I read this on the advice of a good OS friend. She wanted to know what I think. I am writing this in direct response to that request. As my blog is a place for people to see my artwork and read my haiga and to post pictures conveniently, I currently am steering clear of controversial stuff. Please ignore this if you came for art, other posts have plenty of it. But this stuff is serious, and as a feminist who understands that "fat is a feminist issue," I am breaking stride and opening up a thread on something both political and socially intriguing. I am a philosopher and metaphysics is where this type of thinking lies in the rainbow that is philosophy.
Full disclosure:
I am a fat and powerful woman. My insecurities lie completely elsewhere. I own my size and prefer it to smaller.
I am an excellent artist, among the top of my specialization. I am a brilliant designer. My abilities in industrial design are quite astounding, actually.
My power frightens both women and men in real life. My chi is so balanced and heavy that I am completely immovable. This makes me an excellent mother, a rock, a pillar of strength. I am not a delicate flower.
I didn't like being 13 and size 8. It was a shitty time in my life, full of pain and abuse and irrationality swarming around me. As I gained weight and power in the normal course of my life, I became happier. The most miserable time in my entire life was when I was down to a size 8 at age 36.
I am meant to be exactly the size I am right now, no more, no less. I do not count calories. I am diabetic, the extreme insulin calculus that I go through every day to "stay alive" makes the calorie restriction and fat counts in the heads of other people obscene to me. "Choosing" to deal with the daily shit that I deal with in order to feed my body is what I would love to understand.
I defy the fear of powerful women that permeates our culture.
Regarding anorexia and body dysmorphia related to sexual desire:
Any man that is sexually attracted to only adolescent boys (which is what anorexia reduces a woman's body to) is a pedophile and I would not want to know that man, so his desire to mate with me is fairly irrelevant to my outlook. Sewing bags of silicon under the rib carriage to make him seem less of a pedophile by adding breasts to the equation is enabling homo-erotic pedophilia by means of female mutilation. (Women who reconstruct their breasts after cancer or to equalize physical deformity are not part of this crowd. Nor are naturally thin women with large breasts.) Having a sexual preference for adolescent girls is also targeted pedophilia, by the way, but I really think that the mentally ill reduction of the adult woman is also about masculating her as well as de-feminizing her. The goal is not a neutral individual, but a non-threatening and familiar male, a boy, a retreat to when sex was not scary for the now grown but clearly neurotic man. (Although I am not a psychologist, I do play one as I watch tv. I am using the term neurotic in the common lay manner, "having clearly distinct mental compulsions".)
The original thread that got me thinking about this is a good thing. The deeper look at some of the neurotic behavior of people is disturbing, though. And it probably should be.
I have been extremely interested in this topic for a long time and I am glad to see other people discussing it. No one would know it from looking at me, but I have very aggressive thoughts prowling around in my head. I am pale and rosy cheeked and soft. People like to hug me, I have large breasts, rounded hips, and blonde hair. And sharp teeth.
Especially since the election, and now moreso with the potential appointment of 3 justices to the court. Unless they are all women, Obama fails my litmus test, as the highest court in the land needs to be balanced before it can be just.
And with shit like that on the horizon, the idea that my being fat or fuckable is outside the purvue of my give-a-shit-meter.
But my brain is large and can contain multitudes. So I appreciate the thread. And here is what I have to add, it is long so I posted it separately:
I was asked to come comment and I read this with pleasure and I am really glad to see my dear sisters and a few good men thinking this through.
The work that you could do in the space that your person consumes in neurotic tics related to food consumption is measurable. Time it. Give yourself one minute for every thought that you have related to food obsessive thoughts. Add them up at the end of the day.
Count each hour, or 60 thoughts about food that were not about the explicit prep and eating of it, whether the thought is about the size of your ass, the diet, the bikini season, whether some stranger wants to fuck you...whatever. Now give yourself $10 per hour, a low but fair wage for a grown woman with marketable skills.
If you do this stuff 365 days a year, you are spending $3,650 per year on worrying about the size of something that will only fluctuate between 36 and 46 inches on average (hip girth) with the base comparison being assessed on a genetic lottery. So you are spending $3,650 dollars a year on 10 inches (not even cubic) of space that you fill or do not every year of your life that you let this mess control your mind. That is $365 dollars per inch of obsession.
