Sometimes you just want to take the spectacles off

I keep reading a lot of Fatosphere posts lately about Wall-E and how it's anti-fat, and all the rest of it, and...well, people may be right, but I don't particularly want to go into the movie looking for that.

God knows, I'm alert to all kinds of isms all the time. Seriously, I did Cultural Studies at university, and I loved it, but it does mean that I never, ever don't notice things. Sometimes I can just ignore them, but I never fail to notice them.

I'm not sure I want this to become another thing that I can't stop noticing. I'm not sure I can stop it, but I'm not sure I want it. I suppose it's because I take it more personally than anything else. That is strange, when you consider the amount of sexism I notice. But the difference is that sexism and misogyny just infuriate me, they bring out the fighter in me, and that may not be as fun as laughing, but it's more fun than crying. And laughing at the fat people makes me cry.

Once, I went and saw The Nutty Professor, the horrible Eddie Murphy one, and there's a scene in the middle of the film where he was compulsively eating (M&Ms, I think) and everyone else in the cinema was laughing, and I just sat there and sobbed. Because I knew, you see, what that felt like. To everyone else it was something so extreme that it could be a joke. To me, it was everyday behaviour that hurt.

I don't feel bad about being a woman. I get angry when I see misogyny, because I don't think that I or any other woman deserves the bullshit we get heaped on us because of our gender, even by those who share it.

But even now, I feel bad about being fat. Part of me still thinks I deserve what's said about my body. I feel bad about the way I eat. I feel bad that I am positive that when people look at me they see a giant blob taking over the world. Part of me believes all the propaganda. And you know, I'm just not sure that I want to notice the propaganda as long as I believe it.

Of course, it's a vicious circle - is it even possible to stop believing the propaganda as long as it's being dripped into me subconsciously so that I keep on feeling bad about myself? I'm not sure, but since most of my self-loathing really is self-generated, I'm not sure how it's going to help me to invite in all the other players to generate some more.

I can see sexism and misogyny without feeling bad about myself. I can't see anti-fat stuff without it. So I'm not sure I want to look for it right now.

Made of Honour

Made of Honour...well, this isn't a review, so I'll just say it's a fairly friendly romantic comedy, with the usual hearty helping of people being total bastards. This bothers me about romcoms - they're usually full of jerks. Anyway, that isn't really the point of this post. There will be spoilers ahead.

The point of this post is the totally gratuitous and unkind treatment of the single fat person in the film. I guess you could argue that it's a rare thing to have an actually fat person IN this kind of movie, but to be honest, I'd rather that we weren't represented than that we're represented like this.

The fat person in question is bridesmaid Hilary, played by Emily Nelson. She's pretty cute, right? Certainly not freakish in any way. She's short and plump, with one of those hourglass figures. She's not done any favours by the fact that she has to stand next to two very tall, slim women, but she's pretty normal looking, and for a brief flickering moment I thought, it's nice that she was included in her friend's ceremony because she's her damn friend.

The moment didn't last, because Hilary's presence in the film is purely "comic" relief, and all the "comedy" revolves around her being fat.

First it's "funny" that she's a size twelve, but she wants to wear a size eight bridesmaid dress. It's "funny" that she's on some kind of liquid-only diet throughout the film - people comment once or twice that she should eat, and she clearly isn't feeling one hundred percent, but they also think it's normal that she should want to be thinner, so they don't really make a thing of it, and certainly no one says, "Hilary, you're fine as you are", because they don't think she is. She's funny because she's fat, y'know.

Then, to add insult to injury, it's funny that she manages to squeeze into her size eight dress, only to have it split down the side, revealing hilarious fat flesh, when she sits down.

And really, that's it. She doesn't have any emotional moments. The bride isn't ever seen with her. No one tells her she looks fine. She declares early on that she's going to meet a Scottish man and be happy, and that's supposed to be funny too, but they don't bother to let her actually meet the Scottish man, which might've made me feel slightly better about it.

It's just a case of, shit, we need some comic relief in this supposed comedy...let's make fun of the fat chick!

