Ask a Feminist: What Do You Think of Radical Feminist, Twisty Faster?

Image courtesy of LexnGer

This question is from male feminist and friend of NAW, Jeremy:

So I was reading Twisty's post today about the nude revolutionaries business and she argues that for western women to use their nude bodies for the purposes of subversion doesn't work because the nude female body is always re-inscribed into the male gaze. I wonder, then, if the female body must be hidden, how is this not simply placing the power over the female body back into patriarchal terms? She's right that a nude female body will be subject to the male gaze, but by hiding the body it is also responding to the shaping of the male gaze.

I couldn't remember if you had, so I was hoping you could point me to one of your blog posts that takes up this issue of female nudity, feminism, and the male gaze, or if you haven't written on it, I'd love to hear your thoughts. My initial reaction to articles on iblamethepatriarchy is usually one of resistance, but maybe because I think it's because I don't like that version of feminism because it feels to man-hating and second-wave-y to me. I'd love to learn otherwise, but from my infrequent reading, it sure seems that the spinster aunt doesn't like men, and doesn't like male feminists, so I end up being told that any response I might have is wrong or unwelcome right out the gate. Sure, that's what women have experienced for a very long time, but to try to shift the tables so men are then in the persecuted social position is the angry approach of second-wavers who seemed to often want to simply usurp the male authority rather than address the problematic social imaginary and logic that perpetuated the inequality and mistreatment.

Anyway, I'd love to hear your musings.



Now, ordinarily I'm wary of questions about man-hating feminists, since many people ask those questions out of ignorance. Their evidence for the existence of man-hating feminists tends to either come from pop culture representations of hot but angry women with short hair who say they refuse to shave their legs but who always have smooth legs on screen - or some people just get these questions from applying their pre-conceived notions of feminists in such a way that no matter what I say, they think anything other than "I want to obey a man" means "I want to dominate a man." I say, "You know, it's especially problematic that women are so often portrayed without faces in print advertising," and they say, "Sure, blame it all on the men!" Even though I never mentioned men. So, I'm normally cautious about those questions. 


But Jeremy's question struck a cord with me. Not only do I know Jeremy is himself a feminist who knows there are various camps in the movement and who does not buy into those stereotypes - I also know that Jeremy's asking about a specific blogger and about a recent post that left me with some similar questions. Plus, he's asking about a radical feminist that we at NAW kinda endorse by including a link in our blog roll. Awhile ago I posted about a conflict between Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy and a sex positive blogger (whom I linked once in my original post but am not linking again). See, Twisty uses a lot of anti-men rhetoric. This isn't to suggest that she hates all men - she has posted about male friends, for instance. But she is aggressively anti any form of patriarchy or femininity, as she sees patriarchy as the system at the root of all evil, and as she sees femininity as an unnatural system constructed to take power from women.


So recently Twisty blogged about nude feminists and explained why she saw a real reclamation of power in an Egyptian woman's decision to post nude photos in protest of restrictions placed on female attire in her home country, but why she saw a Canadian woman producing a pin-up calendar to simply play into patriarchal values. And that post is what inspired the first part of Jeremy's question - he wants to know my thoughts on this issue and whether I'd agree with Twisty. And, I am very much biased on this issue - we've discussed pornography at length on NAW since Erica sees it as (frequently) empowering, where I see it as (always) degrading to all participants, and usually degrading to women. Erica and I of course have our different biases - as someone who has never willingly watched anything that most people would call pornography, I feel outright traumatized if a pornographic image pops up on my computer. I feel violated - it is a violent experience for me. For Erica, the right kind of pornography can be quite liberating. So, we have different opinions. And there are a lot of different opinions out there. If I had my druthers, pornography would be illegal in the US, or at least more restricted. Yes, I'm that extreme. But I also recognize that quantifying and defining pornography is like trying to catch a shadow. While I see that vampire romance novel as pornographic, I know many people who disagree - and I don't have the right to make it illegal.


So I don't have a very good answer for this question of whether the pin-up calendar is liberating. If I had the stomach to click on Twisty's links to the calendar, I could tell you my opinion of that particular example of nudity-for-feminism. But I'm so opposed to pornography that I'm not about to click on something that touts itself as being in pin up girl style.


