More on Race and Privilege

i'm not exactly sure of the meandering path that landed me on racialicious reading a post about the politics of hair. normally i stay in my happy little feminist/FA circuit of blog reading, venturing into other -ism blogs only as they relate to the other stuff i'm reading. mostly because it's all too much for me to wrap my head around most days. there's too much for me to process all at once, and i just let the search take me where it seems to want to go. which is probably how i ended up there.

i've been mulling over privilege, again... because it's the hinge that everything seems to be hung on. and it's the thing i have the hardest time seeing in myself. but Latoya Peterson's post about her decision to let her chemically relaxed hair grow out to a natural texture, and the body politics that came along with that, was really eye opening. and i thought, wow i can totally relate to that. that's just like the time i decided not to diet anymore and... then i realized it was nothing like that. yeah, there were body politics involved with that decision. but no one told me i was more or less really a part of my racial background because of it. while the beauty myh that leads fat women to diet is the same myth that leads women of color to relax their hair it's not the same situation. and i guess i'm making progress that i was able to rethink the desire to relate to her post and then make it all about me. maybe it's enough to just relate, to say wow that resonated with me. i haven't posted a comment to her blog, mostly because i'm unsure of how to bring myself into her space and not bring my entitlement and privilge with me.

and so i went back into posts about privilege to read more about it and get a furthur handle. i'm still working on sorting it all out. i know i have white privilege. i know i have a seemingly heteronormative relationship which confers privilege. i know even if/when i find another partner to join the relationship there will be a shift in that seeming but i don't know to what extent. i think a lot of it will depend on who i end up with. another white guy? a woman? a person of color? each varriation brings other bagage with it. baggage i'm sure i'll deal with at that time.

but the white privilege thing is the one that i trip over the most. and in amoung the articles i found this gem. it's got some typos and it's an older piece but the list Peggy McIntosh puts together had some ahhhhhh moments for me. these in particular:

I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.
I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.

that last one especially. because, like peggy, i was taught that racism is acts of meanness and bigotry and are pretty blatent. i still get a gut reaction when i hear, or read, about someone saying something is racist when there is no clear bigotry. i think to myself the person crying discrimination is being overly sensitive, or just trying to get sympathy, or is trying to get more help then they were offered. i'm not sure what i can do about it yet, other than keep on reading and pondering.

My Letter to Oprah

so i'm sure many of you have seen this or a similar article about oprah reaching 200 lbs and basically feeling like a failure. kate and the shapely prose family said this amazing thing but i felt the need to write something too. so i did. having a blog is fun...

why does this amazing, succsessful, wealthy woman who has beat sexism and racism to become a very powerful force hate herself and her body? why does she want to make herself dissapear? women aren't supposed to take up too much space, or be too loud, or too smart, or too succesful. or too ethnic. and while she has broken through most of those barriers she still wants to make herself disapear. her weight isn't a "sorce of shame," as she herself said. i'm quite sure she has more than enough willpower.

but she began to "eat what she wanted", and that wasn't good? not good for her to want? why are we still allowing ourselves, as women, to be told that we are not allowed to want, that we have to put the needs of everyone else before our own, that if we want anything at all we're selfish? and serriously, not every fat person is sitting around stuffing their face with junk food. and before you trot out your friend/co-worker/classmate/aunt eillien as your anecdotal evidence please remember that fat people are not all the same. just like not all black people are the same.

the disservice she's providing for the millions of women who hold her up as a role model is her re-enforcement that if you fail at long term weight loss it's your fault. which is a totally false statement. 95% of people who losse weight gain it back. period. and it's not becuase they don't want it enough, it's because our bodies are not designed to do that. she is clinging to the false hope that she, with all her money and support will be able to be part of that narrow margin. and the false statment that the only way to be healthy is to be thin. and the only way for her to be an acceptable person is to weigh a certain amount, that no other accomplishment is worth anything if she weights 200 lbs.

what i would wish for opera, and everyone who reads this blog, is an opportunity to stop hateing herself and her body. i would wish her the chance to learn about health at every size (HAES...google it, serriously) and the growing size acceptance movement. i would wish her self-love based on her accomplishmnets and strength not on the numbers on a scale or in her clothes.

