Panic over pretty

At almost four years of age, Bean is developing a keen sense of how to determine which are socially appropriate expressions of gender. She already has a clear idea of some fashion ‘rules’, and she is beginning to notice differences in bodies and style of dress with astute regularity. I have no doubt that much of this socialisation into appearance-based judgement is coming from daycare, with its school-yard-like hiearchy systems and proto-cliques.

Bean has been bullied over her hairstyle. She loves to express herself through her clothing choices but I know that very often she considers whether her friends would approve of an outfit before venturing out in it.

All of these things are no doubt familiar to other parents and I am not the first or last feminist mother to wish that there was a picture book version of The Beauty Myth distributed to every small child. Although it hurts me that bullying behaviours focused on looks are hitting my daughter so young, I am also conscious of the need for perspective. I don’t want to squash her enjoyment of clothes or criticise her desire to ‘dress up’ or think about colour combinations or choose, sometimes, to be frivolous. My own explorations of fashion and style were laughed at and squashed and this didn’t have the intended effect; I didn’t learn that clothing doesn’t matter. I learned that it really does matter, but that only ‘pretty’ girls get to fully partake.

Is it possible that fear of ‘pinkification’ could also backfire on girls?

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of commentary promoting the idea that girls must strive for goals more worthy than prettiness; that instead of aiming for a celebrity look or a certain body weight, girls should be focusing on meaningful aims like career achievement and wholesome personality attributes. It’s well meaning and often exactly right.

But I fear there’s an underlying failure of understanding in some of this commentary.

Celebrity culture, weight consciousness, ‘sexy’ fashions, beauty ideals — these all impact upon young people. We know this — many of us revile this, and yearn for better role models and more diverse options, particularly for girls (although it is clear that all genders suffer from pressure to attain some superficial standard of acceptability).

But I simply do not believe that conventionally attractive is all that girls want to be.

Bean wants to be pretty — she wants to fit in, she wants praise for how she looks. But she doesn’t state ‘pretty’ as an ambition. She wants to drive a fire truck. She wants to be a doctor. She wants to be a mother.

I am frustrated by platitudes urging girls (or rather, urging mothers with daughters) to aim beyond pretty mainly because I don’t think pretty is actually viewed as a viable lifestyle choice. It’s viewed as a prerequisite for, or an easy route to, where girls actually want to go.

The fantasy of being thin (so beautifully explained in Screw Inner Beauty) is a familiar concept around the fatosphere. At its core, the fantasy of being thin is about denying the possiblities (and limitations) of the present reality in favour of (often literally) buying the rhetoric around what weight loss can bring. It’s the idea that if only something magical happened, all those other things could be possible. For those caught in the thrall of the fantasy of being thin, it’s not so much about the weight loss as it is about the new job, the new relationship, the overseas holiday, the devoted lover/s, the fabulous wardrobe, the one-day-I-will-be-worthy-of-all-this achievement. Very few people want to lose weight because they believe that a smaller dress size will, in itself, make them happy. They want what has been co-opted to sell them the diet shakes in the first place; they want their dreams.

The push to be pretty is not so different.

Girls are lead to believe that pretty finishes first. That attractiveness will help them gain popularity. That success comes with a bright smile and a fashionable haircut and definitely without acne or wonky teeth or stretchmarks or ill-fitting hand-me-down clothes.

Beauty is, perhaps, its own reward. I wouldn’t know.

But I do know that young people are not so vacuous and shallow. They don’t often have the extreme gullibility actually required to discount goals like career and family in favour of the pursuit of prettiness. Rather, they know, perhaps instinctively, perhaps because the teasing starts as soon as their peers are verbal, that what they actually desire may be easier to grasp if they can master the feat of being aesthetically pleasing whilst doing it.

I agree with Pigtail Pals that we need to show girls that they can be scientists, gymnasts, doctors, builders, writers. I agree with the amazing John Darnielle that Lego does girls a disservice when it regurgitates marketing hype about what girls want instead of catering to their needs as individual children unfettered by rigid gender roles.

It’s important to advocate for a rejection of the limitations of ‘pink’ and ‘pretty’ without patronising young people.

Like the fantasy of being thin, the desire to be pretty is backed by a multi-billion dollar industry and untold numbers of daily encounters with people who’ve swallowed the social pressures whole and made them their own mission to prescribe. Girls who desire a piece of the pretty pie aren’t misguided, inherently frivolous or lacking in ambition. They want to do stuff; it’s just they’ve internalised the message that they must look good doing it for it to count for anything.

And that is why the right to be ugly — the right to do and be without being gazed upon and always found wanting — is worth defending.

The right to be ugly

If you haven’t yet read this wonderful piece from Masterchef winner Julie Goodwin in response to mean-spirited tabloid critiques of her body, go read it now. I’ll wait.

With her defence of ‘broader people’, Julie Goodwin has set herself apart from other media personalities who are all too often keen to self-flagellate about their failure to attain physical perfection. This is delightfully sensible and refreshing; I hope the huge support she seems to have received is reflective of a tiny shift in consciousness about both body image and health.

Even so, I heartily wish that there was no imperative for women to do the magazine-covershoot-swimsuit-reveal in the first place. When can a woman get a break from being judged on whether she looks fuckable in her bathers? How is her body shape even relevant to what Goodwin does, and who she is? But we are still in thrall of the suffering ween, apparently (sigh), as well as the stand-in scrutiny provided by other women.

This profoundly-felt obligation to be pretty, this imperative to commit time and money and energy towards some ever-shifting and always unattainable (because not even models look like models) beauty ideal — it isn’t going away. I’m already noticing its toxic effects on Bean, and that’s heartbreaking.

Unfortunately, what passes for commentary on body image issues in popular media generally takes for granted the scrutiny of women’s appearance as right and proper, if inconvenient. I used to indulge in a little Oprah from time to time, and I sometimes liked it, too. If there was one thing that Oprah was good at it was the promotion of public displays of emotional vulnerability. But every time Oprah was about to well up, she’d make some crack about ‘the ugly cry’. When the cameras are rolling, one can’t be ugly. No matter how ‘real’ and raw the moment is supposed to be, we can’t have any screwed-up-face-mascara-running ugliness, at least not without self-deprecation thrown up as a shield. Emotions are good, seemed to be the message, but women can never, ever, let up on themselves when it comes to appearance.

