I Am Living

[Content Note: Fat hatred.]

"I would die if I looked like that."

The words floated across the space between where I was sitting and where a group of 20-something women were sitting in the interior of a crowded mall at the holidays. I was waiting for Iain, who was making a purchase inside a small store that didn't need any additional bodies, and I was people-watching happily while I waited.

They were people-watching, too, but for an entirely different reason. We were all unwitting contestants in a pageant they were judging.

I would die if I looked like that. It hadn't been said in that faux-concern for fat people's health way, but in the I would die of embarrassment way. The I would kill myself way.

I assumed they were talking about me, but when I glanced over, I saw that they weren't. They were talking about a woman who might as well have been me.

Some of them caught me looking and registered the expression of contempt that must have been on my face. They had the decency to look slightly ashamed. I greeted their shame with a bright smile, not because I felt like smiling, but because I needed to communicate to them with a single look that I was not dead, and that their hatred wouldn't kill me.

One might reasonably imagine that I had an urge to respond angrily to this open hostility. And I suppose part of me did. But what I know is that people who hate fat often fear it — and those words, I would die if I looked like that, are words of fear as much as hatred.

What I wanted to tell them, and what I will tell any of you reading this who might regard my body as a figure of hatred or a cautionary tale, is that you probably wouldn't die if you looked like this.

I look even fatter sitting down!
People who look like this have varied experiences with looking like this, have all kinds of different relationships with their bodies, have wildly disparate lives, as the human experience prescribes.

So I am not speaking for everyone who looks like this when I tell you that I am not dying, of shame or humiliation or self-loathing.

I am living.

And I am living more contentedly than many people who are certain they would die if they looked like me.

I have a job that fulfills me. I have a spouse who complements me; who loves and likes me. I have pets who make me happy. I have friends with whom I actually have the amount of fun it looks like we're having in our Instagram photos. I have a home in which I feel lucky to live every day. I have some minor talents that I try to put to good use or good fun. I have a big laugh that carries across a room.

And I have a body that has (at this size or bigger) carried me across the sandy shores of the Indiana Dunes and up the slopes of the Scottish Highlands and through the waves of the Caribbean and back and forth in the lanes of a pool for a mile at a time. I have a body that cannot sweat, which makes physical activity difficult and has limited me more than being fat ever has. I have a body that is strong and a body that is disabled. I have a body that holds a mind that thinks complicated thoughts valued by lots of people, and a heart that loves fiercely and loyally.

I am living in this fat body. And I am doing it well.

What I wanted to tell them is that someday they might look like this, and, if they do, they can also live well.

And that they could do a lot better not looking like this, too. Judging others, publicly and loudly, is unkind. But it's also a kind of death — the death of something you can allow yourself to be. It puts up walls, ever more rigid walls, around a life that gets smaller and smaller by what options are set off-limits by judgment. It's a thousand tiny deaths of your own possibilities. And your own self-love.

They were dying in the constrictions of their own judgments.

I know, because I have felt it myself, long ago, long before I knew how to live well.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

The Importance of Being Your Own Best Friend

In these divisive times, it's never been more important to have friends, and, especially for many intersectional feminists who live in conservative areas, never tougher to make them.

Which is why, among lots of other reasons, it's important to be your own best friend.

First of all, let us be clear that, as so perfectly articulated by Mindy Lahiri (Mindy Kaling) on The Mindy Project, "best friend" is not a person. It's a tier.

THIS.
Secondly and relatedly, let me stipulate that I am not suggesting you be your own best friend to the exclusion of other best friends. This is about making sure that you part of the Best Friend Tier, one of as many best friends as you can have, for yourself.

Being your own best friend isn't easy, since nobody knows all of your flaws and all of your insecurities better than you do. No one, not even your closet, oldest friend, can do an impression of the collected voices who drag you down with urgent whispers better than you can.

But there are three things to remember, when being your own best friend gets hard:

1. Never to hold yourself to standards to which you'd never hold anyone else. This is an important practice in self-care of all sorts, including esteem-building. (For me, it was critical to my body acceptance journey, for instance.)

Letting go of outward judgment is Step One: In our profoundly sick culture of judgment, one of the most important — so simple, so difficult — bits of social justice teaspooning we can all do is simply refuse to judge other people's appearance and choices, which has ramifications both culturally and personally.

Judgment is, at its roots, projection — evaluating people's deviations from a standard we endorse. We are thus quick to see our own "flaws" in others. Judgment reinforces our own shortcomings, reflects our perceived failures back to us, makes it difficult to love ourselves when we see our own supposed defects everywhere we look.

Loving ourselves, "flaws" and all, is an integral part of dismantling the rigid tyranny of the Perfection Dictate, present in everything from the kyriarchal Beauty Standard to the expectation we meet an unattainable level of undiluted fabulousness suggested by carefully curated social media influencers. By embracing our Less Than Perfectness, we refute the obligation to conform to any standard that purports to be universally achievable and demand we be judged by a measure of our own making.

And we grant ourselves the right to be happy in who we are.

It's funny how much easier it is to grant that right to everyone else having once gifted it to yourself.

Letting go of the culturally-imposed compulsion to judge everyone is hugely freeing — a gift to ourselves that makes self-acceptance a helluva lot easier, and a gift to everyone else who steps into our gazes, to whom we can extend the same generosity and esteem.

The most important thing I have ever done for my own sense of value, the most profound kindness I have ever offered to myself, is to take a long look at the deeply unreasonable, inherently condemnatory, nakedly cruel, worth-subverting, kyriarchy-entrenching, target-moving, can't-fucking-win Perfection Dictate in its impossibly unachievable face and tell it to fuck off.

I am a much better friend to myself, now.

2. Remember that you're never alone. Sometime the hardest time to be a friend to ourselves is when we're feeling lonely. When that voice in our head starts spiraling, playing on a loop the scary, painful words I don't have anyone, it's crucial to remember, and to tell yourself: Yes, you do. You have YOU.

And you — wonderful, idiosyncratic, deeply empathic, funny, flawed, smart, wounded, strong, complicated person who is committed to leaving the world a little better than they found it — are pretty fucking great.

What luck that you have all the best parts of you to keep you company and see you through.