As for Jeremy's second question, about radical femininsts and man-hating, I have a few thoughts, but they're still conflicted. On the one hand, I don't share Jeremy's concern that Twisty wants to usurp male authority and set up a world where men are persecuted in the place of women. If anything, I get the impression Twisty just doesn't wants to live apart from men. Granted, she'll then go and post something about a male friend just to confuse me, and she says everything so tongue-in-cheek that I can never tell when she's serious. In fact, I've been chuckling over her posts for so long that it came as a shock to me when I read a recent post that is opposed to romantic relationships of any sort. When I saw the title indicating she was going to "give relationship advice to no one in particular," I expected something pithy about how damaging a certain type of relationship can be: instead, she advised all women to avoid relationship, even adding a note that homosexual relationships are just as damaging because they're based on heterosexual patterns.


And suddenly I sat back and thought, "Crap. She's serious." But even as I type this blog post, there's a part of me that thinks, "I don't know - she can't be against all relationships." But she says she is, and I think I'm guilty of putting up Twisty in my own image. So how do I feel about Twisty's message? I don't know!


But back to Jeremy's request for links to NAW posts dealing with issues of nudity, the male gaze, etc. 


First off, one of our earliest posts came from Erica in 2009, "My Body's Politik," where Erica discusses these issues in the context of her own body and her conflicted emotions about weight loss.


Then I've got a post from last year where I listed off various discussions involving feminism and the body, "Bodies and the Blogosphere." Incidentally, that post includes a brief discussion of Twisty's views on pornography.


If you want to see a full-on conversation about pornography, Erica and I had a conversation in a series of posts last year. First Erica responded to "Bodies and the Blogosphere" (above), in "Porn, Porn, Porn." I then did some research in order to provide an articulate answer and wrote, "The Problem with Porn: Part 1" and "The Problem with Porn: Part 2." Sadly, I never felt that I'd finished that discussion. The timing was just bad - it was the beginning of a particularly stressful period of my life, a period which never quite ended (I know, I know, Rich World Problems and all that). 


You might also appreciate Erica's discussion of "Self-centered Sex Differences" and how the concept of penis envy assumes a penis inherently brings power that breasts and a vagina don't. And then there's Michelle's post about the class virgin/whose (false) dichotomy, "Caught Between an Angel and a Prostitute."  And there's also my post from Fall 2010, "Naked Skin: Why I Love My Face Without Makeup."


And then you really should just look over the entire month of January 2011, as our theme was the body. I also kinda wish I could find an earlier post where Erica pointed to a plus model who was in a relatively tame commercial but who faced a strong retaliation from family-minded folks who interpreted her curves as pornographic. Which is, again, why I recognize that pornography is a tricky, tricky, tricky subject.

Parts in the Press

In keeping with the theme of the month, I thought I'd post some articles that deal with a body image and weight loss topic that always seemed ridiculous to me: pregnancy and weight gain. Sure, too much weight gain during pregnancy and a person can develop gestational diabetes- not fun- but too little weight gain and that person isn't really doing their future child (or themselves) much good. But since most countries in the "West" are obsessed with weight, high expectations are often set by the media and enforced by our peers (and, lamentably, our own inner voices) about how our bodies should look before, during, and after pregnancy. Here are some links, with commentary.

First, commentary from Amy Adams about pregnancy and her upcoming movie revealed more than intended. Not only did she play up the uber-motherhood angle (especially being "vulnerable" and "softer"), but she also revealed that she loved the physical changes she underwent while pregnant: "The whole purpose of my body was no longer to fit into a sample size. It was to nurture another being. So I always felt great, no matter what I was wearing." Hooray for admitting that being bigger felt good! Unfortunately, that message is quite lost in an article that's filled with photos of her looking skinny and quips from the author about "just how much weight" Amy's lost.

Second comes the "let's conceal the pregnancy bump!" from Natalie Portman. The article lauds Portman's choice of dress at a recent awards show because it "artfully" conceals her baby bump. To this I have to ask: when someone's pregnant, what's wrong with their baby bump? Are they not allowed to have a bump because they're a celebrity or because they're human? Since when is it considered a wise choice to try and hide a pregnancy that's already been announced to the world? If you're pregnant and announcing it, why bother?

Third isn't really a news link, but an example of how hegemony culture has valorized skinniness to the point where doctors and nutritionists have to warn us not to try and lose pregnancy weight the way celebrities seem to. Unfortunately, the article still focuses on "getting your body back," as though pregnancy and childbirth aren't things that can alter your shape forever. Think about it: the process of being pregnant stretches your skin, loosens your ligaments, and even alters your bone structure. Looking the same as you did before pregnancy not only hides the fact that your body's done something incredible, but also buys into a culture that suggests that the physical act of becoming a parent turns your body into something shameful because it's no longer been used just for sex. Remember: bodies are pleasing and fun, but bodies do a lot more. Valuing your body for all that it's done (and will do) is a much better idea than lamenting the fact that the hegemony doesn't categorize you solely as a sex object anymore.

