1. Health is not a moral issue. This means being healthy by an arbitrary government standard does not make you a good person. Being “unhealthy” by that same arbitrary standard does not make you a bad person. Health /= morals.

2. You don’t, no matter what your size, need to conform to the mainstream societal ideal of beauty to be a person worthy of respect, love, dignity, and all those other things we’re told are only really for the pretty people.

3. Fat is a feminist issue. If some feminists choose not to deal with it, well, I’m not entirely sure they are feminists.

4. Fat is a social justice issue. Yes, fat discrimination is just that serious.

5. Dieting is antithetical to Fat Acceptance. Sorry, but it’s true. Trying to get rid of fat is the opposite of accepting it. This is a political stance. Personally, I know many dieters and my love for them is not determined by their diet. Dieting conveys no special morality or virtue on a person. However, this blog is an explicitly political space. Dieters are welcome as everyone is. But diet talk is not.

6. I’ve not laid out my comments policy but it is thus: Don’t be an asshole. If you are an asshole, I’ll mark your comment as spam. Don’t come here just to promote your new whatever - I’ll just delete it. Spam comments piss me off.

7. There is no size limitation for Fat Acceptance. There is no, “Oh, she’s okay but I’m way too large!” There is no, “Oh, she’s so thin, what’s she doing commenting here?”

8. An important definition: Politics refers to the ways in which systems of people interact. It is not just about who is running for which office. If you think talking about fat politics is stupid, go somewhere else, please, and save us all a bunch of irritation and headaches.

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I get a lot of emails suggesting topics (I LOVE these emails even if I don’t get to write about the suggested topics) and this morning there was one that had me mentally composing an answer while I drove to work.

What do you do when you try to tell someone that fat does not equal lazy or ugly or unhealthy or any number of other things and you wind up with friends who are hurt because you don’t want to read about their diet?

This is near and dear to me.

When I started this blog, I had some rocky times with a couple of friends. One friend bid me goodbye shortly thereafter and said that it was because she didn’t agree with me on body politics issues (at that point my most controversial statement was that fat people shouldn’t have to hate themselves). Another friend and I argued for quite some time because she takes a different view and I respect that but I don’t want to have those conversations with anyone.

Part of dealing with this is understanding that diets have a performative aspect. I’m sure that, somewhere, there is someone who has dieted without ever informing their coworkers and friends and casual acquaintances on the internet and, you know, more power to them. But it seems like the vast majority of dieters can’t stop talking about it and seeking praise and encouragement.

I think this is because dieting and the intentional pursuit of weight loss is fucking difficult. OF COURSE people want encouragement. They are denying themselves sustenance, often pushing their bodies beyond what is in any way healthy, and dealing with the mental and emotional fall-out of self-deprivation and lowered nutritional intake. That sucks. It sucks hard.

And they’re doing all that in a culture that says self-deprivation, especially self-deprivation aimed at weight loss, is a virtuous and good thing. Part of the expected feedback loop of dieting is praise for being “good.”

So, when you tell someone you don’t want to hear about their diet and, in fact, that you think the whole dieting thing is bunk because there is nothing wrong with being fat, you are denying the worthiness of their pursuit of this incredibly difficult thing. You’re telling them that they are wasting their time - because even if they lose weight, you don’t actually care. Their struggle doesn’t net anything you deem valuable.

That’s a hard thing to swallow.

Does it mean that you should have to listen to diet talk, though? Of course not.

You are responsible for setting your own boundaries. And if you are not comfortable with diet talk - as I am not - then establishing that boundary is absolutely worthwhile. It is going to, pretty much inevitably, make some of your friends angry and/out hurt. You have to be prepared for that.

Unfortunately, your response options are pretty limited. You can sever the friendship ties, but who wants to do that? It’s a last resort. Or you can try to explain things to your friend. If they care about you and your well-being, they’ll respect your boundaries even if they aren’t happy with them because they don’t want to lose you either.

If they throw you over because you don’t want to hear about the latest half-pound they’ve lost? Well, it seems to me that they weren’t much of a friend to begin with and while that may not be super comforting, it’s true.

There are a few things that might help:

1. Establish that these boundaries are about YOU and your mental health needs. That, because it is damaging to you, you do not want to be part of these discussions.

