Round Shoulders

Boleros. I suppose they have some purpose. My mother carefully selected a wedding dress that had a nifty little lace number modestly covering her tea-length strapless lace-and-tulle wedding gown. She wanted to be able to wear the dress again, and she did. I saw my mother off to any number of “formals” with her wedding gown brightened up by corsages of different roses while my father was in dental school. I doubt many people can say they’ve seen their mothers heading out the door in their wedding gowns.

There are some times when the things make sense–boleros, I mean. They make low-cut dresses church-or-temple-friendly and then come off for the boogeying later. I’ve seen the occasional jacket dress that wasn’t hopelessly frumpy, even owned a couple, but mostly, they’re frumpy. If you like them, lovely. Wear them.

But here’s my gripe: The world is full of cute sundresses, strapless dresses, sleeveless dresses and some of them even come in plus sizes. Dandy. And we buy them and wear them, mostly with boleros. The point is, they cover our arms, which most of us don’t much like. There are skinny women who don’t like their arms–age tends to render pretty much everyone’s arms a little floppity and mostly we’re not exactly happy about floppity flesh. Mostly we we’re even unhappier when the floppity flesh in question is relatively vast.

So we wear boleros over our summer dresses. And melt. We’re already wearing our extra blankets of flesh, so summers already suck for those of us whose bodies are inclined to stick to themselves.

According to the doctrine of Fat Acceptance, I’m suppose to like/love my body just as it is. Is that, I wonder, really necessary in order for me to have a healthy, happy relationship with it? I don’t know. I don’t actually think so. I think having to believe in the perfection of my body in order to love it and treat it well would mean that I was in an adolescent relationship with my body. Grown-up, healthy relationships involve loving things even when we know they’re not perfect.  And I’m not generally fond of anyone’s “have to”s. I think I can love my body, respect my body, care for my body without liking every inch of it. I don’t have to think it’s every limb and line is objectively beautiful in order to be good to it. Which kind of raises the issue of whether there is any such thing as objective beauty, but that’s a bit of a digression.

Even though I can’t find boots that fit them, I really like my legs. And even though they’re a bit battered, I really like my hands. I don’t like my arms. Never much have–they’ve always been disproportionately fluffy and now they’re fluffy and floppy. I’m happier in sleeves that come to my elbows. My taste, my choice. But I suspect that a lot of other fluffy women would like elbow length sleeves, too. Because that’s very, very frequently the sleeve-length of boleros. Can’t be a coincidence.

I posted something on Facebook at the beginning of the summer talking about my perennial search for summer dresses in grown-up colors (okay, I always want everything in versions of olive green…teal’s nice, too) with open-but-not-floozy necklines, elbow-length sleeves and pockets in doesn’t-need-ironing cotton poplin. I got a lot of “oh-please-please-please”  responses (and one comment from a friend in Africa that those dresses are everywhere  in Africa). I actually drafted a letter to Land’s End with three drawings. Never got it sent, but I still might. I suspect that there are a lot of women who’d like a little more sleeve but not another layer, because we don’t dress like Bedouins–which requires a lot more layers that are a lot looser than we’re prone to wear–lots of wicking involved there.

So why don’t more manufacturers make more dresses with more sleeves? I suspect they’d say that making dresses that require boleros allows more versatility.  I suspect that’s crap. I think it’s mostly marketing. It forces us to buy two pieces rather than one.  Any versatility is a side effect rather than an intention. Floaty shirts that need camisoles–lovely, except they’re two insulating layers and often two separate transactions. Money. Again.  Somewhere in China/Thailand/Indonesia there are women sitting at 1000-stitches-a-minute commercial sewing machines for 12-14 hours a day, breathing fabric dust and doing staggeringly repetitive-but-precise work so we can have to buy yet another piece of clothing that isn’t exactly what we want or need. Also, not making sleeves saves fabric, thread, electricity,worker-hours, and per-unit-cost.

But, digressing into eco-feminist depression aside, fat chicks end up wearing two layers in the summer and at weddings and parties where the rooms are under-air-conditioned. Partially because they don’t want to show their arms, partially because they don’t want to offend everyone else by showing their arms, and partially because they’re buying what they’re told to buy, wearing what they’re told to wear.

I’ve often thought that one of the things the clothing industry does is tease us with some clothes that are universally useful and comfortable and attractive (good jeans), and then torment us with lots and lots of pieces that are not quite right. Then they change the “styles” so we feel the need to wear the same club-membership-markers everyone else has. It always comes back to those issues–one set of people convincing another set of people that they’re (2nd set) inadequate in order to sell them something they don’t or shouldn’t need, or that will hurt them. Shitty system.

I don’t suppose the fact that I don’t own a bolero isn’t much of a rebellion. But I don’t. Go me and my floppity arms.

Of course, I sew and can make my own damn sleeves. Funny to think of that skill as a privilege. But it’s a funny world.

Round Skinny

Thin girls are the products/children/victims of the same culture that spews psychosis at fat girls. They have “fat days” or “fat moods” or “fat periods” or “fat feelings” and these are tough, icky, hard days, moods, periods. They are often as tortured by the need to stay thin as fat girls are tortured by the need to lose weight. Short version here: being a girl/female/woman in this culture means you’re inevitably on the receiving end of all sorts of dysfunctional/brutalizing/stupid messages about your body. Fat is a feminist issue. So is thin. So is the female body generally. Fold issues of ecology, capitalism, and psychology into it and you have a fine, self-nourishing morass of paralyzing crappola to cope with. But women are, generally speaking, better than that, stronger than that, tougher than that, even as we are almost universally battered by the barrage of psychotic messaging to which we are subject.

Several recent articles/blogs have made the case that thin girls suffer too:

http://www.xojane.com/healthy/why-i-fat-talk

http://www.xojane.com/issues/fat-vs-skinny-smackdown

http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/2012/05/weight-stereotyping-the-secret-way-people-are-judging-you-based-on-your-body-glamour-june-2012

A blog I read on wordpress and can’t find again written in quirky English by a skinny emigree about how skinny girls suffer, too.

Fine. I’d be more interested in all this stuff if it did a better job of identifying the core issue that we live on a planet where women’s bodies have been mistreated and generally treated as lesser by most cultures for most of history. While it rejoiced my heart to hear that the Ivory Coast actually prosecuted and sentenced three women for performing circumcisions on little girls (please, please let this be the beginning of a major movement), it’s just another small victory in a long, long war. And it is a war, I’m profoundly sad to say. We’re losing ground in the U. S. at the moment, courtesy of the hate-filled, pseudo-religious, deluded, demented razor edge of the Right, and it isn’t always a comfort to remind myself that I and my community are on the right side of history. We’ll win. I believe that. I do. But the sheer amount of suffering through which millions of humans will travel while history gets its ass in gear is not a light thing to contemplate.

