labial folds

• “no arch in my eyebrows!”

• FUPA (a delightfully crude acronym for a protruding lower belly)

• muffin top

• spider veins

• saddlebags

• crotch biscuits (that’s what I call the wobbly triangles on one’s inner thighs)

• thin lashes

• bony knees

• low hairline

• calves too big

• “no calves!”

• “green undertones in my skin”

• and my personal favorite, “bad nail beds”

[...]

If you don’t have a good body, you’d better starve the body you have down to a neutral shape, then bolt on some breast implants, replace your teeth, dye your skin orange, inject your lips, sew on some hair, and call yourself the Playmate of the Year.

How do we survive this? How do we teach our daughters and our gay sons that they are good enough the way they are?

We have to lead by example. Instead of trying to fit an impossible ideal, I took a personal inventory of all my healthy body parts for which I am grateful:

• Straight Greek eyebrows. They start at the hairline at my temple and, left unchecked, will grow straight across my face and onto yours.

• A heart-shaped ass. Unfortunately, it’s a right-side-up heart; the point is at the bottom.

• Droopy brown eyes designed to confuse predators into thinking I’m just on the verge of sleep and they should come back tomorrow to eat me.

• Permanently rounded shoulders from years of working at a computer.

• A rounded belly that is pushed out by my rounded posture no matter how many sit-ups I do. Which is mostly none.

• A small high waist.

• A wad of lower-back fat that never went away after I lost my “baby weight.” One day in the next ten years, this back roll will meet up with my front pouch, forever obscuring my small high waist, and I will officially be my mother.

• Wide-set knockers that aren’t so big but can be hoisted up once or twice a year for parades.

• Good strong legs with big gym teacher calves that I got from walking pigeon-toed my whole life.

• Wide German hips that look like somebody wrapped Pillsbury dough around a case of soda.

• My father’s feet. Flat. Bony. Pale. I don’t know how he even gets around, because his feet are in my shoes.

I would not trade any of these features for anybody else’s. I wouldn’t trade the small thin-lipped mouth that makes me resemble my nephew. I wouldn’t even trade the acne scar on my right cheek, because that recurring zit spent more time with me in college than any boy ever did.