It’s okay to have confronting feelings so long as you stay cute, folks.

I’ve been thinking about the ugly cry a lot lately; it’s a pernicious example of how women’s behaviour is constrained by the imperative to ‘look good’, as well as by ingrained notions of feminine conduct. Grooming protocols and fashion policing, it seems to me, are closely related to decorum and manners and, well, come along with a whole lot of sexist (and racist, ableist, classist) baggage. They also rely upon a false dichotomy between beauty and ugliness and fail to allow space for interrogating the very notion that appearance matters.

A lot of fat activism centres around fat visibility; the message that fat people exist and have the right to take up space is pivotal. More than that, the notion that a fat body can be beautiful and desirable is at the core of some body positive work. And these things are important. But there is, I think, a deeper cultural problem here that can’t be solved just by widening (literally, even!) the definition of beauty.

Sometimes, frequently, I have no interest in attaining any standard of beauty. It’s not churlishness: yeah, I don’t meet any aesthetic ideal and I’ve been derided often over the years for exhibiting various forms of ugliness. And sometimes that has hurt. But my interest in exploring the potential for the reclamation of ugly is not merely personal.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel that I had some kind of obligation to be, if not pretty, then passable. Palatable. And if not that, then invisible.

In taking a kinder, more accepting disposition towards my physical self, I am finding that I feel rather invested in my right to be ugly. And I am far less critical of others. Letting go of any judgement about ugliness means it can start to look kinda beautiful, too.

That’s why I’ve enjoyed Definatalie’s explorations of Ugly Cute.

Sometimes, refusing to hide (or hide from) my ugly might be about finding a safe space in invisibility, or it might be about nothing more than pleasing my own damn self by privileging comfort over appearance or prioritising self-expression over fashion. Or sometimes, it’s political. It’s here I am, don’t erase me. Here I am, don’t judge me. Interrogating one’s own choices with regard to personal presentation is a little exhausting and it can be excruciatingly boring, too. But I think it’s important work for feminists — for anyone — to undertake from time to time.

None of us has an obligation to be conventionally attractive. We all have the right to let go of, if only briefly, the imperative to strive.

Letting yourself be enough, just as you are; now that is a beautiful thing.

What ‘childhood obesity’ is really doing to kids

Cross-posted at Feministe

‘Gosh, she’s sooo heavy!’ is not really an exclamation you want to hear uttered by someone as they lift your child onto their lap. Especially if that someone is loved and respected by your child and in a position to influence her. And when you are a fat mother, and a feminist, and that person is a relative (whom you love, but don’t always understand), it makes for a pretty tense moment. Which is fucked up, I realise, because my kid is heavy, and remarking on it shouldn’t be any different to remarking on her eye colour. But it is.

My daughter, for the record, is not ‘obese’ or fat. Not that I should have to state that here, since it’s not anyone’s business nor particularly relevant. (Really, I shouldn’t have to, and I’ve written and deleted that sentence multiple times, but I do state it because I know some of you are wondering and I know that, sadly, in this ridiculous climate of obesity panic and parent-blaming, it’s just going to be that way). She is, however, tall for her age and she has a large head and solid limbs. She’s strong; she has heft.

I was like that as a kid. I thought I was hu-ugely fat by the time I was a pre-teen but photographic evidence shows me that I was not. The fat came later, long after the bullying began.

People who comment on my daughter’s solidity don’t necessarily see her as fat, with all the judgement and stigma that unfortunately implies, but we know that young children are becoming increasingly vulnerable to experiencing weight messaging as a hit to their self esteem . And I know that as a fat parent, I am doubly scrutinised. The shape and weight of my child is, for some, tied directly to the strength of both my morality and my parenting skills. It’s also true that as she grows, my child will comprehend the stigma that is attached to having a body like mine and, because stigma is awful, she may fear it falling on her. Whatever kind of body she grows into, she may suffer because of other people’s lack of sensitivity and compassion, as well as the general public’s lack of real knowledge of the relationship between fat and health. That hurts to know.

I was once told that I had an obligation to become thin (as if I could just choose to be and, voila!) because my kid will grow up looking at me and thinking that fat is a way to be. As if, somehow, she would catch my fat, no matter how our family lives and eats and moves and no matter what her genetic predispositions. (This person assumed, as many do, that thin is objectively healthier and ‘better’ than fat.) Some people think children should be kept from the terrible knowledge that contented fat people exist because that would, by some sorcery, mean that the notion of fatness would never occur to them and they would always remain thin. Some people just don’t believe fat parents can possibly provide a healthy home. Some people think parents of fat children are by definition lazy or incompetent or unloving. Some people are ignorant. Some people are arseholes.

Some of those people have been in the media this past week talking about a study which, it has been widely reported, recommends that very fat children be removed from their parents and put into foster care. One of the problems with this is that the study has been widely misrepresented: have a read of this break-down by Dr Samantha Thomas if you’re interested. I’m not in the least surprised that the media haven’t been more accurate and sensitive in their handling of this ‘news story’. That’s par for the course when it comes to ‘obesity’ and they do love to parade us fatties as cautionary tales. Unfortunately, what could have been an opportunity for some serious discussions about systemic barriers to good health and the ethical problems with performing gastric banding surgery on minors, became a great big festival of fat hate with a large helping of mother blaming. Especially poor mothers, cause they’re really easy to hate on, apparently.

Opportunities for bonus misogyny aside, childhood obesity is a juicy story, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to conveniently forget the facts. In Australia at least, rates of ‘childhood obesity’ have plateaued and we’ve known that for a few years now. On the other hand, rates of body dissatisfaction and unhealthy behaviours like yo-yo dieting are increasing in young people. But it’s far easier to scapegoat parents — most often mothers who are more typically charged with cooking and shopping — than to consider some of the nuance here. There is a strong case to make for changing the story from one about ‘childhood obesity’ to one about ‘childhood poverty’ (because yeah, fat kids can be undernourished kids) but that would involve facing up to some ugly social inequality and who wants to hear about food deserts when we could see a glossy grab about how Happy Meals are killing our children, amirite?