3. You can be the friend to yourself that you need. You know what you need better than anyone else does. You know what you need without even having to put it into words. Sometimes it takes awhile to figure it out, but no one will ever be able to figure it out better than you can.

We're not always capable, at least not right away, of giving ourselves what we need. Sometimes we need help. Sometimes we need lots of help. Sometimes being your own best friend is just about asking for help.

There are, of course, so many things that can stand in the way of being good to ourselves, of loving ourselves, of having the resources we need to take care of ourselves.

Like, sometimes our brains want to be our own worst enemies, vicious saboteurs and abusers, instead of our own best friends.

It's not always going to be possible, but it's a worthy effort to try.

It's worth it to try to be a voice of encouragement that is equal, in volume and authority, to the voice that tells you that you can't, or that you shouldn't, or that you aren't good enough.

After all, your best friend would never let anyone else get away with shit-talking you like that.

[Related Reading: The Best of Friends and Let's Be Radical.]

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

The What Happened Book Club

This is the seventh installment of the What Happened Book Club, where we are doing a chapter a week.

That pace will hopefully allow people who need time to procure the book a better chance to catch up, and let us deal with the book in manageable pieces: I figured we will have a lot to talk about, and one thread for the entire book would quickly get overwhelming.

So! Let us continue our discussion with Chapter Seven: Motherhood, Wifehood, Daughterhood, Sisterhood.

* * *

This was a very interesting chapter for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Hillary wrote it so deftly. It was the same voice, her voice, as every other chapter of the book, but there was a subtle shift in tone that underscored the intimacy of the relationships she was exploring.

It was a reminder, for those of us who cared to take it, that we don't own the entire lives of public figures. No matter how much our culture of judgment may exhort us to opine on every aspect of their lives.

For those of you listening to the audiobook, I can imagine how deeply moving it was to listen to Hillary in her own voice talk about these most important relationships in her life. It was moving to read.

I particularly loved reading her write about her fondness for children, and I recalled all the amazing photos of her along with campaign trail with girls and boys, and I got weepy all over again that she isn't their president.

And, because my most present family relationships are with my family of choice, I was incredibly moved by her section on friendship. The very last words of the chapter may have been my favorite: "I don't believe any of us gets through life alone. Finding meaning and happiness takes a village. My friends have been my village. I wouldn't have it any other way."

Nor would I.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

A Letter About Food and Judgment

[Content Note: Food, fat, body, and choice policing; disordered eating; privilege.]

Dear You:

I will not judge you for what you eat.

I won't judge you for the things you choose to eat—or the things you eat because you have no choice—or in what quantity you eat them.

I won't judge you for why you eat the things you do, or how much of them you eat.

I won't judge you negatively—nor will I judge you positively. I won't assess your character on your diet, or where you procure food, or how you procure it. I won't judge you negatively for using food stamps, and I won't judge you positively for buying organic, or artisanal, or farm fresh. These things don't tell me anything about you—besides, perhaps, how many financial resources and access you have or lack. And I won't judge you for that, either.

I might, however, if I'm being totally honest, judge you if you brag incessantly about buying organic, or artisanal, or farm fresh, or "clean," or even "healthy," in a way that is wholly intended to convey that it's superior, that it makes you superior, without even the merest hint of awareness that such bravado is indicative of privilege.

I won't judge you based on what your body looks like, or make conclusions about your eating habits based on your appearance. I won't presume to know anything about your health.

I won't judge your dietary choices, because I don't know a thing about your individual dietary needs. I won't judge you favorably if you are a vegetarian or vegan (although I may judge you unfavorably if you use your own choices to shame and demean people who don't make the same ones), and I won't judge you unfavorably if you are not a vegetarian or vegan, because I know too many people whose bodies can't be sustained that way. Did you know that there are people who can't eat dairy and nuts and cruciferous vegetables? Some of them find it difficult to survive without meat proteins.

I won't judge the amount I see you eating, if I have the pleasure of dining with you, or the groceries in your cart, or your order at a restaurant. I won't judge you if you have dessert. I won't judge you if you pass on dessert, either.

I won't presume that what's best for me and my body is necessarily the best for you and your body, or that what works for me will work for you, because we are different people with different needs, and I respect that you know yourself better than I do. I respect you as an authority on your own life.

I will never offer you unsolicited advice about food, or your health, or your appearance. (Although I would love to trade recipes with you, if you're interested!) I will never comment on your weight—not that it is too much, and not that it is too little, and not that you look like you've gained weight, and not that you look like you've lost weight.

I will never treat weight loss as a reason to compliment you, because I don't know why you've lost weight, or if you even wanted to, or if maybe you're sick. And because you looked great to me before and you look great to me now.

I will not judge you if you are a "good fatty," or even a "good" thin person, who can afford to buy and prepare and eat the foods we mark as healthy (even though there is no universal thing, owing to food allergies and the like) and who is able and has the time and opportunity to exercise. I will not judge you if you're "bad," either.

I will not judge you if you have disordered eating. I will not judge you if you overeat, by your own definition, for emotional reasons. (Nor if you undereat, by your own definition, for emotional reasons.) I will listen if you need someone to talk to about that, and I won't judge you.

I will listen from here to eternity and back again to someone who wants to honestly discuss their emotional realities, but I will not listen to you berate yourself about your eating habits or your appearance, and I will not listen to you talk endlessly about your calorie consumption, and I will not listen to any other manner of "diet talk," and I will not respond when you are fishing for compliments by putting yourself down, and I will not keep quiet when you tell me that you "feel fat," and I will not tell you whether you look fat in those jeans.

And I won't listen to you talk shit about other people's eating habits or bodies. And I won't let you do it to me.

But if you want to talk about your personal insecurities, or the cultural pressures that reinforce those insecurities, or the family dynamics that contributed to those insecurities, or the trauma which is inextricably attached to them, or the bullying you survived, or the totally amazing experience you just had of wearing a bathing suit in public for the first time in years, or the tattoo you're getting to celebrate finishing your first triathlon after being told your whole life that fat people can't can't shouldn't aren't can't, I will talk with you as long as you need, and I will grieve with you and be joyful with you.

And I won't judge you.

This letter is to anyone who reads it, and this letter is to myself—the one person at whom I still levy judgments I would never aim at anyone else.

With warm acceptance,
Liss

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Today in Fat Hatred

[Content Note: Fat hatred; bullying; body shaming; child abuse.]

