Laurie and Debbie say:

Sarah Wanenchak, guest-posting for Sociological Images, did a fascinating post on “Disabled Bodies and Ableist Acceptance”. Wanenchak uses runners Aimee Mullins

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and Oscar Pistorius

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Mullins and Pistorius present interesting examples. They are both known for being both accomplished athletes and for being physically attractive – Mullins has done modeling work. They present inspiring stories that have generated a fair amount of sports media coverage. And yet things have not been altogether smooth – there has been some controversy regarding the degree to which the carbon fiber prostheses they use for running confer any form of advantage on the runners who use them. Questions over the effect of the prostheses have threatened Pistorius’s bids to compete in the Olympics alongside able-bodied athletes.

I think the combination of positive and negative reactions is worth noting, in light of [Fiona Kumari] Campbell’s writing on culture and disability. Mullins and Pistorius are admired for “overcoming” a perceived disability, and this admiration feels especially safe for people embedded in able-bodied culture because they are conventionally attractive in every other respect. But this is a story with which we only feel comfortable provided that it doesn’t present any kind of threat to our conventional categories of abled and disabled bodies. It is unacceptable for a disabled body to be better at what it does than an abled body. It is even slightly uncomfortable when a disabled body manages to be “just as good”.

We also blogged about Pistorius back in 2007, when we said:

We’re guessing that he won’t be allowed to run all the way to the Olympics, because athletes with “perfect bodies” are terrified being shown up by someone whose natural body is imperfect, and whose prosthetics make him cybernetic.

If the trend to keep visible disabilities as normalcy continues, converting them into assets is an inevitable result. … And if someone competing against Oscar Pistorius needs medication to have the courage to leave the house, and then runs like the wind, would anyone say that he was relying on “something that provides advantages”?

Underlying both Wanenchak’s post and our old one is the cultural conviction that the only way to react to disability is with pity. No one wants to be pitied, but many people are comfortable having others to pity. And it’s easy, if you haven’t thought it out, to pity someone in a wheelchair, or someone who walks tapping her way with a white cane. It’s much more complicated to think about that wheelchair, or that cane as something that opens up the person’s life … and would open it up much more if buildings and streets were more accommodating to a variety of needs. It’s not only complicated, but potentially deeply disturbing, to think about high-tech prostheses, maximized for the needs of a particular person with particular skills at a particular time in his or her life, to think that a “disabled” person perhaps has something that works better than what “normal people” are issued with.

As Wanenchak is deeply aware, many athletic enhancements don’t make people nervous. She talks about skater Johnny Ohno, who is

“as able-bodied as one can get. But … he manages this on the back of technology – on specially designed skates, in special aerodynamic suits, with the help of carefully balanced exercise and nutrition plans; almost no athlete is really “natural” anymore. But at least in part because of the closeness of his body to an able-bodied ideal, this presents no explicit threat to our categories. Ohno fits the accepted model of “human.”

You can say the same of any world-class athlete. The distinction seems to be between what we perceive as “compensations”–replacements for body parts that don’t work or aren’t there–and what we perceive as “enhancements,” physical aids or practices that we put on top of what is “supposed to be there.” Ohno skates on the legs he was born with, in his special skates, in his special suit. Mullins and Pistorius run on legs they weren’t born with, and manage to be successful, conventionally attractive, and enviable. Since we don’t have any cultural slots open for disabled, successful, conventionally attractive, and enviable, people get confused, disturbed, and sometimes threatened.

Laurie says:

Kyoko Michishita was one of the women I worked with on my Women of Japan project. She is a noted feminist and does strong anti-military work.  Michi is also a well known translator.

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She recently published a Japanese translation of Tennyson’s Enoch Arden,  a remarkable accomplishment, particularly given the language differences.

She had asked my permission to use the photo I took of her with her cat Jackie (who is now dead) as her author photo, and of course I said yes. The publisher used a crop of my photo for the book jacket.  (A “crop” is a section of a whole negative or photograph usually chosen for the aesthetics.) And usually, if you are the photographer and have already made your choice, you are often less then thrilled. Magazines frequently do this for overall design purposes, and in that framework it’s perfectly reasonable.

This time, when I got the book and saw the crop, I was pleased. In the context of the book jacket I really liked their choice, so I thought I would share it.

