Fat for the holidays

It’s been a while since I sat down with something real to say, what with finals and all.  Not that I’m actually done with finals yet (my last exam is on the 22nd–clearly the University hates me) but I’ve mostly moved back in with my family for the hols, and my sister is home.

Being a feminist at home is much harder than it used to be.  Or maybe I’m just noticing it more, especially with regards to my nascent education in fat acceptance.

With two non-me women in the house, there is Fat Talk galore.  You know what I mean–’I'm so fat, I need to lose weight, my thighs are so huge, I’m being so bad by eating this…’  That endless decadent parade of shame.  It is so, so tempting to just go along with this and respond as I am expected to.  ’You’re not fat, I’m fat!’ or ‘No, you look amazing, I’m sure you’ve lost weight.’

I know that this is poison.  This kind of talk is toxic.  And it is definitely an indirect attack on me, the largest woman in the house.  Because to my family, I am the picture of obesity.  Nobody else in my family has D-cups or a 29-inch waist.  I am the body that nobody else wants to be.

“I mean, yeah, there’s definitely pressure to be too thin,” says my size 2 self-proclaimed feminist sister, leaning on the island in the kitchen.  ”But there’s such a thing as too fat, too.  I mean, I think any girl over 150 pounds is fat.”

I am 143 pounds and I am 5’2″ and I am a size 10 in pants and M in shirts and I cannot breathe for a moment with the weight of the panicky, dizzying shame that overwhelms me.

I think I snapped something back; it wasn’t clever or insightful or level-headed, because I am none of those things when I am struggling to stay seated and not flee to the safety of my room and my guitar.  It has always been my first instinct to run and hide, stay the silent fat shadow in the corner.

When I reached for a banana the other night, my mother started on a shocked tirade.  ”Do you know how many calories are in one of those?” she asked.  ”You just had a piece of toast!”  I didn’t say anything; I put the banana back.

I know I am not alone in this.  I know countless women are in similar situations–some worse, some better.  But being here with my family, having learned something about feminism and fat acceptance, is like fighting a losing battle every single day.

I want to spend time with my sister while she’s here.  I want to spend time with my parents before I leave for grad school.  I love them; I really do.  I just don’t know how to handle the constant attacks on my body, my atheism, my feminism, my sexuality, my veganism, and my field of study.

“You need to smile more,” my mother says.  I don’t know how to tell her I wish I could.

Glee: Ballad

So, I know this is almost a week after the fact. But I’ve been busy, okay, I only saw the episode on Hulu on Sunday. Anyway, I usually really love the summaries/analyses up at This Ain’t Living and Adventures of a Young Feminist, but this week they really didn’t cover some points that I thought were important. I realize they’re not doing extremely comprehensive writeups and I am not expecting them to cover every little detail, but I felt compelled to mention a few things.

First, a confession. I get that I might be supposed to say that the Kurt side story is insulting and pathetic and the vague overtones of ‘mock the gay guy’ and ‘gay people secretly want to seduce you!’ are terrible, but. All I could think while watching Kurt was “Oh, honey. I know what you’re going through.” Because if there were a prize for Most Pathetic Crushes on Straight People? I would make the nationals. I’ve been around that age, somewhat more confused about myself than Kurt is, and following some straight girl with a boyfriend around like a lost puppy. And yeah, I don’t believe that ‘turning people’ is possible either, but I can’t find it in myself to blame Kurt for trying to nudge Finn towards the bi-curious side, even if we all know it’s hopeless.

As for Lean On Me, I seem to be the only person who found that shockingly marginalizing. The minority characters literally gave up their stories, their personal ballads, in order to celebrate two heterosexual white kids and their baby-drama. I for one was actually really looking forward to some of the minority characters’ ballads. On the bright side, I thought Mercedes’ mini-speech to Puck was really pretty queer-positive, emphasizing the difference between biological parenting and the social role of a parent. Of course, I–like every other viewer–am frustrated that Quinn hasn’t told Finn about Puck’s involvement, but I can let that slide for now. It has been subsumed under the indignation that I felt over Finn deliberately letting Quinn’s parents know about her pregnancy. It wasn’t his decision to make, and although it’s clear that Quinn hadn’t really thought things through in terms of her parents’ knowledge she should have been the one controlling the big reveal. To me, this falls under bodily autonomy–Finn has consistently demonstrated that he feels some ownership over the fetus, while Quinn has to remind him that it’s her body and her choices. Yes, this contrasts sharply with her whole ‘I’m a woman and crazy and demanding that you provide for me!” schtick, but I’m choosing to ignore that. The bottom line is that Finn thinks he has the right to make certain decisions about the fetus, even when Quinn has specifically indicated her intent to make different decisions.

