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.

Gender and God

So, I went to church this morning, for the start of a sermon series called “The Secret of the Sexes.” I winced a little when I saw that, because I was expecting it to be filled with sexist tropes. Basically, I figured I’d try to keep an open mind, but I expected to do a lot of eye-rolling.

While there were some things that were problematic, overall I was pleasantly surprised. There was a lot of emphasis on equality between men and women and on the women who played a major role in the Bible.

One thing I thought was really cool was that the pastor pointed out that the common perception of the Garden of Eden story is that it’s just Eve and the snake at the tree, with Adam absent, but that’s not what the text says. (Gen 3:6 NIV When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.)

That little bitty phrase changes everything. I liked the pastor’s description of Adam as maybe being chicken, letting Eve try the fruit first, so he could make sure nothing bad happened to her before he tried it. It definitely fits with the weaselly buck-passing “the woman you gave me gave it to me.”

I also appreciated the mention that God made male and female both in his image. The standard fundamentalist line seems to be that *men* are made in God’s image, and women are second-tier, less than, and the source of everything bad. A big emphasis in the sermon was that everyone deserves respect as someone made in God’s image, and that ragging on the other sex is dissing someone who was made in the image of God.

The things I didn’t like were the emphasis on differences between men and women, with the implication that those differences are universal or inherent. A huge focus was that “understanding the differences between the sexes” is the key to pretty much all relationships, but I think that misses the mark a little. I think trying to understand “men” or “women” is impossible and you just end up with overgeneralizations and assumptions. I think the real key to relationships is understanding individual people *as individuals.*

The sermon did touch on that a little, actually. The verse (which I now can’t find) about different parts making up the body of Christ but all working together, and each part doing what it’s supposed to do. The pastor related that to each person being uniquely made and every individual being who and what they’re supposed to be.

As much as I like that, the generalizations about gender differences really run counter to that emphasis on people being made uniquely as they’re supposed to be. Even with a little throw-away comment about generalizations not applying to every individual, the more you emphasize those generalizations, the easier it is to marginalize people who don’t fit them, or to shove people into boxes.

One comment I really found problematic was a bit about women getting upset with men “for being men,” with the example of his wife saying “why are you always touching me?” and him responding with “maybe if you stopped being so hot.”

So so very much to cringe at in that. For starters, the trope that men are horny and women aren’t severely irritates me and is just not true. Secondly, touching someone in ways or at times that they’re not comfortable about isn’t just “a guy being a guy”–it’s disrespectful and rude in a particularly sexist way.

Overall, there was more good than bad. For me, the “Amen” to “WTF” ratio was pretty high. I’m going to miss next week because I’m off to see Wicked in DC, but fortunately for me, the sermons are downloadable. Yay for technology.

How I became pro-choice, part 3 of ? – Unplanned but not unwanted

Previous posts in this series are here:
How I became pro-choice, part 1 of ?
How I became pro-choice, part 2 of ?

Also, now that I have 3 posts, I’m going to actually subtitle them for easy reference from here on out.

I used to be pro-life in part because I’d been an “oops” baby. I felt that my parents had taken an unintended and not necessarily happy situation and made the best of it, and I’d turned out all right, and if they could, other people could too, right? That was a little naive. My parents had a rough time early on, but there were also hardships plenty of other couples face that they never did. For example, there was never a point when either of them was unemployed, other than my mom staying home for a short time after I was born, and again after my brother was born. There were times when money was tight, and times when their jobs sucked, but there was always at least a steady income. So, what they did, not everyone could have done.

And even with that, I wonder if things might have been different if “continue this pregnancy and start a family now” hadn’t been a choice my mom made, but something she’d been legally forced into. Would it have been harder for her? Would she have felt trapped? Even if it had been the decision she was going to make anyway, what would it have done to her if it hadn’t been her choice.

And what would it have meant to me if my mom had been legally forced to give birth to me. Knowing that I was unplanned was hard enough to swallow–what would it have done to my self-esteem if I’d had to wrestle with the idea that I might not have been wanted.

I’m pro-choice because I think people should get to make ethical decisions for themselves, not be forced into what someone else decides. *Especially* not by people who value the life of a fetus or even a zygote infinitely higher than the life of a pregnant woman.