Some of the external commentary, and the dehumanizing "headless fatty" picture, accompanying this interview with Harvard University anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh, author of Fat-Talk Nation: The Human Costs of America's War on Fat, is problematic, but the interview itself is excellent and very important.

Greenhalgh wrote Fat-Talk Nation after doing an "auto-ethnography, a method in which the researcher gathers narrative accounts from individuals who write about their lives. This approach differs—quite purposefully—from a biomedical discourse that relies on statistics and, through which, scientists 'impose their understandings of what matters and why on people's lives,' as Greenhalgh phrases it." In other words: It is a research method that centers people's accounts of their own lived experiences and allows them to be authorities on their own lives.

And what Greenhalgh found is, unsurprisingly, what other fat people have been saying for many years, despite our voices being drowned out by "obesity experts" and the cacophonous shouts of "calories in! calories out!": That fat hatred is harmful.

The core message is that 15 years after the launching of the public health campaign against obesity, we are now in the midst of a gigantic, society-wide war on fat in which virtually all of us — including you and I and your readers — are unwitting agents. All of us are making war on fat through constant fat-talk. Yet because very few people can lose weight and keep it off, the pervasive fat-talk does not have its intended effect; instead, it is causing terrible, yet often, invisible harm.

The harm to individuals includes emotional distress and, often, physical injury from trying too hard to lose weight. The war on fat is also damaging critical social relationships, especially the crucial bond between mother and daughter. The stigma and discrimination against fat people are now well known; what isn't known is that the human costs of the war on fat itself are harmful to people of all sizes and to us as a nation.

Emphasis mine.

Fat-shaming is bullying; is is abusive. And Greenhalgh's work is an important document to begin to correctly identify the shaming central to much of the campaigning against "childhood obesity" as what it really is: Child abuse.

And it is abuse with reverberating implications throughout one's life, because there is no incentive to take care of a body you hate.

How good I feel about my fat body is absolutely and inextricably related to how well I take care of it, from the food I put in it to whether I go see a doctor when there's something wrong. That's not a fat issue: That's a human issue. Many of my thin and in-betweenie friends and colleagues have the same experience around their body image and self-care, because we all live in a garbage culture of judgment that conspires to make everyone feel flawed and inadequate in some way.

If we want fat people—or any people—to treat their bodies well, then we must encourage them to love their bodies, no matter what they look like.

No one has ever gotten healthier, in any way, by being constantly treated like garbage. And no one has ever gotten bullied into feeling better about themselves.

Acceptance is only a dangerous idea to those who are hiding aesthetic distaste for fat bodies behind sanctimonious concern trolling about fatties' health. If you want us to be healthy, not fucking bullying us would be a great place to start.

Anyone who purports to be concerned about fat people's health will stop trying to demonize our bodies and shame us for having them, and instead get on board with the idea that fat hatred harms, and fat hatred kills.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

The Best of Friends

[Content Note: Judgment; choice policing.]

I don't mean, of course, people who think they have no flaws, nothing that needs working on, no room for improvement. I mean people who are keenly aware of their own flaws, who are always working on themselves, and who give themselves the space they need to fail and learn and do better, but don't constantly knock themselves for being imperfect, for being human.

People who care about themselves, who define their value based on how much they're living up to their own expectations and not by what other people think of them, nor by some imaginary competition with everyone they know, all of whom have to come up wanting in order that they may feel satisfied.

There is no harsher dispensary of inflexible judgment than someone who always needs to do and be better than you, in order that they might feel they are worth something.

There is no more relentless policer of your choices than someone who doesn't feel secure in their own.

And there is no warmer place than beside someone who is content enough in themselves to celebrate your successes and mourn your defeats with you in a way that makes your successes shimmer even more brightly and your defeats loom a little less grim.

We live in a culture of judgment, in which auditing and gossiping and policing are sporting events in which we participate to mask the insecurities bred and sustained by that very culture. We talk about toxic friendships, but what about the ones that just feel shitty, simply because people are behaving the way we're all entrained to behave?

Sometimes you find that when you decide to love and accept and be content with yourself, those friendships don't work anymore. There is only the prickling awkwardness of insistent judgment meeting blushing reluctance where your friendship used to be.

That's hard, but it's okay.

Once you find some kind of contentment with yourself, even a nascent and delicate contentment that feels so precarious you are sure your knees are wobbling even when they're steady, it's increasingly difficult to maintain friendships with people who refuse to be content with you, too.

That judgment, once a valuable currency of bonding, feels suddenly like a cloak made of steel wool.

You need urgently to sit with people who love you as you are, a work in progress, because suddenly you love yourself as you are, and anything less feels wrong.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

People Are Assholes

[Content Note: Body policing; disablism; culture of judgment.]

Going around the internetz today are pictures of actress Renée Zellweger at last night's 2014 Elle Women in Hollywood Awards. I'm not going to link to any of the articles featuring the images; they're easy enough to find if you really want to see them. Simply, Zellweger looks different; her face no longer looks like it did earlier in her career—a face once described by Jim Carrey's character in her film Me, Myself & Irene as "Your squinty eyes and your face all pursed up like you just sucked a lemon."

In the back of the lint trap, I recall having read or seen something about Zellweger years ago that suggested she had trichiasis, eyelashes growing inward back toward the eye, and might need surgery to correct it. I can't find the source now, so it's just one of those things stuck in the back of my brain. I don't know if it's true; I don't know if it was the reason for her alleged recent eye surgery; I don't know if it was a reason offered, once upon a time, for a potential eye surgery to avoid charges of vanity.

But it seems like a possibility worth mentioning. Because I can pull up stories of other actors and actresses whose faces have changed for health reasons, like the amazing Kathleen Turner, who famously weathered nasty commentary about her weight gain and rumors about drug addiction and alcoholism for years before disclosing that she had rheumatoid arthritis, the steroids prescribed for which caused changes in her appearance. And I don't think that famous people owe us disclosure of health issues, no matter how major or minor they may seem to us.

Famous people also don't owe us an explanation as to why they decide to have cosmetic surgery.

I don't care why Renée Zellweger got surgery on her eyes, provided she did, except insomuch as I hope that she didn't feel obliged to do it because of the gross culture of judgment that has scrutinized and discussed and criticized her appearance for the entirety of her career.

