Beauty is kind of like health

The comments section of one of Ragen Chastain’s posts segued off into a criticism of any discussion of beauty.

beauty should not be a factor at all in movements like Fat/Size Acceptance. A woman should not have to identify as curvy, hot, sexy or beautiful to be accepted in Fat/Size Acceptance and this is what the movement is today

and

Still by stating that everyone is beautiful you are setting the grounds that being beautiful, a person’s looks are the most important thing about them. That the perception of beauty is the number one thing we need to change about the opponents of fat people.

Fat Acceptance spends most of the day on Facebook and Tumblr saying “you are beautiful” “Thanks and you are beautiful too”. That is not much better than the fat haters that say no fat person is beautiful or handsome.

Beauty is a outside issue that Fat Acceptance spends entirely too much time on, instead of dealing with Fat Issues.

First, I don’t know what Fat Acceptance sites the commenter is following where people sit around and tell each other they’re beautiful all day. If you look at the Fatosphere Feed right now, here’s what you’ll see:

• a post about depression
• a post about Star Wars filk
• Body Love Wellness’s yearly roundup post
• one post that talks about taking up space and being under constant public scrutiny
• one about the medical challenges fat, older women face during pregnancy
• an FA Christmas gift list
• my completely non-fat-related post about the Newtown massacre
• a post about the mixed messages given to fat people exercising

Take out the ones that aren’t specifically fat-related, and you’re left with 5 posts, only 2 of which have the slightest reference to beauty (the gift list and the Body Love Wellness roundup), and neither of which focus exclusively on it.

That doesn’t sound like an exclusive or overwhelming focus to me.

Yes, beauty is a thing that gets talked about in FA spaces. Sometimes in a warm, fuzzy “appreciate the beauty in everybody” way, other times criticizing the way women are judged so completely on their looks. I mean, I found “You don’t have to be pretty” through an FA blog. I don’t remember which one, possibly several.

I agree with some of the concern—that it’s easy to overvalue beauty and to buy into the idea that physical attractiveness is one of the primary goals people should strive for, especially if you’re a woman. We should recognize beauty as a nice thing but not a necessary one, and an optional one, not a duty.

But at the same time, freaking nowhere in FA do I see women “have to identify as curvy, hot, sexy, or beautiful” to be accepted. I think I recall, way back when, on Shapely Prose, some disagreement on someone calling herself ugly, because people have the same “oh my gosh, no you’re not!” reaction to “I’m ugly” that they do to “I’m fat.” And even in that discussion, I’m pretty sure it was widely accepted that beauty does not determine anybody’s value as a human being.

I think talking about beauty standards is valuable in FA for a lot of the same reasons that talking about health is valuable. Neither of them should be viewed as a prerequisite for being treated decently, but they’re both things that our fat-hating culture is busy telling us that we can’t have, and that we’re worthless because we don’t have. I really think the message of FA should be the same towards health and beauty both: neither is relevant to your worth as a person, both have value, and being fat does not disqualify you from either.

We’re allowed to be nuanced and multifaceted in response to cultural bullshit. It’s perfectly reasonable to say “That’s not true *and* it’s not relevant,” to messages like “Fat people are ugly” or “Fat people are sick.” Saying “That’s not true,” should not automatically make people assume that we’re agreeing that the statement is relevant.

Another aspect of this is that people as a whole are, unfortunately, pretty shallow. People who are viewed as attractive are more likely to be hired, more likely to be promoted, more likely to be viewed as smart or good. And looks discrimination is part of fat discrimination. It’d be an awfully hollow victory to have weight declared a protected class but to have “I didn’t refused to hire them because they’re fat; I didn’t hire them because they’re ugly,” be an airtight defense to accusations of weight discrimination.

So I see nothing wrong with trying to widen our definition of physical attractiveness at the same time that we challenge the notion that beauty has the slightest thing to do with worth as a person or is something we owe those around us. Just like I see nothing wrong with pointing out the errors and logical inconsistencies related to fat and health at the same time we challenge the notion that health has the slightest thing to do with worth as a person or is something we owe those around us.