And beyond pregnancy, I bring you a very exciting article from (of all places) the Daily Mail, in which Raven Symoné of "The Cosby Show" and "That's So Raven" says that she liked her figure better when she was heavier. Read that again. She liked her figure better when she was heavier. How many people can claim that, both publicly and shamelessly? I think it's especially encouraging that she pointedly talks about the gazes she receives, and how before she lost weight people "were actually looking at me for a real reason" instead of just looking at her body. While I'm not sure I believe her story about why she lost weight- she claims a lack of stress- I like what she has to say. Wouldn't it be great if we could all like our bodies the way they are?

This concludes our brief journey through bodies in the news. If you're wondering why so much of this article is celebrity-focused, think about it: not only are celebrity bodies a constant topic of conversation in the gossip press, but in a world where Americans are surveyed to find out which celebrities they want to get plastic surgery to look like, how celebrities are shaped and talk about their figures- and how newspapers, tabloids, and we talk about their figures too- has a great deal of influence over how we view our own.

The Racist Body

This image comes from NotCot.org and no copyright infringement is intended.

I've talked in the past about my experiences with diet and body image, and included in there a little bit about how my cultural and racial identities shape it. But I don't think we at Not Another Wave have contributed much to conversations about how body image- particularly how it's marketed, and to whom- shape and influence a general culture in the US that perpetuates racist body norms and expectations.

In western Europe and its subsequent colonies, it's been a long-standing tradition to compare the bodies of African and Indian slaves and indigens with the bodies of the culturally declared norm, the White European. This happened (and continues to happen, but we'll get there in a moment) to both cis men and cis women, in efforts by the imperialists to prove European superiority over the Other. Where European men were classified as intellight, African men were childlike. Where European men were tall, Indian men were short. Where European men could be gentlemen and restrain themselves around European women, African men were hyper-sexual. As an article in The Western Journal of Black Studies put it,

Colonial invasive powers bring with them their own myths, beliefs, and forms of colonial ordering which create a bifurcated form of hierarchy that is designed to distinguish between the natives and the colonizers, a form of hierarchy where the colonizer (white, good, intelligent, ethical, beautiful, civilized) is superior in all things, while the native (dark, exotic, sexually uncontrollable, bad, stupid, ugly, savage, backward) is inferior.

The discourse of opposites, of lauding the "Us" and demeaning (and even criminalizing) the "Other," was justification for invasion, dominance, and control. Rudyard Kipling went so far as to refer to it as "the white man's burden," explaining that it was a "moral imperative" that Europeans colonize the Other, for the sake of the Other.

The discourse of Us vs. Them that the European colonists applied to their subjects was also, of course, applied to female bodies and the identities of women. Similarly to the discourses used to subjugate African and Indian men, European discourses painted African and Indian women alike as childlike, subservient by nature, and hyper-sexual. African and Indian women, in the colonist eye, represented the constant threat of temptation into every sin the Christian European imagination could come up with. To support this discourse, European soldiers actually kidnapped a woman from South Africa, nicknamed her the "Hottentot Venus," and paraded her around as a sideshow attraction in Great Britain and then in France. Of particular interest to spectators were her butt and her labia, which were both described as "abnormally large." Think about it: in the day when a person's cranial shape was supposed to determine intelligence and personality, an "abnormally large" pubic and posterior signalled a lot about supposed sexual appetite when compared to the "normal" physique of European women and their "normal" sexuality.

I go through all this because I think it has bearing on current discussions about bodies and their shape here in the US. There's a lot of publicity given to the "majority" culture pressure that is put on White women to be thin, which has a whole field of feminist research devoted to it. As one blogger rightly puts it, "This is about power. It's about wanting women to be small in the world, to take up less space, literally and metaphorically." It also relates to sexuality. Twiggy became popular among White women during a period of time when White women's sexual options were expanding drastically, thanks to advances in hormonal birth control and the emergence of the second wave feminist movement. While everyone's figure is different, the overall effect of weight loss is a body that's contained, restrained, and thus- depending on your build- significantly de-sexualized. The use of clothing to highlight curves only goes so far to refute this argument; accentuating one's breasts, hips, or butt is acceptable and often encouraged, but if a woman's breasts are "too" big, or her hips "too" full, she's "too" sexual. As another blogger put it, "It is...crucial to mention the mental anxiety caused by constant badgering by the chauvinists of the world, and the sexual harassment that seems to find large breasted women because of the stigma that goes with large breasts; and that is that those women must be 'easy'." Essentially, the loss of weight to maintain a minimally curvy body feeds directly into an ages-old series of assumptions about White women- particularly that they shouldn't be "overly" sexy.

