Hypothetical Dystopia

onegirlrhumba:

(nb: edited from previous version for clarity and reposting it in revised form.)

i’m sick and fucking tired of pretending that “loving your body” and rejecting fat-shaming on an individual level does anything to change issues relating to beauty and thin privilege, or that it has any effect on the institutions and structures that perpetuate them.  it does nothing to change the fact that larger people or people viewed as less attractive are widely viewed as less intelligent, as incompetent, or as lazy.  it doesn’t change the fact that larger people have worse health care outcomes or that they are less likely to be hired for jobs and, if they are hired, are often paid less than their thinner or more conventionally attractive colleagues.  it does nothing to combat the pathologization of fatness.  by itself, it doesn’t do anything to change the greater culture.  i, along with many other people, attempt to reject that culture and participate in or create alternate possibilities, but it’s important to remember that these spaces aren’t accessible to everyone who could benefit from participation.  it’s not enough.

here’s a corollary to that: while people who identify as women are inundated with messages that devalue female-coded bodies, sexualize them (in ways that are often deeply imbricated with the simultaneous racialization of such bodies), and present them as being in constant need of improvement, i wonder if the focus on body acceptance doesn’t end up being the same ideas, articulated differently.  certainly, our bodies shape our lived realities, are inescapable, and must be taken into consideration in political or sociological or philosophical conversations.  body acceptance may shift the ways in which these realities are enacted on some level, or at least the way realities are materialized.  but, for many people, bodies can be hard to love, and i’m not sure how necessary it is that many of us “love” them in the ways that body-acceptance proponents believe we should.  for my own part, my neuro-atypical, ethnically marked, formerly anorexic body is difficult to love.  i generally accept my body, understand where it fits into my reality, reject family members’ offers of plastic surgery to “correct” it, live in it.  it is, in some ways, a resistant body.  ”loving” it is not necessarily part of that resistance, nor do i think it needs to be.  a body is not an object that can be detached from a “mind,” an object that can be separately valued and loved.  bodies should not be devalued, and should be free from exploitation, violence, and abuse, but it is not always necessary to love them simply because they are bodies.  (though i would argue that the more culturally and socially devalued a given body is, the more important it is that it is cared for and valued.)

the fact that “love your body” rhetoric shifts the responsibility for body acceptance over to the individual, and away from communities, institutions, and power, is also problematic.  individuals who do not love their bodies, who find their bodies difficult to love, are seen as being part of the problem.  the underlying assumption is that if we all loved our bodies just as they are, our fat-shaming, beauty-policing culture would be different.  if we don’t love our bodies, we are, in effect, perpetuating normative (read: impossible) beauty standards.  if we don’t love our individual bodies, we are at fault for collectively continuing the oppressive and misogynistic culture.  if you don’t love your body, you’re not trying hard enough to love it.  in this framework, your body is still the paramount focus, and one way or another, you’re failing.  it’s too close to the usual body-shaming, self-policing crap, albeit with a few quasi-feminist twists, for comfort.

tl;dr not all bodies are easy to love, or lovable.  challenge normative beauty-standards and fat-shaming on collective and structural levels rather than believing that “loving your body” is enough to change shit.  understand how your body materializes your lived reality and respect it, but don’t feel required to love it.

is that the patriarchal definition of beauty is attainable.

danyphantomzone:

hypotheticaldystopia:

“If our end goal for girls is simply to have them feel “confident”—especially about their looks—then we create a trap where anything that makes a girl feel better about her appearance, no matter how harmful, is a reasonable solution. (How many times has plastic surgery been preceded by a “I’m doing it for me!” explanation?)

…We never seem to question the idea that feeling beautiful is a worthy goal in the first place. We should tell girls the truth: “Beautiful” is bullshit, a standard created to make women into good consumers, too busy wallowing in self-loathing to notice that we’re second class citizens.