2. Remember that you aren’t going to be able, most likely, to logic someone who firmly believes that fat=bad and who is entrenched in the diet culture into fat acceptance. I’m not suggesting you don’t talk about fat acceptance with your friends, just that you understand it might take more than a well-reasoned speech to convince them. Don’t worry about them - take care of yourself and live your life; they might come around based on watching you or they might not but either way YOU are okay.

3. If your friend continues to try to engage you in diet talk or negative body commentary, leave. Seriously. Remove yourself from that conversation and make sure your friend knows why. It’s awkward and kind of scary the first time, but that is how boundaries are established.

Anything y’all would add to this list?

Another water aerobics class and I feel very pleasantly worked out. There was this floating and kicking thing that was surprisingly tough given that it was just floating and kicking.

In weight set point news, I weighed myself for kicks. I weigh exactly what I did when I stopped going to the gym and dieting (during which period I gained instead of lost), the same as when I was going to the gym and starving (during which period my weight changed not one pound), the same as when I wasn’t going to the gym and was eating whatever I want (during which period I gained ten pounds after going on the Pill and then magically lost it by not giving a damn).

Tell me again about calories in versus out…. *snort*

Whenever someone who weighs less than I do decides to get weight loss surgery, it is a little like being punched in the face.

Now, obviously, this is just my emotional reaction and has nothing to do with their intent. But it is there just the same. Because if they think their body is so horrible that, you know, mutilating their innards is a good idea, what must they think of mine?

I do this thing on my personal journal called Secrets Monday. It’s a chance for people to, anonymously, share a secret. Something silly, something serious, something they need to get off their chest. We’ve been doing it since, oh, December, and it is always an incredibly interesting and powerful moment.

And secrets about body image come up pretty frequently. It gets expressed in a lot of ways but yesterday, that expression took the form of several people wishing for weight loss surgery.

This really breaks my heart.

It breaks my heart because these people are contemplating something so serious and life-altering and are also struggling with feeling like they are turning their backs on fat acceptance.

It’s a rock and a hard place, emotionally. I don’t think, as a general and political statement, that weight loss surgery is in any way compatible with fat acceptance. I think there are always going to be exceptions to every rule but that those exceptions often prove the rule - prove that we need better options than cutting yourself open, literally and metaphorically, and tying knots in your guts.

In some ways I understand. My life would be so damn much easier if I were thin. It really would. Sure, there’d be plenty of other problems - there always are - but I wouldn’t have to deal with this day to day struggle to maintain a fat positive attitude, self-confidence, and everything else. I wouldn’t have to look different from almost everyone. I could finally just blend in and relax.

But the easy way, in as much as you can consider bariatric surgery easy, requires compromises I’m not willing to make. I’m not willing to rearrange my digestive system, I’m not willing to combat self-inflicted malnutrition, I’m not willing to compromise my principles - because I BELIEVE in fat acceptance - just to make my life easier.

My friends, some of whose identities I know, who are struggling with this are good people. I support whatever choices they make even when I most emphatically do not agree with them because I believe in body autonomy to the same degree that I believe in fat acceptance.

But I read about their desires for weight loss surgery and, because I love and respect these people who weight 25, 50, 75, 100 pounds less than I do, my own convictions are called into question. Convictions I thought were super stable, questions I thought had long been laid to rest. Reading about their desires for weight loss surgery results in me feeling insecure about my body in a way I have worked really hard to leave behind.

I don’t have a pithy conclusion. I am feeling sad today. Sad for our lack of options, sad for the culture that creates an atmosphere where self-mutilation is preferred to being fat. Sad for people who are fighting insurance companies that will approve weight loss surgery but not the breast reduction that is really desired. Sad for myself that, after years of working toward self-acceptance, it is still possible to be thrown off that horse and made to question the worthiness of my body (not that I’m going to start pursuing weight loss - that way lies only more misery and madness). My body that deserves respect, care, and just as much kindness as I offer the bodies of everyone else.

It’s a wonder, I think, that any of us survive in this culture at all.

So, on Friday night the Wombat and I got dolled up and went down to Pointe Orlando to see Iron Man on the giant screen. It was, of course, absolutely amazing.

And then on Saturday we went to see it again, with friends, with whom we also went bowling. That was totally awesome and the movie was just as good the second time.

And, ever since then, I have been thinking deep, nerdy thoughts.