Hyper-awareness of childhood ‘obesity’ leads to shit like the absolute violation of privacy and trust that is public weigh-ins and fat shaming in educational settings. It increases the stigmatisation and bullying of fat kids but apparently not even prominent anti-bullying advocates give a shit about that, so would should the media?. Unless the bullied fat kid ends up in a viral video, and then the mainstream media will run stories about how he responded to that bullying the wrong way.

I know some readers may see this as contradictory: one minute I’m saying that kids are everyone’s responsibility and then the next I’m saying that we shouldn’t subject them and their families to undue scrutiny! Oh my!

But actually, I ask people to care about children and young people and about mothers and parents, and that implies reserving snap judgements. I ask people to approach parents with compassion, to educate themselves enough to understand the pressures that families face, to realise that individual circumstances vary, and to recognise that systemic barriers to ‘good parenting’ and ‘lifestyle choices’ exist. This complements an acknowledgement that children have the right to live free from abuse and bullying, from undue coercion and from deprivation. And it makes it harder to keep foisting the responsibility for society-wide health concerns onto individuals.

Whatever your beliefs about fat and health (and hey, I know you’ve got ‘em), you’ve got to acknowledge that stigma is harmful. There is no value from a health-promotion perspective in further stigmatising fat people, and certainly not fat children. Most people can’t self-loathe their way to permanent thinness (and certainly not to good health). Fat hate won’t amount to a positive contribution to society, no matter how many ‘reality’ TV shows imply otherwise.

My kid is three years old and she’s already learning what it means to have a heavy body in the midst of ‘obesity’ panic. You cannot tell me that’s for her own good.

When loathing feels normal, don’t buy it.

I had a haircut for the first time in months yesterday, and that meant sitting in the feminized space that is a suburban hair salon and being offered dog-eared magazines.

I’ve never been a major consumer of women’s magazines but I was relatively familiar with them in the past; at school we shared issues of Girlfriend and Cosmopolitan around the dorms, and later I had the spare change for a glossy, gossipy bit of escapism from time to time. Even after I became so fed-up with the sexism and sizeism (and the bunch of other isms) underpinning mainstream magazines that I no longer spent money on them, I still had regular hair appointments and colleagues who’d bring stuff to thumb at lunchtime. The fashion, body, health and behavioural coding in these publications was familiar and, though I actively questioned it, insidiously normalized.

What I mean is, even though I thought it was demeaning to be presented with yet another ‘article’ on some famous woman’s weight fluctuations, on some level I accepted that kind of discourse as normal. Ubiquity lent it a sense of inevitability.

Lately there has been less time for haircuts but also, thanks to the paths blogging has led me down, an even keener media literacy when it comes to body policing and misogyny.

And I have to say, when I was confronted with publications where every cover story is – surprise! – about a woman’s weight ‘battle’, I realized how thoroughly I have moved beyond the normalization of such commentary. In fact the word that sprang to mind was ‘alien’ — these images and articles are alienating, yes, but now they also strike me as foolish, disturbing and truly bizarre.

Hyper-vigilance about the weight of not only ourselves but complete strangers is not, and happily does not need to be, normal. It is disappointing that celebrities continue to answer invasive and pointless questions about their weight, eating and exercise habits but downright infuriating that media outlets continue to demand these responses as fodder for their body-obsessed publications. And, to once again employ a word that I try to use sparingly, it is bizarre that in 2011 we accept the submission to such scrutiny as a normal part of a famous woman’s job.

I used to flick through those magazines with either disdain, vague envy or mild annoyance. Yesterday I chose not to even glance through more than a few pages. I was bored by the same old conflicting and constraining messages. Excluded by the homogeneity. Confused by the failure of the media to find new, modern discourses.

But mostly I felt happy. I no longer need to perform the standard magazine flick-through as part of my engagement with femininity or fashion. I know what those publications are offering, I know I don’t want it, and I know where to look for what I do want.

This doesn’t mean I don’t consider the media to have a responsibility to represent diversity and consider body image concerns (they do, and they’re failing to live up to it much of the time). We need change. Saying ‘if you don’t like it don’t buy it!’ is a pretty disingenuous approach to the problems of sexist and body-shaming media.

But yesterday was a reminder that I personally don’t like it, so I don’t buy it. I don’t emulate it by policing the bodies of others, famous or otherwise. And that feels pretty good, actually.

I am not your cautionary tale

In some ways fat bodies are our current culture’s dumping ground for fear and loathing: we are the go-to places for thrashing out anxiety about consumption and excess, death and disease, work ethic and individual responsibility, boundaries and restraint, ugliness and beauty. Fat bodies are politicised — even politicians literally use fat as short-hand for bad, wrong, excessive. Fat bodies are ridiculed, dehumanised, demonised and charged with meaning.

All of this is, perhaps, largely academic. I’m a fat activist, of sorts, but most days I’m not overtly doing activism. Most days I’m buying bread and milk and taking my daughter to playdates and watching Dexter and, you know, living.

Except my life is lived in this body, which is fat, and when I am buying my bread and milk etc. I am visibly fat and when I am existing I am inhabiting a politicised body.

Today writer John Birmingham had a column in the Brisbane Times about The Biggest Loser. He gave this nod to fat acceptance:

Obesity is an intensely politicised topic… Traducing someone’s character, or mocking them for their weight, isn’t far removed from doing the same things on the basis of their skin color or ethnic background. Grown-ups should be above it.

He also mischaracterised the fat acceptance movement, I think, as angry and somehow ‘dangerous’ as well as misguided about health. But that’s not what I want to write about. What struck me most about his piece was the admission that he views the “freakshow” elements of The Biggest Loser as useful parenting tools.

I wanted [my kids] to feel disgust at the carefully calibrated circus presented for us by the program’s producers. Why? Because as a parent fresh fruit, oatmeal for breakfast, drinking lots of water, and playing sport rather than Nintendo DS, is a hell of a hard sell. The grotesque obesity on display in Biggest Loser makes explaining the benefits of good nutrition and exercise that much easier. Harsh and ugly, but true.

