A Return to Writing...?

Hello, all.  WW here.  After a very long silence, I am writing to you to do three things:

1.  Apologize for not writing in forever.
2.  Take it back because I shouldn't start everything with "sorry" and also I shouldn't apologize for my beautiful life getting in the way.
3.  Announce a return to writing, but this time, I'm not making any serious blog promises because I've done that before and we all know how that turned out.

I still firmly believe that I have one of the most amazing jobs in the world.  What is better than helping kids love themselves after a lifetime of telling themselves not to?  But my amazing job also has quite the toll on me: After working about 65 hour (including my daily two hour commute because the commute is tiring, too) weeks the last 4 out of 5 weeks, I'm pretty much a thin wastrel of a compassionate person...emotionally, of course.  I think that at this point, if someone other than my kids tries to tell me their problems, I might yell unreasonably or burst into tears.  Self-care is so important, and that is coming.  The BB and I are having a reunion soon, and you can bet there will be a post.

Mostly I wanted to write because I am trying to get back into writing.  When my students are mad or upset, the first thing I offer them (besides a safe-touch side hug) is a piece of paper and a pencil/marker/crayon and I tell them to get it all out on paper.  The absolutely 100% true fact that writing is cathartic is something I've known since I was little.  Writing has always been my #1 way of communicating.  I do it so much better than talking (but now with this awesome job, I'm getting better at the talking thing).  I remember writing to my parents anytime I wanted to discuss something because without fail, I would always burst into tears during a conversation because I couldn't handle myself verbally.  But anyway, I've been feeling pretty lifeless outside of work, so I think that this is something that will bring me back to me.

My only problem lately is finding something long enough to commit myself to.  Right now I just have these snippets when I'm feeling creative, which happens more when I'm not working like a madman.  I'm thinking about starting a side blog for these snippets so I don't keep taking this more specific one for my less specific needs.  I mean, I guess I could just have a diary, but where's the fun in that?

Anyway, check back after next weekend...The BB and I might be doing some awesome BoPo stuff while we're together!  But we also might just be watching The Office and taking care of ourselves, because we both need it.  Either way, this blog is still alive and important to us...but sometimes there are other things that are also important, and that's okay.

Goodnight!

Guest Post: Frankie A. Soto, Hidden Legacy

Today we are featuring a piece from our first ever male guest writer: the already famous Frankie Soto, a fantastic poet and activist, who was recently featured in Rust Magazine.  We were introduced to his poetry by a mutual friend, who also introduced him to our blog and he wrote us this piece below.  Please check this out and share it with others; his words convey an important message about fatness and victimizing.  If you like this, go to his website to see more of his work.  Thanks, Frankie!  You are wonderful!

Observe, watch the heaviness of guilt crawl out of eyes as you witness a woman mesmerized by the dessert section of the dinner menu at a restaurant. Counting calories with her fingers like my daughter doing 1^st grade math equations; her fingers her muse, to figure out what 4 + 4 equals. In this instance all it equals is self-consciousness and regret as if even the slightest dive into the image of consumption has now made her a marked woman in the Fat Department. A battle of delight and worrisome thought. Many times I wonder what is really more unhealthy -the consumption of foods not on the pyramid of healthy standard eating, or how the insecurity of food can consume a person. Passing by sidewalks in panicked hurry, yanking shirts on the subway to drop further below the waist. As if the world is holding a magnifying glass to your every pound.

I am all for promoting healthy living, as it has its beneficial value of lessening diabetes, preventing heart attacks as we grow older. In general it provides us with a jolt of energy, the body is a vessel that longs to be used, we weren’t built to be dormant. It is not human instinct to remain still, but how many healthy outlets are offered as suggestion and does not feel like a fist being shoved down the throat and lodged. Basically saying FAT is wrong. So your whole opinion of yourself is scattered like a broken vase. Sweeping your confidence back piece by piece, over the stress of what you EAT.

This is not gender issue. Trust me, many men, like myself, walk like an anvil is balancing on our backs. If I don’t remember to lift those dumbbells 50 times a day or walk that 2 miles in the evening. Almost like I am that teacher I despised in high school, over-critical, displeased with even the best effort of a paper due. Fighting ourselves for placement in social quarters, wanting to sit in the cool kid’s lunch table of life. Unfortunately, as we grow older and learn lessons we realize that the cool kids are just much better at hiding the insecurities; they lurk behind smiles and sit quietly in many while breaking windows an’ intruding -like robbers within others.

