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greenstormI use the word fat in here. It kinda triggers even me. I do this deliberately to try and break down my unpleasant stereotypes. Tread lovingly with yourself here.
This is the tail-end of the marathon-three-days I spend at work/school. I should be at school this second, half an hour into class, but I dropped my bike off and they're keeping her for a week, which kind of broke my stride, and I'm sitting down and that feels amazing, and since about noon today I've really been wanting to write something.
I've been poly for a long time, and I've learned to erase some cultural norms from my psyche and to set aside others in order to do that. I know I'll likely always feel weird sneaky traces of poly guilt, for instance, which results in my believing that any given person is better off partnered to a monogamous person than to myself. This just sits there deep-down, despite my knowing that I am better off partnered to people who have other things going on in their lives (whether those other things are people or different passions) and despite being genuinely happy for my partner's pleasure when they're in a safe happy situation with another person.
I've also been skinny all my life. I don't feel skinny nowadays, I feel "normal" and sometimes jiggly and weird, but during adolescence and through my early twenties I was this same height, 5'8" or 5'9"ish, and 110 lbs, 120 max. That's really pretty skinny. In the last bunch of years I've gained both buoyancy and muscle to the tune of 20 or 30 lbs, topping out at my maximum weight when I'm in very good shape and literally sheathed in inches of muscle, getting softer and wider and dropping weight when I'm in poorer shape. And till a couple years ago I've always slept with tall skinny computer geeks with ponytails, basically.
This is a tangental way of approaching the idea that I've never had to deconstruct my ideas about fatness, though I have had to pull apart other received information like that about relationships. I've been the butt of hostility in the past ("skinny bitch" and "beanpole") but those days are over too.
Oof. This is hard to write. I'm not proud of this.
So, not thinking of this, and then diving into a really intensely hot sexual relationship with Angus (who has tended to carry 'a couple extra pounds' since I've known him) and then with Michael (who is more than twice my weight) I managed to be a total dickwad.
I have to be brief because this hurts to write. Think about this situation:
I meet Michael. We start sleeping together. I find him very hot, the way he thinks, the way we interact, but also his body itself, just the way his thighs feel and the line from his shoulder to his hip and his hands and the texture of his skin and the everythingness of him. And I keep saying to myself, not mindfully at all but in bemused wonder: I never would have expected to feel this way about you. I would say, in with that same bemusement, you are so fucking hot. And I didn't think about it.
And I would forward all this stuff about overeating and the obesity epidemic and whatnot because I'm pretty involved in food activism. Aaaaaand... finally the incongruity hit me. I poked at this in my head for a couple weeks, like a sore tooth, and realised what was going on. I was saying I never would have expected you to be hot because you're fat.
Except it wasn't graceful like this. After all this subtext, after accepting all these unspoken and unconscious endings to my sentences and not walking out on me, Michael had to endure a conversation where I basically said, "I don't know how to reconcile your body type with me thinking you're hot, any pointers?" and it hurt him pretty bad because, face it, it was maybe one of the jerkiest things I've done in my long career of being a dick.
So he was hurt and got quiet and I took it away and thought about it some more. And after a bit I stopped using the subtext. It stopped being woah, I'm shocked that you could be hot and started being just, you're hot. That made me happy, but I wasn't really sure what was going on in my head. Then today someone made a post on facebook and I grasped something more consciously.
It's true that carrying a lot of weight is a health risk.
It's true that stressing over things is a health risk.
It's true that working a desk job is a health risk.
Driving in a car is pretty goddamn dangerous, actually.
Smoking, drinking from plastic bottles, all sorts of things: health risks. In fact, cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada. Then heart disease, in which weight is definitely implicated. But, you know, people die, and statistics are statistics. No one actually chooses a mate by running a statistical analysis of everyone in the room and taking the person most likely to live a long time or we'd all want to date Japanese schoolgirls... oh, wait.
So the next argument, and one dear to the food movement, is that fat people are socially irresponsible because they do something which makes them unhealthy and thus a burden on health care and the rest of society, etc. The usual rebuttal to this is: we've all got our vices, so if you conflate attractiveness with health with skinniness, then also conflate attractiveness with health with nonsmoking AND not driving on dangerous roads AND not drinking to excess AND to not getting sunburns AND to using only glass containers and organic food AND teflon pans AND etc etc or you're a hypocrite.