Holidays and Body Image

I just got back from visiting my parents for Christmas. It’s over seven hours’ drive between our place and theirs, so we don’t see them nearly as much as I’d like. I had a fantastic Christmas in pretty much every respect except the fact that I didn’t go to church. (Yes, I am a slacker. Yes, I have one excellent idea for a New Year’s Resolution, not that I ever actually keep those.)

My dad always makes a ton of food, because he loves feeding people. And there were no comments about this or that food being “bad” or judgment about who was eating what. Well, we did give my brother a little grief over his love of stuffing, but not in a “You shouldn’t eat that” kind of way. More in a “pass the stuffing to him *last* so the rest of us get some” way. And I ate what I wanted, not to the point of feeling gross or overfull afterwards.

And my mom, when she asked what size I wear for clothing gifts, didn’t say anything negative about the fact that I need a plus size. She just went out and bought me a gorgeous sweater (which I love).

I feel really blessed that my holidays weren’t a weight-related minefield, like so many people’s are.

It made me a little wistful to look at all the old family photos and see myself five, or ten, or twenty years ago. I thought of myself as a fat girl in high school, but when I look at my homecoming pictures, I see someone who’s a pretty average size. Kind of chubby arms, and a round face, but not what you would call fat. Probably wearing a size 14 at the time, so very average. And the pictures of me in college, I’d actually call thin, although I never felt that way at the time.

It’s strange to look at pictures that don’t reflect what felt like reality. But then, it’s not like I manufactured that feeling of “too fat” in my own head. That was what bullies said to me (among other insults, of course) all through later elementary and junior high school. I got called a whale, and all the usual insults. And my parents tried to help me with my “weight problem” and encouraged me when I dieted, and when I lost weight. So even when I wasn’t fat, I was viewed that way. But when I look back at actual pictures, I see a slender child become a chubby young teenager, then an average teen and a slender young woman (who then became an average, then chubby, then fat woman, helped by both regain after dieting and my thyroid throwing in the towel).

It seems like the negative messages are always louder and more prevalent than the positive ones. I’m sure I heard, implicitly or explicitly, that I was fat, or ugly, or weird, or gross, much more often than I heard that I was beautiful, or special, or loveable. Which is not to say that my parents messed up my self-esteem. Heck, my mom always had plenty of positive, encouraging things to say to me–they were just drowned out by the overwhelming onslaught of negative. The fact that I emphasized and magnified the negative and took it to heart, while discarding most of the positive, didn’t help.

I also think this ties into sexism. Our culture spends so much time teaching girls that their only value is a very narrow sort of beauty and that they can never be pretty enough, so of course when you’re told you don’t meet the standard, it hurts worse, and it sticks with you.

I didn’t mean for this to be such a depressing post, because I had a wonderful Christmas and am still having a fantastic vacation. But remembering how much I used to hate myself for not looking the way I thought I was supposed to look, well, it just seems sad. So much wasted time, so much needless pain. And I think that if we could figure out how to build a culture that doesn’t teach people, particularly girls, to hate themselves, that would be pretty awesome.

On Speaking Up

I really have trouble speaking my mind, especially around people who I know will disagree with my opinions or think less of me for them. In working with my awesome nutritionist, I realized that I tend to deflect or shy away from conversations about fat or politics, or anything else where I know I have an “out-there” opinion.

Problem is, everywhere I go, I have an “out-there” opinion. I’m a liberal in a conservative county, a fat acceptance advocate in a dieting world, and a feminist Christian.*

Part of my reluctance comes from bad experiences with people proselytizing. For their religion, their diet, their politics, it doesn’t much matter which, it all leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

So, I’m looking for the balance. Not hiding my light under a bushel, but not shining it in people’s eyes either.

So, I’m taking baby steps. I linked my blog to my twitter account (my twitter no longer has my real name, but I certainly have twitter friends who know me in real life–I’d like to keep a little separation between my “personal” online life and my “professional” one.)

