<b>Laurie and Debbie say:</b>

This year’s BlogHer conference was in Laurie’s home city, and just across the bay from Debbie’s. Laurie went to the presenters’ party Thursday night. Laurie says: “The party gave me a chance to see folks I met last year in Chicago, have lots of brief intense conversations, and meet face to face and talk with panel members. Then I went to a party on the top floor of the Westin St. Francis and was completely knocked out by a 280 degree view of the city through tall windows. I took a slow tour around. It was amazingly beautiful. The St Francis is an old nouveau style hotel and I loved the decor.”

Friday morning, we both skipped breakfast and the keynote, and showed up in time for the first breakout session. We chose “Is Mommyblogging Still a Radical Act?” (liveblog transcript here) and found our first outstanding panel of the weekend. Lindsay Ferrier was an extraordinary moderator: the BlogHer style is to encourage statements, as well as questions from the audience and to operate with the assumption that everyone has something interesting to say. Lindsay modeled this perfectly, going to the audience even before all the panelists had had a chance to do more than introduce themselves. The result was a high-level, freewheeling discussion which nonetheless managed to stay focused. Laurie was really happy to have Lindsay as an example before she moderated her panel later that afternoon. All three panelists–Polly Pagenhart from Lesbian Dad, Maria from Immoral Matriarch, and Charlene Li, were as good as Lindsay. (The conclusion: a lot of different meanings of “radical” were in the room, and mommyblogging fits many, if not all, of them. Everyone was interested in the relationship among integrity, commoditization, and blogs as moneymakers. The potential impact of a nationwide–and bigger–network of women building community support networks and political power cannot be overestimated.)

After lunch, we went to “Race and Gender: What are the lessons of 2008?” (liveblog transcript here) If you’re a regular reader, you know that we don’t put much energy into electoral politics. But this panel was billed as going beyond that, and it completely lived up to its billing. The panelists were Adele Nieves (moderator), Maria Niles, Jill Miller Zimon, Cynematic, and Caille Millner. The panel covered an interesting range, not only of issues but of levels of experience. Once again, BlogHer’s cultural expectations made it possible to respect people who are new to these issues while clearly hearing the more complex and nuanced (and sometimes angry) positions. Topics ranged from the controversial New Yorker cover through white people working on racism in ourselves and others, to alternate metaphors (such as the Rubik’s cube) for discussing these subjects with less historical loading.

Laurie’s panel immediately followed this one (Debbie’s liveblog transcript with links to all participants here). Laurie says: “I was nervous about the moderation because Blogher’s approach needs a symphony conductor style. It took a lot of concentration, and it all went really well. We talked about body image issues, including size, race, gender, and sexualization of children in lucid and passionate ways. The conversation about early puberty development in both girls and boys and what that means in terms of parents’ and kids’ body image is one I really want to pursue. All three panelists were clear, lucid, intense and sometimes funny. I got my wish for a panel that discussed kids and body image in the broad and complex sense. The audience comments wove together with the panelists for a conversation that was way more than the sum of its parts. I wasn’t sure we’d pull this off and I was thrilled. Over the next day and a half, I really appreciated how many women told me that the panel was important, and good for them. I need to thank Denise Tanton and Jenny Lauck for their help.”

On Saturday, we went to one more fabulous panel (well, Debbie went to half of it): Blogging About Our Kids with Special Needs (liveblog transcript here). Panelists were Susan Etlinger, Shannon Des Roches Rosa, Kristina Chew, Jennifer Graf Groneberg, and Vicki Forman. The panel description says these women “are among those mommybloggers who are blogging their experiences and finding both a community and a cause.” Panelists and audience were sharing both intimate support and information and clearly finding the results helpful and important. The women in the room were a stellar example of mommyblogging as radical: this is a group which is truly pulling together to change laws, school policies, cultural expectations, and social attitudes. The discussion was intelligent, clear, and loving. Laurie says, “If you’re only going to read one transcript, read this one.”

There was lots of good stuff in the rest of the conference: other panels, hallway interactions, keynotes, swap meet, evening events. These were just the highlights for the two of us.

Thanks to Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page, Jory Des Jardins, Kristy Sammis, and the host of staff and volunteers. We both know what it takes to make a conference as complicated as this one run smoothly, and they did a great job!

Debbie says:

The panel was called: Mirrors: Ours, The Media’s, Our Cultures’ and Our Kids’. It was held at 2:30 p.m. on Friday, 7/18 at BlogHer in San Francisco.

The panelists are Laurie, Tracee Sioux of Empowering Girls: So Sioux Me, Kelly Wickham of Mocha Momma, and Glennia Campbell of The Silent I (also Mom-o-crats and Kimchi Mamas).

Laurie introduces herself. We all want to do our best with our kids in a very hard time around these issues. We want to talk about how we feel about it and what we can do. We’re all not going to agree, and that’s fine; it’s part of understanding each other.

Laurie asks the panelists to talk about issues that are up for them right now.

Tracee: I write about empowering girls, specifically daughters. How girls internalize the media and what we as parents can do to give them tools to fight that. Daughters inherit our emotions about our bodies. So many women self-deprecate for humor; I used to do it all the time. When my 4-year-old said “I hate my fat thighs,” I said “What have I done?” Women use this to bond–I’m not perfect, you’re not perfect. I was joking, but my daughter couldn’t tell it was a joke. Daughters feel that when you criticize yourself you’re criticizing their DNA.

Kelly. “I love my thighs!” My daughter’s here, and she has those same thighs. The things I have to explore in body image are about race, and being underrepresented in media. I never had any magazines growing up because no one looked like me. I thought my parents were being cruel, I wanted my Tiger Beat. Then I realized they were doing a positive thing for me. “You’re not going to find yourself in that.” I think the important thing is raising children to be positive about themselves, and what they think is positive about themselves. My children are so different: my daughter looks exactly like me and my son has red hair, pale skin, and freckles. We call him “Opie.” He identifies so much about being black and doesn’t look it. We’re going to explore that with him. My dad made a joke about how my son had “slave feet”; as white as my child is, he identified with the family in that moment. That’s a strange thing to feel good about, but I understood it immediately. Nothing in the media can understand that.