I came across some site the other day with "BBW" romance novels. Unfortunately, the samples I read were absolutely horribly written, so I didn't spend any more time on it. But this kind of thing makes me wonder - how well would a romantic comedy about a fat chick do? If she was just the lead, and no one made a huge deal out of her weight, if she just met the hot guy and fell in love and had all the usual stupid romcom crap happen, and she was just a normal, beautiful, fat woman. Well, I suppose My Big Fat Greek Wedding did very well, but she's not fat. On the other hand, she is pretty normal looking. Would fat women everywhere go "hooray" and run to the cinema to see Patrick Dempsey make out with a woman they thought they could actually be? Or are our fantasies dependent upon our being thin, so we'd rather see him make out with the skinny chick we could never be? I really don't know the answer to that.

Either way, is it really necessary to pretend that public humiliation like having your dress rip in church is funny, that it wouldn't really embarrass poor Hilary and, since, given her liquid diet, she clearly is not accepting of her own body, destroy her self esteem further?

I would probably have enjoyed this stupid movie in the way I generally enjoy stupid romcoms, but it's left a bad taste in my mouth.

Bones and Ownership

Contains spoilers for the most recent episode of Bones, "The Player Under Pressure".

I was watching Bones last night, which is a show I generally like, and was struck rather unpleasantly by the conclusion. The story was about a murdered basketball player, who turned out to be murdered by the father of a girl who was blowing him immediately before the murder. The motivations were somewhat unclear – the father seemed racked with guilt over the fact that in his youth, he, too, had been an enormous man-whore of the use-'em-and-lose-'em school of seduction, and was devastated to discover that his "baby girl" was just as susceptible to the attractions of the team's star as everyone else.

But despite the subplot about how Brennan was dismissive of athletes as immature and Booth's feeling were hurt by the idea that she thought "guys like him" were perpetually trapped in childhood, no one, least of all Brennan (who really should've been all over this), actually pointed out the fact that it is completely, entirely fucked up for a grown man to be so involved in his daughter's sexuality that he fucking killed a guy over it. I mean, damn, I know Brennan doesn't like psychology, but if that's not a case of projection, I don't know what is. Everyone just treated it like it was a logical reaction to the situation, not an extremely fucked up way to view your daughter. I could almost grasp it if he'd committed suicide, having realised that he was a total bastard, but murdering the guy his daughter was blowing is just...weird.

Look, I grasp that the athlete was an arse, and probably deserved a kicking. I grasp that there are men who use and women who are used, and professional athletes get a lot of opportunities for that sort of thing. I grasp that the guy was portrayed as being a bit of a heartbreaker, at least in relation to another young woman, so he could be presumed to have failed to be clear about the fact that he just wanted to get laid.

However, I really, really resent this notion that somehow a man has the right to kill a man who fucked his daughter, and it really felt like the show and its characters tacitly approved of this murder.

Firstly, I am tired of this notion that sex is degrading for women. Now, the girl in question, a cheerleader, may have been conned by the athlete, but that's never spelled out in relation to her - the only person heartbroken is someone else entirely, someone who is outside the circle of athletes and cheerleaders, and who presumably didn't know his reputation (and you can't tell me that any of the cheerleaders hadn't heard about that). The only information we're given about the two of them was that she was blowing him under the bleachers. Whoop-di-do. She had a fiancé herself – there's no particular reason to believe that she was in love or unaware that he didn't want anything more than sex, or that she wanted anything but that herself.

Secondly, the girl was an adult – a college-aged adult, but she was old enough to decide to get married, certainly old enough to decide to have sex. Her father's place in her sex life should be non-existent. I'll grant you, it would be pretty icky to discover in that particular way that your daughter cheating was on her fiancé, especially in a public place, but that doesn't make her father's reaction any less fucked up and bizarre.

And finally, the implication of the father's final confession – "it's different when you see your baby girl..." – is that, well, he never really understood before that using women like toilet paper was wrong, and now doesn't understand that it's wrong because women are people who shouldn't be treated with disdain (not that casual sex isn't fine if both parties are fully aware what it is when they're going into it), but because his "baby girl" has fallen prey to it. Well, probably, we don't really know, her motivations are never explored. But he only feels bad – is apparently only driven to murder – because, OMG! Turns out? Men using women is bad if it's someone's daughter. Because it's not like every goddamn woman you meet is someone's daughter.