Enlightening Pillow talk

so my housemate, her boy, my beloved, a friend of his and i were all sitting around watching Pen and Teller's Bullshit. now, i love these men and i will totally fess up to having a wee crush on mr. gilette. and i'm not entirely sure how we got on the subject but my housemate said she wouldn't allow her kids to have barbies. and i said something to the effect of not allowing barbie because of some crazy second wave feminist idea was... something. i was tired, and don't really remember all of it. but it's got me thinking back to something i read on fatshionista! a while back about the phenomenon of the "incredible bulk" or fat girls who verbally rampage about their fat acceptance and refuse to "worship at the alter of diets" and how alienating that can be to the casual listener. and i think i'm getting into that mind frame. which i have to curb. which means i have to apologise to my housemate when i see her for possibly getting out of line.

though it did end up with a really intense convo between my beloved and i. we were talking about how this whole activism thing has become REALLY important to me and that i know he understands it intellectually but i'm pretty sure he doesn't get it. and i finally found a really amazing way to express it to him... he's a history major and he's looking to deal in pre-colombian middle and south america, which means aztecs, olmecs, incas and mayans. these cultures are mythic and mystical and alien to the average american, and we imbue them in our pop culture with all kinds of fantastical properties. or we say there we totally savage and marvel at how they could have done the things we have evidence of them doing. and i realized, he plans to spend his education and stake his academic reputation on refuting these myths. and he takes the opportunity to talk to people about them pretty much every time they get brought up. and i asked him, "how is what you do any different then what i'm doing?" and we talked about it, and came to the conclusion that it isn't though it is. but we're coming to a better understanding.

because he asked me the most important question i think he's asked me in a long time. "what do you want from me?" and i have to admit it took me a while to answer the question since i hadn't exactly framed it out in my own head. what it basically came down to though was the need for him to understand how big this really was, and that i was challenging many things in my own head. for him to understand that i'm more than a little afraid of the challenges this could bring into our relationship. and most importantly for him to take this seriously, let me sound off, challenge me with questions, encourage and support me. i also expressed the very real concern i had over creating a cognitive dissonance in my own head about our power exchange relationship which is not equal or egalitarian, and how it fits in with other things i think and feel about unequal relationships between men and women. i do not want to be hypocritical and say it's not ok for you but it's ok for me.

which made him ask in that kind of scared, vulnerable voice i find so delightful and lust inducing, "you're not going to suddenly get rid of me, are you?" i'd be a liar if i said showing him how much i value him didn't end the night on a really good note.

Virtually Walking the Walk

so, i am a gamer geek girl. unabashedly most of the time. and in my geekdom i was playing WoW (that's World of Warcraft.. or Warcrack as we like to say in my house) and chatting with the group i was playing with. in WoW it's very common for several players to group together to accomplish a particularly difficult task, and that's what i was doing. we were waiting for another group member to finish repairing his gear, and during the down time another player said they were going to go get a snack since he was due for lunch but we were about an hour from being done with the task. so, more down time... which usually leads to chatting in game. the three of us left started comparing time zones and where that placed us in the greater world. eventually the first group member came back from getting repairs done to his gear (in game repairs to in game gear, not to be confused with actual equipment) and asked where the second player had gone.

"he's being fat." responded one of the three of us that had been chatting. and my fingers flashed out, seemingly of their own volition.

"that's not a cool thing to say. how do you know he's fat?" and i swear i hit return before i quite knew what was being typed. it just happened. and i waited for this to explode in my face, to have my group tell me to back off and not be so sensitive, to have the player react all insulted... because these were not people i play with regularly. these were people i just happened to find who needed to do the same thing i needed to do. there was no personal context in which my comment might be received. and yet the person on the other end of that comment was surprisingly cool in their response.

"i'm sorry," i'm paraphrasing here, "it just means he's eating here in australia, it's just slang."

and i wanted to have the conversation i could feel was coming, the pointing out how icky it is to associate any kind of eating with being fat. to point out that eating is needful for human life to keep living. that we shouldn't have this kind of association... and yet there were some less than mature members of the group that i just didn't want to deal with, who could have very well turned the potentially awesome conversation into something really ugly. and so i left it. i just told this other player i didn't mean anything personal by it, but that i believed very strongly in size/fat acceptance and felt it was a really mean thing to say. and they kept apologizing.

which totally blew my mind, because i couldn't hear their voice but they seemed really genuine. at least in type, which is all i have to go on in that setting. and it surprised me too that i spoke out like that. it's not something i would have done even a month ago. sure i'll eat cheesecake in retaliation, but opening my mouth to a complete stranger? not so much. until that moment. maybe this is the first few steps of walking the walk... cause i still find it hard to talk about these things with some of the people i'm close to. like my mom. but that's a whole other post.

