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Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day to remember transgender victims of violence. Here’s a list of the people we’re remembering in 2009. Please take a moment to read their names and stories — what is known of them — and think about these people, mostly young women, who suffered often exceptionally brutal violence for their gender identity or presentation.
But don’t stop there. It’s important to have a day to remember the dead, who are often in danger of being ignored, but there are victims of anti-trans bigotry every day, and that bigotry is also ignored or glossed over or made light of or even lauded. Liss at Shakesville wrote about how TDOR is about remembering the victims of discrimination and indifference as well as the victims of anti-trans violent crime:
Lacking federal employment protections, transgender men and women are at higher risk for lack of insurance, adding to the difficulty of securing routine medical care from welcoming practitioners. Transmen, for example, frequently have trouble locating accommodating gynecological services for annual pap smears, risking undiagnosed cervical cancer. The great 2001 documentary Southern Comfort spans the last year in the life of Robert Eads, who died of ovarian cancer after two dozen doctors refused him treatment.
That’s the kind of hate crime that doesn’t make headlines. Or even federal hate crimes statistics.
We remember all the victims of violence and apathy today.
Kate wrote about TDOR at Broadsheet, and highlighted the fact that many of the violence victims were members of multiple oppressed groups — not only were they trans, but most were women and many of those with photos seem to be people of color. She quotes Queen Emily at Questioning Transphobia, who writes:
So it seems to me that to unite all trans people under one banner ignores the specifics of death – sex (the majority are trans women), race (Latina and black), class and occupation (sex work) are as important factors as transness. Appropriating those deaths for political work seems dubious to me at best.
Queen Emily goes on to say, though, that while transphobia may not be the only contributing factor in these murders, it adds an element of silencing that TDOR is designed to counteract:
So what I want to acknowledge is that there’s a paradox, that no trans person can truly witness for the murdered–especially those we’ve never met. And yet, with due caution, I think we should. Not to further our own goals, not to get legislation passed that protects only the already-privileged or to wallow in self-pity, but to honour the memories of every single trans person murdered this year, and to acknowledge the violence that our community lives with as a whole. To acknowledge that even in death, transphobia and cissexism mean that the murdered are not properly remembered, not even by the correct names and pronouns–and those people should be remembered as the right sex.
I’d add, for our cissexual readers, that the prevalence of intersecting oppressions in murders of transgender people, while it in no way lessens the need for transgender victims to have their own dedicated day of remembrance, should also remind us that standing for social justice means standing together, even (especially) with groups who are often still being relentlessly othered even by progressives.
I want to close with a link to Gudbuytjane’s terrific post about her struggle to come to terms with TDOR, because I basically just want to quote the whole thing:
I used to distance myself from the Trans Day of Remembrance. It made me angry, and in ways I couldn’t discuss with my mostly cisgender community (as some of that anger was directed at them, inevitably). … So I kept away, head down and earphones in as November 20th snuck past my peripheral vision, exhaling only when it was gone for another year. Still, on my own I found myself on the internet, reading the stories of the dozens of trans women who are brutally murdered every year. I learned their names and their faces, and soon this cisgender dominance began to slip. I felt myself reclaiming my own experience of the day, my relationship to these women who died, and ultimately my responsibility to them. …
In the face of a cisdominant culture that enforces false narratives to keep trans women marginalized, it is imperative we make our voices heard. I’ve written about this before, and I believe it is an essential process for dismantling cissupremacy. The most important voices to be heard are our dead, and the responsibility for those voices lies with those of us who are still alive. Not for cis culture to consume, not even for ourselves, but for these women who are no longer with us; By giving them dignity we give ourselves dignity, and demand it from a culture which withholds it from us. Even if it is only knowing their name or a tiny bit of their story, it gives back to them some of the humanity their killers took.
Although cisdominant media inevitably focuses on the murders of these women, pieces of the stories of their lives nonetheless get through. This is how she died is supplanted for brief moments by This is how she lived. Amplify that. Know the stories of their lives, and tell the stories of your own. Not just on November 20th, but every day.