What I'm trying to get at is that the whole "thin is in" movement really is a very White-centric movement. While pictures of women laughing alone with salad- one of the trademarks of the weight loss movement- occasionally include a woman who's presumably of African descent, the vast majority are White. And those who are Black have been, for lack of a better term, "whitenized," with light skin, controlled hair, and Romanesque features. Essentially, they are the Other as the European colonists wanted them to be: under control, "saved" from themselves, and "just like Us."

This brings me to the topic of another, less marketed-by-health-companies body standard: the standard of Thick (or Bootylicious). We've all heard it mentioned, either by rappers (especially in Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back"), activists, our friends and families, or our partners. Instead of pushing the ideology of thin, the Thick movement promotes curves and planes that would make fashion designers fall over. It's the idealization of a body that's slender (but still curvy) through the breasts and waist, and flares into a round, perky set of hips and bum connected to a pair of muscular, curvy legs. Is it a hard ideal to live up to? You bet, and don't ask me how hard I worked before I discovered that my butt wasn't built to be perky. But I digress- the point is that the ideology of Thick has become a high-held standard for many women, particularly Black women, instead of the skinny White body. And while I'm thrilled that women of any race could reasonably look to that shape as an example of how many body types are sexy, I'm also concerned about the cultural influences, both from Black and White sources, that have given shape to the Thick ideal.

Latoya Peterson on Racialicious gives a great breakdown of the idea of Thick and the meanings and validation it can carry for the women who identify with it. The valorization of a large butt, for those whose basic body shape involves one, is hugely liberating in a world that's dominated by images of bodies with flat or hardly existent butts. At the same time, however, I find it hard to forget the features that Sarah Haartman was famous for- particularly her posterior- and I have to wonder how much influence the earlier European readings of Black female bodies has had on the current uplifting of Thick. If large breasts on a White woman still read as a measure of her sexual appetite and ability to consent, does the size of a Black woman's butt get interpreted that way too? If so, is the valorization of a Thick body type simply a marketing scheme designed to re-sell the image of the Other? One of the authors of Colonize This!, Serina Riley, addresses the same problem:

"As much as we get praised for loving our full bodies, many young white women would rather be dead than wear a size 14. They nod their heads and say how great it is that we black women can embrace our curves, but they don’t want to look like us. They don’t adopt our presumably more generous beauty ideals. White women have even told me how lucky black women are that our men love and accept our bodies the way they are. I’ve never heard a white woman say she’s going to take a cue from black women and gain a few pounds, however. In a way it is patronizing, because they’re basically saying, 'It’s OK for you to be fat, but not me. You’re black. You’re different.'"

For me, the fact that Thick is so strongly associated with Black women and Black identities is the part that's concerning: while I understand the desire to have ideals and cultures separate from those of the White hegemony, I also have a hard time believing that the Thick ideal in particular is really all that liberating.

The counterargument, of course, is that many cultures in the US find great pride and power in reclaiming images, ideals, and vocabulary from their discriminatory pasts. Words like cunt, nigger, queer, and bitch have all been reappropriated by cultural movements to confront the bigotry that used to dominate them, and there's merit to the argument that the current chart-toppers of hip-hop, who valorize overindulgence in sex, drugs, and violence, are manipulating stereotypes about Black men to gain power over the White imaginations that created them. Sex workers forming unions and declaring pride in their trade are refuting the myth that they're the victims of pimps and johns. In theory, if the stereotype is being used and evolving in the hands of the people it's supposed to harm, its creators- the ones doing the harming in the first place- lose their weapons. In theory. Whether or not it actually works that way is a debate that merits its own article.