(Aside: I had a boss once who had his fourteen year old daughter at work with him at his video store one day, and some lout came in and was making suggestive remarks about her, and he replied "that's my daughter", and the lout quickly back-pedalled with "oh, I didn't mean anyone's daughter, mate, not anyone's daughter…")

I am squicked out by this. I realise that it's probably not an unrealistic portrayal of a certain kind of man, and it's not that I don't think that kind of man should never appear on film – I just think that in a show like Bones, in which our extremely tough female lead is perfectly comfortable criticising the sexual behaviour, not to mention the emotional development, of most of the male characters in the episode, it is very peculiar to have no comment from her on this subject. I feel let down by it, to be honest. Brennan can be annoying with her insistence on viewing everything through the limited glass of her profession, but honestly, couldn't she pull it out when it matters? Wouldn't this actually be a really important thing for her to comment on?

Strangely, this actually does have something to do with eating disorders. I've seen a lot of comments lately from possibly well-meaning, possibly trollish, men on fat acceptance and feminist blogs which amount to "why do women want to be skinny? Men don't like skinny women, so it's not our fault that you've all got fucked up relationships with your bodies and with food". On one level, I understand the protest – probably the individual males making the protests don't pressure their significant others to lose weight (although I'd be interested to know at what point they would consider it acceptable to start that pressure – I doubt very much that most of them are into fat chicks, and they probably still have a notion of what makes an attractive woman, which probably doesn't include "size not important").

But at the same time, it's a disclaimer that I distrust – partly because the assumption that it's all women's own fault that we have body issues implies that only women should have to take any action (I also doubt whether these guys are actually telling women of all shapes and sizes that they're beautiful OR that being beautiful isn't the most important thing in a woman's life), and partly because it comes back to the same old bullshit that was bothering me on Bones last night: many men, I daresay most men, still think they own us.

Hell, they still think they own women they've never met, to the extent that they think their approval or disapproval of our bodies is what should define our relationships with said bodies. They sound like they're disclaiming ownership because they're disclaiming responsibility, but actually, the crux of the question isn't "why do you want to be skinny?" but "men don't like...". The question doesn't mean "why have you developed an impossible goal for you, why can't you love and enjoy yourself the way you are?"; it means "why are you doing something that might actually make you less attractive to some men than you are now? Isn't being attractive to men the most important part of your life?"

The worst part is that it's not an entirely stupid question. It's an offensive question, but not an entirely stupid one, especially for those of us whose battle with our weight has been at least partly motivated by a desire for the attention of the opposite sex. My own father was the one who told me I had to lose weight or boys would never be interested in me. He was wrong, as it turned out, but I believed him. Part of me still believes him, even though I'm married now to a man who thinks I'm gorgeous.

But there I am again, you see. I'm still wrapped in the question of what is attractive to men, even if it's just one man, who has already agreed to spend his life with me, so clearly likes me quite a lot.

Not all eating disorders come from the same source, or have the same goal, of course. My sister was anorexic in her teens, and that at least partly resulted from being raped at the age of twelve. I doubt that she was interested in more male attention just then, and her recovery didn't begin until she took up martial arts and felt some kind of control over her own body again. But a lot of my own self-loathing over the years has been rooted in the notion that I could never be attractive, and I would never be worth anything until I was.

Lately, as well, there's been the wholly disturbing "Open Source Boob Project", which is apparently a group effort to make scifi and fantasy conventions as uncomfortable as possible by forcing women to actually answer the question "can I feel your boobs?" to anyone who cares to ask. (Yes, you can wear a badge that says "don't ask me", but honestly, shouldn't the default assumption be that this is a fucking stupid question to ask a stranger? Ask me and you'll get your fingers broken.) Again, this question of ownership hasn't gone away, even amongst men who tell themselves that they are enlightened and not at all sexist.

But the lead on the "project" also commented in the now-deleted comments that he wouldn't feel up someone who was unattractive to him, because he "doesn't do pity gropes".

I know I said in my last post that I was getting away from anger, and I still am. This is...not anger, exactly, a kind of weary frustration, born of a gut feeling that this is just wrong.