Cissexual readers, please let this Transgender Day of Remembrance be a day of transgender awareness, not only of how transgender men and women die but also of how they live, and the silencing and othering they face in both. For trans readers, of course, every day is a day of transgender awareness, but please know we’re with you.
ETA: Just saw a post from Meloukhia that does a better job of what I was saying in my last paragraph than I did.
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• Remember how Starling gave a rough number of 1 in 60 when guessing how many men commit rape? And Dude Nation went ballistic about how it wasn’t a robust figure? They’re right. At least in some populations (in this case, college students of all ages) it should have been four times higher.
• The calorie recommendations have been telling you to eat too little, but this is NOT a license to eat more!
• Breaking: Some obese people don’t want to lose weight! They actually had the delusion they were healthy, even though they had incidences of high blood pressure and high cholesterol that were similar to or lower than the population as a whole!
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According to Glamour, there are seven reasons why your “man” adores you as is. I have a bit of a problem with the concept of “as is”. I associate the concept with final sale sweaters with ink stains not coverable by a cabbage rose brooch, not loving relationships. But then again, I’m still doing cabbage rose brooches like it’s 2000. so I might have missed a few things.
John Ortved writes:
It’s not your boobs. Or your butt. Or even your bank account. Sure, we men like all of that. Ultimately, though, we’re in it for exactly one thing: you. As a sometimes sucker of a boyfriend myself, I’m well aware of how tempting it is to try too hard. But I’m tired, and I’ll bet you are as well. So consider this a to-don’t list, and chill.
Holy mansplaining, Batman. I was laboring under the delusion that loving relationships work best as a partnership rather than a dictatorship. I stand corrected.
The article goes on to list seven reasons why you can chill including such gems as:
No need to inhale a steak on a man’s account, but we love women of all shapes—with bodies and legs and soft things to hold on to—and it takes food to get that way. (By the way, your ribs? They’re meant to protect your organs—please don’t make seeing them a fitness goal. Thanks.)
Despite giving the appearance of embracing body diversity, the concern trolling about eating habits and body shapes is rather disgusting. The message is still: I dictated the terms of desirability based on what behaviors, aesthetics and fitness goals I deem valuable.
Then there are quotes from male participants providing supporting evidence of just how open minded and progressive this is article for women.
Charles, 28, from Boston: “My girlfriend was really into trying this move from the Kama Sutra. In order to get it done, all of my focus turned to balance, abdominal clenching and other nonsexual, lifesaving things. Not fun.”
Thanks, Chuck! Clearly the fault lies squarely with the girlfriend who was trying too hard. Ever heard of the statement, “Hey, this ain’t working for me.” Try it. It works!
And forget downstairs grooming. Turns out, it’s unnecessary because he says so!
Let’s be real: At the end of the day, it’s your vagina, and you should give it whatever haircut you want. But “extreme maintenance” should be the name of a reality show on TLC, not something that you do to your body. Men have a range of tastes, everything from full monty to landing strip to a grown-out seventies bush. If it’s that important for your guy to be with the ridiculously clipped, stripped and shaved women of online porn and you’re far from interested in going there, simply point him toward the computer and tell him to feel free to help himself.
While I appreciate the freedom to dress my vagina in corduroy and denim, I don’t need anyone to grant me permission to make my own choices.
“No-frills cotton underwear says that a woman knows she’s hot and she doesn’t have to convince me of it.” —John, 29, Gainesville, Fla.
My hackles go up every time I read this sentiment expressed in articles. A person’s choice of underwear is simply another fashion choice, dictated more by personal tastes than anything else. Maybe, now I know this sounds ridiculous, just maybe, a person rocks sexy chonies because it makes THEM feel sexy, without regard to other people’s opinion. My personal philosophy on chonies comes from Erika Lopez who wrote (I can’t find the exact quote, but this is a pretty good approximation) “Panties would just get in the way of everything we’re trying to accomplish here.” I wonder if I should get some “No-frills” cotton chonies. I don’t think so. If there are chonies to be worn they have got to be show stopper chonies. But that’s just me.
I’m not snarking on the writer, but I am questioning why we need another article telling women in a rather patronizing tone what to do to make relationships work. Placing the responsibility squarely on women gives the appearance of agency when the opposite is the case.