Regardless, the point remains that the "ideal body" that's promoted in magazines, billboards, newspapers, TV, and movies that are marketed towards the hegemonic (predominately White) culture is really only intended to be ideal for a specific group. The current popular ideals for White women and Black women, I think, retain a lot of the racist and sexist assumptions that were prolific during Europe's imperialist years, and contribute to a culture that still believes Black women have uncontrollable sexual appetites as compared to White women. Furthermore, the notion of separate ideal bodies is offensive in its own right- that anyone from any culture should be expected to live up to a standard based on a small percentage of the population. Even if it were unproblematic to assume that Black and White women should have completely separate body goals, the fact remains that not all Black women are built to be Thick any more than all White women are built to be skinny. Instead of idealizing bodies based on stereotypes and minorities, we should be idealizing the people who are happy and comfortable in their natural shape. Instead of buying into a diet industry that's upholding racist ideals about bodies and appetites, we should be investing our time and energy in other ways to improve ourselves, such as challenging the idea that self-fulfillment comes in wearing a particular dress size. Let's do away with the Madonna vs. Hottentot Venus dichotomy once and for all.

Note: this article has been notably Black-and-White focused, while leaving out ethnicities and identities that also have stereotypes associated with female bodies (i.e. the "skinny Asian" stereotype). I'd love to hear from you what your perceptions of these are, as well as how you think they fit into a global history of domination and subordination.

From Erica: my body's Politik

This is a post I've been intending to write for a long time, that's very difficult to pen for a number of reasons. The first is that it requires my admission that I don't know all the answers, and that's an admission that doesn't make me comfortable. The biggest reason is that it paints my mother in a very negative light, and while I want to be honest about the things she's said, I don't want to give the impression that she's completely ignorant or oppressive. That being said...

For a number of reasons, this January I joined the millions of other Americans who made a New Year's resolution to lose weight. My primary reason was health-based; I hold the genetic key to a delicious smorgasbord of weight-related diseases and complications, and it was my personal choice to change habits now and reduce my future risks. My secondary reason, admittedly, was self-esteem-based. As a former ballerina, a former borderline anorexic, and a card-carrying member of the United States "majority" culture, I wanted to be thinner again. Seven months and over twenty pounds later, I can say that I'm successful in my venture.

But I'm not entirely happy with it.

Here's the thing. When I was at my heaviest, I never qualified for any label other than "slightly chubby." I wore a size 12, but on a 5'6" frame, that's still slender enough that any claims to fatness are little more than claims to marginalize and render invisible all the people out there who can claim that label for themselves. It's unlikely that any of the fat-positive communities, either internet-based or face-to-face, would have included me as anything other than an ally. However, being part of a society that values a certain type of skinny woman more than any other body means that I spent a lot more time engaged in size politics than in smug attitudes and designer clothes. And I learned how to be an ally to the fat positivity movement and how to call people out on their size-ism.

The problem is, there's a line of personal-meets-political that causes every ally or activist trouble. For some, it's the line that segregates their queer positivity from their ability to come out to their family. For me, it's the line of fat politics and my mother.

I grew up in a household where, for health reasons, our access to refined sugars was limited. As I grew into my teen years, my rebellions often took the form of sugar binges- eating chocolate chips at midnight, sneaking Lindt balls out of the cabinet, or going for hot chocolate before dinner (see the chocolate theme?). After a bout of crash dieting and severe weight loss when I was beginning high school, I started to gain weight. To an extent, this was necessary, as I was undeniably too thin. After a point, however, it stopped being about health and started being about my right to eat what I wanted, when I wanted to. And my mother noticed.

"You look so pale and pasty," she commented more than once. "I'm so sorry you didn't get my figure," one of my favourites, came out a couple of times. Other remarks included exhortations to lose ten pounds, to stop being "so chunky," to "slim down," or, when that didn't work, to tell me outright I shouldn't have this dessert or that snack because I was really letting myself go. These were the remarks and the attitudes that I endured for- get this- six or seven years. It got to the point that I didn't want to go clothes shopping with her, because I didn't want her to know what sizes I wore, and where I dreaded any moment she would see a recent photo of me, because she would be sure to point out how un-photogenic I'd become. And no matter how much I told her that this hurt me, or reminded her of how dangerously skinny I'd once been, she was relentless.

When I lost all this weight, that changed almost instantly. I'm refusing to go so far as skinny- I wear a size 10, which I think puts me at slender- but for my mother, it's like the world has gone from black-and-white to technicolour. "You look so good!" she said when I was home briefly in June. For three days, all the body comments I heard were positive. I looked "fantastic," "so healthy," "great," and so on. We went shopping, and even the sight of me in an LL Bean bathing suit was thrilling to her.