All those bumper stickers that say “Choose life”? Yeah, there’s something ironic about using that word when you don’t want women to be able to choose anything at all.

In which I rant about HR 3

In the next few days, I hope to make a couple more thoughtful posts about abortion, women’s rights, and the religious implications of those things. But at this point, I really don’t have a whole lot of thoughtful in me.

Trigger Warning–lots of disturbing stuff about rape and abuse.

So, here’s what HR 3 does and why I’ve already written to my representative saying I hope he votes no on it, and have started writing to the Democratic sponsors of the bill to say basically “Um, guys, what the heck???”

• Prevents any federal money paying for abortion unless the woman was “forcibly raped.” So just being raped–by drugs, by threats, by being too young to legally consent–isn’t enough. “Forcible rape” is also never defined, so the exemption is pretty much unenforceable.
• Prevents “discrimination” against health care facilities that don’t provide abortion. In other words, a Catholic hospital that lets a woman die on the operating table rather than abort a pregnancy that’s killing her is still welcome to get taxpayer money.
• Prevents tax breaks for companies providing health insurance if the coverage pays for abortion.

So, if an abortion is medically necessary, but the doctor isn’t 100% sure the pregnancy will kill you? Better hope you’ve got a healthy savings account. Not only will Medicaid not cover it, your insurance probably won’t either. Oh, and while you’re arguing with a dozen bureaucrats to try to prove that your life is in danger from the pregnancy–not only are your risks going up, but the clock is ticking on your ability to actually get that abortion. You probably have a decent chance in the first trimester, but push it to the second, and there are fewer providers who will perform that procedure. Go past the 21-week point and there’s pretty much no one. Probably having something to do with the fact that domestic terrorists tend to murder the doctors who do perform these abortions.


And if you’re a pregnant victim of incest who just turned 18? Or a minor who was raped by someone not a relative? Or a rape victim who decided not to fight back against a rapist who was larger and stronger? The official position of the Republican Party is apparently “Sucks to be you.”

The “conscience” BS also makes me angry. What it means is that hospitals can deny emergency health care and still get government money. An example of how messed up this is is St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix–the doctors did the right thing by saving the woman’s life, and as a result, the hospital lost its Catholic status. They were supposed to let her die, apparently. But that’s cool–you go right ahead and ignore the health of pregnant women and you can still qualify for government money.

A couple quickies

First off, my little ego is doing a happy dance that I’m being quoted all over Tumblr. I know, of course, that this is purely due to my own awesomeness and not the fact that I’m on the Fatosphere feed. Or, for that matter, Lesley’s fricking brilliant post on the urge to control our bodies at all costs that got me thinking in that direction. [/sarcasm] The particular quoted bit is:

“In our culture, we have the idea that health is controllable. If you eat the right foods, do the right exercises, live “virtuously,” you will be thin and healthy for 80 or 90 years. And if you’re unhealthy, you must have done something to deserve it, and if you start doing the right things, you can fix it. Again, at its heart, it’s about control. We don’t have near as much control over our health as we’d like to, and we can’t get around the fact that everybody gets sick and everybody dies.”

Second, the search engine terms by which people find their way to my blog are a never-ending source of entertainment for me. My two current favorites:

• “feminazi” (yeah, once I get people to stop using sexist language and quit paying women less than men for the same work, I’m totally taking over Poland)
• “kelly divine” To whoever came here with that term, I’m not the porn star you’re looking for. Move along. (And no, for anyone wondering, I didn’t know that off the top of my head. I had to look it up. Also, Google safe search…isn’t, necessarily.)

Third, it would make my week if people would stop talking incessantly about their diets, oh, excuse me, their lifestyle changes, around me. I accept that it’s a hugely important thing to some people, and that people who are hungry and miserable need an outlet for venting. But after you’ve gone on about points and calories and the things you’re allowed to eat for fifteen minutes, I want to jump out a window. Or vindictively eat ice cream at you. The diet talk isn’t what I’d call triggering per se…just annoying. Nails on a chalkboard, kind of. And it’s so often people I don’t know well enough to mention my own thoughts on diets, particularly when they’re coworkers.