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When I was college I took a graphic design class. I eagerly enrolled encouraged by the 100 level of the class but possessing no artistic talent. I dreamed of prismacolor markers, art bins and black bound sketch books. I fantasized about being locked in an art store and sleeping on a bed made entirely of Faber-Castell sketching pens.
I sat behind a woman who possessed incredible artist talent and wonderful discipline. However, she was not strong in the theory as I was. We both came to the first class with decidedly lopsided skills.
If you’re waiting for the part of the story where we combine our powers like The Wonder Twins, well you can exhale. We didn’t. In fact I never actually had a conversation with her deciding instead it was much more useful to be bitter and envious.
But what if we had? I would have developed my meager drawing skills and she’d know Gropius from Albers.
Each Sunday night I pull out index cards and write my weekly wish list. My weekly wish list doesn’t merely contain tangibles like “Get season three cast of Homicide: Life on The Street to perform top five episodes in my living room.” though it probably should!
It usually starts with one wish:
- Replace judgement with curiosity.
That initial wish informs the rest. Sometimes I make big, loud wishes like, “Stop calling self Dr. Schadenfreude” (that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon.) Other times it’s something like, “Find one good thing about each day”
When I started doing these I was skeptical. I do not always believe in the magical. I go to the puppet show and look for the strings. But I have to tell you these 3 x 5 index cards of wishes transformed what was once a relationship to my body to something that is starting to approximate a relationship with my body.
Y’all are smart cookies. Smart, delicious cookies…wait, where was I? You can connect these two stories. The way you feel about yourself informs what gifts from others you allow yourself to accept. And I say “allow” not because SP is going LOA, but because new shit is coming to light daily and you have to be outside your head to notice it.
Sometimes we are so defeated by our -isms we forget to wish for something beautiful. We forget we’re more than our bodies or our -isms. We are more concerned with pain avoidance and less concerned with pleasure seeking.
Flip that script. Make some wishes for yourself today.
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1981 saw the release of Sharky’s Machine, a Burt Reynolds helmed taut crime thriller. The film is both a love letter to the city of Atlanta and an astute critique of the systemic corruption that held the city hostage for much of the seventies and eighties.
Critic Roger Ebert had this to say:
SHARKY’S MACHINE has a lot of plot, most of it inspired by the original novel by William Diehl. Maybe it has too much plot for a movie that Reynolds has referred to as Dirty Harry Goes to Atlanta. But this is an ambitious film; it’s as if something inside Reynolds was chafing at the insipid roles he was playing in one car-chase movie after another. He doesn’t walk through this movie, and he doesn’t allow himself the cozy little touches that break the mood while they’re letting the audience know how much fun Burt is having. The result of his ambition and restraint is a movie much more interesting than most cop thrillers.
This film came into my life during a very low point and provided both the inspiration and encouragement to chafe at the insipid societally sanctioned roles required of me. And my handle is a loving homage.
That answers question number one.
In The Fantasy of Being Thin Kate closed with the following:
The question is, who do you really want to be, and what are you going to do about it? (Okay, two questions.) The Fantasy of Being Thin is a really convenient excuse for not asking yourself those questions sincerely — and that’s exactly why it’s dangerous. It keeps you from being not only who you are, but who you actually could be, if you worked with what you’ve got. And that person trapped inside you really might be cooler than you are right now.
This was my first entry into the Shapely Prose world and at the time when I read this quote I wasn’t having any of it. I was going through my own TFoBT and I had some damn good reasons why I deserved a “doctor’s note” to be excused from class.
My logic was as follows: Being brown and female were two fixed points of oppression. Being a chunkerbutt wasn’t. So if I could jettison this one oppression in order to lessen (but not entirely relieve) the way in which the other two impacted my life… (wait for it) THINGS WOULD BE SO MUCH BETTER.
Sound familiar?
No matter how you arrange the notes, the song is the same.
Who was this woman to take away my sunshine! My reasoning was certainly legitimate. I had oppressions and examined things through lenses and used “the way in which” and found things problematic. I didn’t need anyone harshing my mellow.
Gimme my weight loss! Give me my moment standing inside one pant leg. Give me my makeover montage set to New Attitude.