So, yes, my skinny sisters, you suffer, too. But I would like to stand up here and remind you that there is a list of small and large brutalities you do not suffer (it’s undoubtedly a partial list):

You can walk into any store (from Barney’s to Goodwill) and chose from the full range of clothing that store offers. And shoes. And not be sneered at by sales associates for walking into their store at all (hi, there, Neiman Marcus Bitch)…

Airlines do not threaten to curtail your ability to travel or empower under-civilized gate personnel to have opinions about your body.

You don’t have to consistently fight to have medical professionals see that something besides your weight might be wrong with you (that being said, we all have lousy-medical-experience stories–just think of having add a thick, juicy, sticky layer of automatic misjudgement over everything else you’ve ever dealt with at the hands of the medical system–yeah, it’s that much fun…).

You can go to the gym without people either sniggering or offering paternalistic “support.” And you can readily find decent workout clothes (if that matters to you–while I am clothes-obsessed, I will admit that I don’t much care about looking “cute” while I’m grunting and sweating…).

You can dance well without everyone either looking away because seeing a fat body move is soooo gross or having everyone be shocked that you can move that mountain in rhythm and even look seriously happy doing it.

People don’t automatically assume you have Brains-of-garbage. According to the Glamour article, they may assume you’re a bitch, but that, at least, is a position of some sort of power. Stupid and lazy and sweet-natured are not positions of any power at all.

For the most part, men who find your body attractive aren’t treated as if they were themselves defective and automatically derided.

Sometimes, when you’re conventionally pretty, you get jobs/privileges/hands-up/positive attention that you have not earned. When you’re “conventionally” un-pretty you get turned-down/held-down/locked-out/hostility that you haven’t earned. You can, for instance, find a great many male CEOs, CFOs, and other power players who are not exactly conventionally attractive, but I dare you to find a woman in one of those positions who isn’t within the range of normal attractiveness. There are some fields where this isn’t so universally true–law and medicine come to mind–but there are many where it is.

Your very presence on an airplane/a bus/a train (much less in any theater) does not make everyone else cringe and sneer.

You aren’t in maybe the last group in Western culture that it’s pretty much universally acceptable to loathe. It is not a good/helpful/healthy thing to be a loathe-able human.

So, yes, I admit that crap happens to you that’s connected to your being skinny. And I’m sorry. I admit that I have an awful, visceral, hostile reaction to some of you some of the time–a prejudice that is as unacceptable as it is the product of being on the receiving end of a fair amount of bitchitude  from leggy blondes during my formative years. Even though I get that their nastiness was itself the product of a universally damaging set of cultural pressures and constructs.  I also got a large amount of crap for being too ‘brainy,” and that, oddly enough, did a lot less damage. It can’t be totally coincidental that anti-intellectualism, by the time I hit my teen years, had become a more or less un-gendered prejudice (not true of the generation before mine, and even more true of the generation after mine, but still a gender issue once brainy girls leave the education system). Still, “brains” could always flock together without shame or guilt. Fat chicks, not so much.

But yes, we live on a planet where the female body is pretty much never truly safe. And skinny women suffer for it, too. That’s one of a long list of reasons we still NEED feminism. But we do not, per se, also need Skinny-liberation and we do need Fat-lib. We just do. Get over it.

 

 

 

 

Round Grief

One of the women who writes for xojane, s.e., responded to the shooting in Colorado with a column about how automatically categorizing folks who do evil as “terrorists” or crazies is a kind of linguistic violence. She got off the track a little, I think, with her using the shooting and her observations about language to move into a discussion of how inadequate our medical system is in dealing with mental illness. Well, it is. We are. But it was a digression in a column that otherwise had some important points to make.

Language can be a form of violence. No news there. But I think the real reason we want people who do things like that to be “terrorists” or “crazies” is because we desperately want them to be other, to be not-us. It’s the same sort of impulse that labels Nazis “monsters.” That kind of language lets us off the hook so we don’t have to look in our own dark corners and see how close we mostly are to that sort of crazy, or, more to the point, that sort of evil.

No, I am not saying that we are the same as the Colorado shooter. No I am not saying that he wasn’t insane as well as evil. I am simply saying that we are all, or almost all, capable of evil, and that we mostly avoid it by the grace of God or will or chance or a thousand random factors or gifts.  We are no more separate from the shooter than we are from the victims. And I believe we’re less likely to open ourselves up to our own capacities for evil if we remember that as much of the time as we can bear to. Maybe more.

And, yes, for the record, if I’d been standing next to him with a gun in my hand, I’d have shot him without a nano-second of thought. And I’d have been wrong to do it, but it would have been the right thing to do. And, no, I don’t understand entirely what I just wrote, but it’s the best I can come up with.

Meanwhile, in so far as there is any comfort I can offer the universe in the face of this new wound, it comes, as it often does (comfort, I mean), from John Donne:

Meditation XVII

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

&

Holy Sonnet X

Death, be not proud, though some have callèd thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which yet thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more, must low
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men
And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then ?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

 

 

Vogueing Around

Oh, Vogue. I used to love you. I started having problems with you way back when you stopped photographing clothes and started using clothes to make “statements” so that I basically couldn’t see the clothes–was that the 80s? But still… You occasionally print actually good articles with intelligent, even feminist content, which always gave me a chance to make excuses for you. But mostly you just worship at the altar of MONEYMONEYMONEY. Which makes sense, since the only people who can afford to shop for couture are people who have $$$ and the places to wear clothes-as-art. So, fine. I’m all for supporting the arts, and think it’s one of the major uses/values of the rich.

But, for fucking crying out loud, now you’re sanctioning child abuse?

In case you missed it, gentle readers, the April issue of the Fashion Bible printed an article by Dara-Lynn Weiss about how she put her 7-year old daughter Bea on a strict diet because the child’s society physician and acid-tongued, under-parented classmates proclaimed her obese. I talked about the non-relationship between childhood obesity and adult obesity here********, so we won’t go into that again, beyond reminding everyone that there isn’t one. And, heaven knows, reams and reams of comments and fuming and defenses have already clogged the net. I’m a little late for the party. But there are some things that still bear discussion, I think.