WARNING: The following is UTTERLY dorky.

See, Tony Stark is sort of the opposite of Batman. And I love Batman, don’t get me wrong. But Tony Stark is the opposite of Batman and that speaks to me more at this point in my life than all of Batman’s brooding darkness.

Because both Batman and Stark are seeking redemption. Batman has never forgiven himself for the death of his parents and he also seeks redemption for Gotham, perhaps in the hopes that if he saves the city from itself, he will also be able to save HIM from himself. He punishes himself, unconsciously, and he uses fear (and theatricality as Batman Begins puts it) to rule the streets.

Tony Stark is also seeking redemption, just another bajillionaire playboy who also happens to be a genius. But he’s a totally different kind of guy. He’s not one to keep to the shadows – Tony lives his life at full speed, wide out in the open. He has no sense of boundaries. And so when he opens his eyes and finds out what is going on, he embraces that quest to make things right with the exact same fundamental passion with which he used to grasp making weapons for the military.

Batman works in the corners, manipulating individuals. Tony finds the problem and blows that shit up.

And then he doesn’t waste his time sitting alone in his mansion feeling tormented about the past. He goes and he makes other stuff better.

This is why his struggles with alcoholism (if you haven’t read the comics, well, he winds up homeless for a while because his drinking is out of control and the theme pops up several times, throughout the various reboots) are so heartbreaking – the alcohol prevents him from being the man that he fundamentally IS.

And that is why the movie is so great. It isn’t so much a reboot as a, well, modernization. All the elements are there. Tony, cocky and completely disregarding the way everyone else just knows things are so that he can go out and make things the way he wants them to be.

I love reading/watching Batman. He’s a phenomenal detective and he is trying so hard to protect the lightness of Gotham. But I want to LIVE in Tony Stark’s world. A world with a superhero who goes and protects and shapes the world on the strength of his own intelligence and ingenuity and who is human underneath it all – Superman is human (despite his alien origins), but his crises of faith aren’t…. They just don’t seem to be a true part of his character. Superman is the ultimate optimist. Stark is an optimist but he’s also a realist and that means he has doubts (though never about his ability to figure something out) and issues and struggles. I also want to live in a world with the tech from the movie commonly available. OMG, the design board he was using. And his bedroom windows!

And, ultimately, I kind of feel like we DO live in Tony Stark’s world, we just haven’t realized it yet. That was another strength of the movie – it was very real.

So, all of this ridiculous and deep comic type thought was going on when I realized something else, something related.

See, Batman was one of my favorite comics for a very long time. I was angry and afraid and desperately unhappy 9/10 of the time, inasmuch as I allowed myself to feel ANYTHING, living with my mom and the rest of my family, because my mother’s crazy was inescapable. It permeated every aspect of my life. And to escape it, I read. I read, and I, like Batman, learned the power of secret lives. I had stories in my own head rather than a costume, of course, but I still learned that I could escape everything I was in the search for something better in the future. Batman reinforced the power of secrets.

The Iron Man comics had a different effect. I think it is telling that we call Batman, well, Batman, but Iron Man is always Tony Stark.

See, now I HAVE escaped a universe shaped by my mom’s personal and unique version of reality. Now I am shaping my own world and I am held back by my own blinders. Obviously there are still factors beyond my control but I have so much more power now. Power to be who I choose and to live how I want to live and on what terms.

Batman taught me the virtue of shadows but Tony Stark taught me to not be limited by them. Tony Stark taught me to live in the open.

I told you this was full of desperate nerdery.

All my life, because everything else was always so loud and traumatic and full of upheaval, I have wanted a quiet, little life. A life full of routine and the small comforts that tell me I am safe.

The genius of the Tony Stark character is that he makes me want to push beyond that and do something extraordinary.

Tony Stark reminds me that reaching for more is something I can do and that it is a good thing. That feeling safe is about more than enjoying that safety – it’s about using that atmosphere to try new things and attempt grand things that have not previously been imagined. When one feels safe, one is in the best place to try something amazing. And, if it fails, that’s okay. Because you have the space to try again.

I think I’ve been moving towards this more and more over the past few years but I’ve been too busy freaking out to really sit down and put it all into words. But I need to verbalize this stuff if I am going to consciously work on it, and I need to consciously work on it if I want to make it happen instead of just drifting along.