As is obvious from the photo, Michi and Jackie were very close.

Debbie says:

I don’t have a lot to say about Emily Rapp’s essay, Transformation and Transcendence: The Power of Female Friendship. Unless, that is, I write a book-length response.

It’s a very sad essay. I’m not so much one for trigger warnings, mostly because I believe people’s triggers are too complex and nuanced to be well-protected by warnings. Let’s just say that if you have a hard time reading about the slow, inexorable death of a child, you won’t find this easy. And who doesn’t? If you have a hard enough time that you don’t want to do that to yourself, don’t click the link. The quotes below dodge the hardest stuff.

Nonetheless, the essay isn’t about death, it is (as advertised) about the friendships of women. I love to tell people that the word “gossip,” so maligned in these times, means the talk of women, and it comes from the term “godsib,” or “god-sibling,” which was a medieval term for “best friend,” the woman who is not biologically my sister, but should be. Rapp isn’t interested in gossip, or etymology: she’s interested in how a particular group of women older than herself–women she worked with in a nonprofit in a country she didn’t know–led her to see the world in a different light:

They understood, together, as friends, and apart, as individuals in the world, the urgency of compassion, and that it often goes unnoticed but that this doesn’t make it any less important or vital or difficult to sustain and cultivate. And they also understood that you could try as hard as you possibly could, and disaster could still strike – mercilessly. Without warning, without fairness, and with fatal consequences. I wasn’t ready to change my man-chasing, embarrassing ways, but a seed was planted on that afternoon. Nearly fifteen years later I get out of bed each morning and am thankful that I wasn’t so myopically committed to old, tried myths about women’s roles that I couldn’t see what was happening in that room between those three women, or what was happening in my own mind.

While Rapp pursues her young-self goals of marriage and motherhood, her older friends (self-dubbed “The Wrinklies”) follow a different path:

The last time I saw the Wrinklies was in 1999 on a return trip to Geneva. The youngest of the three had had a stroke as a result of a brain tumor. These friends she’d worked and traveled and lived and laughed and loved with for over half her life rented a new ground-floor apartment that would accommodate a wheelchair, took shifts taking care of her, all the while holding down jobs that were about saving other people’s friends, other people’s kids, other people’s lives – not directly, no, but on the sidelines, behind the scenes… I was nervous as I sat waiting in a pub to see them all again, afraid of seeing my paralyzed friend. Would my face show a reaction that I didn’t intend? Fear? Disgust? The three of them came in together, smiling. The unaffected two had learned to understand the other’s few words; they wiped her face, helped her eat and made her laugh. This was a snapshot of what my own deep friendships could lead to: transformation. I saw, on that afternoon, that it’s possible to transcend the limits of your skin in a friendship. That a friend can take you out of the boxes you’ve made for yourself and burn them up. This kind of friendship is not a frivolous connection, a supplementary relationship to the ones we’re taught and told are primary – spouses, children, parents. It is love.

Support, salvation, transformation, life: this is what women give to one another when they are true friends, soul friends, what the Irish call anam cara. It’s what the Wrinklies did for one another, what the French resistance fighters in Auschwitz did for one another, what women do for one another in real relationships with real consequences in real time, every day, what my friends do for me. We help one another other live and sometimes, we watch – and help – one another die. It happens in movies, sure, but it also happens every day, in real life – now, tomorrow, yesterday. It is transformative and transcendent. It is real. It is love.

I have men in my own life with whom I have friendships with this strength and depth and power. I’m lucky. And when I think of those friendships, I think, “Those are like friendships with women.”

Unlike almost every other topic on the Internet, this one brought out the best in the commenters. Read the comments, if you read the essay.

We don’t write about these friendships enough, we don’t talk about them enough. But we live them every day and–speaking just for myself–I couldn’t live without my friends.

Thanks to Jill at Feministe for the pointer.

Lynne Murray says:

Sometimes I feel like I’m in one of those horror films where the entire population is increasingly infected by an incurable Body Hating Zombie Virus. Only instead of eating other people’s brains this sickness forces one to eat one’s own and pay for the privilege.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s film,Miss Representation, and the website/movement that goes with it, aim at a different goal for women: not purchasing power, but real power. The goal is to bring women together in dialogue, action and mentoring to break the advertising trance and redirect women’s energy away from buying the message and the products–and into running the store, and running for public office.

