Triangle Round

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.

Round Others

I think I have always watched other people’s bodies. Maybe not always. Maybe just since I became hyper-aware of my own, which I guess would be around 7th or 8th grade. Critical years, those, in so many ways. I got serious about poetry then (writing oh-thank-God-they’re-lost bad tendentious crapin which I used the word “gossamer” a great deal), got serious about clothes (learned to sew), got serious about politics (MLK & Bobby Kennedy assassinations, Vietnam), got serious about feminism (boys were obviously NOT representatives of a superior gender), and got serious about hating my body (thanks, gym teachers and everyone else). Mind you, I was, in today’s terms, a size 9/10. Big (read: tallish and shape-ish for junior high) by the standards of my classmates, but not by any reasonable standard. It’s hard not to wonder what life would have been like if I hadn’t had people atomizing my body constantly and negatively. But that’s surely water under some bridge or other.

The point is that I got judgemental about other people’s bodies around then. I remember sitting on the beach with my mother and talking pretty endlessly about whose bathing suit was good, whose was bad, whose posture was good, whose tummy was too round, whose butt was too big. Much of it was about the choices of bathing suits–about what flattered and what didn’t. That was a conversation that I’ve been happily engaged in ever since, even though I admit there is an element of judgment involved in it. But enough of it was about the bodies in the suits for me to take talking about other people’s bodies as a normal activity. God knows, men did it back then constantly and publicly. And there was so much conversation about my body that I grew to think that was normal and appropriate. Erg.

Bodies and the clothes adorning (or abusing) them are fascinating, legitimately. We love infinite variations-on-themes, and some are more obvious (or less in need of convincing themselves of their uniqueness) than others–clothes, bodies, genre fiction, scenery.

But I have tended to be awfully hard on other fat women. In my head, mind you. But awfully hard. Of course, I have also been awfully arrogant about how well I dress my own fat body, and have therefore felt entitled to my judge-yness. I am only just beginning to realize how much damage I do to my own head/heart by running around being snarky in my head all the time.

And there are people whose clothing choices do constitute a sort of assault. Those “outfits I’ve seen in Walmart” websites more than prove the point, though I don’t recommend that you go check them out. They’re sort of classist-creepy. Says the woman who has checked them out. And been sorry.

So I’ve been making a conscious effort to look at other fat people more gently. I’m not sure it’s doing them any good, but it’s maybe making me a nicer or less twitchy person. By some teeny increment. But every bit helps.

We were at a wedding this past weekend. It was a particularly delightful wedding for a bunch of reasons–most of them having to do with the sheer niceness of both families and how happy all the guests were for the bride and groom. But it was interesting, too. It was maybe the first wedding I’ve ever been too where no one was wearing anything truly awful (there’s usually at least one guest in something ghastly): the folks who were, strictly speaking, too casual, were clearly dressed up according to their lights and looked plenty nice. The young women in teeny/slinky/skin-tight dresses had the bodies for them and were some fine degree on the side of ladylike, so they were fun to watch in them. The bridesmaids were all wearing dresses they’d chosen for themselves in the bride’s chosen colors, so they looked comfortable and pretty. The wedding gown was an exquisitely handmade radiance in silk satin, courtesy of the lovely bride’s lovely mother’s talented hands. And the other fat women were rather charmingly arrayed–the two in my age group in a pretty layered white linen number with a sparkly orange jacket and a really graceful aubergine portrait-collared number. The two who really interested me were the two young women (mid-20’s). One was wearing what I think of as the fat-girl-goes-to-wedding uniform of a print dress with a black shrug, but her dress had a particularly nice William Morris-ish print and she had a spiffily edgy pair of wedge sandals giving the outfit a bit of dash. The other was wearing punk-romantic–a mauve lace dress, lace shawl, matching mauve rose in her burgundy hair, and savage blue-and-mauve stilettoes. Her proportions were  a teeny bit off, but the outfit still charmed.

The thing that was most interesting was how much my conversation-with-myself about them differed from what it used to be. I felt protective. I watched to see whether they were dancing (yes, and very well, as a matter of fact) and whether they seemed to feel comfortable with themselves (one yes, one not so much). I wanted to tell them that there is Life With Fat, that men should love them (or women, or both) and respect them, that they are pretty, that their souls shone in their eyes at that happy event, that…well, you get the drift–I went all Mom and gushy.

And let me tell you that that is a different enough experience that I’m all warm and gushy sitting here writing about it. Maybe yet another piece of healing-through-blogging.

It does rather make me wish I could say a bunch of things to my 13/14-year old self. Have to think of what that list would be.