Speaking of ice cream, vindictive or otherwise, Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey is the bomb. Banana and walnut with chocolate pieces. The combination of textures with the subtle banana flavor, and the creaminess of good ice cream. Aw, man. I bought a pint of it, enjoyed some tonight, and will probably be having ice cream as a bed time snack for the next day or two. (I will resist the urge to eat it in front of the dieters, hoping that they give me lip about it so that I can reply, in perfect honesty, “Sorry, just following my nutritionist’s instructions.”)

Names and Identity, Part 2

Part 1 is here.

In a nutshell, the issue with a woman taking a man’s name is the way it folds her identity into his. We’ve mostly gotten past the idea that women are the property of their father, until he hands them over to their husbands. (I say mostly because of the “giving away” tradition at weddings, and please don’t get me started on Purity Balls.) So, we should maybe *not* have the default be that her name reflects that handing over from one guy to another, with the idea that a woman’s only identity is in terms of the man she belongs to.

At the same time, your identity does change when you’re married, so having a name change reflect that isn’t wholly a bad thing. It’s just that the husband’s identity should, presumably, change too, rather than the wife’s identity just being subsumed. In the more or less egalitarian society we’re supposed to have, he’s made a major life change and commitment, not acquired a new piece of property. And yet, most of the time, the wife’s name is the one that changes.

There are times when one partner’s identity is subordinate to the other’s. Like, when I go to a work picnic with my hubby, I’m Mrs. Matt–anyone there who knows me knows me in relation to him. That’s not a bad thing. When he goes to my cousin’s wedding, he’s basically Mr. Kelly.* In that context, people know him in relation to me. And when we have kids, their friends and teachers will know us first and foremost as “Billy’s mom” or “Susie’s dad.” Identity is complicated and multifaceted, and the people you have connections to–particularly your spouse, the person you share your life with–do define facets of your identity.

Ideally, there’s a balance there. My identity isn’t wholly subordinate to Matt’s–there are times when my role is “Matt’s wife” and I’m in a certain place doing a certain thing to support him. And the reverse is also true. But for most people, the name change pretty much only works one way (though in fairness to Matt, I should point out that he offered to take my name if I wanted him to).

There’s really no way your name can incorporate every part of your identity, because no one has the time or inclination to string all the facets of identity into a person’s name. I can’t very well introduce myself as Kelly, daughter of M and C, wife of Matt, sister to A and sister-by-marriage** to D, M, and B, daughter-by-marriage** to T and K. And that’s just the close family portion of the identity. Start the whole thing off with a dozen key things about me, like where I’m from or where I live now, where I went to school, what I do for a living, or the fact that I’m a Christian or a writer or a sci-fi geek, and it gets supremely ridiculous.

And I don’t really expect that a name should encompass every piece of your identity. That’s not really what names are for. They’re there to give the people who know you something distinct to call you that’s unique, or close to it, in the circle of people they associate with, so they can distinguish you from everybody else. But how names are formed, and when and how they’re changed, does say something about what we define as distinguishing one person from another. And it’s problematic for the first thing that distinguishes one woman from another is “who her husband is.”

*I will say, by the way, that I love the trend among feminist bloggers who are married to casually refer to their spouses as Mr. [Theirbloghandle]. It’s so perfectly appropriate, because as their readers, we know about these husbands only in relation to the wives whose work we’re reading.

**If it were feasible to incorporate all your familial relationships into your name, I like “sister/daughter-by-marriage” better than “in-law” because it better conveys my relationship with my husband’s family, all of whom are awesome. “In-law” has a connotation of people who aren’t real family, but you’re legally stuck with because of who you or they married.

Names and Identity, Part 1

When I read Against the Name Change: A Polemic, it gave me second thoughts about my decision to take my husband’s name. This wasn’t an ill-thought-out or hasty decision, but this post made me wonder how many of my reasons were justifications for simply following tradition because it’s easier.

Let me say first off that I have a very egalitarian marriage. We both cook, we both clean, we both try to support each other in that whole “working outside the home” thing and fairly juggle errands and taking care of the fuzzy children.*

And when Mr. Thinkstoomuch and I were engaged, I had examples of all sorts of not changing your name. A friend who was going to keep her name, with no hyphenation, another set of friends where the man was taking the woman’s name. (I actually know *two* guys who’ve done this–it’s a tiny minority, but it is becoming more common.) I knew a number of people who hyphenated, but I’ve never been a fan of hyphenation. If either original name is longer than two syllables, it gets really clunky.