Miss Representation … exposes how mainstream media contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America. The film challenges the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls, which make it difficult for women to achieve leadership positions and for the average woman to feel powerful herself.

In a society where media is the most persuasive force shaping cultural norms, the collective message that our young women and men overwhelmingly receive is that a woman’s value and power lie in her youth, beauty, and sexuality, and not in her capacity as a leader. While women have made great strides in leadership over the past few decades,, the site points out, the United States is still 90th in the world for women in national legislatures, women hold only 3% of clout positions in mainstream media, and 65% of women and girls have disordered eating behaviors.

On getting to the website, a visitor is immediately offered the opportunity to sign a pledge “to challenge the media’s limiting portrayal of women and girls.” I did this, got on their mailing list, and begin to receive weekly ideas of “actions you can take immediately to make a difference…” For example:

…Remember your actions influence others. Mothers, aunts and loved ones- don’t downgrade or judge yourself by your looks. Fathers, uncles and loved ones—treat women around you with respect. Remember children in your life are watching and learning from you.

…Use your consumer power. Stop buying tabloid magazines and watching shows that degrade women. Go see movies that are written and directed by women (especially on opening weekend to boost the box office ratings). Avoid products that resort to sexism in their advertising.
…Mentor others! It’s as easy as taking a young woman to lunch. Start by having open and honest conversations with a young person in your life.

When I first planned to write about Miss Representation , someone pointed out that it seemed similar to Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly so I checked that out. It’s available in segments on YouTube

Miss Representation, as a film and as a nudge toward collective action, stands on the shoulders of Kilbourne’s pioneering work on media brainwashing. These films have some equally activist siblings, all of them addressing the insidious invisibility of the advertisers’ message. Kilbourne points it out clearly in the fourth revision of Killing Us Softly:

Advertising is more sophisticated and more influential than ever before but still just about everyone feels personally exempt from the influence of advertising.

I asked the first four people I spoke to after hearing this, and all of them confirmed her observation, saying they were not much influenced by ads because they seldom or never watch television.

Kilborne counters this mindset by listing some of the innumerable, half-invisible entry points through which ads can infect your mind:

The average American is exposed to over 3,000 ads every single day…. The ads, as you know, are everywhere. Our schools, the sides of buildings, sports stadiums, billboards, bus stops, busses themselves, cars, elevators, doctors’ offices, airplanes, even on food items like eggs. Almost every aspect of popular culture is really about marketing. (Killing Us Softly 4, part 1 of 2 on YouTube)

Watching Kilbourne’s YouTube slide show, I suddenly realized I had bought and read her paperback book a few years earlier. Seeing the ads in video format brought home to me how much more intense the film medium can be.

Images from film versions of books stick in our mind even when we reread the books. Harry Potter will always resemble Daniel Radcliffe in our minds. Even a documentary film is simplified and streamlined compared to a book; the visual nature of images and movies bypasses the forebrain and goes directly for the gut.

Advertisers know this better than anyone. The cultural goals that have been carved out for women in particular have sneaked into our brains and become an abnormal “normal” that needs to constantly be questioned.

Author Amy Ahlers expresses frustration at how advertising’s toxic self-assessments creep into our minds and color our self-worth in her essay “Big Fat Lies Women Tell Themselves: Ditch Your Inner Critic and Wake Up Your Inner Superstar”:

Studies show that only 8 percent of the images we consume are registered by our conscious mind. That means that 92 percent of the airbrushed, stick-thin, perfectly proportioned images infiltrate our subconscious minds, influencing the way we feel about ourselves. It’s an onslaught of insanity: all these unattainable bodies put before us as an ideal to strive for. As the supermodel Cindy Crawford once said when looking at her airbrushed, Photoshopped pictures, “I don’t even look like Cindy Crawford.”

We need to consciously work to win back our thoughts about how we are supposed to look. We need to overcome the Big Fat Lies about our bodies and our self-care. We need to tune in to our Inner Wisdom on a deep level and to practice, practice, practice, so that we can model a healthy relationship with ourselves.

It is refreshing to see independent and dedicated filmmakers fighting back.

One such is Darryl Roberts, whose America the Beautiful, targeting the unwholesome “beauty” standards Debbie reviewed in Body Impolitic in 2009.