I e-mailed my church explaining why the comment from last week’s service was so problematic.

I e-mailed the commissioners of the next county over about their proposed breed-specific regulations, and I’ll be attending the meeting where it’s discussed. Maybe some time I’ll write a post about what breed-specific laws have in common with fat hate. There are similar over-generalizations and disregard for experience (and often scientific studies) in both, and a similar focus on quick fixes.

*How much of an issue that last is depends enormously on the denomination, of course. At the church I grew up in, *huge* issue. At an interfaith church whose main pastor is a Southern Baptist, it tends to be an issue some of the time. At Quaker meetings, much less so.

Reasons Aren’t Excuses

A trolly comment that crops up pretty much any time the difficulty of losing weight, or impediments to eating healthy, or fat acceptance as a whole is discussed–”But you’re just making excuses!” To which my most coherent response is usually “Thbbbbbbbbbbbbpt!” (that is, a big old raspberry)

Sure, I could explain and give evidence and cite studies and provide counter-examples, but they’re never going to be good enough. If someone is sincerely curious about my individual situation and how I ended up the weight I am without stuffing my face with donuts at every conceivable opportunity, maybe I’ll share. But not only are trolls not worth my–or anybody’s–time, I think trying to explain is conceding and doing ourselves a disservice.

To me, an “excuse” is an explanation for not doing something you’re obligated and expected to do. The note from home explaining that you were too busy puking your guts out to come to school, that’s an excuse. Because you’re supposed to show up.

I don’t need an excuse for not dieting. I looked at my available options and made the decision, as a grown-up, that dieting was a bad choice for me.

I don’t need an excuse if I don’t exercise on a given day, or if I eat a cookie, because I’m not obligated to meet someone else’s unreasonable standard. I’m not even obligated to defend my view of the standard as unreasonable.

I don’t have excuses for being fat, I just am. The days I exercise, I don’t need an excuse for not running instead of walking, or not going three miles instead of one, or not getting up to a higher speed on the bike. The days I decide I don’t feel like it, I also don’t need an excuse. As the person who lives in my body, I’m the one who gets to decide how to meet its needs.

Every day, people make decisions. They weigh the pros and cons and they do what works for them at the time. Other people are entitled to their opinions on those decisions, but they’re not entitled to expect anyone to actually *care* about those opinions. You’re entitled to your opinion; I’m entitled to ignore it. Just as you’re entitled to ignore my opinion about your life and your decisions.

When you try to defend your life and your choices, you’re ceding the other person authority that they don’t really have. You’re implicitly saying that they do get to tell you what to do. There might be times when explaining your reasons is useful, but I think it’s important not to let jerks and fat-haters set the tone by trying to prove that our reasons and choices are valid when we’re accused us of “making excuses.” The answer to that accusation is, “I don’t answer to you.” It should probably be phrased more politely than that to family members and friends than to random buttheads who troll FA blogs, but the point is the same: This is my life, not yours, and I have to choose how to live it.

Skinny People Who Need to Shush*

So, I mentioned Debra’s Just Maintaining to someone I know, talking about the intense exercise regiment she goes through every day to maintain her weight. She gets up at 4:30 in the morning to work out hard and fast, doing almost an hour of aerobics with 20-30 pounds of weight. (I think I actually misquoted how much she works out.) He said, “You know how else she could keep weight off? Stop eating so much.” I think my jaw may actually have dropped. If you read the blog, you know she eats 1600-2000 calories a day, carefully portioned out and strictly measured. This is the number she’s tweaked deliberately to make sure she doesn’t get so hungry that she feels the need to binge, or so full that her body has a chance to create fat stores. She describes it as “spend[ing] the day ice skating on a single blade at the edge of hunger.” Stop eating “so much” indeed.