My reasons for name change were personal and idiosyncratic, but I don’t think invalid. I like the assonance and alliteration of my first name with the new last name. And after two years of teaching and a lifetime of answering calls from telemarketers, I was sick of hearing my last name mangled. So, the idea of a shorter and more easily pronounced name was really appealing. (Though I totally underestimated the number of people who can get a simple, but uncommon, name wrong or need it spelled for them.)

There were also identity-based reasons. When Mr. Thinkstoomuch graduated from college and I left my teaching job several hundred miles away, his parents let us stay with them until we got jobs and got settled in our own place. I felt very much a part of his family and wanted to honor that too.

And yet, if I had it to do over again, I might choose differently. The paperwork is a ginormous pain. I still don’t have my bank account stuff straight, because the times I’ve gone, there’s been some requirement they’ve neglected to mention the last time. Sorry, you need to bring your spouse with you. Oh, no, we need a copy of the marriage license.

But the point where I felt a real pang of regret was at my brother’s wedding. He was talking about how many [Last Name]s were there (not many) and described me as “one who left.” Dude, I didn’t leave, I’m right here.

This is getting long, so I think I’ll break it into two posts, with the primary point for this post being that the “easy” choice where the woman changes her name is not, in fact, easy. It’s *traditional* which makes it easy in some respects. And as much as I like having a name that ties me to my in-laws, my new family, it feels as though I’ve some how replaced my family by giving up the name that ties me to them. In reality, of course, I haven’t, but names are symbols and symbols are important.

*No, we’re not goofy people who treat our pets like kids. But like children, they’re cute and dependent, and need a lot of looking after. And it’s a term of endearment.

How I Became Pro-Choice, Part 1 of ?

So, for a while now I’ve wanted to explain how I went from being extremely anti-abortion to being pro-choice. This took place gradually over years, and there were a lot of reasons for it, so I wasn’t quite sure how to start putting it together. So, I’m breaking it into smaller pieces. I’m not certain how many, really. As many as it takes.

The order won’t necessarily be sequential, either. This post, for example, talks about one of the last nails in the coffin of my pro-life-ness. I’d previously defined myself as pragmatically pro-life, basically acknowledging that a lot of women’s options as far as preventing pregnancy are crap, and as long as we’re going to teach abstinence only in schools, and have insurance companies cover viagra but not birth control pills, and do a crappy job of helping out people who can’t afford to raise a kid, having abortion be illegal would be complete BS.

A couple years ago, I started reading Shapely Prose. Not only did I learn about the revolutionary concept of fat acceptance, I also got an education in the basics of feminism. I had considered myself mostly a feminist before that, without knowing more than a rough summary of what that meant. And I usually caveated it with “not that I really count as a feminist, because I’m pro-life.”

Anyway, it was after I’d developed a major blog crush on Kate Harding that Dr. George Tiller was murdered. And I read about Operation Rescue’s comments, which can pretty much be summed up as callous and evil: We really hope this doesn’t negatively affect our ability to keep intimidating and harassing people. So…terrorism. You’re for it, then. Nice.

Between reading that, and reading these stories about the situations people are actually in when they have late-term abortions. This was a sad and scary revelation for me, because all I’d ever heard on this topic was the rhetoric around partial-birth abortion, nothing about the fact that it’s pretty much always done for major medical reasons, not somebody changing her mind at the last minute. In a lot of cases, these abortions are essentially taking a baby who isn’t going to survive off life-support, rather than condemning them to a short and excruciatingly painful life. That analogy brings up a whole host of other contentious subjects, but when the life support apparatus is a *person,* it should be her call.

Around the same time and from a lot of the same sources, I started reading about crisis pregnancy centers, and learning that they are often sources of misinformation and manipulation.

I went to an evangelical church since I was a teenager, and having heard that crisis pregnancy centers were there to help women in desperate and difficult situations. I remember thinking that they were a good thing, a “money where your mouth is” kind of pro-life stance that was actually compassionate and helpful.