Glennia: I’m half-Korean, half-Caucasian. I’ve always straddled the two different cultures. My Caucasian family lives in Kentucky; they’re sort of mountain folk. The idea of body image to me doesn’t just talk about how big we are, how small we are. It also goes to issues of race and culture. I’ve always considered myself a woman of color; it’s a very different experience to how my son will experience in the world. It’s important to raise him so that as a member of that privileged class, he doesn’t look down on people who don’t look like him, because he has a mother who doesn’t look like him.

Laurie: I was going to talk about something else. This is as much about boys as it is about girls. Our society says body image = women, but it absolutely affects boys as much as girl. Body image turned me into a social change photographer. My older daughter had body image issues in junior high school because she was a small girl with large breasts. She got teased mercilessly, but she was a socially successful being and we worked with it and talked about it. I didn’t have this sense of larger body image issues in the culture. My younger daughter, who wasn’t fat, got teased about getting fat all the time. anorexia epidemic 5th grade. fat activist movement in the Bay Area; going to performances.
“Fat is not evil” was really what was important for her. (Books: real bodies are beautiful.) If it had not been for my younger daughter’s stuff, this never would have happened.

Kelly: Difference in culture. None of my black women friends sit around and lament their weight. It does not happen in that culture, because there is a difference in black men. White girlfriends say “How come you never talk about what you don’t like about yourself?” Number one, I wasn’t raised that way,and number two, “My ass is revered in that culture!”

Tracee: I heard a woman in a restroom saying “My ass is so big!” and I thought, “She wasn’t saying that in a bad way.” How come we white girls don’t get to have that?

Audience 1: I have a boy and a girl. They just know everyone comes in different shapes and sizes. We try not to joke about it. My son at 6 is getting very aware of how he looks compared to other people. My daughter is just a princess and doesn’t think about how she looks in the clothes, but my son worries about the gap in his teeth, and says it will make him look like a nerd. No matter how strong you are, it’s in the culture. He’s a white boy, he’s supposed to have everything for him, but he’s worreida bout what he looks like.

Audience 2: My daughter’s tall and athletic; she’s never going to be mistaken for a small skinny girl. We do all the stuff you’re supposed to do. More than once, a friend has come over and said “Well, you’re fat.” Part of me wants to take back that word and say “It’s not a bad word; it shouldn’t be used as an insult.” But how do you deal with it, both for your own child and for the other child. I had a conversation with her, but I didn’t want to — I once used something I didn’t know was a racial slur

Tracee: It’s a huge risk. You can offend the other parent. I say “In our house, here’s the house rule.We don’t use words like that in our house, because it would make you feel bad when you heard it.” I also told my daughter, “You don’t have to hang out with people who treat you like that.” I want her to have clear boundaries; if the girl down the street is calling you names, she can leave.

Kelly: I’m an educator. I would use that as a teachable moment. “What does fat mean? How do you use it?” I just sat down at the Cafe Press table to get my free t-shirt, and when the woman asked me what size I need, the gentleman covered his ears. I said, “No! I’ll tell you. I need a large.” Even with him, I used it as a teachable moment. I agree, it’s a risk. You be the first person to tell that parent what you think.

Glennia: My kid came home one day from day care. “They were calling me names!” “Well, what did they call you?” “Asian!” “Alex, you are Asian.” “No, I’m not.” “Well, your grandma’s from Korea” and we looked at the globe and I said “You should be proud that you’re Asian!” I asked him, “So the next time that girl calls you Asian, what are you going to say?” “I’m Asian and I’m proud!”

Laurie: With my daughter, we dealt with it that people of all sizes are beautiful. I just said, “You know, lots of fat people look really good. Is there anybody in your family that’s fat?” And they would say, “Yes, my grandma, or my aunt.” And I would say, “How does she look to you?” and they would say she looks just fine. That’s a good way to handle it, because you aren’t saying anything bad about anyone. One thing is “how to be man enough”; most men don’t feel like they ever measure up. When a 6-year-old says he feels like a nerd, he’s saying “I’m afraid I won’t measure up.”

Audience 2: We’ve been focusing on empowering girls and in my kids’ classes, I see the boys are less confident and we’ve gone over too far.

Glennia: I think that’s a cross-gender problem.

Laurie: I do too.

Audience 3: I wanted to go back to something on height, but I have a boy and a girl and I’m a little more worried about my daughter. I watch my son but he’s into sports and that’s measuring up. My daughter is lighter than me. I think that’s a whole issue she’s going to deal from Caucasian people and black people. Being light-skinned, just growing up and dealing with the way black people look at you. But height. I’m 5′11″ and my husband’s tall.She’s going to be a tall girl. I don’t know what her weight’s going to be like. I was “big bird” and “sasquatch” and I was teased and I hated it. So I’m trying to instill in her that “you’re beautiful and you’re going to be tall and you can wear heels” (she’s only 5, so I’m not putting her in heels now).

Kelly: I’m the shortest girl in my family. My sister developed so young that she developed this aloofness. We were in Chicago and she got so paranoid about everyone staring at her: she was 6 feet tall in high school. We walked by this couple who was talking about her, and my sister did something really foolish–she just let them have it. And the woman says, “You know, I was giving you a compliment!” And she completely missed that because no one had ever given her a compliment about her height. I know because I’m tall, I can own a room.

Audience 3: I love my height now, but I want it to come sooner for her.

Glennia: If she can look like you, I think she’s going to feel good about that.

Laurie: Most of us are not raised to feel good about how we look. If you feel bad about how you look, that doesn’t make you a bad person. I want to talk about that and about how you were raised affects how you feel about your kids.

Audience 4: My son is only 2-1/2, so he doesn’t have much of a problem. I was anorexic for over 10 years, very skinny, very praised for my weight. My mother made a really big deal about it. When I healed myself, I gained a great deal of weight and I’ve never gone back to what she considered the ideal. And she has called me fat to my face. I’m not skinny, but god-damn, I’m not fat. So it’s very difficult for me with my son, even though he doesn’t have really a personal reaction to it yet, I find myself very defensive. People say, “Oh, he’s a big boy!” and I find myself going “He’s normal!.” I find myself worrying what effect my defensiveness and protectiveness on that subject is having on him.

