May 3, 2007
Fat Post #45
I didn't watch the whole thing, because the beginning had me in such gales of outraged laughter. The Fatty in the Mirror in this video (who is meant to be a boogeyman symbolizing out-of-control indulgence and shame) isn't even fat.
Come the fuck on. If you want to steer little girls away from developing eating disorders and body dysmorphia due to everybody and his mother's constant harping on their bodies, does it really make sense to skew reality right there in the anti-ED film?
I headdesk and headdesk, but the hurting does not stop.
In other news, I hereby acknowledge that I have a tendency (a near-obsessive tendency, if I may be honest) to revisit certain topics and concepts that prove difficult to express fully in words. I'm not as embarrassed by this tendency as I was even a month ago. It's just part of the thinking process, and as I develop as a writer, hindsight can kick in and give me access to all those tricky little nuances that escaped me the last time I hit on the topic.
You get what I have to say in bits and pieces, sans the editing and rewriting that would, in time, forge the important thoughts and ideas into one single streamlined essay.
Anyone who wants to stop tuning in can do so at any time. I promise I won't kill you for it. I get tired of hearing me go on a lot more often than anyone else ever will.
Anyway.
I think I've put my finger on the source of my particular loathing for singers and other American parasites who blather on about self-acceptance and how they're not perfect but somehow (sob!) manage to drag themselves out of bed every morning (sob!) and love themselves even though they have... (sob! GASP!)
...freckles.
How many times have we seen this woman, who turned heads by preaching 'revolutionary' self-love, posed on the cover of a trashy magazine, wearing a sexy bikini to maximize the impact of her airbrushed goodies?
What a phony.
The message itself is powerful and should be spread, but it gets corrupted and ends up perpetuating the social evils you think you're fighting against. When you start tacking on those society-mandated qualifiers ("I deserve to live, even though I gained five pounds last year!") you are doing the devil's work for him. Where is the elevation in that?
All I see is more of the same hollow judgmental crap, dressed up as a daring act of Cosmo-terrorism. It's a revolution, all right. In the hamster-wheel sense of the word.
Tell me how you are loving yourself when you flash a list of your imperfections, begging someone, ANYONE to tell you that you still deserve to live on the same planet as Kate fucking Moss.
That ain't no kind of self love, any more than our latest sighting of the Fatty in the Mirror is actually fat. It's just the same old mouthful of reality-distorting bullshit getting swished around into the other cheek. I, for one, am getting tired of the taste. Are you?
Do not be conned into perpetuating the lie. True revolution will bring peace and an end to petty insecurity and thinly disguised self-criticism. It does not require you to justify your flaws or reinforce the media swill with empty statements about how you feel you should be loved 'anyway.'
There is no crying in baseball, and there is no 'anyway' in revolution. There is only you, and the courage to let that be the only thing that matters.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
...You know, when I first started watching this vid, I thought, "Okay, so the girl could stand to gain a few pounds to be healthier. But she's not that bad an example of anorexi--wait that's supposed to be the fat chick?!"
ReplyDelete...And then the vid continued to demonstrate how you're apparently not too skinny until you look like the living skeleton, and I joined you in your headdesking.
The chick in the mirror is hot. (she could, perhaps, be described as pleasingly plump.... but not fat. Not by any measure...) o_O
ReplyDeleteWas anyone else horribly fascinated by the fact that mirrorgirl tried to grab some flab,, but couldn't? Honestly, I could grab a larger roll of fat, and I must weight at least twenty pounds less...
*sigh* Headdesk indeed.
~annoyedwabbit
Wow. That's so off, I'm not even sure it's hypocrisy.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the point was that the living skeleton's perception of OMG DISGUSTING FAAAAT was an average-looking girl. The "if you go this route, your mind will eventually become this warped."
Caveat: I'm an optimist, thus salt should probably be taken with all my judgements.
I've never been interested in weight issues, so that was probably the largest number of anorexiacs I've seen in my entire life. Couldn't watch the entire thing, to be honest. Creeped me out too much.
The human body is a pretty amazing thing, to persist through that kind of torture.
One of the things that frustrates me about the obsession with being skinny and not-fat is that then people miss the other side of the coin: skinny people who want, even NEED to get fatter. Not skeleton skinny like those girls, but naturally underweight girls who can just never push the scale just that much farther.
ReplyDeleteI'm one of those girls. I'm of average height, and my whole life I've been pushing the line between healthy and underweight, and was overjoyed this year to discover I'd finally reached 115lbs. I could finally give blood! My energy levels were improving! Stomach problems in December flattened all of that, knocking off ten pounds and putting me further back than I've been in years. I still don't know what the problem is, though I'm now on meds so my appetite is nearly back to where it was and I'm not nauseated to the point where I can't eat, anymore...but the weight still won't come back.
I've tried eating healthy, eating unhealthy, having good and bad carbs and fats, drinking more fluids, drinking less fluids, more sleep, less sleep, and nothing's working.
The problem is trying to discuss this with anyone but my doctor. If I went to my friends and said "I've been putting on a lot of weight! Look at this fat. I need to lose a couple pounds," I would get sympathetic nods and words of comfort. But instead, when I go and say "I've been losing a lot of weight lately! Look at my ribs. I need to gain a couple pounds," people LAUGH. They chuckle, they brush it off, they say stuff like "Consider yourself lucky! I would kill for a body like yours."
Because I'm not fat or obsessed with being TOO fat, my problems aren't really problems. Yes, thank you, I'll consider myself lucky that I have freaking health problems that make me dizzy, nauseated, and unable to take in enough calories to bring myself up to the base standard of physical health.
How many problems does this cause for me? I want to get back in shape, but I'm scared to exercise since I need to gain weight, not lose it. I'm getting married in a month and will have to take horrid birth control pills for who knows how long because I'm well below the body fat content required to safely carry a pregnancy.
But I guess I'm much luckier than my fellow sisters, who have to deal with *gasp* bigger clothes sizes and the realization that they're not adhering to a superficial societal standard.
The great thing about the human body is that it's as fleeting as a candle flame. Not to be morbid but it's not forever, it won't last you more than a century even if you are very lucky. In this brief moment you have a body you should enjoy it, even if it's only a second, because who knows when you'll have a chance to interact with the world like this again.
ReplyDeleteSure it comes with discomforts like pain, and sadness, and such but it also allows you to talk to your friends and family, feel the sun and wind and cold, move about and everything else. Without it everything becomes a big unknown.
If the soul is really immortal then I'm going to run around and touch shit and eat and talk to people and make things while I have this body. What is looks like really doesn't matter as long as its mostly functional. Being a soul without a body sounds awfully boring. . . When I die I want to be like 'damn, I sure used this body to its fullest' not 'damn, remember that one time I was hot'.
I guess it's an issue of goals.