We are now not only subjecting weight as a link to obesity but also the judgment is growing; now we are using it as a means to excuse behavior and death. I watch replays of Eric Garner pushing out the distress calls of “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe”. My sensitive nature wants to interrupt the chaos and lift him up. The reality sets in he will never rise again in his body. A body which now is his crime, his curse. For in the eyes of people who want to be jurors now, biting their Big Macs and whoppers but labeling Garner guilty of being FAT and legitimatizing that as his reason for death, not the lack of oxygen to the brain an heart, not the pressure of knees or the choking as he pleaded for air. While we scream on the streets for revenge on police, while we yell for revolution and change all I can think is: how can we be worthy of change when our perceptions have not graduated to levels of acceptance that present us with ease, so that we can be secure in our own skin? That our weight is our weight, and it will fluctuate up and down, it will never be consistent, the same. Life is never the same, but our happiness, our value in ourselves should never waver. It should be a steel door during a hurricane current, withstanding all. 

Frankie A. Soto, Hidden Legacy

www.hiddenlegacy.org

All About That Bad Activism: Bodies in Trouble

Hello wonderful readers! It’s the BB here with some ideas that I’ve been meaning to commit to words for awhile, but it just took the right inspiration and research to articulate my feelings.

Our blog is all about breaking the fat glass ceiling; we want to show how successful, powerful, and worthy fat women are. Even though we operate through this lens because we identify as fat, feminist, cisgender women, we often open up the discussion to all bodies. This is an absolute necessity as part of the Body Positive Movement, because fat bodies aren’t the only bodies under scrutiny, and women aren’t the only group subject to body shaming, either. I reiterate these truths so that readers can keep in mind the expansive nature of the BoPo movement as we discuss the specific dimensions of body shaming that together form the need for body positivity. Overall, Gribbski’s Guide brings our lovely readers along on the many aspects of our journey to body acceptance.

Today, I’d like to write about an extremely important aspect of that journey: how I reclaimed my femininity in a fat body, and how those of us who consider femininity an important part of our identities (and I mean individuals of any body type, gender, or sex) are under fire.

When I first heard Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” I really wanted to be thrilled about it. Here was a sexy, curvy woman singing about how big women are desirable. In her music video she wears these unconventional outfits that show off her shape and she even incorporates a fat man in the dance crew. At first I thought this was great—she gives both fat women and men visibility as worthy and sexy. However, I quickly became skeptical of the video, lyrics, and overall message when I started to analyze the subtle body shaming within a song that is supposed to be body positive.

WAIT, WAIT! Pop culture throws fatties a bone and now you’re going to criticize it?!

You’re goddamn right I am.

If you haven’t already, please check out the video and lyrics here. As I said, it seems wonderful on the surface; but as much as I want to love it I just can’t. For weeks something about this song, and about various images I’ve been seeing online, have been bothering me. Finally, I figured out the specific aspects of the song that were problematic for me, and they line up with phenomena I’ve been experiencing in my own life recently. The following messages (lies) are steadily becoming more popular in the mainstream version of what masks itself as body positivity:

1. “Real Women Are Curvy.” There are so many problems with this statement. First of all, it’s an offensive backlash against the idea that fat women (or fat female-identified individuals) are often made to feel like they aren’t sexy or feminine. Instead of addressing the problems with that line of thinking, some have adopted the idea that curvier, larger women are actually more feminine and small, petite women aren’t. Instead of reclaiming femininity for all body types, proponents of the “real women” message only support one body type at a time, taking an extremely reductive approach to what can be feminine, sexy, and worthy. 

Check out Reddit’s Fat People Hate page here to get an idea of how fat women are reduced to sexless, identity-less objects of disdain. Reddit is by no means a scholarly source; what I'm trying to show is how fat hate, body hate, and body shaming are perpetuated at the cultural level by media from music to forums. 

The term “androgynous blob” is used in the comments to describe fat people. Fat men are berated for having prominent breasts while fat women are chided “you only have breasts because you’re fat; they aren’t real.” Statements like these spark the flawed activism of saying “real women have curves” and contribute to a body shaming cycle that doesn’t help anyone.  

For a long time I felt as though my own femininity was at stake because of my weight. I felt like I had to exaggerate and perform my gender in an over-the-top way to be taken seriously as a cisgender female who values femininity as a part of her identity. I would alternate between feeling like my over-performance made me look childish, to thinking that it was the only way I could be sexy. My immersion in feminism and body positivity is really what helped me realize that my expression of my own identity is not contingent upon anyone else’s biases, and certainly not upon their unfair and destructive stereotyping. If I feel feminine, worthy, and empowered, then I am, despite what Reddit users are saying.