Audience 5: I have three daughters, 10, 7, and 18 months. I married a very large football player. My oldest daughter is my husband’s body type; the middle one is a skinny little thing. I took my oldest daughter to Abercrombie & Fitch, and everything is small, small, extra-small, and I had to find a large and it barely fit her. She desperately wants to buy those clothes.

Tracee: The clothes made for little girls are way too small. I buy my6-year-old daughter “small” adult clothes. Clothing manufacturer sizes are just all wonky.

Audience 5: But she wants that label. I want her to have things that will make her be successful in middle school. Her peers value that. I want her to have the chips so she has the confidence. I bought her a large, but it’s tight, and I don’t want her to wear tight clothes either.

Kelly: My daughter and I have these conversations. We’ll see a woman and we’ll say to each other “She has no friends!” Because if she did, they would have told her. You see a woman wearing clothes and you say “She can’t breathe!” So we discuss what would look good on her. I don’t think you’re ever going to get her not to want Abercrombie & Fitch.

Tracee: Talk to her about the labels. What does “S” mean? Abercrombie & Fitch has dubious marketing; I’d also talk to her about Abercrombie & Fitch.

Laurie: We live in a world where people are being told that everybody is a blonde size 2. And everybody isn’t. And people are making billions of dollars telling you that’s what makes you beautiful.

Audience 6: I’m interested in how we talk about children as little and bigger, and the influence peers have when they’re 8, 9, 10, and how that shapes their worldview. I had a mother who was severely eating disordered. She always told me how beautiful I was; she was never never critical and somehow I managed to escape that way of thinking. I have a daughter now and I’m hoping to instill the same values in full. Starting them strong and giving them a good foundation when they encounter people who don’t have the same values, and when they’re exposed to the magazines, is a good way to go.

Kelly: Queen Latifah, who is losing weight and not saying how much she’s losing.

Laurie: The mantra “It’s okay not to be thin.” I obviously think you can be beautiful at any size, but in this climate, sometimes that’s the best you can do.

[At this point, they started taking audience members' names and blog names. I caught a few.]

Squid at The Adventures of Leelo and His Potty-Mouthed Mom: I have a 9-year-old daughter. I spend a lot of time around her being naked. This is my body. I’m not size 2, I’m not blue-eyed, I’m not any of those things.” Sometimes I wonder, she’s getting older, is this an okay thing to communicate to her? I’m just curious to see what other people think about that.

Tracee: I’m pro-naked around the kids; my husband’s not. I’m kind of happy with that gender difference. I think me being naked around my daughter is good; she feels free to ask me when she’s going to get boobs. I’ve been caught doing other things in the bathroom when my kids walk in; there’s not a lot of secrets in our household. My mother was never naked around me.

Glennia: Something I tell my son a lot if someone is making fun of him or if he hears kids making fun of other kids. I always tell him “if someone’s making fun of you, that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you; it means there’s something wrong with them.” Even on your blog, if someone is unleashing on you, it means there’s something wrong with them. He’s internalizing that at a very young age.

Kelly: The last troll I had was criticizing me for putting up a picture of my daughter. He was like “You guys think you’re so beautiful,” and I was

Gina Garrubbo from BlogHer: I have an 8-year-old daughter and I’m paranoid about things like Barbie. I call her Barbie the Bimbo and I explain she was made by white men in the 50s and her feet are anatomically impossible, and we’re more an American Girl family. I wonder if I’m going too far, but I hate the way

Lots of agreement and audience discussion of Bratz vs. Barbies.

Tricia from Four Plus Four Equals Ten: In my house, we walk around and both of us are well-endowed. We go skinny-dipping and the kids are around it all the time. “You can call me fat, but we don’t call strangers fat. You’re big, you’re fat, that’s good, let’s go to find Macy’s and find one of those women who will shop for you.”

Gina: You can give her all the help at home, but her peers send other messages.

Tricia: It’s a different perspective from “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could fit in those clothes?”

“The Princess” from Flooded Lizard Kingdom: When I was pregnant last year, I was already gearing up for Barbie, and I had a son! I have no idea what I’m doing! I came up in feminism and I know all the stuff to do if you have a girl child and the messages they’re going to get. The only information I’ve ever been exposed to about men is in discussions where they attempt to hijack women’s issues, so I really don’t know where to start.

Laurie at Not Just About Cancer: I’m a feminist who’s been blessed with two beautiful boys. Until I had boys, I never thought about how body image could be for boys. My younger son comes down in the morning and says, “No, I want to wear this because Niko will think it’s cool.” My beautiful sensitive 10-year-old son has long curly hair and frequently gets mistaken for a girl. He doesn’t care and I don’t care. He gets very upset in class when kids use the term gay to put other people down. The other day, I went to get his hair trimmed and the hairdresser said “But boys don’t have long hair.” I said, “I’m fine with it, and his father is too.” We’ve talked about sexual orientation; he says, “I’m 10; I don’t know!” But when boys don’t fit that image of what a man is supposed to be its … I feel I’m going a bit by the seat of my pants except to tell them that they’re beautiful.

Glennia: When I saw the ultrasound, I thought “Oh, shit! What am I going to do with a boy?” But I think your son will teach you. You have to have faith in your son and in yourself. I’d like to know what it is to have a daughter.

Tracee: I think feminism helps to parent him because I think about what would make him a good husband to a feminist. He has a toy kitchen and he plays with dolls. He’s pretending to be a father, and that’s what I want him to do. He likes the trains, and he likes to rough and tumble, but he’s also allowed his feminine side.

Glennia: We had a policy that we were not going to have any guns or any swords or any violent toys. That went out the window the day he chewed his toast into a sword. It makes you think “Why do I have that bias?” That’s another way they teach you.

Cecily from Upper Case Woman: I was raised by a feminist and I wasn’t allowed to have Barbies. Now I have a two-year-old and I kind of feel that way, but mostly I resented the hell out of my mother. In a commune, the boys were allowed to have dolls, but we weren’t. “Have a truck!” I have a shitty body image anyway, so I don’t think it did me much good. I hear about not being allowed to use the word fat in public and I don’t agree with that. It’s like blue or green or short (Laurie: or thin): I saw a woman slap her kid once for calling me fine.

Someone: What would you say to that mother?

Cecily: I told the kid it was fine. “You’re black and I’m fat.” His mother was pretty angry.

