I learned a lot of things during my chat with Aimee and Rebekah of the "More Than A Mouthful" podcast - among them that Microsoft Surface doesn't support Google Hangouts (wtf, Microsoft? you don't get to opt out of Google stuff just cuz) but we made it work. In this episode I dish about fatness and sex and life and relationships and my idea of what it means to be an 'Mericun. 

Take a listen right this second! I think you might just totally lurve it, ghurl!

xo,
Virgie

Today I was reading the comments on a post that was up on my friend Kitty’s Facebook feed. The post was about a woman who had been fat and currently isn’t fat and how her transition in size helped her understand the intensity of weight discrimination. As a thin-bodied person she talked about receiving more eye contact, more enthusiasm when people meet her, etc. Someone had commented that she wondered how much of the change had to do with this woman’s level of self-esteem before the size transition. And I remembered a time when I would have wondered the same thing...

Because that’s the line I was fed. It goes something like this:

“Virgie, it’s not that there is a major culture-wide system of discrimination and bias, it’s that YOU have a bad outlook and aren’t working hard enough to create the life that you really want. Why do you choose not to create the life that you really want? In fact, your low self-esteem is getting everyone down. You should probably do something about that. Chop. Chop.”

Let me tell you what’s wrong with the self-esteem myth line by line.

1. “Virgie, it’s not that there is a major culture-wide system of discrimination and bias, it’s that YOU have a bad outlook and aren’t working hard enough to create the life that you really want.”

I am certainly not the first person to have made this observation, but I think it’s worth repeating: THIS IS VICTIM-BLAMING/BOOTSTRAPPING RHETORIC. Victim-blaming is about convincing someone that it is the victim’s fault - not the victimizer’s fault - for whatever negative outcomes have resulted from the experience of having been victimized. Boot-strapping is about convincing people that each and every one of is personally and solely responsible for our success or failure.

Both of these ideologies are sold especially hard to people who are (wait for it) marginalized (oppression can get so predictable sometimes, ghurl) because our psychology has already been primed through a lifetime of having been taught that we are inferior. The idea that each individual person regardless of what their experience with discrimination has been is personally responsible for having a sunshiney outlook on the world is weird, creepy, wrong, fallacious, and non-sensical. It just doesn’t make any damn sense at all. Oh, and it’s racist, sexist, and classist too.

2. “Why do you choose not to create the life that you really want?”

The language of “choosing” has made its way into more conversations I am a part of recently (I will admit that this could be a San Francisco thing). Don't get me wrong: I love choice! But sometimes the language of choice is used to obscure the very real ways in which oppression affects our ability to make choices.

Time for a dating anecdote! Once I was on a 3-day date with this New Zealand former-fat-now-skinny-yogi-master named Bruce. We were in Santa Cruz, which he’d driven me to in his bio-diesel fueled Hummer. Seriously. He asked if he could watch me take a bath, and while I was in the bathtub he proceeded to spend the entire time reminding me of how much weight he had lost and how I am at risk for a panoply of diseases blahblahblah. Seriously. Not only was this totally wrong for the obvious reasons  - I’m naked and he’s not, I’m fat and he’s not anymore - I didn’t consent to having this kind of conversation with him while I was bathing and he was touching his dick. Seriously. Fat shaming me while he was touching his dick. If that isn’t the perfect metaphor for patriarchy I don’t know what is, ghurl. Anyway, I got upset and the yelling started and then he looked at me and asked: “Why are you choosing to ruin our weekend?” Oooh. I knew he was trying to mind fuck me, and I wasn’t having any of it. Moral of the story: don’t go on 3-day dates with a kiwi who has a hummer.

Back to the analysis. This language of choice keys into bootstrapping, but with an extra dose of mind fucking. Mind-fucking (aka gaslighting) is particularly sexist, in my opinion, because it pushes people to question their sanity and their ability to decipher what is “really happening.” This is a tactic that has been used on women for a very long time because we are taught that women are likelier to be unhinged, “hysterical,” or otherwise mentally unstable.

3. “In fact, your low self-esteem is getting everyone down. You should probably do something about that. Chop. Chop.”

Seriously? So let me get this straight: I was totally fine until the culture taught me that my fat body was wrong and worthless. Then I developed low self-esteem and the attendant body language of surrender so that people would understand that I knew my place (SO THAT I COULD SURVIVE). Now it’s MY responsibility to fix the problem that I didn’t create AND it turns out that somehow it’s actually all my fault? That just doesn’t make any sense, ghurl.