But I've realised that it's much simpler than that for me, suddenly.
I find some people, and some bodies, maddeningly earthshatteringly attractive. I find some people and some bodies very much not. I don't control and can't anticipate this attraction; it's a gift when it's put in my hands.
And, separately, I worry about the economics of health: health care; the high cost of good veggies; eating well; desk jobs; yes, high fructose corn syrup and the subsidy pressure from the agroindustrial machine to maintain a steady cheap supply of that rather than fresh fruit and veggies and by the way more veggies would mean more farmers instead of more jobs where people sit down and that's socially unacceptable; and in the same category a lack of biking infrastructure and pesticides and the lack of self-worth driven by our lack of worthwhile projects to break our teeth on and thus teach us how to be effective in the world and how that leads people to do stupid self-harm or self-risk to fit in; a poor definition of health overall; no actual value placed on a culture where people can share knowledge about how to live well or have socially-sanctioned conversations about same; epidemic depression, the list goes on and on and on.
These two things, what we find attractive and what we approve of morally, are rarely connected and in fact often backwards-wired as per the girls-like-bad-boys stereotype. So it's really not cool what we do: we project all the guilt for our broken food culture and food system onto the people who bear the most visually obvious symptoms of it, then we use the threat of sexual and romantic rejection, which really drives to the core of our happiness as humans, to try and get them, any them that's not us, to make it go away. And we dangle romantic acceptance and sexual fulfillment as the carrots gained for successfully putting that societal skeleton back in the closet where we don't have to look at it. But, that's getting a little meta. My real point is merely the separation.
So there's how I was a dickwad with my projected shit and my inability to treat a human like, you know, a person instead of as a social issue. And that's why I try to be mindful about it now. And it's kinda incoherent because I've had a long week, but I really really needed to get this out. And I'd really like people to respond to it if they have something to say, gently if possible, because I need to hear the voices of my friends on this.
This is the tail-end of the marathon-three-days I spend at work/school. I should be at school this second, half an hour into class, but I dropped my bike off and they're keeping her for a week, which kind of broke my stride, and I'm sitting down and that feels amazing, and since about noon today I've really been wanting to write something.
I've been poly for a long time, and I've learned to erase some cultural norms from my psyche and to set aside others in order to do that. I know I'll likely always feel weird sneaky traces of poly guilt, for instance, which results in my believing that any given person is better off partnered to a monogamous person than to myself. This just sits there deep-down, despite my knowing that I am better off partnered to people who have other things going on in their lives (whether those other things are people or different passions) and despite being genuinely happy for my partner's pleasure when they're in a safe happy situation with another person.
I've also been skinny all my life. I don't feel skinny nowadays, I feel "normal" and sometimes jiggly and weird, but during adolescence and through my early twenties I was this same height, 5'8" or 5'9"ish, and 110 lbs, 120 max. That's really pretty skinny. In the last bunch of years I've gained both buoyancy and muscle to the tune of 20 or 30 lbs, topping out at my maximum weight when I'm in very good shape and literally sheathed in inches of muscle, getting softer and wider and dropping weight when I'm in poorer shape. And till a couple years ago I've always slept with tall skinny computer geeks with ponytails, basically.
This is a tangental way of approaching the idea that I've never had to deconstruct my ideas about fatness, though I have had to pull apart other received information like that about relationships. I've been the butt of hostility in the past ("skinny bitch" and "beanpole") but those days are over too.
Oof. This is hard to write. I'm not proud of this.
So, not thinking of this, and then diving into a really intensely hot sexual relationship with Angus (who has tended to carry 'a couple extra pounds' since I've known him) and then with Michael (who is more than twice my weight) I managed to be a total dickwad.
I have to be brief because this hurts to write. Think about this situation:
I meet Michael. We start sleeping together. I find him very hot, the way he thinks, the way we interact, but also his body itself, just the way his thighs feel and the line from his shoulder to his hip and his hands and the texture of his skin and the everythingness of him. And I keep saying to myself, not mindfully at all but in bemused wonder: I never would have expected to feel this way about you. I would say, in with that same bemusement, you are so fucking hot. And I didn't think about it.