You know, I have some sympathy for Birmingham’s position as a parent who is trying to instill healthful habits in children who are presumably bombarded with “junk food” advertising and the lure of screen time, like the rest of us. Bean is very active, in touch with her natural appetite, and in love with the existence of fresh fruit but she is also not-yet-three and so I willingly accept that what has been a breeze for me may require more conscious effort in coming years (although I am of course hoping that our early approach will continue to help Bean have a healthy and peaceful relationship with food and activity as she grows). I certainly don’t feel that modeling any kind of body-shaming — of her body or others’ — will ever form part of my parenting strategy. Fat-shaming children is harmful and I know I could never be convinced otherwise, despite how hard I work not to be overly judgmental about the parenting decisions of others.

But, to be frank, I find it quite chilling that the “grotesque obesity” played up for the cameras on ‘reality’ TV could be masquerading as a fable for children in homes across the world. Look kids, you don’t want to be so big and wobbly and disgusting that they put you on television, do you? Chilling because it normalises fat stigma and body shame (wouldn’t it be better to normalise diversity and acceptance?) but also because it is a reminder, to me, that some people are looking at me and feeling grateful that they aren’t like me and fearful that they could be.

I am a walking cautionary tale.

When I raised this concern with John Birmingham on Twitter, his response was

Maybe it’s not about you.

Obviously, his piece was about The Biggest Loser, a particular kind of “freakshow”. Me going to the shops to buy my bread and milk? Not so freakshowish, admittedly. But I am still there, I am still visible, I still jiggle, I still have a double chin, I still look fat enough to be a folk devil.

Fatshion bloggers sometimes find their images reblogged as thinspiration by people who are engaging in disordered eating and looking for fodder to increase their fears of becoming fat. People in public places like swimming pools snark and gossip about fat bodies around them and barely feel the need to disguise their disgust. A friend on Twitter, Jennifer Gearing, mentioned this afternoon that Birmingham’s article “reminds me of time stranger told his 5-6yo she didn’t want Maccas or she’d look like me.” That’s right, children, fear and pity that fatty over there, and thank your lucky stars it’s not you.

There are so many problems with taking that approach with children. (I shan’t list them all but, um, how about these: what if your child grows up fat? what if your child develops an eating disorder? what if your child becomes a rude and judgemental body-snarker?) One really big loser of a problem is that the fatty over there is a human being. The fatty on your television screen is a human being. Human beings have emotions and a need to be treated with respect. We also have diverse histories and reasons for being the sizes that we are; we have individual stories that you can’t read from just looking at us.

My fat body is not your punch line, it is not your entertainment, it is not your grotesque freakshow, it is not your life-lesson.

I happen to think that many kids could learn a thing or two from people like me, beyond a cautionary tale. But until our culture starts valuing people for what they have to give and not what they (apparently) have to lose, a lot of people will fail to see that.

And exploiting that failure to see human beings instead of “the obese” isn’t edgy and it isn’t even productive. It just hurts.

All of us (thoughts on fat acceptance)

Some of us don’t feel like we can trust our bodies, or feel that our bodies don’t look as we wish they would, and never will.

Some of us feel shame when we look in a mirror, track stretch-marks with our fingers, tsk at varicose veins or acne, grasp handfuls of errant flesh, or try to straighten out a back that hunches more than we would like.

Some of us avoid mirrors.

Some of us are in great health, with good ‘numbers’ and a body that gets us through the days with ease.

Some of us eat a wide variety of foods according to our needs, shopping and cooking for freshness and flavour, crunch and juiciness, and we stop eating as soon as we feel full.

Some of us eat in a disordered way, or have been diagnosed with an eating disorder, or face food insecurity, or are afraid of eating, or prefer a narrow range of foods.

Some of us face doctors’ waiting rooms with fast heart-rates and dark kernels of anger in our bellies because of how we have been treated before, how our bodies have been held up to too-harsh light and been found wanting.

Some of us have health conditions which could be related to being “too fat”, or “too thin” — some of us feel betrayed by our bodies, or that we have betrayed them.

Some of us feel magnificent.

Some of us feel confused and uncertain about the conflicting messages we hear about health and beauty; some of us struggle to understand how the truth can be so different from what is being sold to us, and yet also so elusive.

Some of us have been told by PE teachers, parents, lovers, strangers, doctors, hairdressers, friends, that we are wrong in some way, that we do not work, that our bodies are decaying faster than other bodies, so many times, that believing otherwise is a radical choice we face daily.

Some of us are so very sure that we are doing what is best for ourselves and our bodies.

Some of us have supportive friends and family who offer us the love and acceptance we deserve.

Some of us feel isolated and alone.

Some of us carry the scars of bullying and abuse. Some of us are still bullied and abused.

Some of us feel at home in fat acceptance circles; some of us are denizens of the fatosphere, fluent in size acceptance speak, revelling in fatshion, happy to have found a tribe.

Some of us feel fraudulent, or excluded, or as if there is no place for us.

Some of us carry scars on our bodies from weight loss surgeries, side effects from weight loss drugs, or damage to our relationship with food and our bodies from dieting. Some of us simply carry the fear of being shamed for “not trying hard enough” to lose weight.

Some of us were born with bodies which do not reflect our true gender, or with a gender that is not often recognised by this world which clings to binaries. And some of us are shamed for being too fat or too thin or too something to present as feminine enough, or masculine enough.

Some of us are ill.

Some of us revel in our sexuality and have sexual partners who tell us we are beautiful.

Some of us have bodies which stay around the same weight, and which reward us with strength or fitness when we exercise. Some of us have bodies which fluctuate in weight, sometimes dramatically, sometimes because we are ill or because we are in pain.

Some of us have to face that surgery or prolonged disordered eating or allergies will prevent us from always being able to eat intuitively in a healthful way.

Some of us are disabled; still more of us will acquire disabilities in the future.

Some of us feel like the fattest person in the room every day, even if we aren’t. And sometimes some of us move in fashion industry circles or into other spaces where body-shaming cannot be avoided.

Some of us face difficult decisions about our bodies and may have little choice but to work with health professionals who do not value body diversity as much as we do.

Some of us aren’t interested in pursuing good health or longevity. Some of us want it more than anything.

Some of us are vibrant, loud, feisty.

Some of us are quiet.

Some of us struggle every day to like ourselves in a world which wants us to feel ashamed, and some days we fail.

Each one of us is brave.