The Take Home Message
What I'm saying is that you don't have to buy into the self-esteem myth anymore if you don't want to, ghurl. The problem is REAL. It's not just in your brain and we can't solve a system of oppression by all making aggressive eye contact and having all of the oppressed people just pretending that the discrimination and injustice aren't really real.

My analyzing brain is tired and I need some eggs now. But you get why this shit is fucked up. So, I trust you to take it from here.

Xo,
Virgie

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I spent this afternoon talking with Jen at the Winnipeg Free Press about my Lose Hate Not Weight philosophy and lots of other body image related topics - since it's around that New-Year's-resolution-driven-fat-panic-diet-spiking time of year. And then Jen introduced me to something I had never heard of.

It's called fitspo.

It's short for Fitspiration. According to Glamour:

Fitspo refers to images and words that women post with the purpose of inspiring
themselves and others to live a fit, active life.

The fitspo trend arose after thinspiration - #thinspo - images were banned from social media sites like Tumblr and Twitter because of the images' consistent portrayal of very thin (some say unhealthily thin) women. In my albeit brief research, fitspo images don't seem much different, but now they say things like "strong is the new thin" or they say this:

In looking particularly at images that have text I found 5 major themes that were consistent in fitspo messages that I argue are ruining your day, our culture and perhaps most importantly ice cream:

1. Failure & Bootstrapping
Dear JilMike, you call the absence of a 6-pack failure; I call it cake-is-delicious. For those new to the concept of bootstrapping, it's the belief that we are each completely independently responsible for our individual success or failure. And that if you fail it is because you didn't try hard enough. Notable example of this being a big old lie: the economy.

2. Death & Destruction
Like the first image (about fat funerals), there is a distinct necropolitical bent to some of the messaging. According to political scientist Achille Mbembe: 

"contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death
(necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure the relations among resistance,
sacrifice, and terror." 

Writers like Naomi Wolf have discussed the ways in which sexism seeks to imbue women with a desire for our own destruction.

3. Pain
This theme ties to the first and second themes I mentioned and is based in the very Protestant/WASP belief that nothing worth having - nothing respectable - comes without suffering. Also, naturalizing pain - saying that pain is a natural and inevitable condition of success - sets women up to be unhappy no matter what we do.

4. Ableism
Ableism is, in part, about creating anxiety about your physical abilities and equating disability with personal failure. This image uses our cultural anxiety about aging/loss of ability to convey that you have a limited timeframe during which you can actually achieve things and that not using your body for intense exercise is something you will regret. Beyond being ableist, it's also just really manipulative.

5. Bullying
Maybe I'm in the minority but I don't like to make things - even inanimate things - cry, and last time I checked that was called emotional abuse (or dacryphilia).

So, let's recap. I don't think that:

• Failure & Bootstrapping
• Death & Destruction
• Pain
• Ableism
• Bullying

are inspiring. They also create a psychological link between physical activity - which should be fun and pleasurable - with really awful outcomes and intentions.

One of the last things Jen (you remember, from the Winnipeg Free Press) and I talked about was the ways that IRONICALLY the diet and fitness industry actually creates the really negative relationship that people have with food and with physical activity. 

When you give foods (like cookies or kale) magical powers you create a situation in which people will act irrationally and inauthentically around food. 

When you endow physical activity and movement the magical powers of success and failure you create a situation in which people will develop a really fraught relationship with movement of any kind.

I know that for me, sometimes even going out for a walk - because it's gorgeous outside and I just want to see some gorgeousness! - can trigger feelings of shame or "yay me" or goal-setting. These feelings are NOT natural or innate; they are learned.

So, Fitspo, I'm sorry but I'm going to have to say that you are anti-humanitarian, you are sexist, you are ableist and you're just a plain misnomer. There ain't no inspiration in suffering.

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My friend Jes (aka The Militant Baker) just launched a #SmashTheScale Revolution and she asked me to tell the interwebz why I am smashing the scale this year. Well, here goes...

Stay tuned for a new blog dedicated to this April's Body Love Conference (another of Jes' brainchildren) and a promo code for tickets!

This blog continues to be free through community support. Yay! Want to support me in my continued efforts to generate fat positive content online? Donate now <3