First, I have a new hero: http://chubstr.com/2011/features/jimbo-pellegrine-proves-that-fat-guys-can-surf/
I hope he makes fat-surfer clothes for girls, too.
***
In a recent post (http://danceswithfat.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/feeling-fat-vs-being-fat/ Check it out for the charming photo, if for no other reason…) Ragen takes on another blog from xoJane in which a young woman named Daisy talks at some length about feeling fat (http://www.xojane.com/healthy/im-fat-and-im-not-okay-it) and suggests that it’s okay, maybe even good that she feels that way. Ragen acknowledges the complicated issues Daisy brings up–class, fitness, self-improvement, family influences, maternal insanity, self-loathing, therapy, and rightly, I think, suggests that Daisy breaks the “Underpants Rule” (You’re in charge of your own underpants and of no one else’s). I find that the Underpants Rule is a little simplistic, if basically smart and useful, but breaking it is almost always a bad thing and observing it is mostly a very good thing. And Daisy does violate it: I think it’s great if you’re happy with yourself inside and out. If that’s the case, I commend you whole-heartedly. I also think it’s OK if you’re not. That being said, there are probably some of you who are OK with your weight, but maybe shouldn’t be. And some of you who aren’t, but who should be. I’m not an expert though, so I refuse to go discuss it any further than that.
Usually, when folks say they refuse to discuss something any further, it’s because they know they’re wrong. It’s not as if I haven’t engaged in that bit of Stupid Human Trickery at one point or another.
The pictures Daisy posts of herself make it a little hard for me to remember to be human/humane. She’s pretty much perfectly sized and cute as a bug’s ear. And I have a real problem remembering that conventionally pretty women I don’t already know and love are just as entitled to my courtesy as The Rest of Womankind. I’m working on it. I really am. And if I shut The Angry B up for a second, I notice how truly wounded this young woman is. She’s the child of a woman who was clearly obsessed with her own physical perfection–narcissistic enough to force her children to eat the extreme diet foods she fed herself in order to maintain her own notion of seductive perfection. Quite a recipe for lunacy, that. It goes without saying that this woman also obsessively comments on her daughter’s body. I hope Daisy’s mom comes to appreciate the fact that Daisy talks to her at all, and I hope that Daisy’s therapy helps her make peace with the hornet’s nest of issues she’s carrying around. Self-loathing is one of the greatest wastes of human energy out there, and the pain of it is always hard to watch.
So here’s what seems most important to me about both women’s blogs: Daisy raises the issue of the differences between self-loathing and self-awareness that includes the acknowledment that one might have some things to work on, and between an interest in self-improvement and a kind of self-abusing narcissism. Ragen’s response brings up some maybe pretty important differences between The Underpants Rule and the reality that no one exists without context and connection, and the icky truth that smart people do dumb things, and The Underpants Rule doesn’t actually cover what we should do about DUMB whose effects are not limited to a single individual. In political terms, it’s the problem inherent in Libertarianism, much of which is not stupid, but, I would argue, just a little/lot naive about human nature and human responsibility.
Of course, in the pure sense of Keep Your Hands/Ideology/Prejudices Off My Body, I agree with The Underpants Rule pretty absolutely. But that’s not what the issue is here.
Daisy is certainly entitled to want to make both her insides and her already lovely (and, she admits, healthy) body better, stronger, prettier in whatever ways seem good to her. She’s even entitled, I suppose, to loathe her body (or her discomfort with her body, or the things her mother did to her, or pink hair, for that matter). But here’s the thing–mental health consists, to a large extent, in having a vision of yourself and your universe that has some relationship to reality. So if Daisy thinks it’s a good thing that she thinks of herself as fat, and she’s not fat by any sane definition, then she’s not dealing in reality (okay, okay, I know that’s a vastly mutable and issue in and of itself, but I am not concerned with speculative metaphysics here), and therefore not healthy. Ah, then, that raises the issue of whether we’re entitled to choose to be unhealthy. To which I answer both Yes and No. You are entitled–have the right–to smoke cigarettes, for instance, even though the evils of them are inarguably well documented. You are entitled to medical care for the diseases the cigarettes cause because A) decent medical care is a human right and B) a civil society makes provision for the idiocies of its members to some extent and it damages all of us for some of us to be denied rights. But you do not have the right to make anyone else breathe your carcinogenic smoke. You have the right to drink as much as you want, as long as you stay the hell out of the driver’s seat of any vehicles and don’t expect any member of your family to bear the burdens of your buzz. I’ve been up close to the consequences of un-dealt-with alcoholism a number of times (really, really bad consequences) and I did not find myself overly concerned with the rights and entitlements of the drunks involved–though I am happy enough that there were institutional structures in place to care for those rights.