Audience #7: You don’t describe someone by “fat” or “black” My daughter will say “the white Shannon and the — brown — or –tan– Shannon”

Kelly: It’s reducing people to the one thing.

Cecily: I’d rather be “the fat woman” than the one in the tattoos and the tan pants.

Tracee: I’m trying to teach my kids manners, too. I wouldn’t slap her in public, but I don’t …

Glennia: “fat” or “tall” are descriptors. It’s the overlay we put on it. You have to be taught and 5 or 6 year old kids don’t know that. If you’re teaching your kids that those aren’t bad things, but it’s different when you get out there in the world. Then their peers are teaching them what’s good and bad. You just have to continually reinforce to them that people are just perfect the way they are.

Laurie: I think it’s also nuanced. If you are fat, or in my case older, saying that about yourself in the world is a really important positive thing. But there are women who if you say they’re older would cringe. I think kids are perfectly capable of learning those nuances.

Laurie: Do we want to talk about the sexualization of children?

Tracee: I talk about sexualization of children in advertising a lot on my blog. A new e-trade commercial where a computerized infant boy makes a porn reference: why is there not a huge outcry about that? A girl baby emails him some porn, and he’s like “I gotta go now!” When did that become okay. Some serious boundaries are being crossed and they’re affecting our kids and they’re affecting us. I see Google ads where “girl” has turned into a 4-letter-word which is synonymous with porn. We’re more worried about our daughters because it’s not out of bounds to make a sexual reference to a young child any more. I’ll surf the net and it’s amazing how many sexual references I see to young girls.

Laurie: The first time I saw a six-year-old girl in a t-shirt that says “I’m a porn star,” and combined with earlier puberty in both boys and girls.

Audience 8: I have a 16 year old and a 12 year old. The 16-year-old just said to me, and we were watching a biography of Jenna Jameson, and my daughter said “What movie was she famous for?” I’m raising girls in a world that thinks that porn stars are celebrities. And my 12-year-old got her period at 11. It’s kind of what we were talking about before with the backlash. It can look like anything about sexuality and girls is wrong, and I see her trying to figure out about the body she’s got and the attention she’s going to get. I want her to feel good about that. I want to say “Your sexuality is good and it can be one of the most enriching parts of your life.”

Kelly: My daughter said she was surprised she liked a Happy Gilmour movie, which means it was an Adam Sandler movie, and I said “were there two Lesbians kissing in it?” because that’s what he’s known for. And I say, “Do our Lesbian friends look like that? And do they do that in front of us to try to turn us on?” I say we need to look at that

Audience 9: I don’t blog about my daughter’s sexuality, but she’s 10 turning 11 and it’s time to have conversations, only because I want to empower her and I don’t want to hit her with phrases like “blow jobs” that she doesn’t already know. I don’t want her to go unarmed. My husband is judging her clothing choices. I think that she’s a little girl, and I think little girls get to wear shorts. I don’t think little girls should be wearing a habit in the summer time when she’s hot. He has this way of messaging to her that that’s not okay, and I am very defensive of her right to be a little girl, and I don’t want her to be ashamed. “You’re a little girl, and you get to just be a little girl.” My husband and I go round and round about that.

Tracee: I have that same issue with my husband. We’ve been to therapy about some girl issues. We have to realize that their job is to protect little girls, but we as mothers sort of have to teach them … There’s this idea in society that if a girl covers up, nothing bad will happen to her, and that’s just plain fiction. Husbands want to do something, fathers want to do something, and we have to teach them. I don’t want her to wear the midriff not because I’m afraid of sexual predators but because I’m afraid you will judge me as a mother.

Audience 9 again: I’m a rape crisis advocate, and I’ve taught my husband a lot. But it’s different to him when it’s a rape victim and when it’s her. It’s her god-given or whoever given right to wear what she wants. Though there’s sexualization in media, that’s not her. I don’t want to push it on her.

Tracee: Our brains are getting hardwired to certain images. When we see a Catholic girl, we have sexual thoughts. I don’t think girls are dressing more slutty.

Laurie: I actually disagree. Teens and tweens are dressing much more sexually. That’s a commercial thing. They discovered an enormous amount of money could be made by selling clothes to people younger and younger. That’s one reason the sexualization happens is that then people want certain types of clothes.

Tracee: I’m seeing a lot of halter tops and bikinis, and then I see kids getting sexually criticized for them. Those have been around a long time.

Dana from The Dana Files. I was raised in a very strict Catholic family. I couldn’t wear anything that looked too sexy or too revealing. You can’t have sex before marriage. I held to that. My father owns a bar and grille; when I turned 18, I worked for him. The first night he left me alone to manage the bar, I came to work in a tank top and shorts, and was stunned that men were attracted to me. Some of the things that men would say to me were revolting. I thought when I have a son, I want to teach him the proper way to treat women. How do we teach our sons? Do I do it myself? Do I get my husband to do it? I’m at a loss

Glennia: To go to your question, I think you have to have a continual dialogue with your kids about these things. If you’re open about it, they can ask you a question. If they can ask you what they think about something they saw, I think that’s going to help them when they go out in the world to apply those lessons. You have to look at all these things as opportunities.

Kelly: Not just thinking about the boy issue, but as an educator I’m all for a dress code, because I spent 50% of my day sometimes policing what kids wear. I ask girls, “What kind of image are you trying to portray?” If you’re trying to get a boyfriend by what you’re wearing, you have no right to complain if all he values you for is your body. You have to build up yourself in a completely different manner. Let’s talk about your brain because you do have one; nobody else took it home with them.” I love to see these girls thinking, “This is going to be gone someday, but my brain is going to be there forever.” As women, we do it backwards: we do not dress for men, we dress for each other. I don’t expect a man to tell you I have cute shoes: I expect you to do that.”

Tracee: Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood putting boundaries around marketing (such as on report cards, and playgrounds, much of it sexually or gender inappropriate). The Normal Breasts Gallery if you have daughters who are maturing and seeing silicone everywhere.

Audience: Why not for sons?

Tracee: I agree! Our perspective of what people look like is distorted. When talking about sex, Third Base Ain’t What It Used To Be is a good balanced resource.

Laurie: Scarleteen. Really really good sexual information for teenagers. All About S.E.X.: The Scarleteen Book, by Heather Corinna. The best book I’ve ever seen for answering questions about teens and sexuality.

