The skirt in question hugs the hips and then flares out, so for three days I kept trying it on and seeing nothing but huge hips. I don’t know what made me keep trying it, but I’m glad I did, because this morning I put it on and just felt cute. Nothing much had changed between Saturday and today. I certainly didn’t lose 10 pounds in that amount of time. So the change has to be mental, but honestly I just don’t feel like staring at it too closely. If I’m feeling pretty good about myself today, I’m just going to leave it alone. No point in analyzing it to death; it’s much more fun just to swish around town in a nice autumny grey skirt. :)
So I’d like to take a moment and point you guys at this thing Maura Kelly wrote. Maybe you saw something about it in the last few days, it’s been floating around the internet for a while. The writer says some pretty horrible things in it, like this:
“I think I’d be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other … because I’d be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything. To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room — just like I’d find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine [sic] addict slumping in a chair.”
She ends the article with “Do you think I’m being an insensitive jerk?”, and judging from the comments, YES, everyone pretty much thinks she’s being an insensitive jerk. I read her blog entry, I read a bunch of the comments, I’ve read the commentary, and I’ve read her reply to everything, and I have to say, I give her credit for leaving the post up, and for writing a sufficiently contrite response. It was a blog entry, she wasn’t writing out a researched and reasoned article, a lot of people just poop out the first thing that comes to their minds without really filtering it.
The thing is, if you read her apology, there’s a quick, almost throwaway sentence: “a few commenters and one of my friends mentioned that my extreme reaction might have grown out of my own body issues, my history as an anorexic, and my life-long obsession with being thin.”
That’s where my heart kind of broke for the girl. I know exactly where her blog post came from, that dark part of the lizard brain that’s judging herself and everyone else on a sliding scale based on what size they are. That internal meter that tells you that fat=shameful, embarrassing, bad. That no one wants to look at that, that your size is offending people. Maura Kelly might be skinny, but it sounds to me as if she’s just as tightly wound around these body issues as I am – maybe more so.
I know I’ve said this a lot lately, but being thin and feeling better about yourself, these are TWO SEPARATE ISSUES. There’s no reason to wait until you’ve “lost the weight” to start liking yourself better. Her black smoky monster sounds meaner and bigger and louder than my little guy, and I bet you she’s at least 50 pounds lighter than me.
Hey there, hot mama!
I have to admit, I did not think her response was sufficiently contrite. She tried, but still not sufficiently contrite. For writing that kind of eliminationist bile, she has a lot more contrite to go.
I’ve been mulling over the whole anorexia issue as well, and have decided… she can THINK those things and I will vacillate between being sorry for and being ticked at her. But for PUBLISHING them, she does not get an anorexia pass. That may have been her two-hour-blog-blurt-out, but that is why God invented editors. Seriously. What person over at Marie Claire read that before it went up and said “oh, hey, yah… no problem!?”
I was so pleased that the general response to her blog post was “you’re wondering if you’re an insensitive jerk? Well. The answer is a resounding yes.” That kind of made my day.
This could tie into my more or less consistent policy of absolutely no hateful trash talking about bodies in my house, ever. Rarely will I let it slide in my presence. I don’t care if I walk the line of ruining an evening anymore.
I hit this point when I was trapped in my car once with two women who went ON AND ON AND ON AND ON about how fat and horrible they were. They had NO IDEA what anyone else in that car’s issues with bodies and weight were. They were so engrossed in out-body hating one another I don’t think they could have. I seriously was expecting a smoke monster vortex to open up in my backseat and just swallow them whole.
I could not solve whatever their body issues were in that minute. (And apparently, I found out later that one of those body issues was disordered eating, quelle suprise.) But I COULD say “you know, I don’t want to hear trash talking about bodies in my car, ever, about anyone, not even if you’re talking about yourself.”
And I have stuck to it. And I do not regret it. So. That could be some of the reason I don’t have much patience for Ms. Kelly.
One outcome of this intolerance for body hating is I live in a more pleasant world. Another is, when I DO talk to people about body insecurity and feelings about weight and looks and such, it feels like we’re in a space where discussion and exploration is about acceptance and analysis and processing without judgement or criticism. I don’t do that with a lot of people, and when I do I want it to be as safe an experience as possible.
In a charitable moment towards Ms. Kelly, my feeling is… “she needs to be educated about how this is supposed to work. She should be so lucky as to have people modeling the kind of behavior that IS healthy. And one of those behaviors is not allowing hate speech to go unremarked.”
Oh I’m so with you, what on earth were her editors thinking? How did no one stop this thing from getting published? Is there no vetting process for the Marie Claire blogs? I was so surprised to see it come from Marie Claire too. I’m hardly a connoisseur of fashion mags, but I thought Marie Claire was one of the more sensible and body-positive ones.
Also, Kate… I am really digging this idea of a zero-tolerance policy for trash talking bodies! I need to adopt that. I have noticed that when people find out how much I bike, and marvel at it, that I have an instinct to reply “The REAL trick is doing it without losing any weight!” and kind of smacking my butt as I say it. In my head it always sounds disarming and funny, but it mostly just makes people feel uncomfortable, and then I wonder why I said it. It’s not a helpful thought, it’s not disarming, it’s not funny. I think the instinct to say that is there because I am assuming when people say “that’s a lot of bike riding” that they are thinking “…for someone who’s so fat.” But no one is thinking about my body’s shape until **I** bring it up. All they’re thinking is “that’s a lot of biking.” Period.
I do hope that Kelly learned something from this experience, not just about tolerance and body acceptance, but about her own issues as well.
My guess would be that editors are the first to go when times are hard, or so it seems. As a technical writer, it really bothers me because things like this happen more easily. And of course, more typos, but those are merely annoying, not hurtful.
Sarah:
I can SO UNDERSTAND THAT IMPULSE. It’s like an automatic excuse-making for Doing Things Except Try Hard To Be Invisible While Fat.
Thankfully, I expect you are right. People probably don’t think about how much you weigh all that often. (And if they do and they’re doing so negatively… it’s time to reassess their role as “nice person in your life.”) But even if they did, you don’t have to excuse yourself for being the lovely person you are doing the awesome things you do. You do not have to be invisible while being imperfect according to society’s impossible, ridiculous standards.
So. Yeah. I highly recommend test-driving a zero tolerance policy and seeing how it goes.