I had been on this roller coaster before. I practiced body acceptance, usually when things were going well. It was always amazing how a couple of challenges would send me back to the fantasy. Oddly enough it was through my fiction that I was able to find my way back. I created a character who could only complain about her life if she turned it into a blues song. I spent so much time living with this character that I found myself Bessie Smithing my own woes. It is quite challenging to pout when you’re making harmonica sounds without the benefit of an actual harmonica.
Harmonica sounds led to making complaints in Vader voice, which of course led to actively seeking ways to get out of the body snarking business completely. Talking like Vader gives you a sore throat.
The other day, longtime commenter Arwen noticed something:
HEY, SNARKYSMACHINE HAS A BLOG!
Oh, sorry. I got a bit excited there.
We did, too, when we first found Snarky’s blog, and after a couple of weeks of reading that and her smart, hilarious, ass-kicking comments here, we started wondering if she’d ever consider blogging for Shapely Prose. Unfortunately, we also read the “about” section over at her blog, which says:
Having been burnt out on online activism, ally jockeying, ally cookie distribution and watching the snoozefest which is oppression olympics, Snarky pretty much seeks to avoid attracting that kind of thing to her current blog. So please spare her your critiques of her politics, language or viewpoints, as she probably wrote theory behind your critiques on the internet two billion years ago.
And we thought, yeeeah, it figures we’d never get that lucky.
But then she kept being fucking awesome, and we finally decided nothing ventured, nothing gained. So we actually asked if she would ever consider writing for Shapely Prose, and Shapelings, SHE SAID YES! We have a new blogger!
Snarky’s been waiting patiently for two days while Fillyjonk drew the icon and I finished writing the mammoth post that went up right before this, though she’s already moderated a few comments for us, BLESS HER FUCKING HEART.
Now all that’s left to do before she starts gracing this place with her fabulousness is add her bio to the “About” page here:
Snarky’s Machine is a writer, storyteller, blacademic and rabid Barney Miller fan who wrote her first short story at the tender age of nine. She can’t recall the specifics of the story, but it rocked. Currently, she writes grants and presents workshops on a host of pop culture-y, diversity and writing topics and doesn’t mind being paid in delicious cupcakes. (Sometimes.) Her work has been featured in Bitch and couple of other places she can’t actually remember. Snarky received her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in 2007 and can be contacted at snarky@snarkysmachine.org.
Welcome, Snarky’s Machine! We could not be more thrilled to have you.
As I write this, there are 1,181 posts on this site, most of them written since late March 2007, when Shapely Prose was born. That’s a lot of fucking writing — and for a while, it was all me. When I started, it was my full-time job; I had come into some money and gave myself a year to figure out if I could turn a blog into a writing career before breaking down and getting a real job. Rather unbelievably, the plan worked. Which means that increasingly, paid writing has taken me away from the blog.
On the one hand, it’s really sad that writing elsewhere means I no longer have much time for the blog that started it all. On the other hand, that was always going to be the case: If the writing thing hadn’t worked out, I would have had to find some other paying job by now. All of my co-bloggers have always had full-time work — and one of them has two kids on top of that — so for all of us, it’s a labor of love that involves sacrificing time that could be spent relaxing or spending time with our families and friends. And in addition to writing 1,181 posts, in the last two and a half years, we have moderated 91,017 comments. That’s a lot of fucking comments. (For a glimpse of what moderation entails, check out Sweet Machine’s collection of some of her favorite deleted ones. Trigger warning on that whole damn blog.)
Why do we do it, then? Because it’s worth it. There have been incredible rewards — seeing fat acceptance get more mainstream attention, developing a large readership comp0sed of people we (mostly) love talking to, getting to know each other well (Sweet Machine and Fillyjonk were already besties, but the rest of us met online), getting immediate feedback on our posts, learning ridiculous amounts of stuff from the Shapelings. And for me, obviously, enjoying the beginnings of a real writing career, which is all I ever fucking wanted. So I’m not complaining, I swear. (Nor are we quitting, if anyone’s worried that that’s where this is going. We all love this blog, love the commenters, and remain as passionate as ever about feminism and fat acceptance.) I’m just putting this in perspective: Thousands upon thousands of hours of work have gone into this blog, almost entirely for the pure love of it — and in my case, because it was an investment in my career (but still mostly for the love of it, or I could have quit a year ago).