Most of the time, I hate my body and I can't control my eating. Most of the time, this may not be about what actual individual men like or don't like. It's not even about what my husband likes or doesn't like, because all the internal evidence suggests he likes me just fine, at any weight, at any level of craziness. But it is, to a lesser or greater extent, to do with the fact that in my heart – as opposed to my head, which is outraged – I still believe that being attractive to men is of primary importance for a woman, and that being fat is fundamentally unattractive, and you can't disentangle that from the fact that it is still considered appropriate for men's opinions of our bodies, what they look like and what we do with them, should be proprietorial. Fat is still a feminist issue, because regardless of whether an individual man is going to find me or any other individual woman attractive, our culture is still founded on the notion that the opinions of men at large about the bodies of individual women are important, whether it's because they're telling fat OR skinny women that they're not attractive.

And I don't accept this notion that it's all women's fault, because, oh dear, we're putting pressure on ourselves to be TOO thin. We're also putting pressure on ourselves to have bigger (or smaller) breasts, and smaller (or bigger) bums, shiny hair, perfect skin, bigger eyes, not to mention every other damn thing, and it's got nothing to do with what YOU, THE INDIVIDUAL MALE, find personally attractive and everything to do with what SOCIETY, of which you are a part (as am I), says is attractive. If you're genuinely that offended by the notion, try to get some of the companies promoting these images to put some of what YOU'RE actually attracted to into their advertising, or, better still, start encouraging the women of your acquaintance to love themselves as they are, regardless of whether they fit into any social standard of beauty. You can't disclaim responsibility while you're still claiming ownership, and you're still claiming ownership while you assert the importance of what you (or men) are attracted to in relation to women in general, as though, as we already feel, what we look like is really all that is of importance about us. That you don't like "skinny chicks" doesn't make you morally superior, as much as fatter women may often like to make you feel it is. We want people to find us attractive too, and we're more likely to like you if you seem like you might, because it makes us feel better. You're still asserting a proprietorial right to judge, even if you seem to be judging in our favour.

(I do wonder sometimes if I would find this whole thing easier if I were a lesbian, or if I'd just find a way to feel like women couldn't find me attractive either. I don't know. But the lesbian gaze doesn't yet have a strong enough hold in culture at large, so doesn't really come into this entry.)

I'm not blaming individual men OR women (apart from those of either sex who glaringly deserve it, who individually harass individual women or make their partners feel bad for being heavier than they think they deserve etc) for a society-wide issue that crosses nations and continents. But I don't believe that women's investment in being attractive, even if we're individually hit and miss with men's supposed requirements (as though those are universal), is purely a woman-created problem – how could it be, in our still male-dominated society? Men as a group feel quite free to dismiss us if they consider us unattractive, whether it's by leaving "men don't like skinny women" comments on our blogs, or criticising our bodies from building sites, or dumping us because we are too fat/thin/short/tall/ugly for them. Even our concerned commenters seem to feel quite free to dismiss slender women, as though they're somehow lesser because they're thinner than the commenters themselves find attractive. If they're really that concerned, they should find a way to be sympathetic to the pain of those obsessed with their weight and attractiveness without dismissing the concern because "men don't like skinny women". That doesn't engender confidence in slender women, it doesn't make fat women feel any better because we may not be skinny but we're probably still too fat, and it doesn't move us any further from the fundamental position that men's opinions of our bodies are still paramount.

This is a sticky business, because attraction is obviously still pretty important to the human species. Without it, we come to a dead end. I'm here in a blog no one is reading, muttering about television shows and my own struggles with my weight and my eating, and I have no real answers. I just know...I'm tired of this. I'm tired seeing the assumption of male ownership of women plastered everywhere, from stupid TV shows that can't be bothered to question a man's possessiveness about his daughter's sexuality to advertising which uses women's bodies as a kind of public message board about what's acceptable and isn't solely in order to make us buy things, to commenters who disclaim their part in women's obsession with being attractive because we're not doing it the right way for THEM, to my own despair when I look at my body or the newly forming lines on my face. I'm not even angry. I'm just tired.

So far my fat positivity has not come around to the notion that I could be devastatingly attractive at any weight, or that it doesn't matter a fuck if anyone ever finds me attractive because I'm clever and talented and a bunch of other good stuff. If I ever get there, you'll know I've recovered. And that I've reached a new level of personal evolution in which I understand in my heart as well as believe in my head that my attractiveness to men, or lack thereof, is not the most important thing about me.