(And no doubt before she was famous, too, on a more intimate scale.)

Predictably, the comments on these articles are the grossest of the gross. Zellweger is unrecognizable. She is hideous. She is vain. Et cetera. I don't need to recount them, because we know the entire song and all its cruel verses and vile refrain by heart.

So, for a moment, let us imagine that Renée Zellweger's primary reason for supposedly getting cosmetic surgery was because of decades of ridicule and venom about the shape of her eyes.

I did this for you, and now you mock me for doing it.

That is a cycle of abuse, being played out in public as a fun game for the abusers.

One might be inclined to argue: That's why celebrities shouldn't change their features, because people will never be happy, will never stop judging them.

But you know my position on that sort of argument: As long as unrealistic expectations of women exist, we shouldn't be punishing the women who try to meet them.

Or tasking them with finding individual solutions to this pervasive, aggressive, overwhelming systemic problem.

Perhaps Zellweger just felt obliged to have cosmetic surgery, if she did, to stay relevant in a career that is profoundly hostile to older women. As a response to unfathomably unfair expectations to defy time and the reality of human existence, a woman who makes the decision to get cosmetic surgery or fillers is making a valid and entirely understandable choice.

Especially when the alternative is: No more career for you bye-bye.

Of course the women who have cosmetic procedures to try to attain the Impossible Beauty Standards demanded by their horrible industry are then punished for doing it, if there is any evidence at all they've done it.

None of this is fair. It's not fair to judge Zellweger if she got cosmetic surgery for health reasons, for reasons of pleasing fans, for reasons of employment, for some combination thereof, for some other reason(s) altogether.

Renée Zellweger looks different now. The only reaction any of us need to have to that is: "Oh. Okay."

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

This F#@king Guy

[Content Note: Misogyny; choice policing; judgment; rape culture.]

In case you have ever inexplicably thought, "I'm not sure if I'm actually hating Dr. Drew, who is definitely the worst, at maximum intensity," let me direct you to Part One of the Teen Mom 2: Finale Special which aired last night on MTV.

After every season of the show finishes, Dr. Drew hosts the four teen moms (and their current and former partners, and/or parents) in a studio, where he looks at clips from the season and then makes jokes about their crying and then shames the fuck out of them while absolutely not listening to anything they're saying.

Further, he continually badgers the young mothers about how they don't understand how hard it is to be a dude, hectors them for being ungrateful, and frames abuse dynamics as "immaturity" while berating their failure to demonstrate sufficient appreciation for the people who abuse them.

He is aggressively unethical, smug, and cruel to young women who put their lives on display in the hope of educating other young women about their experiences and serving as self-aware cautionary tales.

And he ends the show by saying things like, "Pregnancy is absolutely preventable," despite the fact that rape and reproductive coercion are things that exist in the world, to which young women are particularly vulnerable.

I detest him with the red hot fiery passion of ten thousand suns.

Dr. Drew: You are the fucking worst.

[Note: There are valid criticisms to be made about the Teen Mom series, and its progenitor, 16 and Pregnant, but those are not on-topic for this thread.]

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Selfies, Again

[Content Note: Invisibility; reference to disordered eating.]

From the BBC: 'Selfie' body image warning issued.

Spending lots of time on Facebook looking at pictures of friends could make women insecure about their body image, research suggests.

The more women are exposed to "selfies" and other photos on social media, the more they compare themselves negatively, according to a study.

Friends' photos may be more influential than celebrity shots as they are of known contacts, say UK and US experts.

The study is the first to link time on social media to poor body image. The mass media are known to influence how people feel about their appearance. But little is known about how social media impact on self-image.

Young women are particularly high users of social networking sites and post more photographs of themselves on the internet than do men.

To look at the impact on body image, researchers at the University of Strathclyde, Ohio University and University of Iowa surveyed 881 female college students in the US.

The women answered questions about their Facebook use, eating and exercise regimes, and body image.

The research, presented at a conference in Seattle, found no link with eating disorders. But it did find a link between time spent on social networks and negative comparisons about body image.

The more time women spent on Facebook, the more they compared their bodies with those of their friends, and the more they felt negative about their appearance.

"Spending more time on Facebook is not connected to developing a bad relationship with food, but there is a connection to poor body image," Petya Eckler, of the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, told the BBC.

She added: "The attention to physical attributes may be even more dangerous on social media than on traditional media because participants in social media are people we know. These comparisons are much more relevant and hit closer to home. Yet they may be just as unrealistic as the images we see on traditional media."

Okay, so a couple of things jump out at me:

1. 881 female college students does not axiomatically translate to "women," especially when age makes a significant difference in how lots of women view themselves. Often, extrapolating from a small data set works; this is not one of those cases.

2. I am curious about the seeming discordance of asserting that friends' photos function in the same way as celebrity photos in terms of broadcasting unrealistic images, yet simultaneously asserting that the comparisons with "people we know...are much more relevant and hit closer to home." If you know what someone looks like in person, unlike a celebrity, then you know how realistic or unrealistic a posted picture is.

3. That suggests something else may be at work. And what is that thing? Well, the study wasn't designed to answer that question, but I have a pretty good guess: The culture of judgment that persistently admonishes women to judge other women's appearances, choices, and lives and value our own success by measuring ourselves in increments born of competition with other women. Which isn't really about selfies and social media, or not exclusively, but about patriarchal dictates that cast women as competitors for limited successes in unwinnable games.

4. I have no idea how many of the 881 female college students surveyed for the study are part of marginalized communities whose markers are considered inherently incompatible with kyriarchal beauty standards. But whether someone's body image is lowered because they perceive themselves to have failed to perfectly approximate a beauty standard they believe other women have achieved, or whether someone's body image is lowered because their bodies are culturally deemed less than, by virtue of being fat, or having a physical disability, or having racial features culturally disfavored, or any one of a number of other "deviant" traits, is a meaningful difference. And thus present different challenges to countering the source(s) of the lower body image.

5. Reducing this to "posting selfies is bad!" is problematic in the same way that a lot of anti-selfies stuff is bad: That comparing oneself to posted selfies might be harmful for some young women does not mean that there are no women for whom posting selfies, and looking at selfies posted by other women, is not empowering. For lots of women who deviate significantly from kyriarchal beauty standards, selfies are profoundly affirming and have become a crucial tool in amplifying visibility.