And I would forward all this stuff about overeating and the obesity epidemic and whatnot because I'm pretty involved in food activism. Aaaaaand... finally the incongruity hit me. I poked at this in my head for a couple weeks, like a sore tooth, and realised what was going on. I was saying I never would have expected you to be hot because you're fat.
Except it wasn't graceful like this. After all this subtext, after accepting all these unspoken and unconscious endings to my sentences and not walking out on me, Michael had to endure a conversation where I basically said, "I don't know how to reconcile your body type with me thinking you're hot, any pointers?" and it hurt him pretty bad because, face it, it was maybe one of the jerkiest things I've done in my long career of being a dick.
So he was hurt and got quiet and I took it away and thought about it some more. And after a bit I stopped using the subtext. It stopped being woah, I'm shocked that you could be hot and started being just, you're hot. That made me happy, but I wasn't really sure what was going on in my head. Then today someone made a post on facebook and I grasped something more consciously.
It's true that carrying a lot of weight is a health risk.
It's true that stressing over things is a health risk.
It's true that working a desk job is a health risk.
Driving in a car is pretty goddamn dangerous, actually.
Smoking, drinking from plastic bottles, all sorts of things: health risks. In fact, cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada. Then heart disease, in which weight is definitely implicated. But, you know, people die, and statistics are statistics. No one actually chooses a mate by running a statistical analysis of everyone in the room and taking the person most likely to live a long time or we'd all want to date Japanese schoolgirls... oh, wait.
So the next argument, and one dear to the food movement, is that fat people are socially irresponsible because they do something which makes them unhealthy and thus a burden on health care and the rest of society, etc. The usual rebuttal to this is: we've all got our vices, so if you conflate attractiveness with health with skinniness, then also conflate attractiveness with health with nonsmoking AND not driving on dangerous roads AND not drinking to excess AND to not getting sunburns AND to using only glass containers and organic food AND teflon pans AND etc etc or you're a hypocrite.
But I've realised that it's much simpler than that for me, suddenly.
I find some people, and some bodies, maddeningly earthshatteringly attractive. I find some people and some bodies very much not. I don't control and can't anticipate this attraction; it's a gift when it's put in my hands.
And, separately, I worry about the economics of health: health care; the high cost of good veggies; eating well; desk jobs; yes, high fructose corn syrup and the subsidy pressure from the agroindustrial machine to maintain a steady cheap supply of that rather than fresh fruit and veggies and by the way more veggies would mean more farmers instead of more jobs where people sit down and that's socially unacceptable; and in the same category a lack of biking infrastructure and pesticides and the lack of self-worth driven by our lack of worthwhile projects to break our teeth on and thus teach us how to be effective in the world and how that leads people to do stupid self-harm or self-risk to fit in; a poor definition of health overall; no actual value placed on a culture where people can share knowledge about how to live well or have socially-sanctioned conversations about same; epidemic depression, the list goes on and on and on.
These two things, what we find attractive and what we approve of morally, are rarely connected and in fact often backwards-wired as per the girls-like-bad-boys stereotype. So it's really not cool what we do: we project all the guilt for our broken food culture and food system onto the people who bear the most visually obvious symptoms of it, then we use the threat of sexual and romantic rejection, which really drives to the core of our happiness as humans, to try and get them, any them that's not us, to make it go away. And we dangle romantic acceptance and sexual fulfillment as the carrots gained for successfully putting that societal skeleton back in the closet where we don't have to look at it. But, that's getting a little meta. My real point is merely the separation.
So there's how I was a dickwad with my projected shit and my inability to treat a human like, you know, a person instead of as a social issue. And that's why I try to be mindful about it now. And it's kinda incoherent because I've had a long week, but I really really needed to get this out. And I'd really like people to respond to it if they have something to say, gently if possible, because I need to hear the voices of my friends on this.
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 04:13 am (UTC)I had a hard time reading this, as the whole concept of fat is triggering for me. I've heard the trumpets of fat-activism, and although the words get to me, the feelings don't. I hate how shamed I can feel sometimes about my weight, about the number on my clothes, about those odd wiggles and jiggles that, despite my healthy lifestyle, won't leave me alone. I hate how the concept of FAT can alienate me from my body in an instant, making it my will versus the body instead of the oneness that is healthy.
