I used to absolutely hate having my picture taken. In fact, there aren’t a lot of photos of me in between childhood and just a few years ago.

And then I started to let friends take my picture. It made… all the difference in the world. Every time a friend comes to me and says, oh, I have this great picture of you, it is a chance to see what they see.

I recently got attended Convergence, which is a long-running annual gathering of netgoths. It is a large extended family – I’ve known some of these people for more than a decade. It might not seem like much but I’ve known them longer than most of my in-person friends.

Everyone on Twitter is watching More to Love right now (I wrote an article for the Daily Beast with my thoughts) but I’m sitting here flipping through (well, the online equivalent of it anyway) Convergence photos. And when I see myself, I am smiling and laughing and making ridiculous faces and having an awesome time.

Sure, I’d have memories without these pictures. But with these pictures, I have MORE memories. And my fat friends? I have pictures that are memories for them as well. It’s beautiful.

Yes, I get all kinds of sappy about Convergence, shush. But it is – it’s beautiful to have these images of everyone. Different bodies, different people, different lives.

When I hid from photos, I stole that from people. Every time I dodged out of a photo, well, that person might remember I was there but they can’t share it with anyone else the way I can share these images with you.

It’s hard sometimes to be comfortable in front of the camera. There’s a lot of trust involved – and not just because photographs steal a piece of your soul. *GRIN* But because we’re used to seeing ourselves a very static way most of the time, from very specific angles and in certain lighting. You don’t get to control that when it’s someone taking a quick snapshot at a restaurant in the middle of dinner.

I am so glad to have these memories. And to share them with you.

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I hear a lot of people asking about whether or not fat people are “allowed” to have short hair when it’s the summertime.

You know by now, I hope, how much respect I have for those sorts of ridiculous and arbitrary and limiting “rules” – just a bunch of nonsense.

My hair was really super long at one point. Well, it was hip-length and curly and mostly all one length. It was nuts. I loved it but it just got to be too much. And so I cut it off and then I started experimenting with hair cuts and started dyeing bits blue and whatnot and at this moment in time I’m pretty in love with mostly short hair.

Got a new hair cut today as a matter of fact. Thought I’d share it with y’all.

Yes, those bits at the front are slightly longer than the rest. I have a potentially emo haircut and I LOVE IT.

You can see the angle, a ridiculous unsure facial expression, in this shot.

No makeup at all in these; I just didn’t have time or energy for it. I usually, when I’m getting something new and different done, whether it be style or color, wear makeup to give me a little extra, I don’t know, not confidence but a slightly less naked face, I guess. Like, haircuts can make you look so different, it’s good to have a little buffer if you aren’t sure how you’re going to react. That’s my theory anyway.

In any event, I think fat people look good with all sorts of haircuts. Short ones and long ones and at-home ones everything in between. What matters is that you love it.

I think I love this. The straight across bangs took me an hour or so to get used to but I’m digging them now. And I can’t wait to play with this more!

So, seriously, y’all, do your own thing, make your own style, own it and love it and have fun.

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So, I really dig photography. I think it can speak to a viewer in a really direct fashion. So when a friend linked to the work of Vancouver photographer Dina Goldstein, I was really intrigued! The Fallen Princesses series looked to be making a really interesting commentary on the idea of princesses and the traditional roles assigned to women.

And then I got to Not So Little Red Riding Hood.

*sigh*

Seriously, y’all. It’s gets really exhausting to constantly be slapped in the face by this stuff, by the assumptions and overwhelming HUBRIS of a culture full of people who think they can look at my body and know everything about my lifestyle.

My friend told me, in effect, that I was being too sensitive. That this was a light-hearted project that didn’t mean anything. This is how feminists get their reputation for being humorless. I get that it’s meant to be light-hearted, but our art describes our culture whether we want it to or not.

So many of these photos are challenging the intersection of “Happily Ever After” and the daily reality of many, many women. We don’t get the happily ever after – we don’t live in a fairy tale and it takes a lot of work to create our own happy endings.

In fact, we don’t even really get happy endings – we get happy continuing stories. And our stories have some bad stuff in them and some sad stuff and they take constant effort on our part to develop, to tell the way we want those stories to be told.

So many of these photos are challenging and striking. And then there’s Red. And then there’s Jasmine. There’s all this buying into cultural stereotypes without bothering to examine or question them.

My initial response to Not So Little Red Riding Hood was red hot anger. My body looks like that, dammit. We talk about how the political in this movement is based in personal experience; my body looks like that and Dina Goldstein is saying something about me personally when she produces YET ANOTHER in an endless series of images that equate fat women with women who are constantly eating shitty food. Which also totally buys into the idea of good food and bad food which is just a pain in the ass and unhealthy to boot.