Selfies aren't the problem. The problem is a patriarchal culture of judgment that is garbage for most women. And the ongoing conversation about how young women are damaging each other with their compulsive narcissism is a reprehensible red herring designed to deflect cultural responsibility for the harm done to them by a centuries-old cultural system of oppression—and instead task them with the blame.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

This is a real thing in the world.

[Content Note: Fat hatred and shaming; body policing.]

Yesterday, actor Keanu Reeves arrived at the Cannes Film Festival looking like he weighed slightly more than he does usually. This was, naturally, a Major News Story, with pop culture commentators wondering, "What happened to Keanu?" and engaging in all sorts of reprehensible body policing and fat shaming. But US Weekly really managed to stand out as especially despicable, among a sea of contemptible stories:

Before I get into the content of this garbage article, I want to observe that "looks bloated" is often used as a synonym for "appears to have gained some weight," and they are not the same thing. Bloating can be caused by and is often a symptom of illness; it can also be a side-effect for the treatment of illness. So can weight gain (and weight loss). Commenting on someone "looking bloated" is often not merely fat-hating, but eliding illness, disability, and/or treatment for either/both.

Actress Kathleen Turner famously weathered nasty commentary about her weight gain and rumors about drug addiction and alcoholism for years before disclosing that she had rheumatoid arthritis, the steroids prescribed for which caused changes in her appearance. Not everyone who "looks bloated" has "let themselves go," as haughtily sniffed by the body-policing tyrants who believe we owe them conformance to beauty standards to indulge their delicate eyes, so easily offended by the obligation to gaze at imperfection.

I have no knowledge of Keanu Reeves' health, nor is it any of my business. I also don't give a fuck that he (might have) gained a few pounds and wouldn't even be talking about it were I not compelled by a metric fuckton of fat hatred. The US Weekly article begins:

Whoa! Keanu Reeves, 48, was spotted at Cannes looking quite different from the slim-hipped looker he was a decade ago. The actor, whose last hit movie was in 2003, which saw the release of both The Matrix Revolutions and Something's Gotta Give, is at the French film festival to promote his directorial debut, The Man of Tai Chi, but he didn't seem quite ready for the spotlight on Sunday, May 19.

Wearing baggy jeans, a gray V-neck tee, and a linen blazer, the former hunk sported stubble, shaggy hair, and a noticeably bloated appearance as he stepped off the yacht "Odessa" in the French Riviera.

The next day, Reeves cleaned up, thankfully, for his movie's photocall. Dressed in a black blazer and navy tee, the actor looked groomed, clean-shaven, and more like the actor audiences first swooned for in Speed.

Wow. That is a lot of bullying horseshit to pack into three paragraphs. The piece then includes a picture of Reeves looking pretty much like his usual self the next day.

(And the "random unflattering picture" used in service to body policing narratives and/or fat-shaming and/or reproductive policing and/or plastic surgery spotting, etc. that's all the rage in pop culture media these days is a whole other post entirely.)

I hate a lot about all the gross body policing fuckery packed into this story, but perhaps most of all I hate that "thankfully." Thankfully he cleaned up for us to spare us all the agony of looking at his grotesque self! It's not just the shitty judgment of his appearance, but the implicit expectation that we are somehow entitled to have Keanu Reeves look a certain way for us. That is so fucking vile. THAT IS SO FUCKING VILE.

Keanu Reeves is a 48-year-old agency-bearing human being who has the goddamned right to look however the fuck he wants to look. He doesn't owe the public a thing, least of all a promise to never change, never age, never diverge from whatever arbitrary benchmark separates "hunk" from "former hunk." I can't believe these are sentences I am typing in the year of our lord Jesus Jones two thousand and thirteen because our "civilized" culture still doesn't fucking understand the basic concept of autonomous choice, nor the simple principle of mind your own fucking business and stop bullying people for a pastime.

Fuck. FUCK. Fuck.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

An Observation

[Content Note: Misogyny; body policing; culture of judgment.]

If I never heard the phrase "side boob" ever again, that would be okay.

I would also be very okay with never reading "bump watch," and especially the related "baby bump or brunch bump," ever again. Ever.

I wouldn't miss "bikini body," either. Or "beach body."

Or "post-baby body." At least in the context of: "Look at Cis Female Celebrity's banging' post-baby body!" or "Look at Cis Female Celebrity's shitty post-baby body!"

And "nip slip" is one of THE WORST. It can fuck off forever.

I pretty much hate every cutesy phrase used to publicly audit women's bodies, is what I'm saying.

[Related Reading: I Would Like to File an Official Complaint.]

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Bloomberg's Soda Ban Halted by Judge

[Content Note: Fat bias; eliminationism. Background: Blame the Fatties; Today in Fatties Ruin It for Everyone.]

New York City Mayor and "Anti-Obesity Crusader" Michael Bloomberg's proposed ban on sugary drinks in sizes greater than 16 oz at restaurants, street carts, and movie theaters has been struck down by a judge one day before it was supposed to take effect:

In an unusually critical opinion, Justice Milton A. Tingling Jr. of State Supreme Court in Manhattan called the limits "arbitrary and capricious," echoing the complaints of city business owners and consumers who had deemed the rules unworkable and unenforceable, with confusing loopholes and voluminous exemptions.

...The mayor's plan, which he pitched as a novel effort to combat obesity, aroused worldwide curiosity and debate — and the ire of the American soft-drink industry, which undertook a multimillion-dollar campaign to block it, flying banners from airplanes over Coney Island, plastering subway stations with advertisements and filing the lawsuit that led to the ruling.

It gives me no joy that it was corporate pressure, rather than respect for fat people's agency, that resulted in this ruling, but I'm nonetheless glad for the ruling, which subverts the execution of a campaign that centers fat hatred.

As with all of these campaigns, lest anyone imagine I am seeing fat hatred in a "health initiative" where none exists:

Mr. Bloomberg said he would immediately appeal, and at a quickly arranged news conference, he fiercely defended the rationale for the rules...

"I've got to defend my children, and yours, and do what's right to save lives," the mayor said. "Obesity kills. There's no question it kills."

