I don’t diet any more. I eat what I feel like eating in the quantities that I’m hungry for. I order large plates of messy foods in front of whoever, including my boss, and devour it all. I belly laugh. I’m loud. Well, never mind the whole list, my motto is “live as fully and joyously as possible.” Some times it’s more possible than other times, but I do my best.

I wear black and a nose ring and combat boots. This makes me happy. If someone else finds me grotesque, I figure it’s their problem. Dainty is inadequate. I need foods and music and sex that rock my socks, and I will have them!

When men are targeted, the metaphor goes in reverse: eating delicious food is depicted as a sexual conquest. (The examples for this include hilariously awful ads of men whispering sweet nothings to their Betty Crocker desserts.)

I am a lady, and I frequently speak of eating sexually. (I just made love to that Burger/Sushi/Chicken Salad with my mouth!) That’s not a counterpoint, just an observation. I do a lot of things that are considered “dudley,” something I used to find complimentary (back when I was a “guy’s girl” and said things like, “other women are so petty.” Oh guy’s girls, sometimes you need to look within and think that the problem is not all other women) until I thought about it more.

Sleep was suggested as something we are supposed to take dainty bites of, I cannot agree more. I tend to sleep 8 1/2 to 9 hours of sleep a night, and often more on weekends, and you would not believe how judgmental people are about this, despite the fact that it’s only a little more than doctors say you *need.* But tell that to a friend who only sleeps five hours a night and they sniff something about luxury and “must be nice.”

No dude, it’s necessary. Different bodies need different things. Believe me, if I could get by on five I would love to. Much as I’d love to have stopped expanding at a size five.

Now, of course, it’s going to depend on the individual man what he thinks of as a hot woman, but supposing the woman who he imagines choosing between the salad and the steak is a conventionally attractive woman, ordering the steak becomes a signal of her unassailable beauty and femininity.

Yes. So well articulated. Beauty must be perfect, but also effortless. You can never show the work, ladies.

About DLB’s of attention/speech, I think one of the biggest places I’ve witnessed this is in classrooms. Women will preference their question with qualifiers like “Maybe I don’t know enough” or “Correct me if I’m wrong” which leaves people the ability to answer simply with “You don’t” or “You’re wrong” (which unfortunately I have seen people answer with).

Yes, my pet peeve, which I’ve curbed my own use of, but which I hear ALL the time: “I was just going to say that….”

You were not just going to sat it! You are saying it. So say it!

Not to jump too hard on the societal “blame mommy” bandwagon, but we middle-class white girls often absorb a lot of messages about food, bodies and DLBs from our mothers, along with the communication patterns that Deborah Tannen studied.

Lucy, I appreciated your invoking the evil eye metaphor for mother’s cautionary strategies, and it helps me understand part of my very problematic relationship with my own mother:

My mother was one of those who decided we should diet together when I was about 12 or 13. (She posted our weights on the inside of the medicine cabinet. I don’t know how tall I was at the time, but I was still growing and I weighed 119. She weighed 133, and she’s 5’6″, so you can see how skewed her idea of overweight was). I of course ended the diet a lot fatter and more food-obsessed than I started, and had to live with her constant disapproval.

A few years later, through some combination of cigarettes, drug use, exercise, undereating and teenage metabolic freakishness, I lost a huge amount of weight and fit alarmingly well into mainstream norms of female beauty. I contended with overwhelming amounts of social approval and compliments, but my mother, formerly so concerned with getting me to an acceptable weight, was strangely silent.

I confronted her several years later on her refusal to ever notice that I had “succeeded” or acknowledge that my borderline anorexia had (temporarily) gotten me to become what society considers beautiful. What she said, essentially, was that although she did think I looked beautiful she didn’t want me to be over-confident. Like somehow hating myself (or withholding approval from myself) would offer me some protection from future disappointment.

I also think her self-hate is so great that she hates me by extension, that she thinks that anything she has had a hand in creating must be flawed, and that she can’t accept me as I am or trust her own judgement of my worth.