Girls don’t need more self-esteem or feel-good mantras about loving themselves—what they need is a serious dose of righteous anger. But instead of teaching young women to recognize and utilize their very justifiable rage, we tell them to smile and love themselves…

As my friend and writer Jaclyn Friedman once said to me, the problem isn’t that girls don’t know their worth—it’s that they absolutely do know their value in society. Young women know exactly how ugly the culture believes them to be. So when we teach girls to simply “love themselves”, we’re implicitly telling them to accept the world as it is. We’re saying that being beautiful is something worth having when we should be telling them a culture that demands as much is toxic…” -Jessica Valenti

It is important to note that those who learn to love themselves, knowing that they don’t fit into society’s standard definition of beauty, are engaging in an act of rebellion against our current culture. It’s the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to be happy with oneself when society is telling them that they’re inadequate and ugly.

“We’re saying that being beautiful is something worth having when we should be telling them a culture that demands as much is toxic…”

I SORT OF disagree with this.
A culture that demands people fall within specific KIND of beauty is toxic… but finding yourself beautiful can have legitimate worth outside of the reason assigned by society.

Yes, I agree with you! There’s also a difference between what society sees as being beautiful versus feeling beautiful. When society says that beauty is the number one thing that women must aspire to be, it is different than telling us to feel beautiful. But then again, the quickest way to feel beautiful is to buy into the current hegemonic notion of beauty and ascribe to become beautiful.

internal-acceptance-movement:

Australian swimmer Leisel Jones qualified for her first Olympics when she was fourteen years old. Fourteen. She was in ninth grade. She was a phenom, a prodigy, and she won two silver medals at those Games. She now has three Olympic golds, four Olympic silvers, and a bronze medal just for funsies.

She also owns a few world records. Now, at twenty-six, she’s qualified for her fourth Olympics, the most of any Australian swimmer in Olympic history. She’s arguably one of the best women breaststrokers the world has ever seen.

BUT THE MEDIA WANTS TO TALK ABOUT HOW FAT SHE IS.

Sure, we could talk about her London medal chances, or about how much she’s matured since she was thrust into the limelight when most girls her age were busy picking their favourite Backstreet Boy. We could talk about how hard the life of an Olympic swimmer is, and what an enormous level of commitment it takes to qualify for the Olympics a record four times. Instead, we’re talking about her weight, thanks to Melbourne’s Herald Sun, which decided to publish “then and now” photos suggesting that Jones has gained weight.

Luckily, lots of her teammates have come to her defense, saying that her weight is unchanged, or that it’s fine just the way it is. And people outside the swimming community – other athletes, feminists, mental health advocates, and so on – are rightfully pissed at the Herald Sun’s move.

The Olympics are such a remarkable time for so many reasons. They’re remarkable because for a few short weeks, we put aside politics, or at least pretend to while we express our political animosities and anxieties in different ways. They’re remarkable because every Games, something happens to inspire and awe us. And they’re remarkable because they give us moments like this: powerful reminders that sexism doesn’t suddenly evaporate because we’re all feeling warm and fuzzy and inspired and united by the spirit of competition and all that jazz.

What’s happening to Leisel Jones right now is an important reminder that no matter how accomplished a woman is, no matter how talented, how skilled, how strong, how tenacious, how gutsy, she is not exempt from the rules of modern femininity. Not even during the Olympic Games. She has to be skinny and beautiful before she can be recognized for being any of those other things, and if she isn’t skinny and beautiful, we’ll ignore her guts and tenacity and talent and dedication and waste our time debating whether or not she’s gained weight during the twelve years she’s been in the public eye.

What I’m saying is, the Olympic Games are a remarkable period during which we like to tell ourselves it is not business as usual. And in some ways, I suppose, it isn’t. But this is not one of them. If you’re a woman Olympian, it is entirely business as usual: you’re a sexual object first, and an athlete second. Thanks to the Herald Sun for reminding us of that before any of us gets too swept up in Olympic fever and imagines for a moment that we can suspend sexism for a few short weeks in August.

Doug Barry from Jezebel shared his opinion on the matter:

Jones has a whole pile of medals (three golds, four silvers, and a bronze) to prove that she doesn’t need the Herald Sun’s permission to wear a bathing suit, so maybe the sports editors over there should keep all their grubby little opinions about her weight to themselves.

Source: Feministing