Let’s get this out of the way: I think Vogue is doing a not-unimportant job in so far as it supports the work of traditional and extraordinary artisans like the legendary french embroidery firm of Lesage and the work of real artists whose medium is the intersection between fabric and the human body. I don’t particularly care about most models being super-skinny most of the time, though I don’t find institutionalized semi-anorexia particularly attractive or socially responsible. But some of those women are more or less naturally skinny, and more power to them for making use of their genetic gifts. But I do believe that $40,000. purses are repugnant (Tod’s) on any level. There is no relationship there between decently paid artisans and wealthy patrons–there are just already-rich people getting richer by charging other already rich people a zillion bucks for membership tags in a club no sane and secure human would want to join. But the rich have always engaged in this sort of tribal-marking. Well, really, we all do–and maybe with the same ferocity and intolerance, maybe not. But the noxiously rich we will have always with us.

I’m not in favor of class warfare. I’m not in favor of any warfare. I am in favor of good behavior (Gates, Buffett) and certain of my right to think Trinity Church on Wall Street is whoring to its already morally impaired congregation. Capitalism’s fine by me–it has a number of inherent usefullnesses–but balance, responsibility and decency seem to me to be perfectly reasonable things to ask of it.

There have also been reams of writing on the subject of the tendency of upper-middle and upper-upper folks to view their children as elaborate accessories. I’m reasonably certain that decent and crappy parenting occur at about the same ratios among the wealthy as they do among the non-wealthy. So we’ll pass over in silence the extent to which Ms. Weiss has treated her daughter as very little more than an extension of her own scarred, obsessive, and emotionally trivial psyche, though it’s worth noting how much the article focused on her own not-so-healthy relationship with her own body and food:

Sometimes Bea’s after-school snack was a slice of pizza or a gyro from the snack vendor. Other days I forced her to choose a low-fat vegetable soup or a single hard-boiled egg. Occasionally I’d give in to her pleas for a square of coffee cake, mainly because I wanted to eat half of it. When she was given access to cupcakes at a party, I alternated between saying, “Let’s not eat that, it’s not good for you;” “Okay, fine, go ahead, but just one;” and “Bea, you have to stop eating crap like that, you’re getting too heavy,” depending on my mood. Then I’d secretly eat two when she wasn’t looking.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/27/vogue-essay-by-a-mom-who-put-her-7-year-old-daughter-on-a-diet-garners-outrage/#ixzz20yxdcQvh

It’s hard to read the article, mind you. Vogue, interestingly, has chosen NOT to put if on the web. Wimps. It’s not like they published a retraction, so they’re just being wimps.

Pretty much every article about the article (cripes, does that make this meta-meta?) rehearses the standard crapola about The Childhood Obesity Crisis with its standard crapola dire warnings. Often in pretty much the same words–is there a “childhood obesity crisis” macro out there now? Jeez-looeez. It’s as if it’s impossible to talk about anything to do with fatness without rehearsing the standard crap so that folks will know you aren’t…um…pro-fat, and therefore not worth listening to. Even when you’re being critical of the sort of neurosis-driven toxicity Weiss thought was fit meat for public consumption (I’d think it had been a sort of ass-backwards good thing if I thought the ensuing storm of articles would have done much to change anything–I’m glad there was a shit-storm–Weiss more than earned it–but the drivers for her behavior are waaaaaay too entrenched/embedded for one controversy to do much. Still, maybe…one can hope…) you can’t be seen to suggest that it’s okay for a kid to be plump, much less anyone else.

I’d like to feel sorry for Weiss. I really would. Okay, I do, a bit. I feel sad for any human who is so tortured by her/his own body and the internalization of external and brutalizing standards that she’s driven both to the sort of behavior she writes about, and to making a public, defensive display of those wounds. But she’s passing the wounds on. On purpose. She is clearly incapable (or unwillingto) of  questioning the standards by which she has chosen to live. And she lives in a world where the “right” look and the “right” child and the “right” parties are all IMPORTANT. And clearly, she’s willing to sacrifice her child on the altar of that “rightness.” Not acceptable. And clearly, her exceptionally bright 8-year old knows it. Here’s the end of one of the articles about the article (http://jezebel.com/5895602/mom-puts-7+year+old-on-a-diet-in-the-worst-vogue-article-ever ):

For Bea, the achievement is bittersweet. When I ask her if she likes how she looks now, if she’s proud of what she’s accomplished, she says yes…Even so, the person she used to be still weighs on her. Tears of pain fill her eyes as she reflects on her yearlong journey. “That’s still me,” she says of her former self. “I’m not a different person just because I lost sixteen pounds.” I protest that, indeed, she is different. At this moment, that fat girl is a thing of the past. A tear rolls down her beautiful cheek, past the glued-in feather. “Just because it’s in the past,” she says, “doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

I wish her a spine of steel and a heart large enough to both forgive her mother and love her body for the miracle it is, no matter what size it is.

It’s been called “the worst Vogue article ever,” which I am inclined to doubt, Vogue being Vogue. But it’s not nearly as good as any number of articles I read back when I had a subscription.

Vogue used to have a fat editor-at-large (he’s now a contributing editor), André Leon Talley. Apparently, his friend Anna Winokur and some other Vogue-ettes held an intervention and badgered him into a Weight Loss Campaign back in the early aughts. He lost a ton of weight. It was all lovingly chronicled in the magazine. Maybe they liked him better then. I have no idea. But he has gained a good chunk of the weight back. I have the vague impression that he’s eating more healthily now. Maybe he’s still exercising–which there was a great deal of talk about in the magazine while he was losing weight (do I remember correctly that his pet rowing machine was flown to Paris for the runway season?). I hope so. I kind of wonder how he felt about Weiss’s article. Maybe he’s been so long in that world that he can’t let himself think about stuff like that. Which would really suck, since he seems like a pretty interesting and rather nifty sort of gentleman.

I understand the attraction of that world. I have a fantasy life in which someone else cleans my house daily rather than semi-weekly, all my clothes are made by Hebbeding and Shirin Guild and feature lots of cashmere and linen, my shoes are all custom made, and we have season tix to the New York City Ballet and travel where we want, when we want. I love “nice” things. Beautiful things. I’d love to have anything of mine printed in Vogue–though I’d rather Poetry or Kenyon Review, I suppose. That world is full of really interesting people who do really exciting things–many of whom are lovely humans. I get it. But the price, in Weiss’s case, anyway, seems a little steep.

Ultimately, I suppose that if I had a single question to ask Dara-Lynn Weiss, it’d be something like “What’s more consumption-obsessed and ethically questionable: a $40,000 purse made by skilled artisans who are paid nearly nothing or treating a human being like a $40,000. purse?”

Around the Net.2

Do folks click on the links I post? I’d be grateful if you’d take a sec to comment and let me know, so I know whether to keep copying stuff here.