Actually, there is a lot of question about that. People do not die of "obesity." Some fat people die from complications of what are commonly known as "obesity-related diseases," like heart disease and diabetes, but those diseases have only been shown to be correlated with fat, not caused by fat. (Which is why thin people have them, too.) So it's not even accurate to assert that obesity kills indirectly.

This, however, is a thing that is accurate to say: Fat hatred kills people all the time.

One of the most widely linked comments I have ever left in this space is this one, in response to a commenter who took issue with the idea that fat people are an endangered population.

No, there is not a documented epidemic of brutal murders of fat people for being fat, but there is a documented epidemic of failure to provide life-saving healthcare: Google will easily help you find stories of fat people who died while emergency crews laughed at their weight and appearance, of fat people who were told they should lose weight to fix problems actually caused by blood clots, cancer, internal injuries, infections, and myriad other problems that later killed them, because their doctors couldn't see past their fat to properly treat them. Google will also easily help you find stories of medical equipment that cannot accommodate fat bodies, of anesthetists who accidentally kill fat people in surgery, of doctors who prescribe wrong doses for fat bodies, of drug trials that make no attempt to include fat patients. Google will also easily help you find stories of fat people who did not seek life-saving healthcare because they had been so viciously fat-shamed by doctors their whole lives that they had given up hope of finding sensitive and caring providers who would treat them.

The blog First Do No Harm is an invaluable resource in its documentation of fat prejudice in healthcare. (See also. And here. Also over here. Etc.)

Obesity doesn't kill, but fat hatred does.

Additionally: "A 2013 study reported in the Journal of Eating Disorders documented that weight bias and stigma cause both physiological and psychological harm."

Internalized weight bias was associated with greater impairment in both the physical and mental domains of health-related quality of life. Internalized weight bias also contributed significantly to the variance in physical and mental health impairment over and above the contributions of BMI, age, and medical comorbidity. Consistent with the association between prejudice and physical health in other minority groups, these findings suggest a link between the effects of internalized weight-based discrimination and physical health. Research is needed on strategies to prevent weight bias and its internalization on both a societal and individual level.

Would that Mayor Bloomberg were half as concerned about the harm he and his fellow "anti-obesity" crusaders are doing to fat people's health.

I can (and do) choose not to drink sugary soda. I cannot, however, choose a life that is free from other people's public, shaming, harmful, bullying, dehumanizing, eliminationist fat hatred.

If you don't care at least as much about that as whether I drink a fucking soda, you're not interested in my health. And I'm not going to humor that sanctimonious codswallop anymore.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

On Naming, Identity, and Choice: Part II

[Part One is here.]

So. One of the results of a culture of judgment in which women's choices about everything from the shoes they wear to the sexual partners they take is that there emerges a language of easy responses to common judgments.

Some of these are reflexive qualifications, like the familiar, "I'm a feminist, but I don't hate men," which is a preemptive response to the ubiquitous judgment that feminism is not about hating patriarchy, but hating male people.

And some of them are responses like those being discussed inside the conversation about name-changing. The example I used in part one was: "I wanted my whole family to have the same last name." The examples Jill Filipovic used in her piece were:

"We want our family to share a name" or "His last name was better" or "My last name was just my dad's anyway" – all reasons that make no sense.

Leaving aside the entirely subjective assessment of whether those reasons "make sense," if they don't "make sense" to you, well, maybe there's a reason for that. And that reason might be that they are being employed as easy responses to a common judgment.

I want to clearly acknowledge that some women cite those reasons authentically. Period. Pause. Break.

I also want to clearly acknowledge that some women cite those reasons uncritically, as in they've never really thought about it much, but those reasons resonate to one degree or another. Period. Pause. Break.

And there are women who cite those reasons because their prevalence makes them an easy deflection of someone impertinently asking her, directly or obliquely, to justify her choice.

This is a thing that humans do. Particularly when we are in a vulnerable spot, like being asked to justify an intimate decision irrespective of our having invited the discussion, humans tend to reach for familiar turns of phrase that we expect will suffice, specifically because of their familiarity.

We intuit, quite reasonably, that words which a judgmental inquisitor has heard before, and thus can easily be placed within an existent framework, will halt the inquisition. And that tends to work even when the person doing the asking doesn't like your answer.

It's great that there are women who are willing to publicly discuss decisions about name-changing! I love so much when women speak and write about the choices they make through the specific and unique prism of their individual circumstances!

BUT. No one is obliged to do that. And none of us are entitled to reasons that "make sense." None of us are entitled to forthright answers about complex personal decisions on demand.

If we can acknowledge that asking women to publicly comment on and justify their reproductive decisions and circumstances is wrong, then we need to similarly be able to acknowledge that asking women to publicly comment on and justify other personal, intimate decisions is wrong.

(Especially when we acknowledge there are women who change their names for immensely personal and sometimes traumatic reasons. No woman should be expected to disclose a history of familial abuse or sexual violence/stalking in order to be deemed A Good Feminist Who Changed Her Name for an Acceptable Reason.)

There is a deep tension surrounding the way we set off as fair game the very personal decisions regarding name-changing, in a way we do not for equivalently personal women's choices.

On the one hand, people are arguing that YOUR NAME IS YOUR IDENTITY! and it's so goddamn important that you should never change it for any reason ever—and, on the other hand, people are treating name-changing like something so casual that it's NO BIG WHOOP to demand women to justify their choices to anyone who asks.

Your name is everything when we want to judge you. Your name is nothing special when we demand you publicly account for your decisions around it. It's exactly as important or unimportant as we deem it to be in order to audit your choices.

This is bullshit. This is bullshit.

It might not be the worst thing if a woman offering a nonsensical familiar reason for a personal choice were understood to mean fuck off, it's none of your business.

Because seriously? It isn't.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Today in Fat Hatred

[Content Note: Fat hatred; misogyny; heterocentrism.]

Erica Barnett emails, which I am sharing with permission:

A real gem from the WSJ: "Mixed-Weight Couples Report More Conflict." [Currently titled: "Put a Stop to 'Do I Look Fat?'"]

Accurate translation: Douchebag dudes who say things like, "I guess you're one of those people who looks better in clothes" justifiably piss off female partners.

But don't worry, there's a happy ending: If women just count calories and lose weight, their partners will find them attractive again!