Fat body, open mind

**This post discusses weight-loss dieting.

I have a fat body; I’m really great at gaining weight. My body (which has a particular genetic blueprint and at least one metabolic/hormonal disorder, some history of medications that cause weight gain, and which has lived through some interesting times) is predisposed to laying down adipose tissue and snuggling into it on a permanent basis. This is true of, well, many people, but I can only speak about myself.

Unlike a lot of fat people, I don’t have a long history of yo-yo dieting behind me. That is not to say that I never dieted or engaged in diet culture for much of my life – I did, but not with a lot of prolonged enthusiasm. I’ve known that dieting is not a long-term weight loss ‘solution’ since my early teens, when I read some stuff and started to think critically. I also like food, I don’t believe self-flagellation in the form of food deprivation is virtuous, and I also need to eat reasonable amounts regularly or I get, um, snappy. The net result of that knowledge and those characteristics was not that I magically learned how to eat competently despite all the messages I was getting from the culture surrounding me, nor was it that I didn’t gain weight, but I just wanted to put it out there: for me, serious weight-loss dieting for a prolonged period was a one-time deal. I did it once, and I ‘succeeded’, and then ‘failed’, and lived to tell about it.

Four years ago I was trying to get pregnant and not getting anywhere. I finally found a doctor who would listen to me and who sent me for testing and referred me to a specialist. (I had been repeatedly told, by other GPs, that I should ‘go on a diet’ and — my favourite — I was directed by a GP to try jogging in the form of interval training as the solution, at a time when I was already doing interval training several times a week under the guidance of my personal trainer and, um, not getting pregnant. She hadn’t asked me about what exercise I did, though, likely assuming that at my weight I must do nothing but eat doughnuts on the couch all day). It turned out that after years of symptoms I had, surprise!, a condition that caused both weight gain and low fertility. The GP’s suggestion was, surprise!, weight loss.

I began dieting in earnest. At the time, I didn’t call it a diet. In fact, I bored my friends witless talking about my not-diet. But if seeing a weight loss ‘coach’ weekly and writing down food intake in a diary and planning meals around previously-allocated serves of carbohydrates wasn’t ‘dieting’ then I’d hate to see what dieting really is.

I lost weight. Not nearly enough to put me in the ‘healthy’ BMI range, but enough that it was clearly evident. The compliments flowed. One colleague who’d never really bothered to speak to me before came bounding up to me just to tell me how wonderful I looked. Friends talked about how good it was to see me so ‘healthy’. My husband started to comment on my appearance more often. Upon hearing of my weight loss – all my clothes were too big – shop assistants flattered me enough to encourage profligate spending on clothes that they were sure would also be ‘too big for me soon’. A woman who worked at my gym talked about profiling me as a ‘success story’ for people with my health condition. At the time all of these things felt really wonderful.

I didn’t think about the fact that what facilitated my weight loss — the time and money to spend literally hours at the gym and shopping for and preparing meals each week, a body taken by surprise by rapid changes that it had not yet learned to compensate for, a workplace full of dieters who policed my food choices and passive-aggressively ‘celebrated’ my ‘success’, a degree of mental wellness that meant I didn’t require medication for my depression, a body that had not yet given birth or breastfed and experienced subsequent metabolic and lifestyle changes, a functional gall-bladder, & etc — were all transitory. Although I didn’t crash diet or yo-yo diet, I did diet, and weight-loss dieting is by its very nature temporary.

To be clear: I know that I didn’t regain all the weight (and then some) only because I stopped working with obsessive dieters or could no longer afford my ‘weight loss coach’ at the gym. Our bodies are clever, they know how to maintain the status quo and they don’t mind biding their time. Our bodies also change, age, get sick, get well; they are mutable. I’m okay with that. I’m really okay with accepting that. I’m okay with learning to derive my self-image from places other than how many kilograms I weigh compared with how many kilograms I weighed last month. So okay with it, in fact, that I work to encourage others to avoid focusing on weight. The amount of adipose tissue you carry — and most especially whether this differs markedly from some point in the past or some point in the future — is really not the most interesting or important thing about you. It doesn’t, could never, define you, or define me.

I know all of this. And yet, I still wonder what people who thought I looked so ‘healthy’ back then think of me now.  I would not wish to reunite with the colleagues who’d so lavishly praised my dieting; they’d scorn my ‘failure’, I’d cringe at their attitudes. The ‘coach’ at the gym who once wanted to profile my success barely acknowledges my greetings now; despite my evident long-term commitment to exercise, I am of no interest as a success story. Only the pursuit of thinness has worth. Only coming a little closer to a societal ideal is a story worth telling. There are ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos, but no ‘after that’ shots. The happy ending is meant to be one size fits all, and it’s not plus-sized.

But I am a success story.

Right now, I’m not as fit as I would like to be. I am not as healthy as I would like to be. I have learned, however, that I can address those things (and I am addressing them, incidentally, but all of that for another post and pending medical test results) without being unkind to myself. I choose to embrace who I am and to look myself as I am — not as society would have me wish to be — full in the face with acceptance and honesty. I choose to speak up for myself and for others and I refuse to be erased or dismissed. That — this — is my success, and it’s hard-won.

There will be some people in my life, and many strangers, who will think that aesthetically and perhaps even morally, I am worse now. I am less palatable — I’m fleshier and lumpier and, scandalously, I’m a bit loud about it. I can’t tell others what to think or feel about what they see. I can’t tell others how to feel about their own bodies. I can’t dictate what is attractive. I don’t even wish to.

All I want to do is own my own story and speak my own truth and live my own life and support others in doing the same. There are many spaces where our bodies and our feelings about them can be discussed and obviously, for me, body-positive and diet-free spaces are where I am comfortable. But mainstream body image discourse also needs to accommodate people who do not even remotely fit a societal ideal. Over-simplifying the physiology of weight and the experience of fatness, and erasing fat people not only from visual images from also from inclusion in narrative and dialogue is the current standard for fashion magazines and mainstream media. It’s easy to see why commercial interests promote that but it’s harder to understand why it is allowed to continue even in some spaces that are explicitly concerned with positive body image. Even in such spaces, people who are above an ‘average’ size and weight are frequently ignored, or even openly vilified. This isn’t okay. I am tired of being erased. I am tired of having my body type held up as synonymous with bad, wrong, lazy or ugly.