My mother is a classic product of the 1950s in a lot of ways, and I truly believe that she has been deeply wounded by patriarchy, but I am still really pissed off at the ways that she has passed that along to me, especially the ways that she has undermined my self-confidence. I think that a part of her wants me to succeed, but I also think that a (possibly larger) part of her wants me to fail. Not just in terms of having a socially acceptable body, but in terms of my career as well.

I’ve taken more than just a dainty little bite of space on this thread, and I’m tempted to apologize for that, but instead I’ll just ackhowledge that if you weren’t interested in my mama-drama you probably just skipped over it.

As it’s my first time posting I’ll also just say that my moniker? It’s part of my trendy white-people foodie thing. I was a vegetarian starting in those Laurel’s Kitchen days of the ’80s, but now I’m more of a locavore/flexitarian/CSA type, like those well-meaning/condescending white folks who wanted to do the “drive-by fruiting” probably were. I do have a real commitment to food justice issues, though, and I think it has a relationship with FA. Food deserts are definitely a real issue in the cities I’ve lived in, as are community organizations who are making fantastic efforts to combat them. I wish that instead of calling the one black man working at an unrelated charity they had looked for a local food justice organization and asked what they could do to help! There probably is some kind of need, and it probably would require more in terms of time or effort or self-inquiry than just showing up with some veg and getting to pat oneself on the back.

Thanks for the blog, Shapelings, I’m addicted! I came to the site today to see what y’all think of these studies saying that food deprivation prolongs life, with the pictures of the starving (but apparently long-lived) monkeys and all.

I forgot to add that, additionally, B’ham has a small, but strong and growing urban farming organization that’s trying to help with access to produce in downtown neighborhoods. The founders have been instrumental in educating and working with local chefs, so that’s part of what’s driving the trend here.

I hate that I missed out on your convo. I’m living in B’ham now — I grew up here and moved away for a while. As far as the “fancy soul food” goes, it’s part of the Southern equivalent of the slow and organic foods movement. Most of the high-end eateries are cooking local veggies and trying to work with local dairies and such. And local veggies means tomatoes, greens, and okra, and peaches and blackberries, etc., because that’s what grows best here.

But I think this is symbolic of it: About ten years ago, I was about to get a tattoo. I showed my mother the design, and she was verrrry negative about the whole idea, but then she saw that she wasn’t going to succeed in convincing me not to get it, so she said (in a sort of “let’s be reasonable now and compromise” sort of voice): “Well, why don’t you just get them to make it very SMALL?”

There. That is probably my most classic example. But it’s the tip of an iceberg. I think we have all kinds of DLBs in place regarding being different, being original, owning our lives.

My daughter is now one year away from being officially, legally grown up, and she is tattoo crazy. Where we live, the law says that one CAN get tattoos at 17, but only with a parent’s signature. At 18, no signature is needed. I signed for two TEENY and inobtrusive ones when she turned 17. Then she wanted more.

I think she’s wrong. I think she’s being compulsive. I don’t want her to get any more until she’s a lot older. and most of all, I don’t see why the hell she can’t wait even one portion of one more year, till she’s 18 and can do it without harrassing me about it.

I told her all that, and more. She said…oh, that classic phrase… “it’s my body”. And, to (I think) my credit, that stopped me in my tracks.

Yes. It’s no less ‘her body’ at 17 than it will be at 18, or 28. I don’t own any part of her body, and I’m not even really the custodian of it anymore, because she does all that custodial stuff rather well herself.

It is her body. And if my signature is needed to aknowledge that, and to release it from my control, I’ll sign. What else can I do? I’m just not enough of a hypocrit to do otherwise.

I think she may or may not regret the tattoos. I think 17 is much too young. I think 30, which is how old I was when I got mine, is a much better age. I think it all might be a mistake. But, if so, I think it’s not a mistake she particularly needs protecting from. It’s not a mistake that can kill her or harm her.

I think that is one of the major DLB things for women. Mistakes. Or.. potential mistakes. It’s certainly a DLB for children. Well, no, maybe more of an outright Thing to be Avoided at all costs. But why?

Ahahaha, I started out doing this.

(And I’m middle-class! DLB: I’m dooin it wrong.)