But this guy is naturally very thin. He’s one of those people that it’s easy to be jealous of if you’re not happy with your own body, because he’s built like a runner and yet seems to eat everything in sight. It’s easy to assume sometimes that your body works the way everyone else’s does, that if you can eat 2500 or 2800 calories in a day and be skinny, that a fat person must eat much more than that. If he spends an afternoon at my house and drinks two full-sugar sodas, he probably thinks I drink four or five a day. (I might drink one in a day, and only if I’ve run out of diet, or at least caffeine-free diet like Sierra Mist or Slice.)

This is why when people honestly describe what they eat, they aren’t believed. The doctor or nutritionist or random internet know-it-all may be judging based on their own body, not realizing or accepting that bodies are different. The people preaching “calories in, calories out” ignore a zillion variables to make that seem like a simple equation. How many calories does your body actually wring out of the food it takes in? What’s your body temperature and energy level? And at what point does your body go into a panicked starvation state and start burning muscle for energy? It’s not anywhere near as simple as it looks.

*This is not in any way meant to rag on skinny people in general, just on a particular behavior I’ve seen from some people.

Thinness Is Not a Religious Duty

Kataphatic’s post about dieting as an anti-gospel really resonated with me.

And then I read this, a devotional about how taking care of your body (by which the author mostly means losing weight) is a spiritual discipline. The author starts with a statistic about how many people are “obese” and how many people will die of chronic diseases “due to being overweight.”

First off, there is not a single disease that fat people get that thin people don’t. Not heart disease, not diabetes, not anything. Weight is a risk factor, not a 100% certain cause. And for things like thyroid issues, PCOS, and other diseases, it’s neither a cause nor a risk–it’s a symptom. But we assume, automatically, that if Person X is fat and Person X died from Disease Y, fat caused disease Y.

“Your body is God’s temple. If you were walking down the street and saw some gang vandalizing a church, you’d do something about it, right? When you don’t take care of your body, you are vandalizing God’s temple.”

Wow. Just wow. The body as a temple, sure, I won’t argue with that. But we’re equating eating a donut or failing to go for a jog with throwing a rock through a stained glass window. Seriously. Not. On. The. Same. Level.

You want to talk about vandalizing God’s temple? How about skipping lunch day in and day out? How about walking a mile or three in dress shoes, wrecking your heels and ankles? How about gall stones, or ruining your metabolism?

Also, the idea of a religious duty to be healthy is all kinds of problematic, because it creates the idea that if you’re sick, it’s your fault. Oh, and not only did you fail yourself, you failed God. That attitude reminds me of nothing so much as Job’s so-called friends telling him how his troubles are his own fault, and he must have offended God in some way. This article seems to imply the same of people with diabetes or heart disease, that they’ve offended God, and ill health is some kind of divine punishment for eating “sinful” foods.

What makes conflating religion and the pressure to be thin so dangerous is that believing that God wants you to do something can thoroughly side-track your common sense. That’s not a bad thing, in and of itself. Common sense helps you interact with the here-and-now physical world, and faith goes beyond that. I mean, it wouldn’t have gone real well for Noah’s family if he’d been focused on the likelihood of that amount of rain falling, instead of getting his tail in gear on the construction and rounding up critters.

But when the message isn’t actually from God, that same derailing of logic can have awful consequences. Even without religious reasons, people do really dumb things to try to be thin. Make it a religious duty, and the potential for self-harm just increases.

One other thing about the “body as a temple” metaphor. I’m not finding the reference right now (it’s somewhere in 1 Kings, I think), but if I recall correctly, God was supposed to have told Solomon what the dimensions were supposed to be, what the building materials were supposed to be, and how it was to be laid out. To me, there’s a huge parallel there with the fact that body size is largely genetic. God sets the size and composition for each human temple too. And if the body is a temple, is it respectful to the builder to try to force it into another shape from what he created? Sure, we try to change our bodies in all kinds of ways, to fight nature for all sorts of reasons. Some good, some bad, some pretty much neutral. But I don’t think you can use “your body is a temple” to argue that everyone should view thinness as a religious discipline without addressing the issue of whether God *wants* his temples remodeled to human specifications, and probably damaged in the process.

Calorie-Counting for the Pre-K Crowd…Why?