I have a fat body, and my mind accepts the reality that I have a fat body. My mind accepts that all body types, fat or thin or in between, exist and that this is okay. Unfortunately, on that front, society is still catching up.

Talking fat

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a seminar facilitated by Dr Rick Kausman, author of If Not Dieting, Then What? One of the presenters was Dr Samantha Thomas, who spoke about how public health policy makers need to consult fat people about their lived experiences, because right now the voices of people actually affected by anti-obesity campaigns are not being heard. The first presenter was Sian McLean from LaTrobe University who spoke about her work in the area of early intervention in eating disorders, through group programmes designed to tackle body dissatisfaction and negative body image. Along with Professor Susan Paxton, a member of the National Advisory Group on Body Image, Sian’s done some promising research demonstrating that it is possible to help people with low self esteem due to body image problems and that this is best done with a no-dieting approach. I agree that critical literacy to decode the body-shaming messages the media bombards us with is key, and that encouraging people to eat ‘naturally’ rather than to strict diet regimes is a really positive thing.

But, to be frank, I struggled with some aspects of this presentation. I hope you’ll indulge my thoughts here — my intention is not to pick apart the work of people who are trying to subvert cultural messages about weight and body image, but I think we need to be serious here. Fat stigma is insidious enough to exist even in positive spaces and I have to tell it how I see it.

One way to develop positive body image promoted in the ‘Set Your Body Free’ programme asked participants to face their body fears. To put themselves in situations that made them anxious (wearing bathers at the beach, for example) and to realise that they can actually survive that anxiety: that nothing bad happened to them. There is certainly some merit to that approach, in my mind — part of what fat acceptance advocates for is a kind of moral courage, a personal bravery, a willingness to ‘put yourself out there’ in order to challenge the idea that fat bodies need to be shut away. But there is always a flip side to this and that is that other people in the community do not always react positively to displays of self-confidence from those of us with bodies outside of the acceptable range. Newspaper columnists feel justified in admonishing fat women for even considering wearing bikinis. Some people hang out of car windows and make cow noises at fat people just trying to exercise, or walk from A to B. When I was a teenager, a group of girls came up to me at the local pool and told me I was ugly and had an awful body. In other words, the fear of reprisals simply for occupying a body that is fat is not all in our heads. Listening to Sian’s presentation, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the participants in these body image programmes were given the support needed to deal with outright body hatred. It seems to me that tackling body shaming and stigmatisation only amongst those who feel it, rather than in the broader community, is a pretty limited strategy. I don’t fear wearing a bikini at the beach simply because I haven’t worked out how to love myself enough yet but because there are people who honestly think I am too disgusting to live.

A lot of mainstream body image discourse centres on girls and women who do fit societal beauty ideals in a basic way but who feel as though they are impossibly ugly or (gasp) fat. That’s a problem, obviously, because extreme body dissatisfaction can lead to disordered eating and mental health problems. We can all do with a reminder from time to time that the air-brushed ideal is an steaming pile of aspirational bullshit and that real people’s bodies are actually diverse and ripe with imperfections. But I’m not like those girls and women who are ‘normal’ or ‘average’ – I’m fat. I’m fat enough that it’s not really a matter for debate. When I say, Gee I’m fat, the correct response isn’t oh, no you’re not! Because I am. And I have to say that when Sian McLean was talking about her programme’s aim of eliminating ‘fat talk’, I started to feel very uncomfortable. I felt silenced and erased.

Negative ‘Fat Talk’ is a recognised problem: so much so that there’s a ‘no fat talk week‘ happening right now. And I completely understand how, particularly amongst young women, engaging in social interactions based around body shame and diet talk is really damaging. But I don’t feel that eliminating talk about fat, erasing fat from our vocabulary, banning the labelling of bodies as fat, is the right path. Fat is not the worst thing that you can be. In implying that girls can harm themselves even by entertaining the thought that they might be fat, that they might be like me, proponents of the ‘fat talk’ ban simply reinforce the idea that there is something inherently bad about fatness. Instead of reifying the fear of fat in this way we should be changing the conversation. We should respond to ‘I feel fat today’ not by hastily switching the subject, but by talking about what that actually means. We need to talk frankly with young people about body shame and fat stigma. We need to talk in a way that acknowledges that some people really are fat and that that could possibly be okay. Because if I was a fat teenager in a programme telling me that ‘fat talk’ was psychologically harmful to my peers I’d probably feel as though my very existence was so shameful that it hurt people even to think about me. Not such a great boost for self esteem.

Last night during that first presentation I felt my own self esteem take a hit — not something I expected from a no-dieting seminar. Another method for counteracting some of the negative self-talk that study participants were engaging in was to take the practice of comparing body shape and weight with one’s peers and try to make it into an affirming, positive thing. Comparing bodies is a really insidious practice. We are socialised into it, and that socialisation doesn’t stop — in adulthood we’re still encouraged to do it by magazines and Frockwatch- style approaches. The result is competition amongst women and the constant feeling of having to measure up, keep up, put others down to stay up there. And for people who are prone to influence from the media (and which of us is not?) this can become a truly dangerous practice as the bodies we see in magazines don’t even look like actual people look. We compare ourselves with a fantasy and we always come out wanting. Tapping in to this practice, the body image programmes run by Susan Paxton and Sian McLean encouraged participants to instead compare themselves to women that they saw on the street. To bodies that existed in the real, everyday world. In fact, they asked them to stop ‘comparing up’ and instead to ‘compare down.’

There are times when I am the fattest woman on the street, the fattest woman in the room. I could easily, as the study particpants were urged to, watch ten women walk by me on the street and compare all their bodies to mine and find that rather than falling somewhere in the middle (as Sian suggested participants would), that my body falls at one end. At the big end. I’m not saying this is a particularly difficult thing for me to deal with — I’m writing about it here without qualms. But it may well be a difficult realisation for a fat teenager. It may well be devastating. And I felt that the programme was therefore erasing that potential, erasing the needs of actual fat people in promoting better body image in those who actually have socially acceptable bodies.