Roberts aimed his cameras at the now $65 billion weight loss industry in a follow-up America the Beautiful 2, The Thin Commandments,

The Australian feminist group Collective Shout, which I wrote about here last year, is also aiming to raise awareness of the toxic and dangerous definitions being forced down our throats, and of course there are dozens (if not hundreds) of others.

Each group’s focus is slightly different, but they are all trying to help us shake free of the hypnotic media-induced trance and each invites to examine the advertising industry’s vision of womanhood:

Kilbourne remarks,

The ads decrees that women should be polished, perfect indeed flawless. She has no blemishes, indeed, she has no pores.” Such a woman also need not concern herself with ideas, as she is made to be seen and not heard. Her mission is to devote most of her energy into the quest for an unnatural, truly impossible beauty standard, which will supposedly result in the heavens opening up and showering her with all that she desires.

Sadly, the hook that the advertisers are setting is baited with an almost real, physiologically based experience of power that many people have, briefly, during their prime reproductive years, when nature heightens every hormone in humans to ensure the continuation of the species. The myth advertisers are selling is that this attractiveness can be captured, distilled and sold as a product and used to help the consumer stay young, powerful and vital.

Also highly disturbing is the advertisers’ use of shocking images to grab attention in this morass of advertising, particularly of shocking violence toward women. The advertiser’s “normal” world, where “all the women are flawless and men are Alpha” is also one where battering, gang rape and stalking are presented as appealing courtship modes.

Newsom, Kilbourne, Roberts, Collective Shout, and their allies are engaged in a fight to wake all of us up from the consumer ad dream/nightmare and energize our lives for real. It can benefit every one of us.

Sometimes I wake up from the Body Hating Zombie Virus film and get the much more positive feeling that I’m in one of those sci-fi movies where we’ve managed to contact The Resistance and there is still hope to save the planet. May the Force for Self-Empowerment be with you!

Laurie says:

As I posted earlier, Filament magazine did an interview with me in their last issue. They are an English feminist erotic magazine that called itself the thinking woman’s crumpet. The questions were excellent and they chose a really good selection of the photos from “Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes.” The editor Suraya Sidhu Singh was a pleasure to work with.
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This is part of the interview:

In a world where beauty is portrayed almost exclusively as young, thin, white women, photographer Laurie Toby Edison works to reveal the beauty of people of all sizes, ages and ethnicities. Interview questions by Jacqueline Dunkley-Insight and Marta Owczarek.

I looked through the book before answering this question. I wouldn’t change anything important, but my eye and my work have moved on since I finished Familiar Men. I’ve changed aesthetic – I can always see differences and potential changes in previous work.

If you’re interested in getting the magazine, it’s available in these places including several in the US.

Laurie and Debbie say:

We were very impressed by this article by Valerie Tarico at truthout.org . Tarico couches excellent contemporary birth-control information in the context of Rick Santorum’s recent attack on birth control (“It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”).

Good news: Even if you feel hazy or muddled right now, you likely have access to technologies your parents could only have dreamed of. Bad news: The confusion is no accident.

Although the headline implies that she is simply writing about birth control misinformation coming from the right wing, the article is much more nuanced than that. She covers five things the right wing doesn’t want you to know about birth control, five that big pharma doesn’t want you to know, and five that the medical gatekeepers don’t want you to know. One thing all of these groups have in common is that they don’t want women to be able to control our bodies. Here’s one from each group:

Right wing: IUDs work by preventing eggs and sperm from hooking up. Opponents of abortion and contraception would have us believe that virtually all modern contraceptives are abortifacients. They especially have targeted the most effective contraceptives available, IUDs, with this accusation. In reality copper IUDs like the Paragard work primarily by inhibiting sperm motility, thus preventing fertilization. Hormonal IUDs like the Mirena work primarily by thickening a plug at the opening to the cervix —another means of preventing fertilization–and secondarily by decreasing ovulation. …

Pharma: The best contraception is also the cheapest. The most effective contraceptives on the market have the potential to kill some of Pharma’s big profit streams. The Paragard copper IUD, which is top tier from an efficacy standpoint (over 99%) offers the cheapest month over month contraception. The problem for Pharma: you put it in once and then don’t spend any money on contraception for the next 10 years. The Mirena hormonal IUD (99.8% effective once established), is more expensive, but has the side benefit of reducing menstrual bleeding and cramps over time by an average of 90%. Family planning practitioners who promote LARCs joke about putting themselves out of business. In contrast, Tarico says that one in twelve women on the pill gets pregnant each year, a higher number than we would have guessed.