Tracee: Good books for tweens. Discovery Girls book series.

Audience 10: Our partners are so important. Our kids constantly look to us for nonverbal cues as to whether or not we approve. We have to be so aware that our kids are attending on every level.

Laurie: You just said something I wanted to say. Everything we’re talking about about talking to our kids is hard work. It’s like cockroaches. Sometimes you get tired of talking to your kids, but you just have to keep doing it and doing it. The most subtle messages are the ones kids see the most.

Audience: And misinterpret!

Laurie: But if you live with someone who thinks you’re beautiful and loves you and hugs you, it’s a message kids are going to get. If you really feel positive about their kids, they do know. I raised a woman who now talks back to the television for her whole life, because I did that. The reiteration works.

Mallory, Mocha Momma’s daughter. As someone who just came out of my graduation from college, and the end of my parenting: at the end of the day, no matter what they said to me, it was my choice. I was one of those A&F kids. I was multiracial and I could pass. But I appreciate that Mom never bought me those clothes; if I wanted them, I had to buy them myself. I remember thinking “I’m really uncomfortable in these size zero pants.” As much parenting as she did, there was some blockage that I put up. It really does start at good parenting, but when it was my choice, and I could make those decisions about the clothes, that’s when it really turned me on. So keep going; it helps.

Melanie at Left Coast Mom. When I was in high school, I had the same kind of thing. My parents didn’t have any money so I never had the right kind of clothes. So I developed this distaste on clothes. I heard my five-year-old say “Mommy doesn’t like [???]] and neither do I, because they’re tacky.”

Glennia: As parents, we always want our kids to have it easier than we did, but I don’t think those things are avoidable. As parents, we can tell our kids the right things, and then when there are these bumps in the road, you have to be there to catch him. For him to grow as a person, he has to go through those things.

Debbie says:

Laurie and I had a plan for today; we set time aside to blog together about the movie Wall-E and this fat activist article about it from Slate.

It would have been an interesting post–maybe it still will be. But I’ve been derailed, by my friend P., who sent me the link to the Slate article.

Apparently, the Slate article (which I agree with in some part and disagree with in some part) pushed my friend’s buttons, and she published a vitriolic, name-calling anti-fat-activist rant on her blog. It’s public, it’s not password-protected, I could send you to it. But I’m not going to, and at the end of this post, I’ll explain why.

Warning: if you’re a fat activist or an ally, you may find this next paragraph hard to read.

The title of the post is “Idiocy.” She calls fat activists “as a group,” “rabid and out of control.” She says we will respond to the “tiniest bit negative about being fat” by “jump[ing] down your throat and rip[ping] you a new asshole from the inside.” She says that if you suggest there’s a choice involved (in being fat), “you should fear for your life.” She says that if you write a fat character “in a less-than glowing light, you will be crucified on the activist’s altar.”

When I put in a mild response, she replied that she thought I was “one of the few sane ones.” That pushed me over the edge.

As a fat activist for the last 25 years, and an activist on other issues for the last 40, I have (of course–so have you) seen this kind of thing many times before. In milder terms, I’ve taken P.s side.

But here’s the thing that P. never acknowledges.

Everything she describes about fat activists is a hundred times, no a thousand or a hundred thousand times, more true of weight-loss true believers. For every individual who doesn’t think she should lose weight, there is a million-dollar business pushing her to lose weight. For everyone who doesn’t want to admit that there might be something the “tiniest bit negative about being fat,” there are hundreds of thousands of doctors, thousands of bariatric clinics and hospitals, who won’t admit that there might be anything the “tiniest bit negative” about being thin. Trust me (from personal observation), a 109-pound person has a harder time in chemotherapy than a 209-pound person. That’s just one. Have you ever heard anyone other than a fat activist say it?

Here’s where I agree with P.: In an ideal world, none of us would be telling anyone else how to live their lives. No activist would be criticizing women who diet, or get breast prosthetics, or African-American women who straighten their hair. In that same ideal world, no one would have been so barraged with hateful messages from early childhood that s/he would become an extremist in the other direction.

I work hard not to be the kind of activist (fat, queer, antiracist, whatever) that P. describes. This decision is made solely on the grounds of usefulness. I’m well aware of the part of me that wants to jump down the throat of every weight loss evangelist, every person who tells “socially acceptable” racist jokes and doesn’t see the harm in it, every person who says, “That’s so gay! and means “That’s so stupid!” I don’t jump down their throats, because I want them to listen to what I have to say. This makes me “one of the sane ones,” but you know what? The “insane” ones by this standard seem pretty damn sane to me. They’re angry enough to say things that have to be said. (Think anyone would have printed that review if Daniel Engber had said, “Wall-E gets some things about fat right and some wrong?” Maybe, if he has a regular column. But that’s not how you get a regular column.)

If you want individuals to listen to you (which is what I want), you have to learn how to moderate your extremism. If you want a soapbox, a place to yell from (which I desperately want my allies to have), you have to learn how to minimize your moderation and be extreme. You have to define the endpoints to move the middle–I learned that in college, studying the abolitionist movement which got rid of slavery in this country. For each Daniel Engber, a thousand people in theaters are nodding and thinking, “See, I knew the people covering the earth with garbage were fat.” And no, the movie does not say that. The movie is nuanced and interesting and worth discussion–but first there’s a cheap takeaway message for the people who aren’t noticing nuances.

I do not want to be “one of the sane ones.” I want to stand with my “rabid and completely out of control” allies. I’m sometimes wrong-headed, sometimes overly didactic, sometimes an extremist. I also know that what “extremist” really means is “angrier than me.” And right in the moment, I’m pretty damned angry. At the same time, I want friends who choose to diet or have weight loss surgery to be willing to talk to me; and I want to support them without giving up my beliefs.

So why didn’t I give you the link to P.’s post? Because I know that some of you wouldn’t be able to resist going and ranting there. And ranting at her is not going to be useful. This post is an attempt to practice what I’m preaching: be extreme on the soapbox and moderate when dealing with individuals.

Laurie says:

I’m back. It’s nice not to be in 110 degree weather. I was in Las Vegas for a show with my jewelry.