Before anyone starts offering suggestions for monetizing the blog itself, we’re not interested in doing that right now. We decided long ago that we didn’t want ads, nor did we want to solicit donations. And this isn’t about money, anyway. Like I said, there are loads of rewards that make it worthwhile.
But increasingly, there have been headaches and frustrations that have made this feel a bit like the kind of job where, if they didn’t pay you, you’d have no motivation to show up every day. Thousand-comment threads. Blogwars we tried to stay out of but somehow got dragged into anyway, without any of us saying a fucking word. Constant arguments about whether the boundaries we’ve set for our own space are appropriate. That sort of thing.
But most troubling of all is the expectation of leadership on our parts — of a movement, a community, a fatosphere — just because we’re a high-traffic blog. Some people have argued that whether we asked for a leadership role or not, that traffic means we’ve got it, so we have a responsibility to accept that our position means certain things. Like that we must be more democratic about what goes on here,we must weigh in on blogwars, we must set an example, we must respond promptly to all assertions that we are, in some manner, Doing It Wrong.
But you know what? No. It’s a fucking blog. As we’ve tried saying a gazillion times, it is not the movement. It is not the fatosphere. And the fatosphere is not, in fact, a real place or institution that has — or needs, necessarily — an identifiable leader to set standards, referee fights, and generally be all things to all fat people. If the majority of fatosphere bloggers decide it does need such a leader, that’s cool — but none of the Shapely Prose bloggers are running for office. We write a blog. We own what we write on the blog. We moderate comments on the blog. We started a community site for people who want to have discussions off the blog. That is the beginning and the end of what we do, apart from paid work and hanging out with friends and family and occasionally sleeping. We are four human beings, writing one blog among many. Period.
But just saying that isn’t enough. A lot of people refuse to accept our self-identification as bloggers — no more, no less — and keep insisting that as long as Shapely Prose remains the most visible blog in the fatosphere, we have an obligation to “lead” it in ways that are never clearly defined and involve some highly mobile goalposts. So we made the difficult, much-discussed and verrrrry well thought-out decision to reduce our visibility in the fatosphere — by simply not being part of it anymore.
What this is not: Some big, dramatic flounce or rejection of other fat bloggers or abandonment of fat acceptance.
What this is: The four of us making the decision that’s best for our blood pressure.
What this means: We’ve taken ourselves off the feed, as Bri mentioned the other day, and we will be taking the feed off of the sidebar here.
If you count on traffic coming from this site, or you rely on SP for access to it, we’re sorry about that. (The feed can be found here, for anyone who wants to add it to an RSS reader or their own site. Please do!) But there are other reasons why we made that decision, too. For one thing, the combination of our workloads and the increasing number of fat blogs (which is a fucking awesome thing) means we can’t actually read 90% of what comes up on the fatosphere feed, and we’re not comfortable giving an implied endorsement to blogs we don’t read. We wish we had time to read more. We don’t. We can barely keep up with this one.
And finally, when we made the decision, Bri hadn’t made this explicit yet, but now that she has, I’ll quote her, from the new rules for submitting your blog to the feed:
Your submission will not be accepted if your blog entries are not at least 75% relating to fat/size acceptance – Notes and Fat Chat are fat acceptance feeds for a reason…
Most of the 1,181 posts on this blog are about fat. Which means we could probably write about nothing but lemurs and still technically clear the “75% fat” hurdle for some time, but going forward, we are not necessarily going to be focused on fat more than 75% of the time. This is not — let me make sure this part is clear, NOTNOTNOTNOTNOT — because we are any less committed to fat acceptance than we ever were, or because we want to distance ourselves from the movement, or because we’re softening you up for the big announcement that we’re all going on diets “for our health.” It is because, quite simply, we’ve already written like a thousand fucking posts about fat. I’ve also written half a book about fat, and many more posts and articles for other outlets. I am in talks to start writing about fat for a monthly publication. I’ve been doing (and arranging more) speaking engagements about fat, and dozens of interviews. We all will still be writing about fat here. But it’s just, with all that writing and thinking and speaking about fat, we’re starting to feel like broken records. And we all have other interests we would like to write about. So we’re broadening the scope of Shapely Prose a bit.
