laurenfelton

(Clearly all of my posts today are going to be about what’s trending on Twitter…)

Like I’ve said before (here, here, and here), one of my biggest problems with the body acceptance / body image awareness movement, aside from its tendency towards racism and heterosexism, is its obvious hypocrisy in terms of preference for a particular type of body. Dove’s campaign for “real beauty,” which basically only depicts women of the same general size, is a perfect example of this, as is the #NoSizeZero hashtag on Twitter, which seems to be trending in response to Kenneth Tong’s Twitter. Tong promotes anorexia as a lifestyle and regularly tweets misogynistic, fat-phobic posts about women’s bodies and the importance of being a perfect size zero. 

His posts make me angry enough to vomit, but I’m upset that once again, the idea of body acceptance is translating into anti-anorexic and anti-skinny responses to this man. The #TongIsWrong trend I understand, but why does no one thing to tweet #YesAllSizes rather than #NoSizeZero? Why respond to the negativity with more negativity when the idea is to accept everyone’s body, regardless of its size? Let’s not forget that some people are naturally thin and that people of all sizes suffer from eating disorders — adding one more negative voice to a culture obsessed with criticizing “imperfect” bodies doesn’t really help counter Tong’s message.

I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.”

When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

From The Porn Myth

Why is it that any time someone wants to offer a “new” and “progressive” take on clothing customs—particularly the idea of veiling—it all relates back to sex? Instead of arguing that the veil is oppressive to women, we’re supposed to buy the idea that it’s liberating because it allows women to feel sexy? I say both camps of thought are a load of crap. Whether a woman veils or not she is doing so in order to please men or to be sexy. Whether a woman veils or not she is being sexually oppressed. Whether a woman veils or not it has nothing to do with her own beliefs, but instead with how the men in her culture might react to it. Here’s a ~radical~ idea: maybe we should learn to see women as people who are perfectly capable of making decisions regarding their dress without first considering whether the menz will approve.

A related post, from Facebook:

A non-Muslim guy asked a Muslim: Why do your girls cover up their body and hair? The Muslim guy smiled and took two sweets, he opened the first one and kept the other one closed. He threw them both on the dusty floor and asked the non-Muslim: If I asked you to take one of the sweets, which one you would choose? The non-Muslim replied: The covered one. Then the Muslim said that’s how we treat and see our women…

I recently saw this pop up in my news feed when a FB friend (see the kickass blog she writes for here) sparked an interesting discussion about the trend on her wall. As she pointed out, both of these popular takes on veiling are problematic in that one is rooted in the Islamophobic idea that all Muslim women are oppressed, while the other is an example of misogyny within the Muslim community. Those same ideas are at work in the article posted above, though it’s about a Jewish woman rather than a Muslim woman. Somehow the author seems to privilege these beliefs over the Western norm, arguing that porn has ruined men’s appreciation of the “real thing”—but I won’t even get into just how fucked up that point is. I’ll just leave it at this: she’s completely ignoring an entire culture of sexism toward women and hatred of our bodies that extends beyond porn and the way women in our society choose to dress. Also, I don’t know who the hell she interviewed, but some of us watch porn and have sex and make out with women because we enjoy it, not because we want to be “cool girls.”

Ever notice how often women call themselves “bad” for eating in a certain way? “Oh, I’m being so bad right now!” or “I can be bad, just this once…” or “I was bad today, I shouldn’t eat this.” I do this to, as much as it bothers me. If I was “good” today (read: ate under x calories, burned x calories at the gym, etc.), that means I can eat dessert and not feel like a terrible person because of it (but I will, anyway).

A lot of us will probably justify this by attributing these feelings to not wanting to be greedy (reasonable), or attempting to be health-conscious (also reasonable), but it’s interesting that you rarely hear men talk like this. I’m sure part of it is about greed and gluttony, but only in the sense that women are brought up to believe that their desires are somehow wrong or that they should feel guilty for having any desires in the first place. Men don’t necessarily have a particularly healthy relationship with food in our culture, either, but they’re less likely to feel like they don’t deserve to “indulge” or take what they want. We women, on the other hand, seem to believe there’s something intrinsically wrong with food, that there’s also something wrong with us for wanting it, and that taking what we want will result in an immediate and obvious weight gain that will show the world how awful and undisciplined we are. We’re basically taught to be ashamed for taking up space.

That’s not to say this craze about being “healthy” in a fast food nation is unreasonable, but it certainly manifests differently according to gender. Men don’t just want to be healthy; they want to bulk up, be more muscular, take up more space. Women don’t just want to be healthy, either; we want to be slim, toned, and often, even invisible.

(Note: Men are not immune to disordered eating, but women are much more likely to actually develop eating disorders… and I’m willing to bet that even the types of eating disorders they tend to develop show more gender distinctions. It would be an interesting topic to do more research on, but I just wanted to point out that I’m not saying men can’t or never do develop eating disorders.)