[The photo at the end of this blog is not suitable for most office viewing]

I received the email below from Fukazawa Junko, who curated the Tokyo exhibition that ended June 29th. I’ve made some small changes in it for language clarity

I thank you for your cooperation in exhibiting your works.

Akiko Yamasaki, a young feminist art historian, wrote about the exhibition in her blog and how important it was to have it exhibited in the public women’s center .

On the fifth day of the exhibition, the officer of Minato ward government asked us to change the photo from one with a penis to one without full frontal nudity. The photo is grandfather and grandson on the sofa. I’m very sorry, but I wanted to continue the exhibition, so I displayed another photo. The presentation of penis is prohibited in the public space in Japanese law, as you know.

I am very pleased that many people saw and dialogged with your works. Some of them want to talk more about your works, so we are going to have a session for them in a few weeks.

I’ve been aware of the Japanese law prohibiting the showing of the penis for years, but this is the first time I’ve had a portrait with a penis taken down. I have had two exhibitions of Familiar Men there, one in a gallery and one in a museum. I think the difference is that the Minato Center is a government space. Women’s Centers in Japan are sponsored by the government. They are in my experience large, attractive buildings with lots of programs and classes (some feminist, some not).

Junko had warned me beforehand that this was an issue, so under the circumstances I was happy the photo was exhibited for 5 days.

I was glad that the exhibition was in a Woman’s Center. I’ve given talks at Womens Centers in Japan but this is my first show in one. Many people saw the work who would not have seen it in a museum or gallery. Viewing the portraits in the context of “health and body image” created a lot of intense discussion that I really like. I’m sorry that I don’t have the Japanese to read Akiko Yamasaki’s blog. Hopefully Motomi rudolf, who works with me, will be able to translate it for me.

This is the photo of David and his grandfather Ray that was removed.

Debbie says:

I’m sorry to report that transphobia is alive and well. The good news, however, is that trans activism is thriving. In the last week or so, two stories have come to my attention.

Just a week ago, my friend Roz attended the LGBT (that’s Lesbian/Gay/Bi/Transgender parade in London. She encountered a problem at the event toilets.

Official stewards who were running the toilets at Trafalgar Square announced that I, and any other transgender or transsexual woman, had to use the disabled toilets and was not allowed to use the regular women’s toilets. I pointed out to the stewards that I transitioned and had surgery before they were born; I was more polite than a polite thing. No dice.

I went and fetched a posse of transwomen and transmen and we made a collective fuss. Their response - and remember these were official stewards AT PRIDE - was to radio in ‘we’re being attacked by a mob of trannies! send backup’. They were joined by a policeman, who was a LGBT liaison officer, who claimed that we had to be able to show our Gender Recognition Certificates* if we wanted to use the women’s loos and got quite upset when I explained to him that I had been involved in drafting the Act and that it did not take away rights that existed before it. At one point he threatened to arrest us for demonstrating on private property - those loos belong to Westminster Council, so you are not allowed to make a fuss there.

*GRCs are formal change-of-gender documents issued by a reviewing panel. Since 2004, they have been the only route by which transgender people can change legal gender in the United Kingdom.

At one point it was claimed that they had instituted this policy a few minutes earlier because a man had attacked a woman; at another they said it was official Health and Safety policy.

It was one of the most wretched experiences I have had in thirty years, only made positive by the love and solidarity of my community - including various transmen who proposed that, since they had no GRCs, they should be made to use the women’s loos. Beards and all.

As should be apparent from the above, Roz is a lifelong activist. She, other transfolk, and allies did not let this sit. Instead, Roz’s sweetheart dubbed it “Toiletgate” and the activists worked with the Pride organizers to get an apology:

*… we deeply regret that Roz Kaveney had to endure such an experience at our event, this is deeply regrettable and should never have happened, and so I publicly apologise on behalf of Pride London to her with regard to this, and we will endeavour to ensure that it never happens in the future with respect to any groups that are a part of our Stakeholders forum, or indeed any one attending Pride London’s events.*

When things like this happen it leaves a very distasteful feeling with any person or community who feel that they are being singled out or picked on and this is not what we are about at Pride London. We hold very dearly our commitment to equality. We accept that in some cases training is important and we are happy to work with any of our contractors with the training of their volunteers in this respect, and we will also include any individual or groups that have an interest with this as well, where appropriate. This can involve Trans members being called upon to be a part of a training package.

This incident has marred a very successful event and lessons have to be and must be learnt from it.

Apologies are better than refusing to apologize, or ducking the issue; right action in the first place is better than apologizing. Next year will be the test.

What I come back to in this story are Roz’s reflections on activism:

Always do actions as part of a group; always stay calm; always document.

I am feeling part of an empowered community. People tried to humiliate us yesterday, but we are smarter and stronger and we have, and are, Friends.

I can’t think about this story without thinking about Thomas Beatie, the “pregnant man,” who gave birth last week to a healthy daughter. Beatie (who is from the Phillippines) is a transgender man who kept his uterus and ovaries. His wife Nancy has had a hysterectomy, so they decided that he should bear an (artificially inseminated) child. The couple have faced more than their share of opposition.

Doctors have discriminated against us, turning us away due to their religious beliefs. Health care professionals have refused to call me by a male pronoun or recognize Nancy as my wife. Receptionists have laughed at us. Friends and family have been unsupportive; most of Nancy’s family doesn’t even know I’m transgender.

Beatie is not the first transman to bear a child, but he seems to be the first to attract national attention: appearing on Oprah will do that for a person. Cruising the web, I can find some mighty nasty comments about the Beaties, but to my surprise and delight the transphobics aren’t in the majority, nor do they show up in the first groups of links. There’s a lot about Beatie’s appearance on Oprah. Many people sound surprised, or confused, which is understandable: if you don’t travel in trans-friendly circles, the details of how these things work are likely to be unfamiliar. Yet the tone of much of what I see seems to be “well, good luck to them!” I couldn’t agree more.

Seems like Thomas and Nancy Beatie are following Roz’s advice; I hope they’re getting the same kind of support and empowerment that she is.

Mocha Momma, who will be speaking at BlogHer on the panel Laurie is moderating, says:

I have this theory. Don’t we all?