Overall, Glee is sorely trying my patience. I love that there’s a show on the air with singing and dancing in every episode. I love that this is a better alternative to High School Musical. It’s fun, and entertaining, and it has Lea Michele in it. It also, increasingly, makes me go, “Wait, what? Seriously?” If this keeps up I’m not sure I can continue watching it.

Fat Acceptance and Me

I have a mild eating disorder.

It’s not serious; I just tend to restrict my caloric intake to about 800 calories per day.  On the weekends I let myself have about 1000, and then feel extra guilty about it.

The guilt’s not new.  I have felt guilty for eating as far back as I can remember.  Whenever I put something in my mouth, I feel the recrimination and self-hatred rise up in me, dizzying, blinding.  I hate myself because I eat.  At different times during my life I have dealt with this by 1) eating more, 2) eating less, 3) first 2, then 1, then crying a lot.

The reason I eat more on weekends is because I, as a student working on her honors thesis and applying to graduate schools, have no life and usually stay home studying on weekends.  That means I don’t  usually interact much with people, and that means I am not reminded of how fat I am.

How fat, exactly, am I?  I am 5’2″, and I am 140 lbs.  That puts me squarely in the ‘overweight’ category, according to my BMI.  My doctor tells me to eat less and exercise more.  She says she’s ‘not comfortable’ with where I’m at.

These are my confessions: my typical menu for a day involves a piece of toast, a 6″ pita, a cup of beans and a piece of fruit.  Occasionally I include some raw vegetables and maybe a (small homemade vegan) muffin for lunch.  Hardly a starvation diet, but I find myself hungry more often than I’d like to admit.

I’m a vegan, and my diet–fueled by the combined laziness and busyness that comprises a student life–is primarily composed of seasonal fruit, leafy green vegetables, pitas, avocados, carrots, and various beans.  Sometimes my mother sends me vegan muffins (the latest batch had carrots and raisins in them), which I put in the freezer and consume as slowly as I dare.  I do yoga and run through some simple exercises almost every day.  I usually skip Tuesdays and Thursdays because I come home exhausted after 14 hours of classes and meetings, and have plenty of work to do before I can sleep.

I’m a fierce advocate of the vegan lifestyle, so I’m pretty loath to blame my diet for my weight.  I do believe I eat much healthier than many other students, and I do believe that plant-based diets lead to better health than omnivorous ones.  In fact, the only real issue I have with the Fat Acceptance movement is its demonization of veganism.

I am not a vegan because I want to lose weight.  The facts that I am a vegan and that I have an unhealthy obsession with losing weight are unrelated.

I could go on about the benefits of veganism, both health-related and otherwise, but I think I’ll save that for another post.

Nonetheless, I’m at a loss.  My size 0-2 sister once told me, “Just don’t eat as much.”  That’s what I’ve been trying to do, but for some reason the laws of biology and/or physics don’t seem to be working; I’m still fat, even though theoretically I should be burning more calories than I consume.  I wear size 10 jeans and M or L shirts and a 34D bra.  At least twice a week, my mother asks me how much I weigh.

I feel enormous.  I feel like my bloated, fleshy body is greedily consuming everyone else’s space even when I’m alone: the grotesque fact of my existence is a weight on the rubber sheet of society, drawing unwilling passers-by into a spiral of revulsion.  I feel too solid and ponderous and blubbery to be real, like my body is so alien to the concept of true womanhood that I should be called a new species altogether.   After all, Asian girls are supposed to be petite and slender, right?

More than anything I want to be A Thin Girl.  Thin Girls have flat bellies and narrow shoulders and slender arms.  More than that, they are attractive and witty and charming and talented and–

Okay, here’s the thing.  I know that what I am thinking and feeling is total bullshit.  I read Kate Harding, I’m a feminist, I am reasonably intelligent and somewhat socially aware.  I find many women of my size and larger very attractive.  I know that, objectively speaking, I have it pretty good vis a vis privilege.  But I still want to die every time I eat a piece of chocolate.

Part of me thinks, viciously, Good.  You should want to die, you deserve it for what you’re doing to yourself, maybe this will motivate you to finally drop some fucking weight.

And then part of me thinks, That’s a terrible thing to think.  Maybe you really are a terrible person.