It would bother me less if there were powerful and positive images of fat women, fat people (and I mean in the mass media, in galleries, in our common cultural viewing space). It would bother me less if it weren’t considered edgy and honest and all of that crap to perpetuate these images. It would bother me less if, honestly, some of the other photos weren’t so good.

Because the good photos are going to carry those problematic photos along for the ride. And people are going to see and feel validated in their assumptions. And it’s going to continue to make my life and the lives of people I love more difficult than they need to be, for serious.

I hate to end on such a downer. I mean, we get hit by this stuff all the time in every day life. There’s really no such thing as safe space, right? So rather than end with that, with the anger I felt as soon as I viewed that damn picture, the hurt I felt when my friend brushed off my hurt as though it were nothing at all, I want to end with how I felt this morning.

This morning I watched myself and Gabi on Good Morning America. I watched the internet clip, and I freaked out a little but because it was just so WEIRD. But I didn’t cringe away from my body at all. And I was bummed that all of the political stuff got cut and that they closed on such a downer but dude. DUDE. I was on Good Morning America. Fat people, calling themselves fat and being awesome with it, were on a show as mainstream as Good Morning America and we weren’t there to be objects of ridicule.

We’re being visible. Fat people are being visible and maybe that will be enough to eventually tip the scales (pun totally intended) away from images like Not So Little Red Riding Hood being the default. I think… I think maybe some people are starting to hear it, starting to feel it, starting to be tired of hating themselves and hating other people.

And that is a huge, amazing thing.

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And, you know, it makes just as much sense as the usual version. *grin*

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Mmmmm, pie.

Ahem.

via Graph Jam

What are y’all’s thoughts on this?

It cracks me up – though I don’t think dieters are necessarily stupid. I DO think diets are stupid and harmful behavior but that isn’t a commentary on dieters so much as on our society that places such a high value on the activity. Harrumph. Anyway.

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So, I started taking pictures of my daily outfits in the bathroom mirror not too long ago and then posting those pictures to moblog and flickr. I get frustrated when I go to photo sites and everything tagged “fat” is awful and full of ridicule.

And then it occurred to me that, oh yeah, I have this blog and pictures might not be off-topic here, either.

I’ll tell you honestly – the times I have posted pictures of myself here are the times when, invariably, some troll comes and makes up shit about how awful I look and how horrible I am. And it has definitely had a negative impact on me posting pictures.

Well, that and I look pretty boring on a lot of days. *laugh*

But, screw a bunch of that. If I post a picture to moblog or flickr (man, I love wardrobe_remix), then I’m going to post it here. If you follow me in more than one place, I apologize – you’ll get to see the same mirror shots more than once.

I’m not ashamed of what I look like – no one should be.

This is what I look like, as of about 20 minutes ago.

I think it’s important for fat people to be visible. Visible in all sorts of spaces – which totally includes the internet. I am not hiding from anyone.

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A quick amusement – I did my nails and did this little tutorial over on Bugawk. I only just now realized that… I painted my nails to match this site. Ha!

Oh, pink and black. Good times.

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I am reviewing the copy edit master today, and it’s Friday, so I thought a little total cuteness was definitely in order:

It’s a female pygmy hippo baby.

And, you know, I’ve been called a hippo before but it’s hard to take it as an insult when they are such rad animals.

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(Click the comic to see it full size at the site.)

You know, I’m not actually inherently opposed to fat jokes. I AM inherently opposed to tired, played out jokes that aren’t funny because they make assumptions that a) are not true (my suspension of disbelief only goes so far, particularly when I’m so damn fed up people telling me my experience is a lie) and b) actually damaging to many people – and that, you know, applies to more than just fat jokes, actually.

I have a group of friends who play the “your mom” joke game and it is, 99% of the time, hysterical. It’s juvenile and ridiculous and, given the people involved, that’s the juxtaposition that makes it work. But the vast majority of the other people I’ve seen/heard make the joke…. It’s just…. Really? Is that the best thing with which you can come up? I know comedy writing is hard but still. Stretch yourself a little, people.

It’s different on tv, in print. There are no positive representations, no moments when fat people aren’t the butt of the joke, and so it’s all ridicule – tired, played out ridicule at that – all the time. There’s no relief from being the expected comedic character, no opportunity to be anything other than laughable, mockable, unworthy of being taken seriously.

I think this xkcd strip, with just that little spoken “Zing!”, offers some commentary on how stupid and weak most of these jokes are and also turns this into something incredibly poignant.

Good for you, xckd.

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Post Secret breaks my heart on a regular basis. So many secrets, so much pain and regret. And, quite often, a secret about bodies, about fat, pops up. I saw this one tonight.

My wish is that more people will come to that sort of realization BEFORE they mutilate their innards.

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