Category: Flagrantly Feminist

Baby Jiu Jitsu

A Dance of Appreciation and Avoidance

On By MezzoSherriIn Detox Journey, Don't you want to be thin?, Fat is Just an Adjective, Flagrantly Feminist, Health at Every Size, Practicing in the Heart2 Comments

Baby Jiu JitsuOne of my other weekend activities was to get a somewhat-overdue haircut (and a color touch-up, though that was more on-time).

I had a haircut scheduled two weeks ago, but my hairdresser got sick, and I just decided to grit my teeth and wait till the Saturday coloring appointment I already had on the books.

The upshot of all this scheduling information is that my last haircut prior to this one was the weekend before I flew down to begin the HCG protocol. So, my hairdresser hadn’t seen me since this whole journey began. And I guess I look different enough now for it to be noticeable.

“You look great! Have you lost weight?”

Welcome to the compliment minefield.

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[HAES/FA Basics Break]

Just for clarity, let’s recap some of the reasons why this particular “compliment” is deeply problematic and not very complimentary.

As a start, here’s Regan Chastain at Dances with Fat:

People who undertake weight loss attempts are often encouraged to motivate themselves by hating their current bodies.  When they are successful at short term weight loss, they are encouraged to look back at their “old body” with shame, scorn, and hatred.  And that’s a big problem.

Not just because at some point the person will probably start to think “if everyone is talking about how great I look now, how did they think I looked before?” but also because the vast majority of people gain back their weight in two to five years.  Then they are living in a body that they taught themselves to hate and be ashamed of, remembering all of those compliments. Yikes.

Tracy I at Fit, Feminist, and (almost) Fifty unpacks some of the deeper implications of this compliment, and its collusion within a structure of the Foucauldian panopticon:*

It reinforces the idea that it’s okay to let people know that we are monitoring and judging their bodies. One thing that shocked my friend in the story I opened with was that she really didn’t even know the person who commented on her weight.  And yet the person felt completely entitled to say something. What kind of a twisted world do we live in where the state of our bodies is fair game for comments from whoever feels like making them?

Finally, here’s a meditation from Michelle Parrinello-Cason at Balancing Jane on the question of what exactly we’re praising when we compliment weight loss.

What if I say “Have you lost weight? You’re looking great!” to someone who has been starving himself for weeks. Now I’ve reinforced that behavior.

What if I tell someone she looks great when she’s actually suffering weight loss as a side effect from a deadly disease (as happened to this woman’s friend who was suffering from Lupus).

We don’t know what we’re praising if we’re only praising a result. If our goal is to encourage people to take care of themselves and to be healthy, then shouldn’t we make sure that we’re actually encouraging people to, you know, take care of themselves and be healthy?

If someone gets up an hour early and went for a run, we should praise that. That’s hard work.

If someone cooked healthy meals all week long for themselves and their family, we should praise that. That’s hard work. [. . .]

If we rethink the way that we give praise, we can begin to restructure our norms. If we praise hard work instead of outcomes and acknowledge beauty wherever we see it and the people who are doing that hard work don’t get any thinner, we’re still reinforcing positive, healthy changes. Isn’t that what we really want to value as a culture?

[/Break]

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For all that I agree with these multiple analyses about the problems behind my hairdresser’s statement, I also agree with Golda Poretsky at Body Love Wellness about the root cause of these “compliments”:

I think people are, in some ways, nearly literally blinded by weight loss culture. So when they read something or someone as beautiful they make an automatic connection between beauty and weight loss. I really don’t blame people for that. I think that most of us who have woken up from weight loss culture have been truly hurt by it (or have great empathy for someone close to us who has been hurt by it), so people who haven’t had that experience often just see our current weight loss culture as normal.

So the question becomes, what do you do in the moment? Depending on the context and your relationship to that person, you can handle the compliment of “You look great. Did you lose weight?” in many ways.

Among the options Poretsky lists are saying a simple thanks, setting a boundary against public discussion of your weight, or using humor to redirect the conversation. In the moment on Saturday morning, I didn’t select any of those precise options, though I feel as if I kind of rolled them all together, a bit.

I thanked her and said I’d been doing this detox diet for a number of weeks, limiting my food to lean proteins and fresh produce. I was sure some weight loss had occurred as a side effect of the detoxing, but that’s not my focus.

“Do you have an ultimate weight loss goal?”**

“Nope,” I repeated, “that’s not my focus.“

And that’s where we left the topic. Me wanting to acknowledge and appreciate her desire to say something nice and kind, while also jiu-jitsuing my way out of the specific value proposition (thin=beautiful=virtuous; fat=ugly=lazy cow) she was unconsciously peddling.

* I stumbled across this blog tonight looking for good links to use here and I am already head over heels in love with Tracy’s intelligence and insights.

** You see, this bit shows as much as anything how deeply unconscious and blinded we are by the weight loss culture. When an otherwise lovely young woman hears a statement about how weight loss isn’t my focus and then without blinking an eye disregards that assertion to ask me my weight loss goal, there’s nothing else to call that but a symptom of cultural insanity.