I know that I am in a terrible spiral, a cycle of undeserved self-hatred heading to a bad, bad place.  This knowledge does not enable me to break the pattern, just like knowing that my self-perception and attitudes towards food probably constitute an eating disorder doesn’t mean I can stop.

All of this is why I can’t call myself part of the Fat Acceptance movement.  I’m just not there yet, and part of me is terrified that I’ll never be.

Part of me doesn’t want me ever to get there.

All Hallows’ Eve

I have a complicated relationship with Halloween.  Growing up, I never trick-or-treated; I was bundled off to my church’s ‘Harvest Festival,’ where we played games and got told about Jesus, so I don’t really have the emotional connection to or experiences of Halloween that others seem to.  And as I’ve learned more about it, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

I have learned to be wary of Halloween.  I have learned to shut my eyes to ‘geisha’ costumes, ‘Mexican bandit’ costumes, ‘Indian chief’ and ‘Indian princess’ costumes–all worn by white people, always.  I am not claiming that no PoCs, particularly those middle/upper-class, cisgender, straight PoCs, are completely oblivious, but…it’s more complicated.

As far back as I can remember, I have been too uneasy to dress as another ethnicity.  I remember complaining about this quite a few years ago, in my pre-activist days: I knew I didn’t look like the white characters I loved and there weren’t any Asian characters I knew to emulate, much less Chinese American ones.   “White people can be anything, but I only get to be Asian,” I’d say; I didn’t know how true that was and still is.  My skin is too brown, too yellow to pass for white.  I look wrong and grotesque dressed as a white woman, but for some reason I never saw it as grotesque when white women dressed as me.  Now, of course, I am more attuned to the realities of normalization, the privilege of being unmarked.

Sometimes these are more obvious than not.  In this case, Halloween is one of those magical times when racism and sexism can be on full display, so obviously that people look at you oddly when you point it out.  ”Well, yeah,” they say.  ”But it’s just for fun, really.”  It’s ‘just for fun’ that the only costumes available are for white women who want to dress in an explicitly ‘sexy’ way–not that I want to deny anyone the right to dress however the hell they want, but when it is social pressures that demand they hypersexualize themselves rather than their own choice, I am not okay with it.

There needs to be a stronger word than ‘problematic’ for Halloween.

Side note: I really find the trend of men in drag for Halloween disturbing.  Aside from my complicated feelings about drag in general, a lot of costumes don’t actually make a serious attempt to appear female; the humor is derived from the fact that OMG it’s guy in a dress!!1

In other words, I feel that in most cases it’s not a question of assuming another gender identity for a night; it’s mocking the idea of performing a non-normative gender identity.  Because it is supposed to be funny.  (Overheard in hallway yesterday, directed at a male: “You should go as a slutty girl!  That would be SO FUNNY.”)  Moreover, women in drag are not read as funny, they’re read–well, a lot of different ways.  But it’s rarely if ever humorous.

Links to people more coherent than I:

http://theangryblackwoman.com/2009/10/31/dont-dress-up-like-what-you-think-is-a-jamaican-this-halloween/
http://meloukhia.net/2009/10/whats_the_difference_between_costuming_and_appropriation.html

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/tag/sexy-halloween-costumes/

http://resistracism.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/your-annual-halloween-post/

http://resistracism.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/seriously/

http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/2009/10/suddenly-get-interested-in-non-white.html

http://www.racialicious.com/2009/10/21/the-racialicious-halloween-roundup/

http://www.angryasianman.com/2009/10/bad-halloween-costumes-2009.html

http://www.angryasianman.com/2009/10/more-oriental-hooker-y-for-halloween.html

http://www.reappropriate.com/2009/10/26/lets-have-a-racist-halloween/

http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/10/30/guest-post-asian-hair-for-halloween/

http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/10/29/racist-halloween-costumes/

http://contexts.org/socimages/2007/10/30/halloween-costumes/

http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/10/28/halloween-another-chance-to-trivialize-women-in-masculine-occupations/

http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/10/30/gendering-halloween-costumes/

Links specifically about that godawful ‘illegal alien’ costume:

http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2009/10/19/undocumented-migration-is-no-joke-neither-is-the-illegal-alien-costume/

http://www.apaforprogress.org/illegal-alien-halloween-costume-sets-firestorm

Introductions

Something I have learned through my seven or so years of internet immersion is that I am terrible at blogging.  I am really and truly awful at keeping anything updated.

So clearly, the solution was for me to get a new blog.

We’ll see how this works out.