Anyway, here’s the xojane.com post that I mentioned, just in case:

 

When You’re Fat On The Internet, Your Photos Are Never Safe

It’s a special extra terrible feeling to know that not only is your inbox liable to be a minefield of vitriol attacking your very existence, your image is being used to perpetuate racism and other forms of oppression.

MarianneMay 21, 2012 at 10:00am | 99 comments

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Yes, I’m aware that I’m fat – thanks for telling me.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away (okay, it was the livejournals), I got involved in a fat fashion community where people posted pictures of their outfits. Before my involvement with this community, I hadn’t really experienced the way some people just cannot physically restrain themselves from opening a comment box to tell you how bad you look in something.

It was, of course, an express train to drama.

I spent a lot of time, in those days, thinking about how brave it is to put a picture of yourself up into a space where you are almost guaranteed to be critiqued. Especially if you are feeling kind of shaky about the way you look, this is a great big middle finger to people’s expectations AND a potentially soul-crushing experience.

Maybe it’s just inconstant memory drawing a vaseline-lensed haze over the past — the deep, long past of the Internet communities from, like, five years ago — but I don’t remember a lot of external trolls coming and weighing in (heh, see what I did there) on our bodies. Those were the halcyon days — the days when fatty critiqued fatty and sometimes it got really goddamned vicious.

Then I started a fat acceptance blog. And as part of that fat acceptance blog, I posted pictures of myself.

I attracted a fair number of trolls at first blush, all convinced they were going to … do whatever it is trolls long to accomplish by leaving anonymous comments describing the firey and terrible death they imagined for me.

At this point, I’ve been both fat and a woman on the Internet long enough to have read and reread most of the insults in the troll playbook. It’s legit boring.

But when it isn’t boring, when trolls get creative, that’s when the reality of just how brave it continues to be to post images online really comes home. Which is what Melissa McEwan of Shakesville is dealing with at the moment.

The teal deer on this one is that some enterprising trollish sort stole her image from a post and used it to create an OKCupid profile that was, basically, focused on her wanting to have sex with black guys.

You see, as fat women, we’re supposed to be sexually insatiable. And because no self-respecting white dude will have sex with us (hello, sarcasm, yes, I will take your call), we supposedly “settle” for black dudes. Melissa discusses the repulsive racism going on in the set-up as well — because it’s perpetuating all sorts of ideas: black men prey on insecure white women, the black community is totally fat accepting, black men aren’t real men because they’ll screw fatties, and so on.

I’ve had my image stolen and posted to fetish communities. And I get some weird compliments, y’all. I get the trolls. But it’s a special extra terrible feeling to know that not only is your inbox liable to be a minefield of vitriol attacking your very existence, your image is being used to perpetuate racism and other forms of oppression.

Melissa got the OKCupid profile taken down but this is the Internet — the images will live on. Possibly forever because that is the way of the Internet — what is seen cannot be unseen.

People used to worry that their parents were going to show embarassing baby photos to their prom dates. (I never worried about this — all my few baby photos are ADORABLE.) Now, I have to worry that new acquaintances will Google and find my photo being misused and think it’s something I’m involved in.

Recently a commenter here raised the question of why a picture of a fat person just *being* becomes about that person being fat rather than what is going on in the photo. I think that is actually a really succinct illustration of why visual representation of fat people on the Internet is actually so vital — because the more you see us, the more we get to see ourselves and realize that, yeah, it’s just a body.

Honestly, visibility is a vital strategy for helping normalize any oppressed group. (And, boy howdy, women of color get some trolls.) (As do people with disabilities. And trans people. And the list goes on, especially if you’re a person with intersecting identities.)

This is why I still think it is brave for people to post their images on the Internet. And why I am not at all surprised when some people just are not comfortable with it. Posting an image of yourself, when you’re a fat person, sets the trolls up with ammunition. That they then shoot you with.

But I cannot help but think: if I stop posting photos of myself, the trolls have won. If the merest sight of my body so radically challenges someone’s sense of all that is right and good in the world, well, I can’t help but think that’s a good thing. If they’re looking for a reaction, that is my reaction — I refuse to affirm or validate that troll comments and actions are supposed to cow me (heh, see what I did there).

I hope Melissa keeps posting her picture (and she has said that she will, including a lovely literal middle finger shot). In the meantime, I will also keep posting mine.

Around the Net

xojane.com gives me serious hope for the younger generation. Aside from the fact that they have two unashamedly fat writers (one of whom refers to herself as a professional radical fatass–which may be my new job title…), the site straddles an interesting bunch of rivers ranging from Hasidic feminism to geek-girl fashion to pop culture to thoughtful political analysis. I like a patchwork, alive-to-all-levels kind of approach to culture. But I love both Lesley’s and Marianne’s occasional forays into fat-politics-and-culture. I love that they’re occasional–that they’re part of conversations that range from the trivial to the serious, and part of lives rather than consumers of lives. I love that they both post pix of themselves and that they both dress with a great deal of style. But it’s the pictures that brought them to my notice. A friend sent me the link to this post:
http://www.xojane.com/issues/melissa-mcewan-shakesville

The reason this particular post hit me particularly is because of what happened months ago when I was noodling around on the net trying to find a photo for the banner on the blog. The images that cropped up were, well, horrifying, disgusting, revolting aren’t the right words. The only one that I keep finding at all accurate is violent. Maybe the images themselves weren’t mostly violent, but the sheer numbers of them and the violence of the accumulated gaze. shocked me. I emphatically do not recommend that you google “fat” or “fat women.” I felt like I was watching a rape happen. I started “reporting” images, especially the appalling number of images with actual sexual content, but eventually quit because there was no way to even make a dent. I get it that there are fetishists out there. Fine. But this stuff came up without so much as a warning and without any age-related gateway at all. So some already-abused fat kid could easily look this stuff up and get all sorts of flailing genitalia along with thousands of pointlessly prurient crap. Lots of the models were obviously more or less voluntarily being photo-ed–the aforementioned fetish crew–and, obviously, all of the photos got posted somewhere in the first place, mostly by people wanted to post them–though probably not all.