I also don’t need to shame petite women as “sticks” or tell them that they are less desirable to men to make myself feel better about my own identity. Here’s a common internet photo that is, unfortunately, one of many adopting the “real women are X” fallacy:

Problematically, there has been backlash to the backlash by others adopting the idea that “Real Women are Skinny/Thin/Petite/” etc. It is incredibly dangerous to invalidate another individual’s femininity because it sends the cultural message that it is 1. okay to put certain types of women into neat, suffocating little boxes, and 2. it is okay for others to dictate how women should perform their gender. Check out this advertisement for a plus size clothing store: 

This ad says: “Well, real women are curvy BUT they also need to be modest and wear a certain type of clothing to be considered feminine, worthy, and attractive.” What is modest for a fat woman? No cleavage, rolls, or stretch marks showing? Covering up big arms and legs? A myriad of other body shaming dress code rules? I wholly reject that idea there is one particular way to perform my femininity as a fat, cisgender female, and I wholly reject that idea that there is any one particular way for any individual to perform their gender, sexuality, or identity.

These internet rants and ads bring us back full circle to “All About That Bass.” The following lines, meant to boost the confidence of curvy women, cannot do so without shaming thinner women, essentially invalidating the body positive purpose behind the song:

“I'm bringing booty back
Go ahead and tell them skinny bitches that
No I'm just playing. I know you think you're fat
But I'm here to tell ya
Every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top”

Although Trainor seems to recapture the BoPo message at the end of the stanza, the lines about “skinny bitches” and “I know you think you’re fat” go beyond ‘playful’ and prey on the insecurities of smaller women and invalidate their own worries about body image. This is not a productive way to empower any body type; if you have to shame one to hold up the other, then the activism isn’t effective.

Additionally, if you glorify feminine bodies by rigid standards, regardless of whether you purport small or large as more attractive, then you limit the power and potential of those feminine identities and bodies. Another limiting notion in “All About That Bass” links sexuality and attractiveness to self-worth:

2. Worth is intrinsically linked to ability to attract a mate. This statement has been perpetuated in pop culture for a long time. With songs, movies, and magazine ads pushing the “perfect” types of women for the pleasure of the male gaze, women have long been expected to live up to unrealistic ideals. "All About That Bass" has not created, but rather re-energized, the idea that curvier women are more attractive to men. Here are more lines that communicate this message:

“'Cause I got that boom boom that all the boys chase
And all the right junk in all the right places”

“Yeah, my mama she told me don't worry about your size
She says, "Boys like a little more booty to hold at night."”

There are no right or wrong places to have “junk;” the idea that there is a right or wrong way to have a body is one of the foundations of body shaming. It certainly shouldn’t be used in a song that has been championed as a mainstream big girl win. Further, it perpetuates the idea that having these curves is a good thing because it will help attract a mate. The myth that women in particular are only worth their ability to charm, entice, or keep a man happy, besides being extremely patriarchal and heteronormative, is completely reductive towards the potential and worth that women possess. The fact that a woman’s worth is still being connected to her attractiveness in so many pervasive cultural outlets is disturbing.

Lately I’ve been having conversations with a very close friend about body shaming and the need to find a partner. She is a small, petite, cisgender female who has been made to feel that her body isn’t attractive to others, and that her worth is based on her ability to find and keep a partner. It has been so rewarding and also challenging to help her see how smart, worthy, and beautiful she is both inside and out. It is an absolute atrocity that a strong, empowered, smart mother of three has been made to feel less in her identity because of the bad activism of others. The difficulty of changing our minds about ourselves lies in the cultural bombardment of body shaming and women’s prescribed roles that we experience and absorb everyday.

In every song that we listen to and movie we watch where body shaming and misogyny run rampant, we are being complicit in letting these attitudes control us if we don’t fight back and think critically about the cultural bullshit we’re being served. If we are going to reclaim our identities, whatever identities they may be, then we have to strike back against our culture. Every television ad, every lyric, and every happy ending to a whitewashed romcom is just another stab at body positivity and feminism. These stereotypes invade our media and culture and when we don’t see them, or when we see them and let them thrive, they are shaping who we become and how we think of ourselves and others.

Now although “All About That Bass” sparked my line of thinking and helped me articulate how I reclaimed my own femininity, I am by no means saying there aren’t other songs that contain the same fallacies. In fact, there are A TON of songs that contain the same fallacies, and even those that INTEND to offend or stereotype. I am simply using this song as an example of activism that could have been well-intentioned, but in the end falls short. I’m not being critical or oversensitive here; poor activism must be identified if we are going to remedy body shaming and other social injustices.

We can talk about specific experiences within the BoPo movement and specific identities WITHOUT shaming others by taking an intersectional approach where we acknowledge that we are talking about a particular experience situated in an array of unique experiences that acknowledge privilege and push back against offensive cultural constructs.   

Stay tuned for an example of productive activism in music from the WW coming soon, and in the meantime enjoy these empowering internet memes: