Pimpage

[bubosquared]

Anna (troubleinchina) has been doing Friday Discussion Posts for a while now, inviting discussion on feministic (hush, it's a word) issues, and I think this week's is an especially interesting one: You must be this thin: >< to perform (But if you are there's something wrong with you).

For once, I n ot only managed to comment, but I actually managed to be coherent enough that I want to save the comment for my own reference. Go to Anna's post to read, or read here, or whatever.

Anna said: It's not about what you, I, or any other particular individual finds attractive or appealing.

I think this is actually the crux of the issue, in a way. The problem with discussions about the Beauty Ideal is that they still usually hinge on the assumption that the Beauty Ideal is about what is attractive -- specifically, what is attractive to men. And it's not. Men find a range of women attractive, IME, and more importantly, contrary to what the media and the patriarchy tell us, they're not actually so shallow that they'll refuse to even look at women who might not quite meet their ideal, or even be the opposite of said ideal.

The Beauty Ideal isn't about Beauty, it's about size. It's about the fact that women shouldn't take up space. Not physical space, so any woman who isn't starving herself to achieve that mythical status of "thin enough" (and there's a reason why the threshold for "fat" is so unrealistically low!) is obviously a whale -- and to a lesser extent, there's the weirdness around tall women, as well, here. Not mental space, so any woman who is naturally "thin enough" get shamed about it, because it doesn't "count" if you don't have to starve yourself for it, that's just bragging, you cheater. And whatever you do, don't ever get an attitude, don't walk around like you deserve to take up the space you do, because then you're a horrible bitch.

And it's not just the pure size thing, either. Lose weight through starvation diets, or diet and exercise, but that exercise should be things like running, or spinning, or whatever, because god forbid you gain ugly muscles -- god forbid you get strong instead of just thin. Strength means bulking up, taking up space, and that makes you double scary.

It's ... *flail* I don't know if I'm making much sense here, or if I'm chasing a rabbit down a hole, because it's hard to cohere a number of seemingly unrelated incidents and epiphanies into something that will make sense to others who haven't had those experiences.

Like: the first time I crossdressed, my friend said something that's stuck with me ever since: that 90% of "passing" as a man is attitude. "Walk like you own the place," he said. "Like it's your right to be walking on the sidewalk. Take up space." And suddenly, I realised why, exactly, people always tell me I "walk like a man": because I walk in the world as if I have a right to exist in it, and that's not expected of a woman.

Like: The furious looks I've been shot by men I've sat next to on the bus, simply because I claimed my rightful half of the leg space and didn't just let them do the "the boys need room" thing.

Like: The frustration of wanting to share with people how annoyed I was at my body's random betrayal a few winters ago, and being told I was lucky for losing a stone (a full tenth of what had been my stable weight for the previous eight years), and who cared if it was through the Winter Depression And Malnutrition Diet?

Like: Having very few people to talk to about body imagery, because my fears run the other way, and no one understands my fear of weight loss. (I don't want to disappear!)

I could come up with a bunch of other examples, all of which contributed to how I look at body politics, and it's hard to explain sometimes without giving those examples, without the context of my life, so maybe including them will help people understand?

Because as long as conversations about the Beauty Ideal keep centering around the idea that it is, in fact, about Beauty, we'll keep pitting allies against each other. Anyone not conforming to the Beauty Ideal will sneer at those that do, whether by starvation of genetics, the "average-sized" women will get insulted about what passes for fat these days, and large women will talk about how hard it is to lose the yoyo-diet weight, and/or about how they're healthy despite their BMI, and so on and so forth. Not that any of the above aren't true, obviously, and I've contributed to most of those rants myself, but in the end, what we're actually fighting there is straw men of each other.

Comments

[anatsuno.livejournal.com]

you make a lot of sense to me. yes.

[bubosquared.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :) I tend to ramble on a lot (and in fact I did so several times in the comments there, heh), but this subject is one of my personal soapboxes, and I've done a lot of thinking about it.

[randominity.livejournal.com]

That is all extremely interesting..... I'm going to take it in and let it marinate (/Kissing Jessica Stein-ism) for a while!

[ruby-fruit.livejournal.com]

You know, this reminds me of something I read back in my teen magazine days (hush!). It was actually something on cross-dressing, What It's Like To Be A Boy For A Day or something. From what I remember it was pretty banal, but there was one thing I still remember and that was the girl talking about how freeing it was to just sprawl on the subway seat without worrying about taking up as little space as possible. And it stuck with me because I was like "oh, you mean girls aren't supposed to sit like that?". It didn't change the way I carry myself, but it did make me way more aware of it.

[bubosquared.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was weird when I started actively realising the things I did and didn't do with regards to gender roles. The "ladies sit with their legs closed" thing, I never did, for example, but another thing my friend said was to not be the first to break eye contact with a girl. I was a bit nervous about that, because eye contact and I are not friends, but I did follow the advise, and seeing a girl look away quickly when we accidentally made eye contact ... there was this visceral moment of recognition, of knowing exactly why she was looking away ("Shit, must break eye contact or he'll think I'm hitting on him") that was almost like a punch in the gut.