(The "study," such as it was, included just 43 hetero couples and only found "increased conflict" when the woman was fat and the man was critical.)

The article is full of awesome stuff, like: "Even people who aren't overweight can obsess about their appearance (sadly, these mostly tend to be women)."

Sadly, that is incorrect. Literally, I cannot think of a single man I know well who hasn't, on multiple occasions, said something to me denigrating and/or worrying about his appearance. It is more socially acceptable, to the degree that it is expected, for women to publicly "obsess" about their appearances, but it is flatly untrue that men do not share this eminently human reaction to living in a vicious culture of judgment that encourages shameless body policing.

The difference is not that men don't have body issues, but that:

1. We are all socialized to view women's bodies as public property, and thus women are disproportionately subjected to criticism on any failure to conform to a kyriarchal beauty standard.

2. Men (especially men who partner with women) are encouraged to police their partners' bodies for beauty, while women (especially women who partner with men) are encouraged to police their partners' bodies for health. A man is supposed to be responsible for making sure his wife doesn't "let herself go," while a woman is supposed to be responsible for making sure her husband eats his vegetables.

3. Men who are partnered with women are judged by their partners' appearance more than women who are partnered with men. A man with a fat/unattractive wife is judged in all sorts of ways that a woman with a fat/unattractive husband isn't. He, with the fat/unattractive wife, must have something wrong with him. He, with the more attractive wife, must be a pretty great guy and isn't she lucky!

These are not absolutes. But there is a whole world at play here that explains why, exactly, it is only the couples with the fat wives and critical husbands who experience "increased conflict." And what underwrites that criticism in the first place.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Star-Spangled Controversy

This is all I have to say on the "controversy" surrounding Beyoncé's performance of the Star-Spangled Banner at the inaugural:

1. The "controversy" is some real racist and misogynist shit. If you don't believe me, ask yourself how many (straight, cis) white men have been accused of requesting they be whitewashed in adverts and on magazine covers, have been accused of faking their own reproduction, have been accused of lip-synching major performances (even when lip-synching is evident), have been accused of all manner of transgressions variously associated with inauthenticity? Identifying oppression is about pattern-spotting, and the pattern in criticisms of Beyoncé is obvious to all but those who refuse to see it.

2. To be filed in the Can't Win Files: If Beyoncé did lip-synch, for reasons having to do with the nature of outdoor performances on a grand scale, she's terrible. If she had chosen not to lip-synch, and had given a less than flawless performance, she'd be terrible. If, in fact, she did not lip-synch, and that was a live performance all her own, we congratulate her with a week of speculation about how she must have been lip-synching. I have a problem with this.

3. There is something deeply wrong with us that we feel owed some arbitrarily defined display of authenticity from anyone, no less a woman of color who is viciously judged in every aspect of her life, no matter in which way she elects to live it.

4. I love the conspiracy theorists' entire premise that I'm supposed to even care whether Beyoncé lip-synched to a track of herself singing. If she had recorded that in a studio a month ago with the best producer on the planet, I'd still be impressed because OH RIGHT Beyoncé is a great singer. The end.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.

[Content Note: Fat hatred; disordered eating; bullying.]

My pal Erica Barnett sent me the link to this piece at The Atlantic (note that author Lindsay Abrams is writing critically about this approach): A Case for Shaming Obese People, Tastefully. Subhead: "One bioethicist's modest proposal to combat obesity through socially motivated self-hatred."

People don't hate being fat enough, basically, according to Hastings Center bioethicist Daniel Callahan. In an editorial published in the Hastings Center Report, he argues that nothing -- not diets, drugs, sugeries, nor appeals to our health -- is working, and goes on to make the case for fat-shaming people until they start eating more salad.

"An edgier strategy is needed," is his (earnest and entirely devoid of irony) way of putting it.

HA HA HA. Yes, good call, Callahan. The one thing I don't hear enough is how ashamed of myself I should be for being fat! You are a genius, sir!

I have been down this well-tread path many times before, so I won't spend another afternoon detailing all the many ways in which presuming that fat people are all fat for the same reason, that fat people are axiomatically unhealthy, that diets work, etc. is ignorant bullshit.

I will simply observe that what Callahan is proposing is bullying. Not "an edgier strategy," but the same strategy to which most fat people have been subjected for most of our lives, whether it's straight-up shaming directly to our faces by people who purport to care about us and doctors and perfect strangers, or our experience of virtually never seeing bodies like ours in popular culture except as objects of ridicule.

Leaving aside the discussion that fat is not a behavior for many fat people (and for many more, it is the result of disordered eating started as a behavior responsive to the very sort of fat-shaming Callahan suggests), bullying is not an effective strategy to address self-harming behavior.

Bullying encourages self-harm.

For those fat people whose fatness is a direct and exclusive result of lack of self-care even despite access to food that fulfills their individual needs and capacity for sufficient exercise, shaming them about their bodies and habits—bullying them—is only going to make them hate their bodies even more.

I have been a fat person who hates her body, and let me put this as bluntly as I can: There is no incentive to take care of a body you hate.

How good I feel about my fat body is absolutely and inextricably related to how well I take care of it, from the food I put in it to whether I go see a doctor when there's something wrong. That's not a fat issue: That's a human issue. Many of my thin and in-betweenie friends and colleagues have the same experience around their body image and self-care, because we all live in a garbage culture of judgment that conspires to make everyone feel flawed and inadequate in some way.

If you want fat people—or any people—to treat their bodies well, then encourage them to love their bodies, no matter what they look like.

I say again: No one has ever gotten healthier, in any way, by being constantly treated like garbage. And no one has ever gotten bullied into feeling better about themselves.

Acceptance is only a dangerous idea to those who are hiding aesthetic distaste for fat bodies behind sanctimonious concern trolling about fatties' health. If you want us to be healthy, not fucking bullying us would be a great place to start.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Actual Headline

Channing Tatum Shaves His Head Bald, Steps Out With Pregnant Wife Jenna Dewan-Tatum.

I am aware that entertainment news is not the same as hard news (although the lines blur more every day), but I can't even believe the shit that "qualifies" as entertainment news these days.

I know that sounds a bit getoffmylawnish, but I'm not really complaining about the quality of entertainment journalism [sic]. I'm just observing that I don't even know how anyone famous can stand to live in a world where "shaves head and walks in public with spouse" is considered newsworthy.