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Image credit: http://www.groundnevermisses.com/2012/02/striking-grappling-traditional-mma.html

 

Hard is Hard

On By MezzoSherriIn Flagrantly Feminist, Meta-Blogging, Self-Acceptance, Topics of StudyLeave a comment

mister-rogers-flips-bird-photoshopEven though work isn’t as crazy now as it was a couple weeks ago, life feels kind of crazy this day or two. (But the taxes are finally submitted!!)

And at work, there are a few challenges looming — not with personalities or anything like that. Just with the aspects of non-profit work that are sometimes really, truly, legitimately difficult. “It’s hard because it’s hard,” my boss and I sometimes say to each other on days like these.

So, in lieu of a longer or more thoughtful post, here’s a favorite TED talk about hard conversations, and the closets we all find ourselves living in when we’re too scared to have them.

There is no harder, there is just hard. We need to stop ranking our hard against everyone else’s hard to make us feel better or worse about our closets and just commiserate on the fact that we all have hard. At some point in our lives, we all live in closets and they may feel safe, or at least safer than what lies on the other side of that door. But I’m here to tell you, no matter what your walls are made of, a closet is no place for a person to live.

Be authentic, be direct, be unapologetic. Thank you, Ash Beckham.

I hope to be back more fully tomorrow night.

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Image credit: http://boringpittsburgh.com/wtf/mister-rogers-middle-finger-flipping-the-bird/

 

An Angry, Angry Woman

On By MezzoSherriIn Flagrantly Feminist28 Comments

My iPod shuffled out a soothing 20-minute mantra for my morning drive to work. As soon as I started the iPod and that song began, I kind of wondered if this was Spirit’s little gift to me on account of me having a gut full of feminist rage this morning.

I’m sure that anyone with even a peripheral awareness of U.S. news has heard the basic details of the shooting at an LA Fitness club in Collier, PA. George Sodini entered a women’s-only aerobics class at around 8 PM last night, fumbled in his duffel bag for the multiple guns in his possession, then turned out the lights and started firing. Three women were killed and ten others injured before Sodini turned the gun on himself.

The picture I’ve seen emerge from the news coverage is that Sodini was conscious in his decision to target women. He blogged about his desire to commit this sort of massacre, and he justified this desire by expressing his frustrations at being lonely and not having a girlfriend for the last 25 years.

But I’m also seeing the inevitable media slants on things. I’ve heard Sodini’s blog described as something documenting “his descent into madness” — a convenient way to try and deflect the ways that his frustration, and the ease with which he could slip from sexual/romantic frustration to a plan to exact deadly “revenge” against desirable women, are deeply ingrained within the patriarchy. By casting Sodoni as a madman, no one has to examine the deeply uncomfortable truths about how in this rape culture, most (all?) men are trained receive training to expect women’s availability, to interpret their attractiveness as purely in service to the male gaze. [Trying to clarify my intended meaning as per Bob’s comment, below.]

I am haunted and infuriated by the premeditation indicated from Sodini’s choice to attack a women’s-only class at his own gym. Is it possible that part of the rage working through him was based in this assumptive loop that why would these women be gym members except to make themselves attractive for men, and with that as their purpose, then how dare they be unavailable to him?!?

I’m too furious and incoherent to unpack it all right now, but I know deep to my core that my growth towards self-esteem is deeply entwined with body acceptance and fat acceptance. And I know that body acceptance and fat acceptance are deeply entwined with questioning patriarchal norms about attractiveness, femininity, and the male gaze.*

I was in (women’s) college back when Marc Lepine murdered 14 woman at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. There was a memorial service on campus, the usual candlelight vigil, some thoughtful hymn for everyone to sing together. And a minister who breathed the fire of feminist rage and turned over one of the hymns’ phrases into the proclamation: “We are angry, angry women!”

I’m ashamed to admit that back in 1989, I disapproved of that minister’s reaction. I thought it was inappropriate and disrespectful of the dead, that her anger took focus away from the grief and sorrow we should feel for these lives cut short by a gunman.

Today, as my stomach burns with feminist rage, I remember this minister so clearly, so vividly, so suddenly. And I offer a quiet apology up into the karmic phone network, in hopes she’ll feel touched by an extra little piece of gratitude today. Because it took me a while to understand, but I got there eventually. So now, two decades later, I’m better able to honor the example of strength and righteous indignation that she modeled for me all those years ago.

Today, as I ponder Sodini’s actions in Collier, and Lepine’s in Montreal, and all the great and small incidences of violence against women that have occurred in the 20 years between those two events, I can say without any hesitation:

I am an angry, angry woman.

* Among other topics.

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UPDATE: Jezebel has many insightful things to say about the misogyny in Sodini’s actions and the ways they are being culturally read. The succinct jewel of wisdom that blew me away:

Roissy’s contention that “anything is justified” to help men avoid celibacy is terrifying, but more subtly disturbing is his assumption that Sodini’s rampage was directly caused by women refusing to sleep with him. Like Sodini himself, Roissy assumes that Sodini shot up a gym because women rejected him, not that women rejected him because he was the kind of guy who would one day shoot up a gym.