Me and My Pancreas

so i have a family history of diabetes type 2, and conventional wisdom would tell me i shouldn't drink coke or fruit juice or any other sweet and delicious beverage. or eat carbs. or be fat. but with every study that comes back from heath researchers not in the pockets of drug companies, we see less and less reasons to cling to the conventional wisdom. and now this study by the women's heath initiative. for people unfamiliar i'll be quoting from this article at junkfood science about the study and about the initiative.

"In 1992, the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched the largest preventive health study in our history, the Women’s Health Initiative. One part was the WHI Dietary Modification Trial — one of the largest, longest and most expensive randomized, controlled clinical dietary intervention trials in the history of our country."

they were trying to prove that healthy eating was the best way to prevent chronic disease, especially type 2 diabetes and heart disease, and promote weight control.

and here's the fun part for me... they completed this huge study and found NOTHING! i know i'm getting ahead here but, yeah. totally null study, which basically means they found no significant difference between the control group and the study group.

so here's the facts and figures bit:
*$415 million and conducted at 40 medical centers
*48,835 postmenopausal women assessed at baseline (the start of the study), one year and then every three years with clinical follow-ups every 6 months and their medications monitored in a pharmacy database
*more than 19,000 women were in the dietary restricted group while the other group was allowed to eat what they wanted.

in fact, here's the quote from the study:

The WHI dietary intervention group received intensive nutritional and behavioral modification training consisting of 18 group sessions in the first year followed by quarterly sessions throughout the trial. Each participant received an individualized dietary fat gram goal estimating 20% of energy from fat during the intervention and a common dietary goal of 5 or more servings daily of combined vegetables and fruits and 6 or more servings daily of grains. Self-monitoring techniques and group session attendance were emphasized.

and apparently they did really well with the women staying within 5-7% over their recommended fat intake, eating roughly 25% more fruits and veggies than the average american and eating a little over 300 calories less per day than the control group.

now the conventional wisdom tells us that these women should have been very healthy, and if not "healthy" thin at least not overweight or fat. but as i said before, the study found no such thing.

After eight years, there were no significant differences in the incidences of more than 30 clinically-documented cancers, heart attacks or strokes, or all-cause mortality. The dieters initially lost some weight but rebounded and their body weights, despite 8 years of watching what they ate, were no statistically different from the women who’d been eating whatever they wanted. Both groups ended up at nearly the identical weights they started with, differing a mere 0.7kg, about one pound.

and here's the bit that was of interest to me, what with my family history and all.

According to the WHI researchers, a total of 3,342 new cases of treated diabetes were reported: 7.1% (0.88%/year) in the intervention group and 7.4% (0.91%/year) in the control group during 8.1 years of follow-up. No statistical difference...In the WHI, there was no tenable difference in risk for diabetes among the different BMIs, with odds ratios even slightly higher for women with BMIs<25

so i'm back to looking at what goes into my body as fuel for my cells and fuel for my soul. i'm working on the intuitive eating that HAES recommends. i'm trying not to ignore my body and my hunger ques because i realize more and more that i really don't like how mean and nasty i get when my sugar starts to bottom out. and i'm listening more when my body says "give us red meat" as well as when it says "give us broccoli."

Shhhhh it's not ok

so last night my BF and i were looking at the latest news on the prop 8 opposition and the move toward legal proceedings in the state. and i was ranting at him about how fucked up it was that the prop passed and how the yes vote people lied and why the opposition failed to not only stop this piece of bullshit legislation from passing, but they failed to be inclusive and unifying in the way they did it. i was pacing, and ranting, and it took him aback a bit. he's never seen this political side of me, never seen this radical passionate side of me. oh, to be sure, he's seen me passionate about other things but never politics. and while our views match i am more well read on the subject i'm likely to rant about. and so he tried to calm me, think he'd done something to upset me, when really i was just angry at the situation. angry and swearing, which i rarely do.

