Shame Shaming
“In a good shoe, I wear a size six, but a seven feels so good, I buy a size eight. ”
“If you are nothing without the suit, then you don’t deserve the suit.
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I need to lose 25 pounds, I could lose 30, and I’d take 40. The BMI chart says I could lose up to 100lbs and still be in the “healthy” range, but I wouldn’t be anything close to healthy. I would be so miserable every day because hours of working out combined with a diet of “kale and dust” (Anne Hathaway’s “Catwoman” diet) topped with constant worry about every item of food that I didn’t prepare—are you sure this is skim?—that no matter how good I looked in spandex, no one would want to be around me. I probably wouldn’t want to be around me, either. Loneliness and self-loathing. How can that be healthy?
There has been a lot of buzz lately about body shaming, fat activism, and body empowerment that all comes back to the idea of what people—well, women, really—can or cannot do with or feel about their bodies. Here are three Ted Talks about body image that bring something new and worth capturing to the conversation.
“I thought back to when I was 10 and 90 pounds and now I’m almost 30 and over 300 and it hadn’t mattered. I’d never been happy.”
Whitney Thore, “Living Without Shame”
I actually stumbled upon Whitney Thore’s talk back in May even though I wasn’t really looking for talks about weight and body image at the time. This is the most emotional of the three talks here and the most shocking in terms of the kinds of physical abuse—strangers walking up to her and hitting her—she received because she is fat. It really makes you think about the intensity of anxiety physical difference evokes in people. Her story speaks to diversity that is not simply binary but actually diverse.
“I had to reclaim my body and its image as my own.”
Ashley Graham, "Plus-size? More Like My Size"
In all honestly, Ashley Graham’s talk is kind of weak. But she is not a verbal communicator; she is a physical communicator. Like a dancer, her body sends a message. And her body has been seen doing things that a body like hers is not supposed to do. Listen lightly but watch closely. Her physical exuberance in a skin-tight dress does a better job communicating her message of owning one’s own body—not sexually but spatially—than her five index cards of tired aphorisms and self-promotion.
“We actually chose to flourish in these bodies as they are today.”
Kelli Jean Drinkwater, “The Fear of Fat—The Real Elephant in the Room”
If you can watch only one of these talks, watch Kelli’s. She is clearly nervous, and she understands the boldness of sharing her message with a live audience of thousands—and a world audience of hundreds of thousands. I couldn’t help but be impressed and somewhat distressed by her images of obese women as professional dancers and synchronized swimmers (“Aquaporko”). She has been called the “ISIS of fat activism” because, as she says, she “refuses to subscribe to the dominant narrative about how I should move through the world in this body of mine.”
None of these women is glorifying being fat. None of them is changing the narrative to “fat is good—you should try it.” But each of them is living the life she has rather than spending that life trying to be someone else. Perhaps this is what enrages the Internet trolls so completely: there are women out there who, according to trolls, should be disempowered, but who actually have more authority over their own lives than most of us.
“Reclaiming yourself can be one of the most gorgeous acts of self-love and can look like a million different things: from hairstyles to tattoos to body contouring to hormones to surgery and, yes, to weight loss.” (Thanks, Kelli.) I do still want to lose 25 (ok, 30 pounds) because I want to be “my size” (thanks, Ashley) which, right now, I am not. But I am not going to wake up instantly happy on the day the scale tells me I am down 30; if I am not happy now, I won’t be then either (thanks, Whitney).
I was born with a fully functional brain and body. I don’t do drugs or abuse alcohol. I don’t beat my kids. I’ve never committed a crime or even had a parking ticket. I’m not addicted to porn or power or lying or Facebook. When I think of all the burdens I could have that would make flourishing in my body so much more difficult, I’m thankful for every pound of what I do have.