Breaking News: Channing Tatum a Human Being!

* * *

Relatedly: Has anyone seen the new documentary $ellebrity (tagline: "Fame has its price.")? Any good?

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Discussion Thread: Finding Women Likable

In tandem with today's Helpful Hints post about the radical act of finding women likable, I wanted to open up a discussion thread to discuss how making a habit of liking women (since presumably most readers of this space are on that journey or have already arrived at the destination) has changed our lives.

I almost can't count the number of ways that jettisoning bullshit notions about being an Exceptional Woman and embracing vast and varied female friendship has changed me for the better, and I'm sure I'll share more in comments, but the most important change has been in the way I view myself: My body image, my self-worth, my capacity to draw boundaries and receive love...

A big part of that is because so much of the practice of not liking women is wrapped up in the culture of judgement, and letting go of the culturally-imposed compulsion to judge allowed me to give myself a fucking break, too.

So: How has the radical act of finding women likable changed your life?

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Cloud Atlas, Lana Wachowski, and "Coming Out"

So, I don't think it's a secret that The Matrix is one of my favorite films and The Wachowskis some of my favorite writers/directors. I can spend a truly embarrassing amount of time detailing why Speed Racer was super underrated. But I won't! You're welcome.

Anyway! I am so excited about Cloud Atlas (which was co-directed by Tom Twyker, the director of Run Lola Run, another film I love) that I can barely contain myself, and I was all a-squee when The Wachowskis, with Twyker, did a promotional tease for the film, since their on-camera appearances are extremely rare.

I was annoyed, however, that this video has been widely cited in the media as Lana Wachowski "coming out" as transgender or "revealing" her "new identity" or "making her debut" as Lana "after years of hiding."

Lana Wachowski's transition has been known for many years. The duo once known as "The Wachowski Brothers" have instead been known as "The Wachowskis" for quite some time. This may be the first time Lana has officially done press as Lana, but she didn't fail to exist as Lana before this moment.

Not officially announcing to the media that one is transitioning doesn't mean one is "hiding," or has secreted oneself away before a dramatic "reveal."

There's a lot of problematic framing around issues of sexuality and reproduction and gender and "coming out," especially around famous people, by virtue of our culture of judgment and entitlement. We aren't owed information about famous people's private lives, and narratives around disclosure which imply famous people are "hiding" something about themselves that they've simply chosen not to share with the public in a grand pronouncement reinforce the erroneous notion that we are owed details about their bodies, choices, and lives.

The idea seems to be that if someone gives access to one part of themselves by living a public life, they are tacitly granting access to all of themselves—that they are no longer entitled to boundaries.

No. Everyone is entitled to boundaries.

Clearly, Lana Wachowski was "out" to the people close to her, and she was "out" enough that I've been thinking of her as Lana Wachowski for years.

Which frankly makes it pretty shitty to accuse her of "hiding" or "debuting" or whatevthefuck. Especially given how that framing plays into transphobic scare-stories of trans* people who secret their identities in order to prey on unsuspecting cis folk.

There's a way of honoring Lana's trailblazing as the first out trans* director with such massive mainstream success, and the bravery of her public transitioning, that doesn't implicitly levy negative judgment on the way she did it, or how publicly.

Anyway. This was a long-winded introduction to saying there's not a lot of good coverage of what is apparently Lana's first official press appearance after beginning her transition (The Advocate's piece is the best I've found), but yay for Lana, one of my favorite filmmakers ever, and here is a place to talk about her and her new film.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Surprise Becks

I have mentioned once or twice or a dozen times that I like the Beckhams. If I'm honest, I feel sort of weirdly protective of them, because the horrendous tabloid scrutiny to which they're subjected, and the inexplicable narratives that result therefrom, so perfectly exemplify the culture of judgment—the shitty, uncritical culture of judgment—that is an outgrowth of the nightmarish entitlement we seem to believe we have to own every part of public figures' lives.

David Beckham is a world-class footballer subjected to petty arguments about being overrated that inevitably devolve into derisive snorts about underwear modeling. Victoria Beckham is a world-class designer whose fashion career is casually elided by people who want to accuse her of unearned fame, snorting reductive judgments about her participation in a (highly successful) girl-band once upon a time.

They are professionally successful, but incessantly picked-on as undeserving. That sort of thing irritates me generally, but really gets under my skin when it's done to the Beckhams (not that they need my defense), because, in addition to living parts of their hardworking lives in public for our entertainment, they seem quite nice.

Niceness is so underrated.

Anyway. That is an unnecessarily long preamble to introducing this adidas advert, featuring David Beckham. He is good sport, in every way.

Text Onscreen: adidas presents

Image of a photobooth labeled "Great Britain #takethestage".

Text Onscreen: We invited a bunch of people to take the stage and support Team GB."

Cut to a group of three football fans, two black women and a black man, doing a footie chant while taking pictures in the booth. Suddenly their expressions turn to surprise.

Text Onscreen: We also invited someone else...

Cut to two black young men in the photo booth; David Beckham peeks his head into the booth and they react with shock and delight. Becks laughs.

Cut to a montage of Becks taking pictures and grinning with lots of different groups of people, who are all surprised and grinning. He genuinely looks like he's having fun, throwing his arms around their shoulders and posing for pictures with them in the booth. He hugs people and lets women and men kiss his cheeks. He shakes their hands and says, "Nice to meet ya." With a group of two white men holding props, he is offered a prop microphone. "I've got the rubber duck!" he says, holding up a Union Jacked rubber ducky. He surprised a young white woman and asks, "Can I get in?" She squeals, "Yes!" and waves him into the booth. He hugs a little white boy who is weeping with being overwhelmed. "Should we do some pictures?" Becks asks him.

Cut to people who've had their pictures taken with Becks leaving in an elevator. They are all excited. "Best thing ever!" enthuses a black woman. "That was wonderful!" says a white woman. "Wow," whispers a black man. The little boy wipes his tears.

Text Onscreen: #takethestage / adidas / official sportswear partner of the 2012 London Olympics

That's the kind of advertising that makes me want to buy a product.

Contact adidas and thank them for positive advertising that uplifts instead of putting people down.

[Via Andy.]

Open Wide...

Shut Up!