I'm sad M had to go through that conversation with you for you to grow, and I sincerely hope that there were significantly more conversations and interactions on the topic to build him up. Chats like that stick with you, else.
I still remember my first fat rejection, when a group of high school acquantances thoughtlessly explained to me(when I questioned why I was excluded from a spin-the-bottle game), "Hey, it's not that we don't like you, but you're Fat. Of course you can't play, none of us are attracted to people your size." It kills me that fifteen years later, I still remember that.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 08:44 pm (UTC)He's probably confused. I always assume that he can read my mind, because I always feel like he is, and I know he knows his body is a temple to me. He'll read this, but I'm afraid to come out and have an open conversation about it because I don't want to hurt him further.
That's a brutal memory. It reminds me of the first time I was called a slut, a little. They just stick.
/hugs
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 06:00 am (UTC)Oddly, I find someone's food habits, rather than this size, more of a determining factor for attraction after the initial meeting with someone. Eating healthy and being healthy and living life are incredibly attractive attributes.... And that doesn't equal skinny in many cases.
Not really coherent response....
no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 08:58 pm (UTC)This Response Contains A Lot Of Pain
Date: 2011-06-10 06:31 am (UTC)The argument that fat people are socially irresponsible because we put burdens on the healthcare system makes me unspeakably angry. What about old people? People with chronic illnesses? Lot of them aren't fat at all.
I have been taught from a young age that my body isn't worth loving, that it is ugly, disgusting, repulsive, monstrous, and unacceptable, and that starving myself is better than being fat (which, hi, not a solution, but y'know). How am I supposed to find a positive self image when all the mirrors around me told me "You are HIDEOUS."
I have never been suicidal, and I am surprised that I haven't been.
I still constantly battle with hating my body. I work out, not to lose weight, but to feel healthier and become physically stronger. I often do not approach people I am attracted to because I am convinced that they could never be attracted to me and that I will be rejected immediately because of my body. I've had mothers of my partners constantly say to them, "I'm worried about Shawna, she's so FAT." No joke. Verbatim. My mother, when I was a teenager, would give my little sister and brother ice cream and say, "But you and I don't NEED any of THOSE extra calories."
I get righteously angry when issues of fat come up because they have hurt and still hurt me so. damn. much.
I realized a week or two ago that I was unconsciously assuming that many of the nerds I work with OF COURSE wouldn't have wives. Most of them do have wives, and I was embarrassed and deeply ashamed to realize that I'd made that assumption.
Re: This Response Contains A Lot Of Pain
Date: 2011-06-10 07:09 am (UTC)Most of the people I hang around with right now haven't seen me much larger than I am right now, so they don't make a point of checking their fat bingo statements around me. They are often surprised about how vehement and sometimes vitriolic I get in my disagreement. But you know, I'm sick about the insincere concern trolling that comes out after I say, "Uh, as a former (and some may say current) fattie, I find what you have to say hurtful and bigoted." I guess that as someone who is now at a more socially acceptable size, they find it completely mindboggling that I could ever have been the irresponsible social drain that they're talking about.
People pull out the "fat people are unhealthy and it's bad for them!" or "it's socially irresponsible!" or "don't you want to be healthy???" statements after I "come out," as if those statements will appear as anything other than a belated attempt to make the bigoted shit they just said more palatable. It happens from people I like, and from people I expected better from, as well as from people I expected about as much from. (Somehow I doubt that someone who gets pissed off at the idea that someone is telling fat people that they're beautiful really gives a single flying fuck about the health about any number of fat people they don't know. And fuck them if they think that saying it's okay to tell a fat person they're beautiful is the same as telling them they have to personally tell a fat person they're beautiful.)
Thank you for sharing your experiences. I am very, very sorry that this is something that you go through, and I wish that my anger could do something to make it stop.
Re: This Response Contains A Lot Of Pain
Date: 2011-06-13 09:18 pm (UTC)That argument about the health-care system really is beside the point, which is what I was trying to say, and I know that anger you're talking about, albeit likely more distantly and less frequently. It's like, stop taking your issues out on the flesh of my beloved, you know? I would fight to protect that.