Katja at Family Feeding Dynamics posted this about cutesy little coloring pages for kids to “teach” them about “nutrition,” at her local farmer’s market by having them circle the “healthiest” choice, that is the one with the fewest calories. They’re supposed to pick the half cup of fruit, not the same thing with EVIL, UNHEALTHY additions like…fruit juice…or (gasp) yogurt! Thirty-six whole calories difference between the “healthiest” choice and the “least healthy” one. I mean, it’s not like kids are growing or need calories for brain development or anything. Or like lots of parents would be thrilled to have their kids happily eat a fruit cup with yogurt and orange juice.

Why why WHY would you want to teach little kids this stuff? Not just the standard line that cookies are bad and everybody needs to exercise more, but full-on disordered eating where TWO FREAKING TABLESPOONS of LIGHT YOGURT is a danger to be avoided. At this rate, I’m gonna get my recommended daily allotment of exercise just rolling my eyes.

Beautiful You

I hear this song all the time on Christian radio, and I want so very much to like it. The first verse is fantastic.

Little girl fourteen flipping through a magazine, Says she wants to look that way
But her hair isn’t straight, her body isn’t fake, and she’s always felt overweight

I remember feeling that way at fourteen. And at sixteen. And at twenty. And every now and again at twenty-nine, though it’s getting better. I think those couple lines beautifully sum up how hard it is to be an average-looking girl in a world where we’re bombarded with unrealistic beauty all the time. I like the way the “her body isn’t fake” bit alludes to silicone and airbrushing—the girl in the magazine doesn’t really look that way either.

I also like how it says that the title girl has always *felt* overweight. We don’t know if she’s fat or not, and that ambiguity lets fat girls and thin girls alike relate to her. It also hints at the way nobody can ever be thin enough to feel like she’s beautiful.

I’m even more in love with the end of that first verse:

…you were made with such care your skin your body and your hair Are perfect just the way they are”

Not just “beauty is on the inside,” but your body is perfect and beautiful as-is, flaws and all. We aren’t told this nearly enough, women especially and young girls most of all.
But when we get to the second verse is when I start to have severely mixed feelings. “Little girl twenty-one” annoys me because a female 21-year old is a woman, not a girl. And the “things that [she’s] already done” seem to consist largely of sex. Why is it always sex that’s the biggest, most horrible sin there is? Not lying or cruelty or greed—always sex, especially for a woman.

And we’ve got two guys in this scenario, both pretty stereotypical. Her current boyfriend, who’s just using her for sex, and the mythical guy who’s out there somewhere and “will love [her] for the jewel [she is].” There’s a lot of problematic stuff there.

First off, what if she doesn’t find True Love Guy? In a song that tries to build young women up, it bugs me to see the subtle implication that her worth and happiness should be dependent on finding a guy to love her.

Secondly, the song comes off as patronizing—a combination of referring to a grown woman as a little girl and the slut-shaming, I think. That it’s sung by a guy only adds to that effect—we have a man standing in a position of authority, telling the little girl woman how to fix her life.

I still want to like this song. I’m all about the body positivity and the message of forgiveness; I just don’t need a bunch of sexist tropes alongside that. (This is not to rag on the songwriter, by the way—there’s a lot there that I like. But the problematic stuff is worth talking about.)

That first post

So, I have a blog. This is the result of reading a lot, thinking a lot, and wanting to join the discussions that are going on in the blogosphere. And, you know, not spam my Facebook with political rants, because it really annoys me when people do that.

This is going to be a feminist & fat-accepting blog for sure. I’ll talk about what that means to me personally, but for more info on the concepts in general, there’s a feminism 101 blog and Kate Harding’s Don’t You Realize Fat is Unhealthy post will give you a good background.

I also want to tie this in with my religious beliefs. I don’t think being a Christian and being a feminist are in any way mutually exclusive. That central principle of equality is actually, you know, Biblical. And yet, I see so much done in the name of God that makes me want to facepalm.

So, welcome to the party. More to follow soon…