Medical gatekeepers: The FDA lags behind. European women have an array of contraceptive options that either never make it to market in the U.S. or are delayed by anywhere from 5-20 years. American regulators are influenced by a litigious environment and by religious fundamentalists, which skew the equation toward inaction. For example, Nexplanon, the latest iteration of the implant, only just became available in the U.S. Similarly, the Mirena IUD has a long track record with women of all ages in Europe but is not yet approved for childless women here. By the time it was officially sanctioned in the US to regulate heavy menstrual bleeding (2009), it was already in use for contraception or bleeding by 15 million women worldwide. A frameless IUD optimized for small women is approved in the E.U., but hasn’t yet reached the U.S. market. If you want to know where contraception is headed, take a look at what Europeans are doing.

Many of the other fifteen points are just as rarely discussed.

So it got us to wondering why birth control has gotten so little attention and discussion over the past couple of decades.

One answer is obvious: the three groups that Tarico singles out are happiest if there isn’t a lot of conversation.

Another is that abortion is getting so much attention and is under such intense attack. This means that the heroes fighting to keep abortion safe and legal are too busy to look at birth control, and that the anti-abortion warriors are really busy with their main campaign. The war on abortion has pushed some of the truly fine birth control resources under the radar: Planned Parenthood (link below) not only has to spend energy fighting it enemies, it has to do what it can to stay out of the public eye, because every time it shows up in the news, the attacks get more fervent. Tarico’s other recommended resource, Bedsider (a new site launched by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy), is one neither of us had even heard of, and it looks excellent.

But why aren’t feminists talking much about contraception? Our guess is that it’s generally thought of as a “solved problem.” In most places in the United States, women who want contraception can get something. And feminists, with so many hot-button issues to concentrate on, may have been too busy to notice that that something is served with large doses of preconception, misinformation, and monetary gain. So wrong-headed Rick Santorum is, for the worst possible reasons, calling attention to something we need to look at more closely.

So, to close with more of Tarico’s words,

You really can manage your contraception. A decision about contraception can shape the rest of your life—your happiness, your ability to contribute to the world around you, the wellbeing of your children. Only you can weigh the risks and benefits of any given contraception against each other in the context of your lifestyle and life goals. To make the best decision possible, you need accurate information, and that means knowing what questions to ask, who to ask, and what factors may be biasing answers. An hour on the internet can fill your mind with rubbish about almost any medical technology. Alternately, an hour spent on sites that are rigorously fact based could mean you have more up-to-date information than your peers or even your doctor. (Bedsider.org and Planned Parenthood are among the best.) Tarico doesn’t mention Scarleteen’s excellent birth control bingo interactive site, so we will.

Thanks to F.S.J. Ledgister, who linked to this on Google+

Laurie says:

We’ve always been impressed with Michael Kimmel’s thoughts on masculinity, which is why he wrote the introduction to Familiar Men:A Book of Nudes. Recently he and Michael Kaufman have written a book called A Guys Guide to Feminism.

Quotes are from Seal Press:

Authors Michael Kaufman and Michael Kimmel, two of the world’s leading male advocates of gender equality, believe it has everything to do with them—and that it’s crucial to educate men about feminism in order for them to fully understand just how important and positive these changes have been for them.

Kaufman and Kimmel address these issues in The Guy’s Guide to Feminism. Hip and accessible, it contains nearly a hundred entries—from “Autonomy” to “Zero Tolerance”—written in varying tones (humorous, satirical, irreverent, thoughtful, and serious) and in many forms (“top ten” lists, comics, interviews, mini-stories, and more). Each topic celebrates the ongoing gains that are improving the lives of women and girls—and what that really means for men.

This seemed like an appropriate place for a Familiar Men photo.

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Here’s Michael Kaufman talking about The Astounding Simple Truth About Masculinity and Goodness (It’s well worth reading the whole post.)