My theory revolves around my body and the relationship I’ve had with it my entire life. My nails grow fast and that was a wonderful thing until I realized that everyone wanted a back scratch from me. My hair, on the other hand, grows slowly and when I’ve gotten a bad haircut it’s a painfully long waiting period until I like it again. Even then, I have a love/hate relationship with it. It’s high time I gave up the ghost, though, because when it comes right down to it I haven’t liked my hair because I bought into society’s view of beautiful hair: long and straight.

That’s a whole other issue unto itself and I have not the time to delve into it right now.

Theories are funny things. They exist for us so long as they aren’t debunked. After that they become “something which we once believed” but can no longer prove.

I say all this to set the stage for an issue for women of color: we do, for the most part, completely enjoy our bodies and all the curves and softness that comes with it even until the point of annoying our fairer sisters on the feminist front.

We have asses that are round and cushiony and we like it.

Our hips are wide and sway side to side and we work that shit like there’s no tomorrow.

Lips are ours and belong to our culture as normal and a part of who we are and how we chew our food and kiss our loved ones.

We make no excuses for these things. In fact, when women are marking off the laundry list of what they dislike about themselves I am, secretly sometimes, feeling sassier and happier inside because I’ve learned to like my body. Really like it.

Not every pair of pants hides my childbearing gut. And not every dress accentuates my breastfeeding mammaries (albeit ones who, in their heyday, saluted every person I passed). It’s not that my body is different from so many other women. It’s that I accept it and hope to honor it.

How do women get to this place?

That would be too tedious a recitation and one that requires more space here than I have to address it. It’s easier to say what I have not done to get here.

I haven’t had a so-called “beauty” magazine enter my home since I was a teenager. I don’t need their definitions of magnificence to try to convince me to be unhappy with myself and deny my body those potato chips.

Lynne Murray says:

Recently I had a conversation with talking my friend, J, about Laurie’s post on writing a letter to her body.

J and I both deal with chronic health issues, which in her case have sometimes been life-threatening, but we share a hard-won positive attitude toward our bodies.

Her challenges are harder, dealing with daily pain, a daunting catalog of symptoms and infuriating so-called spiritual types who suggest that she must “want to be this sick” or she wouldn’t be.

For me the challenge has been to avoid drinking in the poisonous fat hatred that we swim in daily, and to immediately detox from polluted attitudes whenever I encounter them. Sometimes I meet people who are wildly uncomfortable and terrified that my fat or decreased mobility might be contagious. Recently a twenty-something couple stopped by my apartment and the husband, who is training for a marathon, kept looking at my cane as if it would bite him. My guess is that he was telling himself, “As long as I keep running nothing like that will ever happen to me.” I felt like saying, “Maybe yes and maybe no, kid. You can’t order life from a catalog.”

The reality of living with my body is much more serene than some of the terrified people I meet might imagine. Soon after our conversation about loving one’s body, J sent me a little note with two hearts drawn on it. Inside one it said, “J + J” and inside the other “L + L”; for me that note is an illustration of the kind of friendships that are a treasure beyond reckoning. I feel fortunate to have a few of those.

Friendship is a good metaphor for the process of respecting (befriending) my body. It’s an ongoing process. Sadly, it’s also the opposite of how we’re encouraged to treat our bodies. Cruelty to our physical selves is thought of as something to admire in our culture. We’re supposed to outsmart our bodies, fool them into behaving ways not natural to them, and work them till they hurt.

If you constantly beat up, stress out and bad-mouth your friends, they will shut you out and understandably so. Friendship grows much better with a foundation of patient listening, positive words and thoughtful actions. It’s also a collaboration.

The body makes its suggestions nonverbally, but sometimes I will run across something that seems to be under a spotlight, which is my body’s way of saying, “Yoo-hoo! Look at this.” Most recently a suggestion on a label of a bottle of mineral salts suggested a mixing a small amount in a ten-ounce glass of water and then drinking ten glasses of water a day. My reaction was, “TEN glasses, that’s not going to happen. Okay, more water, I could do that.” When I actually did do that, I got a faint but clear signal somewhere in my body, essentially saying, “More water–YES!”

How can we not admire our bodies? They do an amazing job keeping us alive every day despite being treated so badly. They don’t run away (well, they can’t, we’re stuck with each other). They patiently keep asking for what they needs in hopes that eventually they will be heard and heeded. A major part of my own life journey is learning to value and facilitate all the myriad of ways my body lives strong, performs beautifully and takes me through each day with a surprising amount of comfort and pleasure.

Debbie says:

Michael Pollan is probably the most popular food journalist of our time, and I always find him worth reading. His newest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto is a short volume in which he attempts to define “food” and set forth some basic advice for healthy eating in 21st century America.

Let’s start with the problems:

1) His awareness of class issues is woefully nonexistent. He writes as though everyone has as much money, and as much access to ingredients, as he does. This has never been more obvious than in this book, where at one point he has the nerve to include a recommendation that people be affluent and educated. (”Be the kind of person who take supplements.”) He also frequently recommends spending more on food, for reasons I find useful, but never acknowledges that many people may be unable to do this. This class-blindness undercuts everything else he says.

2) He’s anti-fat. Worse, he’s stupid about it. He consistently throughout the book refers to fat and obesity as a “disease,” which is not part of contemporary medical theory. He’s able to use the famous “nurses’ study,” which is a keystone of the health-at-any-size movement to help show that dietary fat may not be dangerous, but he’s unable to use it to show that weight may not be dangerous, even though the scientific conclusions are inescapably similar. He also repeatedly cites the “Americans have gained an average of 12 pounds since the 1960s” (I’ve also heard six pounds), and yet constantly refers to the obesity epidemic, as if he never looked at those two sentences together. (It doesn’t help that he spends some time relying on the nurses’ study and similar studies, and also spends some time criticizing that same study enough to make us doubt his conclusions in the earlier sections.) Fat-acceptance folks may well decide not to read this book.

Those things being said, Pollan does have a lot of information about food history that I found invaluable. One of his key areas of examination is what he calls “nutritionism,” the shift from looking at what we eat as food to looking at it as a combination of nutrients. He traces a lot of history here, and also looks specifically at a 1977 report from the Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, which issued a trial recommendation of “reduce consumption of red meat and dairy products” and was lobbied into changing that to “choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake.”