So, between those two things, the realities of late-term abortion and the dishonesty used by crisis pregnancy centers, I felt betrayed in a pretty personal way. I thought about the change I’d collected in those little baby bottles for CareNet, in a program sponsored by my church, and I felt kind of ill.

I already had more than a little bit of cynicism toward the more fundamentalist parts of Christianity at that point. And I was familiar with the evil and vitriol spewed by guys like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell. So I suppose I shouldn’t have really been surprised that I’d been lied to, systematically and deliberately.

And as much as I felt used and betrayed, all I’d been conned out of was some spare change. How much worse for a pregnant woman who goes to a crisis pregnancy center who lies to her about the risks of abortion, or withholds her test results to make it harder for her to get one. Or promises support and provides help, right up until the point where she can’t abort, then tosses her out to fend for herself.

Blogroll Addition

This really well-written post by Attack Laurel reminds me that I need to add her to my blogroll.

I like the fact that she talks about religion being used and twisted by abusers, without implying that religion in general or Christianity in particular are bad things.

I read this , which Attack Laurel linked, and I felt disgusted, but also angry.

All that stuff about Eve being flawed because she wasn’t part of the original creation–it’s a thin and cheesy fake theology justification for hate and evil and abuse. God made Eve because Adam needed her, remember? He was *alone* and that was *not good.* She was important, valuable. Not some slapped-on, second-rate afterthought.

How much hate do you have to have inside to believe that the God you worship made half of all humans

a perversion of the original creation[..]Only a piece, scrap, made of a man, to deceive him by

Evil, hateful, blasphemous words. Funny how Jesus spoke to a lot of women, many of whom were the immoral women that this pastor rails on about, and such ugly words never crossed his lips.

Superbowl Stabby

Reblogging: If Fatshionista can do it, I can too, right? I originally posted this on the Shapely Prose forum, and since I haven’t been posting much of late, recycling things I wrote before I had this blog is better than nothing, right?

I was supposed to be hosting a Superbowl party last night. Because of the massive snow, the “party” turned into me and the hubby watching the game and playing World of Warcraft. I mostly watch the Superbowl for the commercials, some of which were funny and awesome. Particularly the Budweiser clydesdale making friends with the cow. And everything about the house made of beer cans but the last bit with the girl in the shower.

Two ads in particular made me very very stabby*. FloTV and Dodge can both bite me. Because we all know that what every woman wants is a husband or boyfriend who she can control. Because we’re evil and heartless like that, and totally have all the power in the world.

The FloTV ad has a narrator talking about how this guy’s girlfriend has “removed his spine” and you see him go underwear shopping with her, advising her on what scent of candles to buy, etc., all when he really wants to be home watching the game. So, he should get a little TV so that he can watch football while he’s being dragged around by his mean, evil girlfriend.

I don’t know about you all, but I totally want a guy to follow me around like a puppy on a leash and have him jump when I snap. I mean, isn’t that every woman’s goal in the universe? /snark

The Charger one had the tagline of “Man’s Last Stand.” It featured a bunch of guys saying things like “I will be civil to your family…I will take out the trash.” etc. etc. etc. “And in return, I’ll drive whatever I want” (or words to that effect).

What’s especially stabby-pain inducing about the Charger one is that these guys are talking about what are mostly common decency relationship things (and things that *she’s* probably doing as well) as though they’re some kind of horrible slavery. Wow, you’ll be civil to my parents? Thanks ever so much, my knight in shining armor. And you’ll actually do some of the work of maintaining a household? I think I’m about to swoon. Oh, *and* you’ll resent everything you ever do for me deeply and bitterly, to the point where you figure your “sacrifice” is equal in value to a $25,000 car. That’s twoo wuv right there.

I think the combination of the two makes it even worse. On the one hand, an exaggerated portrayal of a woman keeping her guy so “whipped” that he’s helping her shop instead of watching the game he wants to watch. On the other, the idea that taking out the trash or not being rude to the woman’s family is some horrible sacrifice. Those two things go together, so a woman can’t even make a reasonable request, however small, without having to worry about slipping into “nagging controlling bitch” territory. And then be told that she has all the power. Gah.

*Both that this stuff gives me a stabbing pain and that it makes me want to stab something.