That irritated me, but it didn’t hurt me. What hurt me was the thought that as Sian was advocating that practice, she was forgetting that every time someone ‘compares down’ they are being critical of another human being. That human being is being used. She is boosting up others by making them think well, at least I’m not as fat/ugly/gross as her. I’ve been that scapegoat — hell, for all I know people are looking at me in the supermarket thinking that every week. People may have looked at me in the seminar last night and thought that. And there may well have been study participants in the research that was presented last night who were fat, and who know (because you know, you really do know) that others were looking at them and cheerfully comparing down. Building themselves up by thinking Phew! It could be worse!

That’s problematic not only because it’s hurtful to people, not only because it erases the lived experience of stigmatised fat people, but because it’s ineffective as a tool for ending body shame. I know because I used to think that way too. I used to think, at least I’m not that fat. And you know what? Then I became that fat. I became that thing that I had loathed. Weight gain is a reality that just might happen to any of the people who are meant to be helped by learning to ‘compare down’ and where will that leave their body image then?

Body image advocates really must tell us to cut the comparisons, not normalise the practice. We need to see that diversity is a good in itself, to know that there is not objective way of judging which bodies are better, to accept that beauty can be found in all kinds of physiques, to realise that aesthetic values are not absolutes and they do not define us.

Programmes that are still underpinned by a fear of fat are always going to silence and erase some people and can never really get to the heart of where body shame is coming from.

We really don’t need to end fat talk. We need to change the conversation.

Sometimes the bastards do grind you down

A lot of people really hate fat people.

Sometimes I forget that because it’s rare for me to experience outright hostility.

One of the reasons, perhaps, that we persistently associate bullying with ‘schoolyard’ antics, even though it is so much more than that, is that past childhood people are more invested in managing their behaviour to suit others, and that means sticking to certain types of language and expression in ‘polite company.’ Calling someone a fat bitch and telling hir to get off the couch and stop eating chips is generally off the ‘polite company’ register. I try not to think about the fact that this doesn’t mean people aren’t thinking horrible things about me, or about friends of mine, and sometimes I even forget.

Until the next troll.

Bloggers ignore trolls, and laugh at them, and make them into delicious friendly banter and celebration (nom nom) and yell at them and ignore them some more. And still they come.

They come because they feel perfectly entitled to. They come because articles like this are still printed every day, articulating fat-phobia, giving body-shame license to thrive, providing a forum for anonymous fat-haters to spew forth their vitriol. And then they spread like a plague of poorly-constructed sentences to fat acceptance blogs and sometimes to here. But the only thing that really separates much of the trolling I receive from ‘journalism’ like this is liberal use of profanity and a few more spelling errors.

I can, and do, hit the delete button for trolls. But I can’t delete all the fat hate in the world and some days it’s just too much to bear.

***
If you’re getting around with thin privilege (that is, if you’re not fat) and you’re about to tell me to just ignore the haters or nevermind the trolls or it’s how you feel about yourself that counts or their opinions don’t matter or it’s not that bad there are worse things or sticks and stones or no one can make you feel bad if you don’t let them, please have a read here and here first, okay?

Talking about diet talk

I don’t want to know about your diet. I don’t want to know how many calories you’ve eaten today, or plan to eat tomorrow. I don’t want to know if you lost 500g last week, or put on 3 kg over the holidays. I don’t want to know if Zumba classes have helped you ‘drop two kilos in a week’.

Basically, I don’t give a shit.

This does not mean that I don’t care about you — if you’re my friend, I most certainly do care about you. If you’re a decent human being reading this blog, I care about you too. And if health is a concern to you, I care about that: I care about how you feel about your health, and your body. I probably even care how far you rode your bike on the weekend, if you feel good about that, and whether Zumba classes are as fun and energising as the people at my gym seem to think they are. I probably even care whether that gluten-free diet that you hoped would help with some unpleasant symptoms you’ve been having is working out for you. I just don’t particularly want to know if you were wearing your pre-baby jeans while you baked those gluten-free snacks, or not, and I definitely don’t want to know how many kilojoules are in a portion of those gluten-free chips you’re offering me and for crying out loud don’t tell me how many minutes on the StairMaster that equals.

Because, remember, I don’t give a shit.

Don’t bring your diet talk to me, because

• It’s boring and tedious and cross-making. I get it from everywhere else – TV, magazines, colleagues at work who I (sadly) can’t stab with plastic forks to make them stop, even the doctor. Being on the diet hamster-wheel might feel like a club or it might just feel normal to you, but it’s not a club I want to be in and it’s not normal to me. Don’t expect me to go there.
• It’s offensive to talk to me about losing five kilos to be in a ‘healthy weight range’ when I would ‘need’ to lose forty. It’s offensive to talk about how gross your fat is, how ‘bad’ you are for eating, how desperately you want to keep from gaining too much weight in pregnancy, when you are standing right beside a fat person. You may not mean to disparage my body in pointing out the ‘flaws’ in your own, but you do. So don’t.
• Diets don’t work. The diet industry makes billions off of a completely flawed process and it thrives on the magical thinking of dieters the world over. Don’t buy that bullshit – or rather, if you want to buy that bullshit for yourself, that’s up to you, but don’t ask me to do the same. I won’t. And I won’t build you up for doing it.
• Don’t tell me that ‘diet talk’ and ‘health talk’ are the same thing. Don’t tell me that disallowing diet talk on my blog (or discouraging it in face-face conversation or unfollowing all the people on Twitter who start tweeting their daily calorie counts) is the same as saying I don’t care about health. It’s not the same. Want to tell me how great you feel since you’ve started running? Knock yourself out. Want to tell me how you’re concerned about your knees, and how you want to find a healthy approach to strengthening them and improving your body’s functionality? Fine by me. That’s not insulting your body, or mine, and it’s not asking me to approve the practice of dieting for the purpose of weight loss that is anathema to my beliefs. ‘I think I need some more vitality: I should be more active’ =/= ‘my fat arse disgusts me, I’m forcing myself to go to the gym’. Geddit?

I’ve written before about how critics of FA accuse us of ‘giving up’. Other critics accuse us of excluding people, or of damaging the movement by imposing too many rules or by denying bodily autonomy by spouting ‘thou shalt not diet’ dogma. I don’t think that’s actually reflective of what fat acceptance is about.