When I started this blog, the tag line was “humorless feminism and fat acceptance.” I envisioned it as a general feminist blog that specialized in fat, but then the fat part really took off, and I tightened the focus. What we’re doing now, more or less, is going back to the original vision. 90% of topics will probably still be feminism or fat-related — plus some lemurs and shit. We’re not really setting rules. We’re just going to write about whatever interests us on a given day, so that blogging feels more fun and less stale than it’s been feeling lately.
We know some people aren’t going to be happy with some or all of this news. We’re sorry, insofar as we don’t relish making people unhappy. But given that we are, in fact, doing this for the love of it, we need to make sure it remains something we love doing. And all of the above are steps we feel we need to take to make that happen.
If you’re angry and/or don’t want to read SP if it’s going to be like this, that’s okay. We’re grateful to all of you who have helped to build our traffic, and if we lose traffic now, well… decisions have consequences. That’s okay, too. You gotta make ‘em anyway, and these are the decisions we made.
It’s just one blog. And it’s our blog. And this is how it’s going forward.
So now I’ve told you everything I can about the State of the Prose as of Friday the 13th of November, 2009 — except for one bit of FANFUCKINGTASTIC news I am going to share in a different post, because I don’t want that overshadowed by whatever WTF-ing happens on this thread.
Thank you all for reading this blog. Really.
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Hey, remember when Sonya Sotomayor was first nominated for the Supreme Court, and the White Dude Cabal attempted to claim that having one fucking Latina justice ever was an outrageous act of racism and sexism, and every thinking person in America was furious that the WDC was unable to distinguish between the concepts of “shameful oppression” and “owning only 99.99 percent of everything”? Tom Mortenson, of the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, missed that day. On NPR yesterday, he had the following to say about the fact that women have overtaken men in college admissions, with the result that some colleges are now discriminating against female applicants:
Mortenson: They graduate from high school at higher rates than men do. They go on to college at higher rates. They complete college at higher rates. And I see nothing right now that’s going to turn that around.
It’s so unfair! Maybe 150 years ago, men were the only people allowed in college, and now they’re not only forced to share, they’re getting outstripped? Someone needs to do something! What could make those ladies stop submitting strong college applications and getting accepted? Quick, deploy a fashion magazine!
Let’s not forget here that we’re talking about higher education — a pursuit that, just a hundred or so years ago, people thought would overload women’s fragile little mind-meat like botulism in a can of soup. Some people thought education would give women brain fever, whatever that is. But when instead of obediently falling down in fits, educated women start clawing their way to equality and beyond, the menfolk (and even some womenfolk, like a dean of admissions interviewed by NPR) apparently get the vapors.
Mortenson: And the people who work on these campuses say that boys, frankly, are not at their best where they are outnumbered two to one by girls.
Yeah, the Beach Boys beg to differ.
Seriously, do we really have to be saying things like “correcting an inequality is not the same as gaining an advantage”? Okay, maybe we have to say that to Pat Buchanan, but do we have to be explaining to researchers and college administrators that when someone climbs out of the howling canyon of disadvantage, you don’t really have to put your shoe on their face? This is like saying that if your broken left arm heals, you should probably rebreak it, because it’s going to get an edge on your right one.
Note to the Dudes in Charge: I understand that it throws you off balance when the people you’ve been standing on finally stand up. But that doesn’t mean you get to kneecap them.
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My first post here was about a radical bodily change I was undergoing (drastic weight loss due to an undiagnosed medical condition) and how it made me think about myself, my body, and my visibility as a woman. I shrank, quickly and unintentionally, and the experience reaffirmed my commitment to FA, because people praised me so lavishly for something that was both not under my control and actually a symptom of, well, misery. I was constantly reminded of the strange world of thin privilege: my clothes no longer fit, which was dispiriting and embarrassing — but when I walked into a store I could just buy a skirt, right off the rack, just like that! (That first skirt, I’m telling you, I am still amazed over two years later.) My body felt different in certain ways (chairs felt different; I got cold more easily) but not in others (my rack still got in the way of everything; I still had the same proportions, only narrower). I had crossed the line of cultural acceptability (as I had before in my life, but without the perspective of feminist theory and FA); I was through the looking-glass, almost literally.