and it frightened me for a moment. the idea of him shushing me, not to make me be quiet but to calm me down, was hard for me to process. because i wanted so much to know it had nothing to do with him trying to calm down the hysterical woman who was being unreasonable. i wanted so much for him to not have that seed of patriarchy deep inside him waiting like some cancer to suddenly wage war on our happiness. and while he assured me that no, he was afraid he'd done something to upset me and that i was angry at him, it did make me question the effect of activism.

not that i would give this up for him, but that it would break my heart if we were to fundamentally disagree on this. and i said to him the reason i feel it needful to speak and to give information and statistics is because i genuinely think 80% of people who speak out against gay marriage because it will force their church to do xyz, who back the fat people as unhealthy ideology and participate in fat hatred clothed as concern for the health of others, who are against comprehensive reproductive health are just ignorant or unaware of the spin they've been fed. and i said to him, these people are the kind that have to be talked to, have to be told, because eventually they will listen to bits and pieces and discover new ideas. and once that happens, the number of people who will be able to look at him and think (or worse say) "he's thin, he's good looking, he's smart so why is he fucking a fattie" will go down. if not away.

of course he promised to punch anyone who dared say such a thing in the face. which made me a little melty. but the fact that he hates willfully ignorant bigotry is a huge pat of why i love him.

sexy is as sexy does

so kate and the gang at shapely prose had a post up this past august, which i am only just reading, about attraction and whether or not a person should include efforts at finding fat people attractive as they progress through fat acceptance. the article can be found here.

the things that struck me were two more or less. one being the idea of attraction. we get told, rather often, that attraction is animal and natural and not a social construct. but our concept of beauty and sexual worth is a social construct. i think it's interesting, and i might add admirable, that anyone would be willing to own their social conditioning and allow that they might have missed out on a wonderful relationship or three because they thought someone was too fat. or too thin. or too disabled. or whatever other characteristic they've been enculturated to find non preferential in a mate or potential sex partner. i had never really thought about why i find certain people attractive or why i don't, and i know i'm still working through some of my initial judgement of people based on their outsides. but a really good point was brought up (ok a whole bunch were but this struck me) in the comments about how FA isn't about forcing the world to find fat bodies sexually appealing but rather about according fat people with the respect and dignity due every person regardless of whether you find them sexually appealing or not.

which might be the tie in i've been missing for why FA is a feminist movement at it's core. because yeah, i'm still struggling with the feminist thing and i make some progress and then i take a few steps back. i can get behind the fight for reproductive heath rights, ad the fight for equal rights under the law for EVERYONE, and i can begin to get behind the fight to see more women in top executive spots. but i stumble when it comes to looking for sexism in everything i do, see, read, listen to, touch or taste. i have trouble separating myself from my own privilege as a white middle class woman. so maybe i just have to be hit over the head with a clue by four but the idea that the sexual attractiveness of a person, their decorative ability, might be a measure of their worth in the world at large was one i had a hard time wrapping my head around. (M-O-O-N that spells uptake) because on some level i still crave that outside affirmation of my sexual attractiveness. i want men and women to notice me when i feel i look good. i want the vision of me in my head to be reflected in the eyes of people who look at me.

which brings me to part two in which i was reminded just how close i came to passing up the relationship i'm in now. because he's tall and thin, and i mean knee jerk reaction feed the boy a sandwich thin, and i thought i couldn't date a guy that i out weight by 80 lbs or so. my level of attraction was irrelevant because i just knew he wouldn't find me to be attractive. more importantly i was sure that he might find me decent looking with my clothes on, cause i can dress this body pretty damned well thankyouverymuch, but with my clothes off.... a whole other story of soft jiggling flesh would be revealed against the slim muscle of his body and i just knew it would make me seem 10 times fatter and just kill the mood. so i rejected the idea of intimacy with him, and refused to see the reciprocity of attraction until i realized that i was moving out of state and leaving behind someone i was insanely attracted to, and insanely compatible with, because i was hung up on his waist measurement. and when i put it that way i realized how stupid i was being. and thank god i came the my senses, because he is a constant delight and has made the move to another state so much less lonely and frightening and stressful.

so i can add this attraction thing to the growing list of things i think i need to re-evaluate. and i like the concept of working to find something good in the look of every person rather than mindlessly responding to them as a set of physical characteristics. will is suddenly develop a lust for the very large? i don't know. and that's ok.