Here's the tricky part of my Body Politik, the thing that shames me and gives shape to my relationship with the fat positivity movement: I ate it right up. After all the years of fighting and negativity, after the crying and the self-loathing and the anger at her for her sizeist attitude, I just couldn't do it anymore. It was such a relief to know that every bite going into my mouth wasn't being monitored and judged, and to know that she was looking at my body with benevolence, that I just relaxed and fed into the attention like nothing else. It was really sickening, to be honest. My conscience, sitting on my shoulder with her porn videos (let's face it, my conscience is some sort of Slut), was so shocked she hit the "pause" button. What are you doing, she was screaming. HOW COULD YOU COLLUDE LIKE THIS???

The answer is: I don't know.

The thoughts I've come up with since then have been confusing at best. My mother's obsession with weight- hers as well as mine- points to some of the broader issues facing weight and body image expectations of White women-identified people in this culture. Even women like us who not only meet gendered expectations, but push beyond them- she with a family, an amazing career, and a PhD, and me with a partner, two master's degrees in progress, and a successful series of professional experiences under my belt- are still subject to the body pressure to the extent that it had a severe impact on our relationship for years. And it's not as though we have ever qualified as fat, either; neither of us has ever been publicly marginalized on account of our bodies. My mother, in fact, was rail-thin until she had her children, and even then has barely put on enough weight to be called thick, fluffy, or chubby. She's still thin! But for some reason she's unable to remove the culture goggles long enough to get a realistic picture of herself and our family, and continues to insist that the family (myself being the only exception at this point) needs to collectively shed its excess weight "for our health."

Another thought that's been floating around in my brain, perhaps the most bothersome to me, is how to handle the health question as pertains to weight loss. On one hand, Mom has a point, especially in light of the fact that my long-term health was the impetus for me to lose weight in the first place. No one in my immediate family is severely overweight, or even close to it, but there's something to be said for maintaining cardiac health- which is, to an extent, connected to body mass. The same long-term health concerns that I was focusing on are concerns that my father and my sister consider too, and I can sympathize with Mom in her desire to keep us all together and healthy for as long as possible. On the other hand, my dad and my sister are adults and can make those choices for themselves. They exercise and they eat a well-balanced diet, and their bodies are what they are. The health-based argument from Mom's camp basically falls apart here, and it becomes a question of appearances.

Which brings me to the troublesome aspect of this train of thought. As an errant fat politics ally, I believe that it is a person's right to determine their own level of health and their own body size, and that the two aren't necessarily connected as much as mainstream White culture wants us to think they are. I believe that every body has its beauty, and that every person has the right to be recognized, represented, and respected for who they are, as they are, without critiques or marginalization based on body size. So how, when I lose weight for my health, do I answer to the positive feedback I inevitably receive? On one hand, I'm proud of the choices I've made and the effort I've put in to my body. It feels good to have that recognized by others. On the other hand, I know that the people complimenting my weight loss don't necessarily know about the reasons I used to justify my diet, and they're just complimenting my ability to live closer to the skinny ideal. Worse, that malicious bitch inside me, the one who eats my self-esteem for breakfast, doesn't care why they're saying I look good as long as they keep saying it. And let's be fair: these compliments don't always occur in settings that make a fat politics dialogue a reasonable option.

So how do I, and how do we as a collective society, change this? For one, when dialogue is a reasonable option, I need to choose it. This goes not only for the friends and others with whom I'm comfortable opening this conversation, but also for that trickier person: with my mother. In order to make a real dent in sizeism, I need to confront not only her prejudices, but mine as well- the ones that allow me to keep silent (or to respond enthusiastically) to hers. For another, when that dialogue is opened, we need to engage not only the questions of size, but the questions of what it means to be "healthy." Let's face it: for a lot of people, "healthy" and "fat" are mutually exclusive categories, and that's incorrect. The biggest thing, though, is we need to change the value judgements that come as part of this dialogue, and that I'm sure have been sprinkled throughout this post. We need to break down the negative attitudes towards fat, but also the negative attitudes towards a person's choice about their health. The dialogue needs to be changed so that a person's decision not to jog every day ceases to be a reflection of their individual worth. And the dialogue needs to happen a lot more often, period.

Writing this has been more cathartic than I expected. Whether or not it makes sense to anyone else, it's easier for me to understand the steps I need to take to be more comfortable with who I am and what, size-wise, I am. I might be happy with my body and health now, but I haven't been entirely happy with the social results. I'm still not. But it's easier for me to see the possibilities for changing that.