If you google “skinny” what happens is weird. There are a few photos of horridly skinny models and a few really terrifying photos of anorexics, but there are also tons of before-and-after weight loss photos, a lot of skinny-norm sorts strutting their variably attractive selves, and a weird range of fat photos. “Fat men” gets you all sorts of weirdness–some upsetting, some just meh, some actually funny (two sumo guys holding their cutie-pie babies up to each other). And a weird number of the same gut-wrenching photos of women you see with the other searches. Of course, to a degree, there is some support out there for chunky guys–I just discovered that Provincetown (blessed may it be) has “Bear Week.” There is no correllary happy venereal noun for a group of fat women. Yippee. You’d think the lesbians would have come up with one by now–after all they’ve coined the wonderful “hasbien.” (Maybe they have and I haven’t caught up with it yet–I only just caught on to Bears–I can be a little slow sometimes). So, arguably, it is fat women who come in for the most violent gazes. No real surprise there. It’s true for women more generally–you only have to go to a screening of “Magic Mike” to be forcefully reminded of the difference between the male and female gazes even in the case of strippers. But, God, I do get sick of that testoterone-driven version of the male gaze. It is so often fouls-the-air-we-breathe vile, whether it turns itself on men, women, children, the planet. I am very emphatically not an Andrea Dworkin kind of feminist, but there is some serious thinking to be done by us all about how the violence and possessiveness of what theorists call The Male Gaze is emblematic of the I-take-what-I-want dominionism that has scarred human existence from the get go and is now threatening to kill us all. That being said, The Female Gaze, when turned on other women, can also be a frightening thing. So men looking at women is scary and women looking at women can be scary. Maybe The Gaze isn’t as much the issue as The Object.

And then there’s the fact that we are living in a scopophiliac culture. We want to see everything, to look at everything. We feel entitled to it. At the high end, we often mistake it for pursuing the truth. At the lower end we have reality TV. There are hard things we all need to look at, and the problem with the culture of scopophilia is that we’re so overwhelmed with the befouled lives we’re watching obsessively that we forget to look at what’s actually important. I’ve had students yell at me because I “made” them read Wiesel’s Night, and look at the exhibits in the USHMM. Those same students will gobble up Jersey Shore (which has charmingly offered itself up as a perfect metonym for Everything that’s Wrong in Pop Culture). You will assume, I’m sure, that my response to that sort of whining has been a gently phrased explanation whose real content is “Tough. Grow up.” You’d be right. We need to look at piles of skulls in Cambodia and opened graves in Rwanda and the photos from Abu Ghraib. There are things in those photos that we need to know in order to be responsible, conscious citizens of humanity. Having those pictures in your head is a kind of emotional dues-paying, especially for the privileged. Snookie, the savagely bullied folks on The Biggest Loser–not so much. I’m betting some of you watch one or the other of those shows. Okay, fine. I am the last person on the planet with the right to cast aspersions on anyone else’s guilty or not-so-guilty pleasures, but let none of us deny that when gazes pry–even with the complicity of the victims–those gazes are violent. The complicity of the victim is always a questionable issue, anyway. Snookie is most likely not bright enough to understand what she’s done to herself, let alone to understand what damage she’s doing to adolescent girls all over the country (whose mothers let them watch JS why?). TBL folks–they’re frightened and desperate and maybe a little lime-light hungry (okay, a lot)–again, a complicated recipe for complicity. So whether folks pose for the pictures or not makes no particular difference to the ethics of them being circulated on line. And whether the individual bodies are gross or just whatever they are is irrelevant to the exploitative nature of the posting.

Inevitably, this is going to turn into yet another discussion of the complex and largely uncontrollable ethics of the internet and its capacity to violate and perpetuate violation even as it provides a gorgeously enormous access to important/useful/worthwhile/benign information and discourse. Trolls, I fear, we will have always with us. And, as long as we stop making progress on gender/sexual equality, which we seem to be trying to do these days–stop or slow down, I mean–women will still be on the receiving end of a disproportionate chunk of the troll-driven violence.

Bottom line: reposting someone’s photo with the intent of humiliating or otherwise savaging that person, or of using that photo to make negative assertions about a group of people, is violence both to the culture at large and to the subject of the photo. And the violence to the culture then perpetuates violence to individuals. Great loop.

Soft and Round

Given my usual level of cussedness, it might be surprising that I was so taken with this bit of bloggish loveliness that a friend send in response to yesterday’s already quieter-than-usual post, but it is a piece of loveliness, so I’ll share anyway. Warning: It goes a little sermon-y toward the end, but the point it makes there is also very worth taking to heart, so if you’re unreligious, just ignore the religious thread and listen to the wisdom. The original post is here, should you be interested in reading more of Molly Wolf:  http://molly2rivers.wordpress.com/

Herewith:

The Furbishment of Edna

I bought the dressmaker’s dummy last March, on sale, knowing I likely
needed it in order to learn to fit clothes as I teach myself to sew. It
was a light, rigid object, a feminine torso covered in grey jersey with
dials to change the basic measurements (neck, bust, waist, hips).
Although it was the large model, it didn’t look womanly, somehow.  In
fact, it looked like the torso of the captain of a women’s college field
hockey team:  big-boned perhaps, and muscular, but high of breast and
firm of belly.  I turned the dials to adjust its measurements to match
my own.  Now it just looked pregnant.  I wondered if it had told the coach.

At any rate, it found a place in my crowded sewing room, being shifted
about whenever I needed to move the ironing board.  I tried using it to
fit a dress, but the dress that fit the form did not fit me, not even
remotely.  Diameter is one thing; vertical placement is another, and
jersey-covered plastic is not subject to the combined effects of
maternity, time, cross-linking in collagen leading to decreased
elasticity, and gravity.  I did try using the model in order to pin up a
hem, but this involved crouching very, very low, until my knees creaked
and my ankles sang little songs of pain. I gave up. The dummy and I
regarded each other bleakly. Insofar as a headless inanimate object can
give you the guilts, I felt guilty, to the point of utter paralysis.  It
clearly saw me as a failure.

Last week, the weather was so lovely that I sat out on the verandah to
baste another dress; this one I’d worked hard on, and I’d had expert
help from a neighbour. This dress *fit*. All I needed to do now was to
pin up the hem.  On impulse, I pulled out a small unused table and the
dummy, pulled the dress over the grey jersey neck-stump, and set the
dummy atop the table: voila! perfect hem-pinning height.

It was then that inspiration seized me.  Boldly I ripped off the fitted
dress and seized stuffing, some cheap spandex-laden stretch fabric, a
pair of socks, and an old bra gone whiskery with too many launderings
but still fitting well. The socks filled out the dummy’s bra nicely, and
at the just right vertical level, and I got the giggles remembering 7th
grade.  I went after that dressmaker’s model with purpose and intensity
and a measuring tape: I wrapped, I measured, I wrapped again, I measured
again, I stretched and pinned and folded and tucked — and when I
slipped the truly-fitting dress on, damned if it didn’t fit the dummy
nicely, except in the shoulders.  The dollar store had shoulder pads. There.