It kills me that so many beautiful people are responding to this with so many stories of awful things happening to them and with such struggles involved in acknowledging that. I feel like I have a ....religious imperative, if you like, to see beauty and share it, and I can't imagine what it must be like for that to not start at home. When people snicker at my unshaven legs on the bus, more often than not I snicker back at their provincialism. Being able to do that makes it easier. :/
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 06:54 am (UTC)That...conversation spurred what was going to be the first entry I'd write in my LJ for a while, except my eyes hurt and I didn't have the energy. But the anger is there and it's going to come out in an entry.
Thank you
Date: 2011-06-10 09:26 am (UTC)I sympathize with this post because I have unwanted (sometimes uncontrollable/unconscious) prejudices against fat people and/or fatness. It's rarely at other people, though I'll take the liberty to confess that my mind growls and snaps horrible things when it sees fat people working out in a gym or jogging. (It's visceral and I have been working with mixed success to get rid of it for years. I don't like it and I'm not proud of it.)
I'm also fat. I've pretty much always been fat.
Most of my bullying is directed squarely in the mirror, with the rare outward projection. Even the thought of exercise can sometimes give me panic attacks, because of the weight of the shame and judgement (from myself and feared from others).
A vivid summary of my lifelong struggle is here http://wished4this.livejournal.com/89831.html (and anyone who wishes to read it but can't just message me I'll add you).
I think the absolute worst thing about being fat is the shame (from any direction). And I also think it is my biggest obstacle to losing weight.
When I work out, it's not to "feel healthier", it's to lose weight. Because being fat fucking sucks.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 09:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 12:12 pm (UTC)Me, I've put on about 20 pounds since you knew me, mostly from writing my thesis, but I've also picked up swimming and HEMA fencing, so some of it actually is muscles (or so I tell myself). Still, most of it went (as so often in us males) directly to the stomach. I'm not happy with it, but I also must keep reminding myself that, at my height, my former weight of 160ish was very, very skinny.
It's also very definitely age-related, seeing how I used to be able to eat indiscriminately without putting on much. Alas, gone are the days. But I look around at my friends and acquaintances and expanded peer group, and I see it's normal. None of my friends these days fall into the "skinny" group any more, but most of them I'd hesitate to call "fat". Solid, maybe. There are only two candidates were the rest of us are concerned they're heading into obesity territory, but they've proven resistant to advice, and so we let them be.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 02:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 09:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 04:24 pm (UTC)My own background is that I have always been fat. While in school, I was also very unpopular and bullied, and whether the fat caused the bullying or was just a coincidence, fat became equated with unworthy in my eyes. About 10 years ago, I was able to take off about 50 pounds and suddenly my entire self-image changed. I suddenly saw myself as an attractive, capable, strong, and indomitable woman. Coincidentally (or not) I soon left my verbally abusive husband and started a brand new life in a brand new city.
Unfortunately, the particular eating program (hate the word diet, it's become meaningless through incorrect usage) that lost me that 50 pounds, also permanently damaged my ability to self-regulate; to eat when hungry, to stop when satisfied. It encouraged me to binge and then starve, and I've been doing so ever since. I've used various other weight loss programs (low-carb, Weight Watchers, Isagenix, Sacred Heart) to augment my starve/binge pattern. I am convinced that in my first 20 years of life ... the "fat years" ... I had more healthful eating habits than I have now. I've recently read that yo-yo weight gain/loss is actually far more risky than just keeping a stable weight, even if that weight is higher than normal, and that our idea of "fat people are unhealthy" actually comes from the fact that fat people are more likely to partake in yo-yo diets, and that is the real risk factor.
So here I am, mid-thirties, with a child to raise, faced with the task of teaching her to have a healthy relationship with food and with her body when I still have no idea how to do the same thing myself. I'm finally ready to call what I do 'disordered eating'. I'm wondering whether it's possible to love food and yet not be dependent on it, to enjoy it in a guilt-free way without damaging myself. I'm struggling with how to lose weight in a way that is both mentally and physically healthy, and whether I owe that to myself, or to my partner, or to my daughter, or to some combination. I know rationally that losing 15 pounds will do nothing to improve my health. I also know that it SHOULDN'T affect my sense of self-worth. Yet it's unthinkable that I would - that I *could* - just accept the body I'm in now - that would be lazy, that would be giving up. And at the root is the terror that if I accept this body, it will keep getting bigger.