To me, ‘diet talk’ is not the same as ‘talking about diets’. That is, sometimes, you might want to talk about your past experiences with engaging in intentional weight loss, or you might want to talk about how seductive those diet ads are, or you might want to talk about how you’ve considered (or undergone) weight loss surgery and want to reconcile those feelings of desperation or negativity with a desire to feel better about your body and to be healthy. That’s okay. Provided you don’t frame that talk with ‘all fat is bad, therefore my fat is bad’, I don’t see a problem with it. Likewise, you might want to talk about your diet in the true sense of the word: you might want to talk about the kinds of foods you eat and your eating habits. You might even want to talk about changing them, about attaining greater eating competence. Again, that’s okay – where the end goal isn’t weight loss and where the focus is on things like ‘I’d like to eat more whole foods’ rather than ‘I’m going to cut 500 kilojoules a day out of my diet’ then that kind of talk may well be very closely aligned to Health At Every Size and very compatible with fat acceptance.

Anyone engaging with fat acceptance probably has a complex relationship with their body and most likely, a history of dieting. Most people – particularly women – in the ‘Western world’ do. Hence, we’re all learning and there are always going to be people at different stages of self-acceptance engaging with the movement. That’s okay – but there are also very good reasons why FA blogs are usually free from diet talk of any kind. 99.9% of spaces are open to your diet talk, to your discussion of how much better off you’d be if you lost weight: in fact, unless you are very thin the likelihood is that most of the time you are actively encouraged to talk about yourself that way (and if you are thin, the likelihood is you’re actively encouraged to say other negative things about yourself, like how you wished you were ‘curvier’). FA blogs are spaces where no one will tell you to ‘lose weight’ (or get curvier) as a cure for whatever emotional or physical problem ails you. They are spaces where people never feel stigmatised or demonised for their fat, whether they are ‘healthy’ or not, whether they have dieted in the past, or not. Respecting that is not only decent, but it’s vital to the movement. Fat acceptance is setting up an alternative paradigm about bodies and how we view weight – it makes no sense to ask FA bloggers to host commentary that reflects the dominant discourse about fat rather than our own views. But it does make sense to ask that fat acceptance embraces diversity, including diverse viewpoints (unless they are damaging to the core values of the movement or otherwise hurtful). It also makes sense to acknowledge the fact that many fat people and other potential FA supporters are dieters or weight-loss surgery patients or people recovering from eating disorders. My relationship with my body and my health is not perfect and I have days and weeks when I indulge in the fantasy of being thin(ner). To imply otherwise, or to ask that people exclude themselves until they reach some kind of magical plane of perfect body-acceptance would be ridiculous (which is why FA doesn’t actually do that).

Many fat activists also identify as feminists and in my opinion the most important tenet that those two movements have in common is a core belief in bodily autonomy. Advocating for fat acceptance is about asking for freedom from oppression and prejudicial treatment. It’s also about asking for respect as a human being: if I want to eat that cupcake, I will eat it because that is my right, regardless of how others may wish to police my fat body and the behaviours they perceive to have ’caused’ my fatness. It only makes sense, therefore, to say that if you don’t want to eat that cupcake (or whichever food it is), that’s your right too. If you want to calculate how many calories are in the cupcake before deciding whether you can eat it? Fair enough. Your right. Body and food policing are not on my agenda, and that goes for thin bodies and dieting bodies too. (Note the huge difference between ‘I don’t support that’ and ‘I want to ban that’.)

But, the thing is, in our culture dieting is an activity that is hugely popular and normalised and which is heavily promoted not only by industry but also government agencies, the media, cultural tropes… everything, basically. We don’t need a dieting acceptance movement.

Acknowledging that we need fat-friendly spaces where people can thrash-out their feelings around lingering body shame, confusion over health messages or internalised fears and hatred is not the same as saying that FA should allow diet talk. Similarly, claiming that FA must accept the practice of weight-loss dieting in order to be more inclusive is a bit like saying that feminism should accept misogyny in order to get more support. Most people have internalised misogyny: that’s something that feminists acknowledge and attempt to deal with within themselves and within the movement. Similarly, most people have internalised body-shame and there is no use in pretending that we don’t.

But on the days when I start engaging in negative self-talk about my body and think about jumping on that weight loss hamster wheel? Those are the days when FA spaces which explicity disallow diet talk are the most valuable of all. This is because everywhere else I am vulnerable to being told ‘yes, you should just lose weight to solve your problems’ (nevermind the fact that permanent weight loss is not currently attainable for 95% of people). Everywhere else I am vulnerable to being judged on how I look and held to unattainable standards of body size. I am vulnerable to being seduced into thinking that a diet or other ‘quick fix’ measure – rather than sustainable healthful behaviours which may or may not result in a change in body weight – will improve my health and well-being. I’m vulnerable to that because we all are: the conditioning is so powerful as to be almost impossible for many people to transcend. That’s why FA is so frightening and even offensive to some people. It challenges some of the core beliefs we have formed about ourselves.

As Marianne Kirby aptly says, The response to “I hate my body” should never be “Have you considered weight loss?”

That does not for a second mean that if you are considering, or engaging in, intentional weight loss you are a bad or stupid person, or that you are not welcome here or that you will automatically be excluded by the fat acceptance movement. It simply means that the core to fat activism and positive body image promotion is acceptance. It’s not mandatory to be kind to yourself all of the time, but if you want to engage in fat acceptance, you’ve got to try. You’ve got to be able to draw a connection between your fear or hatred of your own fat and what that says about the place of fat people in society, and work on finding ways to change attitudes – even your own. If you want to engage with fat acceptance you don’t have to have all the answers and you certainly don’t have to believe that I or any other person has all the answers! You just have to be prepared to go looking for them outside of the dominant messages we get from diet culture.

And that might mean taking the time to stop talking about your weight loss efforts for a minute so you can listen to what the alternative is offering you.

—–

This is quite the thorny issue, so I’ve included some thoughts from others on the place (or otherwise) of dieting in fat acceptance – if you’ve got other links, feel free to drop them in the comments.

Low Fences: why yes, FA is difficult The Rotund was involved in a recent tweetsplosion about this issue and here are some of her thoughts.

Why I’m not against dieting This post by Fatuosity is interesting in its own right, and it also generated some engaging discussion in comments.

The elephant (so to speak) in the room This post at Shapely Prose outlines why FA and diet culture (not individual dieters) aren’t compatible.