When I was done, I had a dressmaker’s model that accurately mirrored my
body from neck to hip. I clad the plumper, softer other-self in my old
gym t-shirt, the purple Curves one, and I named her Edna.  It seemed to
suit her. She no longer looked like a field hockey captain; she looked
like a truthful woman, the sort of woman who would sit out on the front
porch in the summer basting together a cotton dress or shelling peas —
the sort of woman who would wear an apron for purely practical reasons,
who might have a good hand with pastry, who wouldn’t get her eyes
crossed by a baby’s full diaper. A soft woman, but a salty one, her
curves betokening hard-acquired wisdom and good will, some cheerful fat
over a lot of pragmatic muscle.  Edna.  A good name.

Looking at Edna’s generous waist, I thought of a photo I’d seen of Lady
Curzon (Mary Leiter, as was) at the 1903 Great Durbar when her husband
was Viceroy of India. Her famous Worth peacock dress is gorgeous, but
the woman inside it has been tight-laced to within an inch of her life,
her breathing constricted, her digestive organs forcibly displaced.  She
died young, leaving three small daughters. Slender? Yes; but maybe her
corsets killed her.  Edna and I, in contrast, will be just fine as long
as I watch my weight, eat sensibly, and get enough exercise.  But
slender? Not a prayer.  This isn’t a failure of will or discipline or
even of radical corsetry: it’s basic biology.  The belly is here to
stay, a protective reserve in case of later illness; the hips have a
purposeful and sufficient width. I am of peasant stock and it shows.

Edna didn’t come cheap.  Not the underlying field-hockey dummy —
they’re expensive, even if this one was on sale half-price (I wouldn’t
have bought it else), although her furbishing cost less than $15 — some
fill, some fusible batting, a remnant of stretch knit, dollar-store
shoulder pads, an old t-shirt and bra and a pair of socks.  Edna’s other
price was higher, although it was spiritual currency that I had to
spare:  egotism, idealism, judgmentalism, self-dislike, fear, sloth,
dishonesty.  I could make Edna look firmer, tighter, younger than I am
in fact, and that would make her (and by reflection me) look better —
but that would defeat my purpose. Honesty isn’t always flattering but it
is almost always foundational.  I can’t build a dress that fits well,
looks good, and gives me room to get creative if I’m basing it on a
self-flattering lie.

Jesus spoke of building your house on rock or on sand.  Honesty with
one’s self and with others sets down a bottom level of trust and good
faith upon which you can erect structures and relationships with a
sturdy footing, ones that can stand storms or shaking.  Start out
building on your own need to look good or to impress someone and you’ll
build a structure that may fall down at the least quiver.  Misleading
others to protect your own inaccurate self-image is an act of deep
unlove, of narcissistic selfishness, like the need to be right
regardless of what it costs.  Furbishing Edna so she’s honestly ample
means that I can rough-cut a pattern and pin it to her and the truth
will just about shout out:  take in here, leave extra there; raise that
seam, move that dart. She’ll tell me truth and it will save me time and
frustration. If she made me look better, or if she represented some
health-industry model of Radiant Womanly Fitness, she’d be a lousy dress
model. Those young, slim, toned bodies in the shiny magazine pages are
no more me than a brass-plated armadillo.

Not that I’ll shout my truth to the outer world: Edna lives inside, not
on the front porch, where the birds might dump upon her and the rain
beat in and the wind knock her arse over teakettle. But I will shout out
the need for truthfulness — not truthiness, but devotion to
self-honesty as best we can manage it — because I see where
self-aggrandizing dishonesty is leading people.  Buying love or
popularity or acceptance or admiration with “truth” squeeze-warped into
a corset like Lady Curzon’s waist is, ultimately, manipulation of the
other and hence predatory behaviour.  For which we will face God’s
loving but sorrowful, clear and honest judgment.

I cut out another dress, this one in plain blue cotton twill, basted it,
and slipped it onto Edna. She told me immediately, not just that the
darts were in the wrong place but where they should actually go.  The
shoulder seams, she said, were just fine, but one side of the neck
needed to be cropped back a tad.

It’s nice to have company that *gets* you.

Playing Around

It occurred to me the other day that there are words for fat that I actually like. Or don’t hate. Of course, there are more words on the negative side. But words do matter, and I thought it would be fun to think a bit about the language in a less-fraught-than-usual way.

I’m pretty sure that I first saw the “I’m not fat, I’m fluffy” line in a Sandra Boynton greeting card sometime back in the 80s, long before Gabriel Iglesias picked it up and turned it into his signature routine. He does a lovely bit on the gradations of fatness that tickles me every time I hear it. Since I haven’t heard that he’s involved in any court cases with Boynton, I assume that he either got her permission or she doesn’t mind what he’s done with her line, or the line wasn’t original with her, either. I could be wrong, but he seems to me to manage to make comedy out of his experience of fatitude that doesn’t have self-hatred as its basis. The only other fat comics I can think of right off hand (my knowledge is admittedly limited) are Larry the Cable Guy (where his bulk is just part of his redneck identity–a not uncomplicated thing, but not one I want to spend time on) and Totie Fields. Nobody younger than me will even know who she was–she died in 1978. Her humor was ferocious–after she lost a leg to a blood clot, she wheeled herself out on stage and announced that she was excited to be able to finally say that she weighed less than Liz Taylor–and had an exhuberantly complex relationship to self-loathing–unlike Joan Rivers’s and Phyllis Diller’s.

So I went to my fave dictionary site (thefreedictionary.com) to see what sort of enlightenment it could provide.

Even the definition is laden:
fat  (ft)
n.
1.
a. The ester of glycerol and one, two, or three fatty acids.
b. Any of various soft, solid, or semisolid organic compounds constituting the esters of glycerol and fatty acids and their associated organic groups.
c. A mixture of such compounds occurring widely in organic tissue, especially in the adipose tissue of animals and in the seeds, nuts, and fruits of plants.
d. Animal tissue containing such substances.
e. A solidified animal or vegetable oil.
2. Obesity; corpulence.
3. The best or richest part: living off the fat of the land.
4. Unnecessary excess: “would drain the appropriation’s fat without cutting into education’s muscle” (New York Times).
adj. fat·ter, fat·test
1. Having much or too much fat or flesh; plump or obese.
2. Full of fat or oil; greasy.
3. Abounding in desirable elements.
4. Fertile or productive; rich: “It was a fine, green, fat landscape” (Robert Louis Stevenson).
5. Having an abundance or amplitude; well-stocked: a fat larder.
6.
a. Yielding profit or plenty; lucrative or rewarding: a fat promotion.
b. Prosperous; wealthy: grew fat on illegal profits.
7.
a. Thick; large: a fat book.
b. Puffed up; swollen: a fat lip.
tr. & intr.v. fat·ted, fat·ting, fats
To make or become fat; fatten.
Idioms:
a fat lot Slang
Very little or none at all: a fat lot of good it will do him.
fat chance Slang
Very little or no chance.

