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One Comment on "hey there sugar…"

1. 

   That (or, at least, an) Other Rebecca
   19/03/2008 at 2:23 am Permalink

   Who could resist, indeed? This is a fucking awesome idea. (The photo project, I meant, not the cupcakes, although I suspect they are also made of awesome.)

   This year, I joked that my New Years resolution was to not lose weight. Partly, this was in my continued tradition of inventing oh-so-clever anti-resolutions in an effort to subvert the widespread misuse of this arguably powerful ritual act to half-assedly enact trivial guilt trips on ourselves over silly bullshit. (The previous year’s had been: Don’t Die.) (And that was a really tortured sentence.)

   But, secretly, it was a real commitment to put my subconscious emotional viscera where my intellectualizing mouth is: Finally face up to and really start trying to deal with my body image issues… And it’s been a hell of a ride so far.

   I totally empathize with the doubt you expressed re: whether something as seemingly trivial as learning to like my body is a worthwhile use of my radical energy while people are starving, being tortured, raped, and suffering from much more violent oppressions than the Beauty Myth. There are definitely days when the fact that I just spent two hours researching Health at Every Size, meanwhile I’ve spent almost no time educating myself about what, say, life is currently like for women in the Sudan, or even for young queer Women of Color in my own town, makes me feel like a total self-absorbed fuckwit.

   But, simultaneously, I think you’re right: This stuff is fundamentally important. Body-hatred is interlocked inextricably with all these other oppressions and it is a big deal; if it weren’t, getting out of it wouldn’t be such a trap-laden struggle. Owning and liking and feeling comfortable in our bodies is a radical act - whether we be ‘fat chicks’, ’skinny chicks’, ‘nerdy girls’, ‘pretty girls’, whatever.

   (In fact, one of the best allies I’ve found in this process is a friend who is a picture perfect Pretty Girl(tm) - who, in trying to reconcile her feminism with the self-destructive choices she continues to make about her body, has started realizing that she’s in denial about being bulemic.)

   In other (much shorter) words: I think what you’re doing is badass.

   Anyway…Where the hell was I going with all this? Oh. Right. One thing that’s really helped turn what I know intellectually about hegemonic beauty standards into stuff that can actually start to transmogrify my self-concept is things I’ve come across in Fat Acceptance blogs - particularly (and you may already be aware of all this) The BMI Project, The Fantasy of Being Thin, and Intuitive Eating - and the simple fact that there is a community of people, of various shapes and sizes and backgrounds, out there who believe body-acceptance is an important issue and want to support each other working on it.

   If you felt inclined to spread the word in that direction (and felt okay about the increased potential for vulnerability and brain-weirdness that comes from suddenly getting a ton of traffic) I bet a lot of folks in that community would appreciate your project and maybe even benefit from stealing your idea. (I probably would, if I owned a working camera…)

   I will now end this interminable comment!

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