And that is assuming that you only think about this stuff 60 times per day. (Men have a sexual thought something on the order of 200 times per day, for comparison.) If you picked up 10 items of clothing while getting dressed and rejected each one because it either made you look fat, showed your fat, or was not a size that you are comfortable wearing due to the number on the tag...there are 10 minutes to log. Start a running count of hatch marks on a slip of paper. If you think about it for more than a minute, make one mark for each additional minute that you thought about it. (One minute minimum per irrational thought)
Do this for three days. Average the numbers per day, and multiply the whole unit hours per day by 10 to determine dollars per day, and then multiply that number by 365 to determine yearly average mental opportunity cost of your personal issues regarding weight and your appetite to be desirable to strangers. Feel free to guesstimate.
So people, how much did you spend today on bullshit that you probably will not be able to control in the end of the day and that only matters to strangers (that are not your current sexual partners) for roughly 10 years of your life (assuming one decade total of necessary mate attraction behavior)?
Show me the money. And we can talk about it. Or just show yourself the money and add it to your bag of tricks in keeping this detritis out of your potentially busy mind.
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I've been thinking something along these same lines with regard to my child. I want her to love herself for all of herself, for the wonderfulness that is the Kid and not wish to love only her societal potential of what someone else thinks she should be. I wish I had a magic wand to ensure that, but there isn't one.
Your kids will do what you do, for the most part, not what you say do. So you need to start inside your own head.
My kid is normal weight and not diabetic. One thing I did for him was make him a special set of dishes that holds "reasonable" portions for him. So he has full plates, but plates the right size for a 4 year old. I find myself using them, too, for foods that are particularly glycemic time bombs. And my insulin needs are improved as a result.
All we can do is try in the face of an irrational society.
I don't mean to miss the point of your post entirely, but to me, comments like that are like stepping in gum.
It is not gum, it was included specifically to indicate the low social priority that sexual attractiveness to strangers should have.
But lets not get side-tracked by the example.
--rated--
Jon - if the history of time were a matriarchal lineage and women subjugated men to ridiculous, mind- and body warping ideals and double standards then yes, a Supreme Court with only one man would definitely be a kind of justice to look at with a jaundiced eye.
I guarantee that her sexual interest in the men criticizing her most recently is nil, and yet their remarks are targeted directly towards being critical of her sexual attractiveness. Same for the Secretary of State, Madame Clinton.
This is not trivial shit. It is seriousing, very seriousing.
Sandra: Through my lot, I've lost many of the privileges usually awarded white men, so to me, your fictitious situation doesn't really answer my question on benevolent sexism, but it was an interesting perception.
I am usually with you, but I am talking about the subject in the language it was presented.
And jon, Thanks! Feel free to spread it around as you like...
This is some of what Eve says.
"What is at the core of this desire to mutilate and starve myself?” she asks. “We spend our days shrinking, fixing, lipo-ing, tightening, dying… I’ve yet to meet a woman who doesn’t do that, even if she’s pretending she’s not.”
“There’s a way women have learned to not like their bodies in every single culture. We’re all contaminated at birth. In some places you have to be fat to be the chosen bride, so you eat, eat, eat. Here, you need to disappear to be the chosen bride, so you starve, starve, starve. Somebody’s making this all up.”
Ensler acknowledges that fighting an internal enemy—in this case, convincing women to change the way they view themselves—is not an easy struggle. “Body image is so deep and complex that the uprooting is very delicate surgery,” she says. “Ninety percent of the world is round and colored, but we’re doing everything possible to be skinny and blonde. That’s insane.”
and this is the part that I work on internalizing:
Her cure: Stop fixing your body, start fixing the world.
“When women do what we’re not supposed to do,” Ensler says, “the world changes.”
Stellaa makes a good point. But the larger point in the book that Lorraine is discussing over in her post is that women's appetites are not something that society is very comfortable with, thus all the pathologizing instead of simple acceptance.
I think of myself as a woman, certainly, but I address the world as if I were a man. And that is a conscious decision.
I believe that the emphasis on our sexuality being our net worth is directly related to our gain in control of our reproductive fates.
If you listen closely to the abortion debates, you will notice that it centers on women's decisions to bear or not bear children, rather than the lives of the children. If it were about the children, there would be no starving kids waiting to be adopted. It is actually about the desperate attempt by society to conserve the balance of power.