What I found interesting is that there is a mix of negative associations and positive ones. Let’s talk about the nice ones:

Amplitude–my absolute favorite, partially because it’s also a literary term for a motif in Shakespeare, who uses imagery of abundance as an indicator of things operating as they should–it’s why the comedies often close with some sort of meal. Which reminds me of one of my favorite definitions of Heaven and Hell: Both are rooms with huge tables groaning under the weight of gorgeous feasts. In both rooms the only utensils are too long for human arms. In hell people sit around miserable, angry, and starving for lack of usable utensils. In heaven, they feed each other.

And, though he’s morally complicated, Shakespeare’s arguably most-beloved character is Fat Jack Falstaff.

Fattened. Actually, I like the King James use–fatted–best. It’s generally associated with a sacrificial animal, which is not, per se, as association that you’d think was positive, but the idea that if you are making an offering, you offer your best, fattest animal suggests that God is into amplitude, yes?

Plump and Corpulent. One’s generally positive (“pleasingly plump”) and the other generally an insult, but I like the sounds both words make and would argue that there is some dignity inherent in the sound of corpulent. And there’s a good reason that the high-calorie, high-nutrient, highly digestible concoction that aid organizations all over the planet feed to starving children is called Plumpy Nut.

Fat book, fat land, fat larder, fat promotion, fat play, fat clouds, fat check, fat year. All good. So is the now out of fashion phat. And every woman I know would be happy to have fat hair.

Then on to the thesaurus. Words it offers that I will admit to finding at least un-offensive:

fleshy: well, duh, we’re all of us creatures of flesh…and the word is pretty.

thick: yes, it’s a synonym for stupid, but it’s also a good thing in velvet and satin and all sorts of other fabrics and things made of fabric, creams of all sorts and any number of other foods and beverages, hair and nails,…

rounded/round circles are gorgeous and perfect in and of themselves.

chubby: cheeks. enough said.

thefreedictionary’s thesaurus function has its limits. It missed zaftig, that giddy bit of yiddish energy.

thesaurus.com gives us beefy, big, …brawny, broad, …burly, butterball, chunky,…, heavyset, hefty, husky, … large, meaty,… plumpish,… portly, potbellied, pudgy, roly-poly, rotund, solid, stout,… thickset, weighty, … and affluent, cushy, fertile, flourishing, fruitful, good, lucrative, lush, profitable, prosperous, remunerative, thriving. Remember, I’m only copying the nice-ish words here. The ones that have been used as euphemisms–husky, portly, stout, burly, brawny, meaty are almost exclusively applied to men, except for “stout.” Isn’t that interesting? Do fat men deserve some sort of linguistic pass that fat women don’t? By euphemisms, I mean that the words have been used in commerce and mostly to refer to size ranges in clothing. “Stout” has alway vaguely amused me as a euphemism for fat women (the specialty retailer, Catherine’s, was Catherine’s Stout Shop until fairly recently), since it sort of calls up images of Ethel Barrymore and Margaret Rutherford and Eleanor Roosevelt. It’s a good Anglo-Saxon term of praise for warriors. By those terms, I am perfectly happy to be called stout.

While we’re on euphemisms, or terms, isn’t it fascinating that the relevant department in most major retailers is called the Women’s Department. “Normal” females shop in “Misses.” I have no idea what that refers to–married women, mistresses, ms.-es, flocks of unmarried females? I’m pretty sure that “Women’s” is a function of stores trying to come up with a non-pejorative term to distinguish the departments from the already named-by-custom regular departments. But the result of that retailing dodge is one of the few places where we’ve ended up with the cooler, spiffier, more respectful term. And the irony is that it makes us sound like the real grown-ups, like the real women. Ha!

The whole out-in-the-world discussion has become so bloody hostile and angry, and so many of the words are so awful, I just wanted to remind myself that there are words we might want to claim. All of them, of course, like ideas of beauty more generally, are entirely dependent on context, but most meaning is. Except for zaftig, which is pretty much always at least an acknowledgement of curvy goodness.

Effing Round

A friend sent me an awful photo of a very round woman in a very bad outfit sitting in a seriously unflattering pose in front of a very big American flag. I think the flag was photoshopped in. I’m not going to copy it here because it would expand the circulation of a photo that just doesn’t need circulation. The words superimposed on the picture read: WELCOME TO THE BIBLE BELT / WHERE BEING OBESE IS “GENETIC” BUT BEING GAY IS A “LIFESTYLE CHOICE”

Did I mention that the woman is holding a half-slurped ice cream bar? And wearing a fanny pack (belly pack)? Skinny people, of course, never do either of those disgusting things. Or have the right to.

Okay. The woman’s outfit is truly unfortunate. I do desperately wish people of all sizes would wear clothes in their actual size. It really helps. But bad taste on one human’s part is no excuse for bullying behavior on another human’s part. Things being what they are in the wired world, there’s a chance that that photo-with-slogan will make its way back to the woman in it. Mean. And the idea of one woman doing that to another woman is pretty disheartening.

So the thing is both anti-fat and anti-southern (my own beloved, way-too-skinny Mama, who is herself southern, is terribly prone to this one, and there are actual issues with demographic tendencies in predominantly Bible-belt states–but we only need to say the words Jan Brewer to remind ourselves that certain types of looniness are not confined to the South). It’s probably anti-other things as well, but those two will do.

It’s really, really unattractive when liberals (folks who believe in gay rights…) succumb to their lesser selves and behave like the folks they claim to disdain. Rule #1 in political discourse really ought to be Don’t be an asshole, don’t you think? Okay. Maybe that should be #2–after Don’t Falsify.

Worse yet, the woman who seems to have posted the thing is a poet. REALLY?!?!  Okay, I know that poets as a population are certainly no more virtuous or assholicity-free than the rest of the population, but we are supposed to be a little more sensitive to words and images, yes? I gather she’s already been on the receiving end of a considerable shit storm of comments, so I won’t add fuel to the fire by offering her up here by name.