So Daisy has a right to her opinion about her body. Daisy has a right to be a neurotic mess. According to the Supreme court and the First Amendment (in which I am a great believer), she even has the right to say whatever she wants about fat people and pretend that her mother was right. But having the constitutional right to do something is different from having the ethical right to do it. Westboro Baptist has the constitutional right to do what it does, but no other right ever, anywhere, in any dimension. Ditto any sort of hate speech, including nasty comments about fat people.
I have said, and will maintain, however, that it is possible that the ethics of fat are more complicated than the Every Body is a Good Body approach of Fat Acceptance. A body that cannot walk is not an okay body–neither for the person who is incapacitated by that body, nor for those who have to help care for that body.
I know for a fact that I have very often eaten more than was necessary for even my naturally high requirements of satiety, and that that has been part of the story of my weight. I even know that some of that consumption was a function of just plain greed or laziness or self-indulgence rather than being a matter of self-soothing or of trying to fill one or another open wound or emptiness.
It kind of boils down to whether a person has the right to choose to be unhealthy, I guess. As if that’s a simple question… I don’t know that I could even manage a decently comprehensive discussion of the meanings of the terms involved–choose and unhealthy for starters. I suppose that if you are the only person on an island, you’re free to suck hallucinogenic toad venom and swig fermented monkey spit until you drop in your tracks, but otherwise, not so much. That being said, the answer’s still a carefully qualified yes, sort of, sometimes. And everybody around you has a right to figure out their own responses to your choices and their consequences, especially when those consequences have implications for anyone else.Assuming that those people are in positions in which they have actual choices, which is kind of rare, at least in any pure-ish sense. Like everything else, choices are both conditional and contextual.
So, as long as Daisy can reliably keep all of the consequences of her own self-loathing completely to herself and swear that it will never damage anyone else, sure, she can go right on despising her body to her heart’s content. And I should keep my opinion (which is inevitably tainted by my own craziness) to myself. And I am inclined to doubt that she can manage to keep it to herself–as her blog evidences.
I am among the people who have been complicit in my being fat and unhealthy. Chances are good that the first is pretty much irreversible (or that trying to specifically reverse it is a pretty serious waste of my energy and mental health), but the second is not. I participated in my becoming this way, and the extent to which I was genetically inclined in this direction (a larger than average appetite, a higher satiety point) and environmentally conditioned for it (traumatic early weaning, an emotionally embattled childhood, a brutally pyschotic culture–so forth, so on), I have not been without volition, no matter how fraught my (yet another turn in the endless knot–I do keep looking for the sword…) relationship to volition is. The tough conclusion (and here I am sticking to The Underpants Rule) for me is that I don’t have a right to continue to be knowingly unhealthy.
I wonder how many times I will have to write it in the blog and say it out loud before something in the deep, slimy, creepy, unreachable dark place in my mind makes a shift. So far, not so good. But not inconceivable, either.
Overarching conclusion: Ragen is mostly right. Daisy is mostly just sad.
That being said, it is always a tough sell when the privileged (by virtue of wealth, class, genetic giftedness, prettiness) want to claim that they aren’t privileged enough, which is sort of what she was doing, in the end. It doesn’t make her pain any less real, it just makes it a lot less worthwhile to read.
We all do it. But just because it’s a Human Trick doesn’t mean that it isn’t a Highly Unattractive Human Trick.