"We project all the guilt for our broken food culture and food system onto the people who bear the most visually obvious symptoms of it." I think this is completely and utterly true. We create a culture of ridiculous food dependence and then we shame those who fall prey to it. I am so glad you posted all this, because it was fascinating to see into the mind, the thoughtful and self-reflective mind, of someone on the other side of the weight divide.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 04:54 pm (UTC)This above is really the core issue.
I was triggered by this. Mostly as someone who has been fat all of her adult life and most of her childhood and was basically told over and over that I don't have the RIGHT to love, affection, respect, regard, space on the bus, common courtesy, CLOTHING, FOOD and oh, LIFE.
I also have finally gotten to a place where I don't fuck people who don't treat my body as normal.
You know why?
Because my body IS NORMAL. When you actually LOOK around at lots of people in the world, many of us are 'somewhat' to 'very' fat. One of the things that drives me NUTS in our current culture is a cognitive dissonance that fat is somehow abnormal. And if my lover(s) can't look at me, touch me, lust after me, cuddle with me, enjoy me as if I am normal, I can't let them do any of that. It makes me choke up.
Because even tho I have had lovers for over 16 years now, I have had, until a few years ago, a great number of them who did not think my body was normal and who could not treat me as such.
Also, a thing to consider is: if food = love and comfort for most of us, and you create a class of people who don't get love and comfort elsewhere, then constantly criticize them from finding ANY love and comfort through food (fatties have their eating scrutinized by their family, doctors, friends, co-workers, STRANGERS) then how crazy will they be?
This is all a bit of a soup, but I think I'm trying to get to this:
You need to love people. Where they are right now. You need to be able to look at them, not in pity or understanding as part of a systemic fuckupedness (which we all are anyway) but as humans who deserve the basics we all deserve. Because when people are loved they get healthier - and that may never be reflected by not being fat, some of us will always be fat - but they will contribute to our world being healthy.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-12 09:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 06:53 pm (UTC)Political viewpoint plays a role in this situation. While you can get fat=ugly or fat=unattractive or even fat=lazy from any side of the aisle, "drain on society" generally comes from the side of the aisle that believes society should pay for people's health care and that government should tell people what's best for them. And there is some room for argument that if your weight affects my taxes, then your weight becomes my business because it directly affects me instead of just affecting you. But that's a separate discussion.
I think a big part of this problem is that we have made love and sex/attraction the same thing. So we take someone who's not sexually attracted to us and interpret that as "I'm unlovable". Sex is not affection, romance, or love. It can be used to express those, but it can equally be used completely without those...to express lust, dominance, or any number of other things. Yes, you really want to have both attraction and love when we're talking marriage and such, but they're not the same thing.
Physical attractiveness is temporary and completely unrelated to a person's worth as a human being. It does have some valid relationship to dating. Different people find different things attractive, whether it's body type or race or height or some other factor. That's okay and normal. The problem is not really who does or doesn't find you attractive; the problem is absorbing the idea that physical attractiveness is part of your worth/value.
One thing I also think contributes is the way we handle relationships in the present day. Promiscuity is common, cheating is common, divorce is common, and the average person does not really believe, even if they desire, that it is possible to have a committed lifetime relationship that truly stays for life. In that kind of environment, it increases the feeling that you have to compete with everyone else to KEEP your relationships, because there's nothing you can really trust to keep them together. So if you already feel at a disadvantage in attractiveness, it makes the fear and insecurity that much stronger.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 09:47 pm (UTC)Unsurprisingly, I find that love informs my idea of someone as beautiful (I'm not talking about attractiveness/lust in this case, but just beauty, joy in looking at them). What I've learnt is that fat doesn't inform my idea of beautiful in either direction.
It is really interesting to try and construct an idea of what metrics we should base people's value on if we start holding them unequal. I realise I really don't even approach the question; I usually just say "everyone's gotta spend their XP somewhere" and assume theirs is somewhere can't personally appreciate it.
Interestingly, poly can also remove the competitive aspect from relationships, just because attraction to someone else doesn't necessarily mean an end. That ends up being somewhat ideology what with limited time at hand, of course.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 09:21 pm (UTC)First, on being a dickwad: yeah, you probably hurt him pretty badly. A solid dose of fat-shame will last a lifetime. I remember each and every time someone I cared for -- socially or sexually -- has insulted my body; they're always very hard words to forget. I'm not trying to condemn you, we all hurt people sometimes. But tread very carefully in future conversations like that. A lot of people are walking-wounded on their body image, it's a minefield.
