Can't We All Just...

It is hot today, as it ought to be for mid-July. But it's that first wave of heat where everyone forgets it was ever hot in the world and we all walk around with fixed grimaces and schlumpy bodies and everyone raises their eyebrows in greeting in a silent, mass proclamation of, "Damn...it got hot."

And with that heat always seems to come that peculiar sense of irritation...the righteous indignation of stepping out of a shower only to find yourself sweaty and mussed again fifteen minutes later. The way no air conditioning can ever hope to compete. The children who suddenly find their twelve-week paradise of summer vacation to be tedious, endless, dragging on because it's too hot to play outside, and lounging in the climate controlled depths of a basement is ultimately every bit as boring as school.

I'm in a bit of this summer funk today, as my sweaty work clothes hang weirdly on my frame, the little wispy hairs escaping my ponytail curl up at the nape of my neck...things that might be romantic in the light of autumnal nostalgia, but right now are just plain annoying. My cats are even whiny...pacing between front door and patio door, meowing pitieously until I open a door for them to leave, and then refusing to budge when the first heat waves off the baking concrete tingle their whiskers. Even the Internet is sluggish today.

So I'm blaming the heat because I was reading several blog posts and forums this morning with my breakfast and now it's lunchtime and I'm still having a problem wrapping my head around the issue:

As a warmup to the Blogher conference in Chicago on July 27 and 28, Laurie Toby Edison, who writes at Body Impolitic announced a panel for BlogHer called "Our Bodies, Our Blogs".

Laurie describes on her site as such:

I’m planning to talk about body image in the broader sense. Obviously I’ll be talking about the issues of fat, beauty, power and health at any size - but body image (as folks who read us know) includes a lot more. When the beauty standard is young, blond, white and thin, it leaves almost all of us out. It leaves most women and men feeling “never attractive enough”, causes endless discrimination, and makes billion$ for the beauty and diet industries. There is so much we can talk about - fat/size, aging, ability/disability, color, “right” facial features, class, children.

Okay, cool. Had I gotten the cash together to book the transportation and a non-skeevy hotel, I would be there with pen and legal pad firmly in hand. I think it's an important subject, I think it's a great idea to bring women together under that particular discussion umbrella, but I'm really having a hard time justifying the motivation and some of the tangential issues with the panel and the movement at large (pun totally intended).

The panel was started by Laurie partially because it's an important and prevalent issue for most women, but also as a response to what she deemed "fat-offensive" items in the 2006 Blogher swag bags (fat free cookies, health water, etc.) And that's fine...I can understand how someone who devotes herself to disspelling the need for such projects would be bothered by seeing them in a giftbag from an organization who also claims to support her causes as well. But I also think it's important to remember that if an organzation like Blogher is going to build and maintain a presence in the online community, they're going to have to accept sponsorships wherever they can get them for awhile, and so maybe it'd be okay to pick your battles from time to time.

And now, for the other more important issue:

As usual, I was a little late in getting my thoughts together on this, so by the time I sat down to write this post, Jen had already read the same forum posts and the same blog entries and had also summed up her thoughts on it very nicely. I won't waste time pointing you to who said what since she already did it very succinctly http://yawwblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/do-i-really-hate-myself.html.

So basically the argument Jen is making boils down to this question: If you're currently attempting to lose weight, and if you blog about such issues, should be you be welcomed at a panel about self-acceptance and body image?

And of course the authors of the blogher posts and the prospective panelists all responded and said "Yes! BUT..." And then went on to explain that eating problems and the subsequent weight loss attempts to correct the eating problems all stem from self-hate, and so therefore aren't really aligned with the principles of the self-acceptance movement.

And this is where my mind started going a little haywire, trying to wrap itself around these arguments. And I need to preface everything I'm going to write from this point on with the following disclaimer:

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M ABOUT TO TALK ABOUT. I am ignorant of body politics. I have never, ever studied feminism or feminist movements. I have very little knowledge of any acceptance movement at all. The following paragraphs are only based on my impressions of the above discussion on Jen's blog as well as my own impressions of the very little corner of the body-image acceptance movement I've read about or seen. Please, if somethign I write about here can be improved by a book or an article or another blog that you think I should read, leave it in the comments. If you think I'm an irresponsible female for never participating in gender studies in college, please let me know who I should start reading so I can become more informed. I would really appreciate that, thanks.

Okay, so.

The body image panel discussion, and Laurie's blog bothers me on two different levels: First, whether or not Wendy McClure should speak at the BlogHer panel because her participation in Weight Watchers was counterintuitive to the body image movement?

What?! This was Brain Explosion #1 for me today.

And I understand (at least I think) that the basic premise is that if you love your body, why would you spend time and money and effort to change it to meet societal expectations of beauty? That any sort of diet and exercise effort should be done for the sole purpose of improving physical well-being and that's it. In essence, if you're trying diet back into your Skinny Jeans, you're too self-loathing to join the ranks of the Body Image Warriors.

I sort of get it...yes. It's the same argument we've been hearing ever since Twiggy bumped out her more Rubinesque counterparts on the cover of Vogue: media puts too much pressure on women to look a certain way and society only values young, thin, white women, etc. etc. etc. so why should we concede that this is how it's going to be?