…To answer the question, “what is good about masculinity?”, we need to remind ourselves that:
Masculinity doesn’t exist. At least not in the way we think it exists. There is no timeless definition of manhood. It varies from culture to culture, era to era. It’s simply how we define manhood and how we define the relations of power among men and between men and women.
That means that masculinity (like femininity) is a collective hallucination. It’s as if we’ve all taken the same drug and walk around imagining that masculinity is real. We might assume it is biological, we might think it comes from being male or female, but in truth, each culture makes it up.

…and here’s the great paradox I’ve written about for the past three decades:  the very ideals that confer and represent power and privilege, are a death trap for men. They are a source of enormous pain, isolation, and fear. The reasons are many: To demand that any human not feel or express pain is impossible. To push boys (and men) to ceaselessly prove we’re real men leads to a constant dialogue of self-doubt about making the masculine grade.

And them he goes on to discuss what is bad and good about masculinity and concludes:

So, rather than talk about what’s good about masculinity, I’d rather encourage both boys and girls, men and women to do two things:  To celebrate and nurture the human qualities that are good for us all. And, secondly, to allow for true individuality: yes, some of us will be more one thing or another. Let’s let our boys and girls be those things without wedging them into the miserable world of pink and blue.

And it’s so good to hear people saying what Debbie and Richard Dutcher said in their essay in Familiar Men.

Lynne Murray says:

Some advertiser (I can’t be bothered to find out which) is wooing ‘60s nostalgia money and set a 1965 song to ringing in my head these days and thinking about how songs echo life strategy problem-solving tactics. The song is Fontella Bass’ Rescue Me

Even though this was Bass’ only major hit, she co-wrote it and I’m glad to report that she is still alive. I’m less glad to report that she has to fight to be reimbursed for all the many ways her song is still being used.

Sadly, women’s fantasies of being rescued by a knight in shining armor, are still a popular idea in life as in literature, even nearly fifty years later.

Popular music is hardly the only social force suggesting a passive role for women, and many men cherish the thought of riding to the rescue. When I think about this as a way to solve problems Barbara Sher’s book Wishcraft keeps coming to mind, probably because I used it myself some years back as a guide to starting my own business to subsidize my writing.

I can still visualize the page in Chapter 6 where Sher suggests brainstorming–listing as many solutions as you can think of to any given problem, just listing them without censoring:

That’s how brainstorming often works. You think of all the staid, sensible, obvious ideas first, like scholarships and loans. Then come the “rescue fantasies”: someone is going to come riding along in a white Cadillac, carry you away, or appear mysteriously on your doorstep with a check for a million dollars. Being free to give those fantasies a legitimate place on your list brings liberating laughter—and only then do the really audacious, original ideas begin to flow.

You notice she’s not suggesting following the rescue fantasies as life plans. Janis Joplin’s plea for supernatural intervention to secure a Mercedes Benz wasn’t really a life plan either:

Looking up the rescue concept online renewed my old acquaintance with Heartless Bitches Website, which is always fun.

My favorite was Jane:
-I don’t expect Prince Charming to rescue me. I’m an 8-year practitioner of martial arts with a 2nd degree black belt. I would probably have to protect Prince Charming in any sort of potential bodily altercation. I really am a GI Joe type myself and prefer to date dangerous men–Navy SEALS, Marine Recon, Firemen, Navy pilots, Cops.. you know, men who can throw me in a bed, and in turn, don’t mind if I do the same to them. Nice men are just that–nice, and best left to nice women who prefer to live mundane, Leave-It-To-Beaver existences.

-I don’t believe women should be married until they’re at least 30 and have figured themselves out and have developed some sort of clue when it comes to life, love and the universe as a whole. This will also enable them to have to learn to take care of themselves financially.

Also included are some real-life role models and books.

In emergencies, rescue is totally appropriate, but rescue fantasies shouldn’t stand in the way of anyone’s learning how to stand on her own, plan for the future and use resources at hand to rescue herself and build herQ1` own dreams.

Laurie and Debbie say:

Happy New Year!