Second, it sounds to me -- and here I am speculating a fair bit -- like the sociological talk you're engaging in here (food justice, medical issues) are distractions, diversions. I disagree with Estrellada's claim that "projected shit..." is the core issue. Or perhaps it's just vacuous: projected shit (our own feelings) are what most attraction is about. But it's not projected rationalizations, it's projected fantasy, fancy, memory, chemistry, romance, lust, a dozen irrational things-in-our-heads. I don't think we react to fatness directly in terms of social good (health care, food system, self-control). I think we use those terms as rationalizations for our immediate, personal, often surprising reactions. It's true that many of those reactions are pattered, and socially trained, but that's independent of "having a reason". Lots of social conditioning is 100% reason-free. Still, it molds who we are, sometimes more and sometimes less than we expect. You were surprised by your feelings. Surprise merits inspection. Reflect on what you feel, not why. Why is terribly elusive (and not always flattering, and easy to bullshit about). Reflect on which things (behaviors, bodies, sights, smells, sounds, personal styles) you do, and do not, find attractive, and under what circumstances. Self-knowledge is cool.
Third, while most of your replies here are from women[1], your concern has to do with a man. I know you hate anything that smells at all like gender-essentialism, but even just speaking socially: men interact with fatness ... differently than women. Not to say we have it harder or easier; just different. This is worth paying attention to if you had not yet. For example, men are less likely to have had their self-image built around bodily attractiveness in the first place, and often have self-worth more easily embedded in other things (hobbies, social groups, status of various forms). This also means that men's response to fatness is often to become alienated from our bodily selves altogether, to try to embrace other ways we have of being attractive. Alienation isn't great either; it's different. There's much more to say here (eg. how many men do you know who self-describe as "curvy"?) but suffice to say, I really do think gender and gender roles are worth noting if you're turning the relationship between "fat" and "sexy" over in your head.
[1] Re: women's relationship, there's a fascinating sequence of articles over at Greta Christina's blog, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this. Or was interesting to me.
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Date: 2011-06-13 09:48 pm (UTC)This was basically the point of my post, that those things aren't the point.
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Date: 2011-06-13 10:41 pm (UTC)my inability to treat a human like, you know, a person instead of as a social issue
Guess I misread? In any case, yeah. Letting rationalizations cloud your actions on the matter is a great way to avoid acting how you feel. Which arises from, mostly, other places.
(There's a parallel here with political rationalizations for one's feelings about kink, *cough*)
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Date: 2011-06-13 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 10:34 pm (UTC)And no, men don't use "curvy" because "curvy" is really more about hips and breasts...having a broad hourglass instead of a thin one. It's a strictly feminine-focused term.
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Date: 2011-06-13 11:13 pm (UTC)(The truth is weirder still: every person will evaluate you with their own mix of factors, appearance and otherwise, plus a good dose of random circumstantial noise unrelated to either of you.)
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Date: 2011-06-13 11:31 pm (UTC)Here's a question: Is saying, "I am not attracted to fat women" the same as saying "Fat women cannot be attractive", do you think? What if we replace fat with tall, short, blonde, brunette, redhead, dark-haired, caucasian, black, asian, latina? One is a personal preference declaration, where the other is a blanket statement purporting to speak for everyone else's preferences.
Taunting someone for their weight or race or whatever is wrong; we'd pretty much all agree on that. But it's the taunting that's wrong in that case. The question would be: is having a preference of attraction wrong? There are highly paid supermodels that I think are not even pretty. I couldn't give you a name off the top of my head, as I don't pay much attention to supermodel names. But I know I have from time to time previously seen a news article or advertisement with a photo of a supermodel in it and thought she wasn't at all pretty. But obviously there are enough people who do find her attractive to keep her highly paid. ;)
I would say that there are really three categories any individual has, not two, when it comes to their evaluation of someone's body. Of course, you can subdivide it as much as you want, but here's my basic three: There are bodies that are highly appealing, bodies that are highly repulsive, and bodies that are average. I think most women are in category one or three while considering themselves to be in category two. It always astounds me how many women are the only one that thinks they're fat.