Now I’m back on the other side. For the last year, a change in medications has both improved the state of my rebellious organs and caused weight gain as a standard side effect. I’m back around where I started, in the inbetweenie range, with an “overweight” BMI and a cartoony-sounding bra size. And you know what? I’m happy about it. Because I feel so much better than I did when I was thinner. Any negative thoughts I start to have about my fatter body — and we all have them, because we’re trained to — are outweighed by the positive thoughts I have about, say, being able to eat cheese again without dire consequences.
This is not to say that there haven’t been things that were difficult about gaining a bunch of weight. I want to make it very clear that here I am speaking from a position where, “overweight” or not, I still retain a lot of thin privilege: doctors still listen to me (so far), people don’t demonize me to my face or on the news, I can still shop in some straight stores (to give just a few examples). Interestingly, the only person who’s commented on my fatter body so far (as contrasted to the people constantly commenting on my thinner body) is a good friend who knows why I was losing so much weight before — and her comment was that she was glad to see me looking healthier. (Okay, to be fair, Mr Machine has also commented that my rack has gotten, uh, more substantial.) The point I’m trying to reach, here, is that between my still-not-that-fat privilege and my gradual shedding of weight-obsessed or non-feminist friends over the last few years, people haven’t given me shit for gaining weight. (I’m sure my grandparents would have had some strong opinions, but dead men tell no tales, right?) I will tell you exactly what has caused me the most grief in the process of fattening up: my bras. Oh, and my boots. And my pants and belts. In other words: the clothes, the manufactured things, the objects. (But I have been patiently updating my wardrobe to keep up with my hips — and this week, I finally got some new bras (thank you Figleaves clearance!), and my world is suddenly a hundred times sunnier.)
Here’s what was not difficult or irksome about getting fatter: my body. My reflection. My shape. Losing sight of my hipbones. Noticing a fold of flesh return to my back. Watching my profile change, take up more room in the mirror. Feeling more of me moving around. I like me. I don’t mind having more of me, as long as I can afford to clothe more of me. There is no absolute value to any body size. There is no line on your mirror saying “If your hips touch this, your body is wrong.” My body’s not wrong now, and it wasn’t wrong before. It’s my body, and now that I live with respect for it, I don’t dread or thrill to its changes in size.
In that first post, way back when, I wrote this:
Right now, I’m a lot thinner than I’m used to being. Temporarily, I’m feeling a disconnect between the “real me” and the “representation of me.” But maybe I’ll stay at this weight, and I’ll realign my self-conception; maybe instead of a chubby healthy person, I’ll be a thinnish person with a medical condition. I’ll adjust. I’ll be good to myself. Maybe my health will improve again, and I’ll gain back those 20 pounds and more. I’ll adjust. I’ll be good to myself. I’ll remember that this body I live in is me and not a container or disguise or symbol for me. How will I do it? I’ll start right here.
Thanks for helping me be good to myself, Shapelings. I drink to you tonight.
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Have at it, Shapelings. I’m using all my words for dissertating today and my co-bloggers are using theirs for their paid jobs. Fluffcation rules do not apply on this thread: feel free to talk about what you want and get as controversial as you feel, so long as you abide by the Comments Policy.
Speaking of which, there has been a trend recently (mostly not from regulars) for commenters to say “I know you said this thread is closed, but” or “I know you said to take this threadjack to Ning, but” or “I know you said this thread is fluff only, but” and then to go ahead and say whatever thing they would have said anyway. To which I say: what the living fuck? This is not a discussion board. (This is.) This is a blog, and we moderate the shit out of it. You don’t have to like every decision we make, but you do have to respect it. It’s not about disagreeing; it’s about respecting the work we put in here. And hey, if you don’t respect that work? You don’t get to comment, though heaven knows why you’d want to anyway.
End of lecture. Open thread!