When women could decide when and how often we got pregnant, the pressure to remain sexually available and forever young intensified. Our fecundity used to determine our worth and with modern means of increasing or decreasing it beyond natural limits, our sexual desirability has become the new standard of social value.
As each ridiculous and artificial means of devaluing us as a class of citizens is removed, a new one springs up. They keep moving the bar, making us chase our tails and spend our energy boxing with shadows.
It keeps coming around to making our genitalia bind us to social structures that keep the haves having more. If you have a population that is distracted by nonsense, you can easily control them. So men push this unrealistic goal towards us to keep us off our game.
When all women were maids and servants and ruled by childbirth and child rearing, women were valued for their skills or efforts in these arenas. Beauty was a more holistic quality. Maybe it is a desire to make us into powerless boys, kind of a "You want to be a man? then start here..." thing. Or maybe it is a desire to limit us with our own gender qualities and now that child birth and rearing is not an available control, irrational standards of sexual appeal are a different kind of knot for the noose.
And I don't think that any given man is even thinking about this, much less that there is some he-man woman-hatin' club with nefarious purposes. I just think that society resists change. And we are all just ants in a big evolutionary hive.
But more women are waking up, speaking up, and rising up above the low stations that we still currently maintain for the most part.
As a species, we are evolving beyond our biology, but things like this are ugly to watch, move at glacial rates, and almost impossible to observe objectively or dispassionately.
If we stay busy watching what we eat, we might not see the frantic efforts of the man behind the curtain.
It is not men that I dislike, but the construction the emerged from our species struggle to survive. A lot was given up in order to make child bearing successful. But we have 6 billion people in the world now and we are left with a society that has been cobbled together with additions and walls added with no overall plan. We winged it, but now it is time to edit and remodel the whole floorplan. And it started with the plumbing!
I am the queen of the obtuse analogy. I have a crown and everything.
That's pretty strong stuff coming from someone who, as previously acknowledged, has had to come to grips with her body type. People like what they like. There is no reason to go around making blanket statements about people like that.
I could make similar observations-- women who prefer women are daughters of the devil. Men who like men are defilers and perverts.
Does that make it true?
Decidedly not.
So please reconsider the extremity of your position(s) and perhaps allow that people may like-- choose or prefer or be drawn to-- whatever it is that they like for reasons other than criminal or immoral reasons.
As for the rest of your post I thought it was well-written and had a number of interesting things to consider.
Why not just skip the log and be who and what you are. Make other people deal with their own shit instead of you. You are as you were created. No more, no less. Why should you be ashamed or feel guilty for that which you have no say? Be happy-- tell anybody else who has a different opinion to take an exceptionally long walk off an equally short plank, and exactly which orifice to stuff themselves. Life is too short to spend it being unhappy.
yes, it is
and god I love you ePriddy- you are incredibly smart in so many different ways.
Perhaps I was too subtle with my sarcasm...hmmm.
(How's that for subtle sarcasm?)
Mine has been shaky of late for a number of reasons, but even at its best, it isn't yours. I admire you enormously for that.
Excellent, well reasoned and beautifully written post.
J
It takes tenacity and extreme self-confidence to not give up in the face of 4 years of failing. But as of Saturday morning: I win. And just like all other men that accomplish things, I felt the power of getting to the top of the mountain. And I gave birth and raised my son to school age in that same time.
Like when my wood kiln hit cone 8 and I DECIDED to stop the firing at the rational point of completion rather than cave to the bullshit machismo that says that higher fire is better. I control the kiln that I built from a pile of bricks.
Women hamstring themselves from accomplishing things by buying into this bullshit and wasting their own time. You HAVE to believe you are better than a piece of meat that someone either wants to fuck or not. When I see 40 year old women denigrating themselves by trying to look like a little girl or a 20 year old, it makes me very angry.
40 year old men may crisis for a bit and buy a car, but then they snap the hell out of it and continue working towards their goals. We laugh at the ones that don't, but we don't laugh at a 50 year old plumping her lips and injecting poison into her face just to convince herself that she is still valuable in society. OMFG. maybe we should laugh at them instead of celebrating the ones that "could still pass for 35". Why the hell would I want to pass for 35???????!?!?!
Every woman should watch "The Edge". You are NOT the Elle McPherson character, you are the hero, Anthony Hopkins.
"What one man can do, another can do."
And you are the man, Woman!