I have never felt the whole “lost potential” thing that so many smart kids go through. I am just as smart now and I was as a child and I have a load of life experience to back up that intelligence now. I am thirty years old and I finally feel as though I don’t have a thick wall between me and the life I want to make for myself – I don’t NEED that wall, because I have learned to protect myself in other ways. Getting what I want is still kind of terrifying but I think I can handle it. And I can handle not getting it, too, because there is always something else for which to strive – whether it is the original goal with a new path or some new thing not previously imagined until a lesson comes to light through failure.

And so, here I go. It is past time to get moving.

Yesterday’s post was pre-empted because I got the contracts in the mail from our agent - OUR BOOK CONTRACT. WHOOO!

I’m FedExing it off to Kate and then she’ll send it back to our agent, and, well, then life will go on much as it has been; we’ll keep writing and doing as many other things as possible. *grin* But it felt like a moment.

And so, because I didn’t think y’all would appreciate a post full of nothing but squeeing, I took a day off from blogging. I had Thai food for dinner. We tried to go bowling but it was league night - no lanes open until 10:30 and that seemed a bit late.

But it was a good night. Thank each of you for being a part of that - for reading and being enthusiastic about fat acceptance and participating in it.

I spent some time at the book store, as I often do on the weekends, and - in addition to a couple of new romance novels - flipped through Sephora: The Ultimate Guide to Makeup, Skin, and Hair from the Beauty Authority.

Chapter one is a bunch of quotes from various people in the beauty industry, defining beauty. Nearly all of them define beauty as that which is healthy. And then they go on to advocate the pursuit of Perfect Health, as if such a thing exists.

And it made me wonder, do people really believe there is some state of Perfect Health in which one will not experience the effects of aging, the ravages of the environment, the “drawbacks” of genetics? There was no mention of genetics, throughout the book, and how that plays a major role in the changes a person faces as they age. There was only “PURSUE HEALTH TO THE EXCLUSION OF ALL ELSE!” They seem to have forgotten - or perhaps never known - that HEALTH IS NOT A MORAL IMPERATIVE, much less beauty.

Never did I expect Sean “Puffy” Combs to be the voice of sanity, saying that confidence and self-assurance are beautiful in everyone. He also said that every women is beautiful - while my knee-jerk response is that we don’t have to be beautiful to be worthwhile human beings, thanks, I appreciate the sentiment. And, really, I think people are beautiful, too, in a way that is very different from subjective attractiveness and that is related almost exclusively to what kind of person they are.

The book continues, with an odd - well, not really odd given the context but odd nonetheless - mix of “you are fantastic just the way you are!” and “this is how to fake perfect long legs!” It was not, at the end of the reading experience, the kind of book to build you up or give you confidence. It was perfectly written so that, once you got to their list of 100 must-have products, you were ready to run out and buy all of them.

I admit, I was soured by the presence of a product I despise, presented in the first section on “faking it.”

That would be the FatGirlSlim anti-cellulite product by Bliss.

The Sephora book described it as fat-hating - because we all need more of that in our lives, yes? The Bliss website describes it as an adipose antagonist. They sell it in sets with another product called Love Handler (which is pretty much the same thing), with a nubby massage thingie, in batches of four, with running shoes….

It’s a cream that uses caffeine to increase your circulation because poor circulation is a contributing factor to cellulite.

I’m not a fan of anti-cellulite cream - it seems like a perfect scam - but the name of it really sets me off. It is not a magical cream that erases fat. Cellulite is not caused by being fat. Which is why models and actresses with the tiniest of BMIs still have it. It’s caused, primarily, by poor circulation and hormone embalances. There’s also a camp that believes free radicals have something to do with it and that we should all eat more antioxidants. That camp advises most strongly against over-exertion.

So why did Bliss choose to call their cream FatGirlSlim instead of GoodCirculationSmooth? Because good circulation doesn’t provoke quite the same Must Have response that the idea of a slimming product does.

Honestly, it took me a while to write this because I had to get over my initial response to Bliss, which happens every time I see the product (and since I go to Sephora fairly often is, well, fairly often), which is to just say this:

Fuck you, Bliss. Thanks for encouraging fat hatred and for reinforcing that fat is an enemy to be conquered through disgust. And, you know, expensive creams.