And you know that battle cry has reached fever pitch when a lingerie model is now telling us to embrace her fat self or shut up:

And so our new Patron Saint Tyra is telling us all to say "So What?" on her show, and she even convinced her audience of fawning women to don red bodysuits with individual body weights proudly emblazoned on each girl's chest (notice in the clips on her show that no one over 160 lbs. made it actually onscreen) and so it seems that the body acceptance movement is gaining momentum in the very arena that caused the problems in the first place. So what bothers me is that the rest of us, unassumingly counting points or writing about cravings on our online journals or slogging away on a treadmill each morning are now no longer part of that community. We're the enemy, we're the backslide to the body image movement because we hate ourselves enough to change how we look.

I absolutely do not understand why there must be a size acceptance camp and a weight loss camp and ne'er the twain shall meet. I think it's stupid, actually, because anyone who approaches this with an ounce of common sense will recognize that the healing process of losing weight, of accomplishing more things with your body than you thought possible at first, of being able to slip on clothes without worrying about what you look like...of those vast improvements in mental health far outweigh and often support the physical benefits of weight loss and a healthy lifestyle. Every single person whose life has been changed through weight loss has talked about the immense sense of freedom they attain while they're going through the motions of working off the fat. They talk about the broken relationshps they've been able to heal, of the new self-confidence, the sense of efficacy...and yes, they gleefully recount the times they've been checked out by someone at the supermarket, or the day that they managed to walk into a non-Fatstore and try on a pair of jeans without tears of shame. And I know the Size Acceptance movement says it should never be about the last part, but it is. It always is, and it always will be. Validation for one's successes, at least in some small measure, will always be an innate human need, and there's nothing that redefining how we're supposed to think about ourselves can do to combat that.

I also understand that another problem with weight loss blogging as a means of size advocacy is that it's a fairly self-centered activity (as Jen admitted in her post). When I write what I ate, what I was thinking when I ate, how I'm feeling, etc., I'm not doing it to inspire anyone at the moment. (Although when people say they draw inspiration from my words, it's a phenomenally gratifying feeling). I'm writing here because I don't have a support network in my own real life, and this is the best way I know to reach the widest variety of people going through a similar process. In my writing, I am not changing minds or effecting societal progress...I know this. But as I considered that, I also realized the other question I have for the size acceptance proponents:

If size acceptance is built upon the idea that you should be comfortable in your own skin, regardless of your weight or appearance, then why be political about it?

Laurie Toby Edison has posted a gallery of her photographs of female nudes entitled Women en Large. From an artistic standpoing, they are brave, bold photographs. They're unforgiving to the women's respective bodies, but they're also respectful, open, and even whimsical in some. But as I looked through each of these...thought about the strength it would take for women like that to strip down and pose and be open to thousands of people viewing their voluptuousness, their rolls of creamy skin, their stretch marks...the primary response in my head was "what is she trying to SAY with all this?"

Because if the purpose of the size acceptance movement is to tell women and men not to worry about what other people think of you, then why publish these photos at all? Or, is the purpose to desensitize the world to the stigma a fat body carries with it wherever it goes? In that case, where does the self acceptance come into play? Why didn't she just give the photos to the women who posed for them so they could enjoy their bodies?

And I wonder about this a lot...whether the size acceptance movement is going awry in politicizing their agenda. I thought about this as I caught a few minutes of the reality show America's Got Talent and watched a performance by the plus-sized girl group The Glamazons. I argue that The Glamazons have made it as far as they did not because of extraordinary talent (their ability to harmonize and exude stage presence is questionable in comparison to the other acts on the show), but because they were, in fact, all fat. The judge's comments were primarily geared towards congratulating the girls on their bravery for appearing in ass-baring lingerie and jiggling and dancing with abandon like the supersized Christina Aguileras they were obviously trying to imitate. So what is this communicating, that these women are being honored specifically for being overweight? It seems to me that size acceptance, in what I understand to be its original form, is completely lost when it's being used as the label for getting other people to accept individuals of size, rather than offering support for anyone who has a problem with their body to improve it and ultimately make peace with it in the process.

I suppose what I'm trying to say, in a very inefficient manner, is that I like the spirit of the size acceptance activists. I like what they stand for, but I do not like their politics. I'm angry that Wendy McClure was made to feel even a little unwelcome because she had the audacity to look for a tool that would help her feel better about herself. I'm angry that talented writers like Jen are told there must be something psychologically wrong for them to want to reduce their body shape and look better. I'm irritated that just because I want to feel that profound sense of relief when I walk into a store knowing that there WILL be something there to fit me, that I've been branded as superficial, body-conscious, shallow for wanting to look a certain way. If that's the case, then label me as such, but I'm fairly certain that in the last seven months of learning how to eat correctly, to vanquish bad habits, to move past all the hang-ups I have about how I am and what I can do, I've done more for my own self-acceptance through dieting than I ever would by simply throwing my hands up in the air and saying "so what?"

And now the cats and I must retire to the patio with a big glass of water and a fan. Because damn...it's hot.