The fat intake isn’t the point here; the point is thinking about foods versus thinking about nutrients. That trend, which started well before 1977, is how we now get to the point where the doughnuts in the store on the corner are labeled “prepared with 0 grams transfat,” and supermarket bread, loaded with high-fructose corn syrup and other additives, is covered in health labels promoting “whole grains” and “enriched flours.”

Two important nutrition takeaway messages which Pollan makes clearly are: 1) all vegetables are not created equal. You can’t quantify the amount of beta-carotene in a carrot, because carrots have different nutrients in different seasons, in different soils, grown organically versus on a factory farm, etc., etc.; and 2) even the best nutrition science doesn’t understand what it is in foods that contributes to making or keeping us healthy. Omega-3 fatty acids probably are important, but they are differently important in the fish that produces them than they are in a pill.

By dissecting the history (and the money trail) that got us from food to nutrients, Pollan does a real service to understanding food, and why we eat so many things that we think of as food but really aren’t.

Pollan ends with a long advice section–I disagree with a few of his conclusions but support most of them, and am taking a few more to heart than I used to. The three basics get quoted a lot:

Eat food.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.

He defines food as “something your great-grandmother would recognize as food.”

Overall, he’s a good writer, he does (at least some of) his homework, and he’s entertaining. So if you can take the fat and class issues with a grain of salt (or a snack that makes you happy), read the book.

Laurie and Debbie say:

Maven has started a new fat website, and it is spectacular!

The Fat Experience Project® is an oral, visual and written history project which seeks to be a humanizing force in body image activism.

By collecting and sharing the many and varied stories of individuals of size, the Fat Experience Project® seeks to engage with, educate, empower and enrich the lives of people of size, our allies and the world at large. …

We believe that, at the root of discrimination and judgment, there is often an unfortunate lack of basic understanding.

We believe that sizeism, racism, classism, ableism, sexism, transphobia and homophobia are related issues whose intersections may best be understood through the exploration of personal impacts.

If you haven’t already gone there and stopped reading …

The site collects individual stories and posts them in categories: Celebration, Childhood & Family, Labels & Language, Self-Love & Actualization, The Shame Game (and perhaps more, or more to come).

Anyone can submit a story. The site welcomes:

* first-person, non-fiction, autobiographical essays.
* first-person, non-fiction, autobiographical video entries.
* Topical spoken word pieces (via text, video or mp3)
* Representative photographs (artful nudity OK.)

Here’s a bit from Stacy Bias in the self-love & actualization category:

I find myself in wonderment at people who are able to motivate themselves to simple tasks like gardening and cleaning their house and grocery shopping on a regular and consistent basis. I have nearly completely divorced myself from my skin. I feel as if I’ve almost completely moved out of my own body. I don’t wish to challenge myself. It’s like, I’ve broken so many promises to myself that I don’t even believe me anymore, so it seems somewhere along the way I stopped trying to even pretend like I was a capable individual.

This is and always has been a huge part of my fat experience — this disconnect between my hyperactive mind and my nearly ignored flesh. My body has been a shameful reminder of my failings, and so for the most part, I have ignored it as a tool for my survival. It has been under-used, abused and all but abandoned. …

So, my solution then, is to challenge myself for 20 minutes every day.
I don’t care what it is. Taking out the trash. Doing dishes. Scrubbing my toilet. Going to the store. Dicing vegetables. Going for a walk. Sorting papers. Organizing a room. Picking up clutter. Pulling a few weeds. Cleaning out my car. Whatever. Something that involves movement. Something that involves the kind of self-care that I seem to consistently avoid.

And another, from an mp3 by Liv McClellan (audio files are transcribed on the site):

We have a lot of fatties in my family. My mom is fat. My mom kind of fluctuates between a size 12 and a size 20. She just kind of fluctuates in between there, depending upon what’s going on in her life. My dad actually has now got a gut on him, you know, later in life. When I was younger, I was definitely the only fat kid. … And my dad was a PE teacher. So, you know, it was a very interesting sort of relationship with the expectation that you were active. I played soccer when I was little, t-ball, swam from the time I was five until I graduated from high school, competitively. Always, was always doing something. … And what I, as an adult now, this Health at Every Size sort of philosophy that I embrace — that wasn’t there. It was just sort of - you’re fat, so you’re unhealthy. … We had a nurse practitioner that I hated; who wanted me on every diet ever and was always telling my parents that I needed to be on a diet. Then I finally moved over to a pediatrician when I was 13 or 14 and she was an adolescent pediatrician, and she was like “Yeah, you swim twice a day, five days a week, and a 6th day you swim for 2 hours. You do all sorts of activities, you play soccer, this that and the other. You’re healthy. You’re overweight, but you’re healthy.”

This is the kind of site that can only get better as more and more people contribute to it. You know you have an anecdote, a story, a success, a memory … a fat experience. Maven wants you to share it, in the right kind of context, for the right reasons.

Check it out.

Laurie says:

BlogHer invited me to be a guest editor and write a “Letter to my Body” for their Body Image topic. Women have been writing these letters since they began on Valentine’s day. Deb wrote hers a while ago.

===========================================

It’s hard for me to think about writing a letter to my body because I don’t feel separate from it. So I’ve decided to visualize talking to myself in the mirror. I think out loud a lot so that’s not hard.

I’m going to talk about “being present in my body” even though that phrase still feels a little separate, but I don’t have a better words to say it in. I didn’t start out this way. Learning to be present in my body most of the time was a mixture of joy and hard work that happened after I grew up. And since I’m sixty-six, it’s been going on for a long time.

I’m grateful for the physicality of my life, both in it’s intensity and all it’s subtleties. Feeling the air on my skin on a warm day, seeing the world as I walk through it. I like the patterns in the cement, the leaves on the trees, I like the faces as I go by.

I’m not necessarily grateful for the fact that being present is about pain as well as joy. And when I hurt, I”ll feel the interruptive intrusiveness of quite small pains as well as the sometimes overwhelming power of strong pain.

I’m grateful for the pleasures of taste, for the repleteness sensation of eating, for orgasm and the more subtle pleasures of sex.

I’m an artist and I work with my hands. There’s the physical sensation of making something with them, something that didn’t exist before. And there’s the passion of dance - whether it’s just me dancing or when I’m teaching belly dance to kids and experiencing their intensity.

Then there’s my face in the mirror looking back with all the lines that tell the story of my life so far. I like that too.