We’ve been big fans of s.e. smith at This Ain’t Livin’ for a long time, so it’s great to have such a timely post to write about. In the maelstrom of New Year’s resolutions, she wants us all to remember:

Fat hatred kills. It kills every day in insidious, sneaky ways, and every January, the dieting resolutions are a reminder of how fat hatred kills, by creating such intense social pressure to lose weight. Some of the people pushing their bodies in the coming days and weeks may push them too far. Some people consumed in self hate may turn to more aggressive measures when their weight loss doesn’t go fast enough, like eating disorders and excessive exercise, or invasive surgical procedures to completely reroute their digestive tracts so they can’t absorb nutrients properly.

Others may push the people around them into bad places; the parent who stresses out a teenager, for example, with constant dieting and exercise talk and statements about how fat is disgusting. The ‘pacts’ to lose weight in the new year where people may become competitive, or may goad and push each other into dangerous activities. When one partner loses more weight more quickly than the other because of quirks of biology, metabolism, life, bodies, it suddenly becomes a measure of personal worth instead of a fact of life. The person who keeps the weight off by force of will, by radically cutting calories and exercising aggressively, becomes a figure of hatred and envy while the person who gains the weight back is ‘disgusting.’

Read the rest; it’s all this good.

It got us to thinking about several things: first of all, how New Year’s resolutions have a tendency to be slightly disguised lists of what we don’t like about ourselves. The whole standard list of resolutions–not just “lose weight,” but “cleaner house,” “more organized,” “finish my novel” and so many more–are really rephrased self-criticisms. They sound all virtuous and improving, and it’s a little too easy to ignore the ways in which they encourage us to undermine ourselves.

Second, the specific “lose weight” resolution has a nasty unintended consequence. Because losing weight, and keeping it off, is so extraordinarily difficult (and for some people, impossible without major intervention), it’s a resolution with an especially high failure rate. (Don’t believe losing weight is difficult? See this recent article, or Gina Kolata’s brilliant Rethinking Thin, among many other sources.) Resolutions to do things that actually affect your health and can be not only easy but pleasant, like eating more vegetables and getting more exercise, are a lot more effective in improving your life. Since the giant cultural push is to frame those things in terms of “losing weight,” people who don’t succeed at weight loss are more likely to go back to junk food and couch surfing because they feel like failures, while they might actually make real change if they picked more achievable goals.

Finally, s.e. smith is so articulate about how fat hatred kills that she doesn’t have to move to the next step: hatred kills. Being hated and oppressed is a key factor in life expectancy, health, and quality of life. And hating isn’t good for a person either. Fat hatred doesn’t just kill because it’s fat hatred; it kills because it’s hatred.

Laurie and Debbie say:

This list is for those of us fortunate enough to have people and resources to celebrate with. Even if you love the holidays, love your family, and are looking forward to the season, you still may find useful hints here.

1) To the extent possible, do as much or as little holiday stuff as you want; it’s supposed to be a celebration, not an obligation.
2) If you have enough to give to someone who has less, this is a good year for it.
3) Spend time with people you love and who are good to you.
4) Wear what you think you look terrific in; accept compliments and ignore digs about your clothes.
5) Eat what you enjoy. Desserts are not sinful, they’re just desserts.
6) If you must spend time with awful people, remind yourself three times (out loud) before you walk in the door that they are awful people. Then do something really nice for yourself the minute you can walk out the door. (If the people are not just awful but abusive, here’s some good advice. [The original link died - this is a live link to the same material.])
7) Plan your responses to inevitable comments beforehand. Try not to spend energy on what they say, because they probably aren’t going to stop. For example, if you know that your mother will overfeed you and then, just as dessert is being cleared off the table, say “You look like you’ve gained weight,” try, “That was really a fabulous meal. Excuse me, I haven’t had a minute to talk with Aunt Mabel.”
’8)’ If the holidays make you sad, or you just hate them, you’re not alone. Participate as little as possible. They’ll be over soon.
9) If you know someone who is having a crappy holiday, take a moment to do something for them that they will enjoy.
10) If you think kids are fun, they can be a great escape from the adult follies. If kids drive you crazy, be as patient with them as you can or keep your distance: they didn’t overstimulate themselves with sugar and toys.
11) You have a right to enjoy things in your own way.
12) Be effusive about every gift you get; then be discreetly rude about the awful ones later to your friends. If they’re really awful, throw them off a bridge in the middle of the night.

If these aren’t your holidays, have a great Chinese meal and enjoy the movie!

We’ll be back in the beginning of the New Year.