It is interesting to see what Sephora considers their top 100 products. It was gratifying to see Urban Decay’s Primer Potion listed in the top 10. I’ve been recommending that stuff to anyone who will listen for some years now (take note, though, women of color, depending on your complexion it might grey out your eyelids and make them look ashy - some people don’t consider this a problem because they cover it with eyeshadow and so it doesn’t matter but it has bothered some other people so I wanted to mention it) because it really, REALLY makes your eyeshadow, any eyeshadow, worlds better. I can put on makeup, go dance for 4 or 5 hours, and come home with perfect eyeshadow. It’s just that magic.

In any event, the world of the beauty industry has proved once again that its primary stock in trade is making women feel as though they are not good enough and that they will be so much better if they only find the right combination of products. Products to wear on a daily basis and changed out in pursuit of BETTER products on a regular basis. I realize they have to keep the consumer machine moving somehow but, eh, it just is becoming more and more gross to me. I love makeup, because it is fun to play dress up and put on other faces. I just don’t need the message that my own face is inferior to get added in to that mix.

None of us do.

I am posting this here because I know not everyone goes back and reads comment threads. Honestly, I think I’ve been spoiled by livejournal emailing comments to me with a handy-dandy response window embedded. And so, from littlem:

here are some useful and interesting suggestions for activities for your downtime.

1) Should someone decide not to read or purchase the book, they might want to
POST A REVIEW ON AMAZON INDICATING WHY (an excellent and concrete suggestion from another blog’s commenter).

2) Should someone who chooses not to read or purchase the book write about their concerns to
- Seal
- Perseus (Seal’s parent company)
- Their own local press
- The press of cities scheduled for the book’s tour stops,

you may want to suggest that the TOUR BE POSTPONED UNTIL THE NEW BOOKS WITHOUT THE IMAGES BECOME AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC.

PERMANENTLY IF NECESSARY.

3) Until that time, should you write to the local press of cities scheduled for tour stops to tell them you will not be attending,
TELL THEM WHY.

4) (Especially for shrinking violet-esque types) Should you decide to reach out quietly, by private telephone call or email, to your friends who are
- publishers
- booksellers
- university administrators
- university professors
- conference organizers
- mainstream and alternative print, radio, and television journalists

to let them know that you will probably not purchase the book until an edition is released without the images in question,
TELL THEM WHY.

(Because somehow I can’t quite see the author or the original press including a statement in the second edition as to WHY the first edition was pulled).

That way, you and your friends have an opportunity to thoughtfully consider the extent to which you want a press – or an author’s voice – that purports to be justice activist but will suppress, but not concede, an error of privilege, in the
- classroom
- lecture hall
- conference
that YOU call YOUR “safe space”.

NO- IT’S STILL NOT OKAY
SO IT WON’T GO AWAY

I would also like to add (this is TR again) that this is a good strategy for answering media that we find oppressive on any topic of social justice. The next time a diet book comes out, the next time some “nonfiction” analysis of why eating such and such is the One True Path to being thin, the next time some article comes out that says Americans would be so much wealthier if only we would all lose some goddamn weight, this list should be a pretty good guide for our response.

Except, you know, with publisher/author specifics changed because writing to Seal Press isn’t going to do us any good if the publisher is, I don’t know, Harvest or whatever.

In the reverse, should a book or other product come out (Rethinking Thin is a good example) that encourages and challenges the status quo, that tells people to stop and think for a moment about everything they don’t question, that teaches people to spend their time LIVING instead of putting living off until they weigh less, we also need to turn to this list and do the opposite - we need to leave powerfully written, positive reviews on Amazon. We need to contact our local media outlets (local news, papers, etc.) that cover and review these sorts of things and let them know why this particular product deserves their airtime/column space instead of whatever dreck they’re reviewing this week. We need to write to authors and publishers and let them know that YES, this is the type of stuff we want to see produced! Then we need to buy it because money still talks.

In this way, we become vocal and more powerful consumers.

In other, completely non-political news, I am trying this new alternative to Paypal. If you buy stuffs online, you might want to try it as well. I have not used it yet - I just signed up a little while ago - but I did so because a friend of mine has been using it on etsy with no troubles whatsoever.

Plus, if you sign up through my link here, I get $10 and you get $25. That is a win-win.