I get it. It does sometimes seem that the South is where a disproportionate chunk the whackos and loonies live and thrive–as if the squishy humid air messes with the brains of otherwise rational folks. Bringing up genius and/or distinguished southerners doesn’t do much to dispel the fug created by folks like Haley Barbour and all those I-saw-this-person-in-Walmart sites. And I get that all those fundamentalists running around declaring that God despises homosexuality on the basis of their over-simplified readings of some complicated biblical passages and then claiming to be Christian and full of love can kind of get to a person. Kind of a lot. Kind of a great big lot. And a person gets weary of keeping her discourse civil in the face of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. A person gets very weary of talking to folks who have made the choice to believe lots of lies. And a person wants to try to make her point clearly enough that she might crowbar a little chink of light into the darkness of the brainwashed. Really, I get it. But this was not okay. Or useful. Or civil. Or kind. Or the product of careful thinking.

And it’s hard, when I see this sort of thing, to not think that the maker is revealing some really unattractive prejudices of her own. And some nastiness.

I say that because when I find myself resorting to that sort of discourse, it usually turns out to be a function of one of my less attractive/civilized/evolved selves having a moment. I usually end up feeling like I’ve befouled myself.

I used to tell myself that it was okay to secretly hate beautiful women I didn’t already know and respect. After all, they had everything going for them, didn’t they? They had it easy. They could bear the weight of my hatred (that they’d never know about…). There’s quite a list of tribes I’ve felt free to loathe over the years: men, the rich, the effortlessly beautiful, fundamentalists, Tea Partyers, people who got published before I did (except the ones I knew and loved…), people who got published in magazines I wanted to get into, the editors of those magazines, Neo-Conservatives, people named Bush, people who call other people “nazi,” it goes on, ranging from the substantial to the silly. We all do it. We seem to be hard-wired to abhor some sorts of Others. Doesn’t make it right or useful or charming. We’re hard-wired for all sorts of behaviors we’ve come to agree are non-functional for a variety of reasons.

One of the things that makes it tough being a liberal sometimes is that we’re so committed to not hating on any groups that we have a little trouble focusing our anger. It’s a bitch. Sigh. and the few groups we can righteously loathe (Westboro Baptist, the Taliban…) don’t exactly feel the sting of our loathing… Sigh again.

Anyway. All fat people are not homophobic Republicans. All southerners aren’t either. All Republicans aren’t homophobic. All homophobes aren’t Republicans. Just like all college professors aren’t liberals. And all liberals aren’t college professors. I started to write that the only one of those equations I thought might hold up is to say that all ballerinas are skinny, but I doubt that’s true, either. All homophobic Republicans aren’t even fat.

I do not enjoy being a member of a group that other folks in the rest of my demographic (upper-middle-class, educated, white, progressive) (and a good many folks from other demographics, too) have decided it’s okay to have contempt for. It kind of sucks. I realize that my life is hyper-privileged in a long list of ways, and that I have relatively little to be angry about in this regard. But it is always a bad thing when humans dismiss the bodies of other humans. Leads to, supports, gives aid and comfort to other more obviously dangerous notions. Once we’re allowed to dismiss someone for hair color or nose size or gait or whatever, we’re on a profoundly slippery slope.

I know I keep saying this, but, dammit, it keeps needing to be said: Every body is entitled to respect. Every. Body. Period.

More Good Round Words

I sort of assume that not everybody reads comments, so occasionally publish comments that come in when they’re particularly smart (though, really, pretty much all of the comments I’ve gotten have been noteworthy for their thoughtfulness and general brainitude…), so, here’re Cath’s beautifully put responses to today’s earlier question. I know you know this stuff, but it can’t be said/read/taken to heart often enough as we go out into the sometimes ugly world:

That’s a good question; but, unfortunately, it has pretty definite answers. As much as we might like to think this shit is random or thoughtless or going to wash away in the great flood of actual data…it’s not. The stakes in hating fat, or fatness, or fat people–or anyone, really–are just astronomical. So I’m going to channel a few haters, pretending for the moment that they’re at all clear with themselves about the reasons for their feelings or at all willing to be truthful about them with anyone else.

1) Anonymous Internet Venom Hater: “If you don’t hate yourself, then I can’t feel as superior to you as I need to, and I need that because (sssshhh) I kind of hate myself: maybe I’m not as successful or attractive or happy as I feel I should be, or having some little problems with addiction, relationships, sexuality, money, my kids or my parents, or, you know, the world. Maybe my car or my cock is small. Maybe I’m just middle-aged, realizing that I only go around once and that at this stage there’s no way my life is going to be what I always hoped it would. But I’m thin, or thin-ish, or anyway thinner than you, which reassures me that at least I’m KIND of normal or disciplined or attractive or fortunate. I need you to hate yourself to help me feel better about myself, and if you won’t, you are hurting me and I’m allowed to hate you for that.”

2) KneeJerk Hater: “If you don’t hate yourself for being fat, then what I take to be common sense may not be as true as I always thought. If you don’t hate yourself for being fat, then maybe being thin isn’t an absolute good [if I knew how to do a flow chart in WordPress, at this point the arrow would point back to AIVH, above.] Then maybe I’d have to wonder about all these self-justifying lies you spew–like BMI not being an indicator for health, or the diet industry’s financial stake in this issue, or whether medical professionals sometimes might just possibly let their prejudices color their science–and I don’t WANT to wonder about them. I’m tired and harried. I work a lot. I’m worried by the way the world shifts under my feet every day, and I’m not willing to put in a lot of time and thought on something that’ll just make me more worried about change and scary shit like that. I need you to hate yourself to give me something secure to cling to–your hateworthiness–and if you won’t, you’re yanking away a spar that keeps me afloat among the wreckage of what I thought were certainties [this is particularly true if I’m a harried or exhausted or slightly slack-ass medical professional]. You’re drowning me, and I’m allowed to hate you for that.”

3) Corporate Hater: “I work in fashion, fashion publication, retail, pharmaceuticals, insurance, cosmetics, or some aspect of the diet or processed-food industries. If people stopped hating their bodies, and I weren’t allowed to push them to hate their bodies more, my industry’s profits would fall, or die altogether. I might lose pay; I might lose my job. I’d be less able to provide for my family. Your not hating yourself is taking expensive low-carb bread from my children’s mouths, and I’m allowed to hate you for that.”

So it’s easy to see why data alone won’t change things: because it DOES hurt people if we refuse to do what they desperately need us to. I’d really feel for such people–sometimes I do anyway–if I didn’t know that the price for their comfort is cruelty, that we too only get one time around, or that, as Alice Walker said, resistance is at least one secret of joy. If they don’t owe it to us to change the (shaky) foundations of their lives in the interests of truth or justice, neither do we owe it to them to keep mortaring up those foundations with our bones.