body image

Over the summer, I saw a play in which a woman in a rocky marriage asked the audience how it was possible that one man could affect her so much, that one man could make her feel so bad. Admittedly, the collective patriarchy and general opinion of men seems to be the "backbone" of sexism, so to speak. But in my experience it's the personal that becomes the political, and that it is indeed that one man that can make a difference.

We read into our personal experiences a lot. I find myself questioning my behavior and even altering it based on the reactions that I get from boys, trying to please them. After a break up, I feel my thoughts don't veer towards "Why didn't it work out?" or "Why aren't our personalities meshing?" or "Why did we have that fight?" Rather, I'm immediately thinking about what I must have done wrong, what actions I could have taken to prevent it, why I drove him away. It's really very hard to find one's self when one is trying to mold into someone else's idea of perfection.

I saw a show today where someone said that perfection is only measured within a frame of imperfection, and it made me think. I have recently started on a journey of trying to do a little more for myself, more counselling, more painting, more things to throw me off this path of dwelling on every little thing that has happened to me in the last decade, and I gotta tell you, it’s hard. It’s easy for me to blend in with the crowd and be the party girl, that’s what they call me, “they” being my friends, the people I work with, people at school. I am the girl who turns up to a test rottenly hung over and gets an A, and they all say they wish they could do that, but I wish for nothing more than to be able to turn up to a test without having to get drunk the night before because I am terrified that I wont get a perfect score. Somewhere over the years I have equated getting anything less than the “perfect” score as my abuser having some kind of control over that.

One of the few feminist arguments that actually gets some validating attention in the "modern western world" is the one that revolves around beauty standards. Mind you, it was bad enough when beauty standards required women to be a slave to "self-maintenance"... but now, even the most expensive products, the most vigorous dietary regime, and the most "fortunate" genetics cannot even begin to approach the beauty demand that is being placed upon our badly photoshopped, surgically altered generation.

"Scientific studies and the most casual viewing yield the same conclusion: Women are shown almost exclusively as housewives or sex objects.

The sex object is a mannequin, a shell. Conventional beauty is her only attribute. She has no lines or wrinkles, no scars or blemishes--indeed, she has no pores.

A copy of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" showed up on the bookshelf where I work this week. Woo hoo!

I've been listening to female musicians in my car all week. Karen O of the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs makes me happy.

I saw an interview with Joan Baez. Amazing person with an amazing sense of the power of her voice and words.

I've also been frustrated over the whole health care debate. If the world ever needed feminism it is now. Yet I feel like a true and honest conversation about the health care challenges women are facing are being ignored.

The same old sexist standpoint is being taken. The same reason why women should not have access to abortion is being now used to defend pregnant women not have access to prenatal care. Women, should plan pregnancy or be responsible for the consequences they should not expect a "hand out" from the government. It is very easy for people who have great health insurance to ignore those without or people who have insurance with high deductibles that don't cover things like prenatal appointments or women who lost their insurance coverage when their husbands lost their jobs. Or women who became pregnant because hormonal birth control was not paid for through their insurance company. Or the women who became pregnant because their doctors refused to give them an IUD or sterilization surgery because the woman was too young, did not have previous children or whatever sexist excuse they could come up with.

I seem to have broken through some mysterious membrane on the body image front lately. Part of it is having a new partner who respects the hell out of me in a way that I didn't even know I was missing from my previous lovers. Part of it is a nude photoshoot that was therapeutic in ways I can't even describe. Most of it is just a slow, boiling uprising from the moment the feminist lightbulb went on when I was seventeen.

I've been beach-bumming in a bikini and getting color in places that haven't seen the sun since I was born, and wondering why I went so long without that pleasure. Just a year ago, I bought my first sleeveless top, and almost had a panic attack the first time I went out in public with it. That blows my mind now.

All of this brought an old memory back to the forefront: my first time.

I'm tagging this "wtf".

Wall Street Journal: Cankles!

The circumference of a woman's ankle is about 11 inches, on average. That's not much to obsess about. But enough Americans are concerned about fat ankles -- or "cankles" -- that gyms are coming up with new ways to tone them; plastic surgeons are pushing $4,000 to $6,000 liposuction procedures to slim them; and shoe companies are offering special models designed to minimize them.

ABC News: Cankles!

I finally applied for health insurance today. It's a bit of a catch-22: I need health insurance so that I can get the help I need to get back in the work force, and I need a job to really afford this insurance. So the hope is just that it will work out: get the insurance, get healthy, get a job, pay for the insurance. Here's to hoping.

Anyway, this post isn't about the evils of capitalist medicine. It's about height and weight. Apparently.

I browsed plans for hours, agonizing over the financial implications of each. I wrote emails to various family members, asking how much if any help they could give, etc. Finally, after nitpicking the details of every eligible plan, I settled for one that costs $158 per month. (So high? It's the perpetual catch, isn't it: if you don't have any money, you can't afford a big deductible. If you can't afford a big deductible, you have to pay almost as much in monthly payments anyway.)

Dear Body,

I no longer maintain the steady desire to be completely and utterly at war with you.

I mean, cause lets face it, its not like you're going anywhere just yet and I'm here and it looks like we're pretty much all we got indefinitely. No boy or girl I have ever met has managed to make me feel better about you. No amount of weight loss at whatever drastic cost has managed to make me see you differently. So baby, it must be me and not you and I'm sorry you're taking the brunt of this abusive relationship.

I'm not gonna lie. Lets shoot it straight. You're no model, never was. The only reason we ended up there was your pouty lips and Bettie Page hair and my momentary non-aversion to being totally naked totally all of the time. Lets face it, mother was fat. Father was fat. Both sets of grandparents are fat. My rail thin sister? Also getting fat. We're probably lucky we're only as fat as we are. Go us!

My "senior project" of sorts for massage therapy school was to research how massage affects body image. I spent several weeks banging my head against the wall, looking for data to support my thesis, and eventually presented a project that I was less than happy with, but I felt a great deal of passion about the topic.

Massage has helped me with body image in ways that no book, media, partner, support group, or philosophy ever could. I still remember entering the program and getting my panties in a serious tangle when I found out that I might have to take them OFF for tech class.

"No! Seriously? We don't get to keep our underwear on?!"

So this summer, rather than pulling my shoulder length hair into a ponytail and getting on with my life, I decided to try a little experiment. I cut off all but two inches of my hair, which I styled into the common men's hairstyle of a faux-hawk, you know, that fake mohawk that it seems like every guy in my neighborhood is sporting?

It was the shortest my hair has ever been. I mean, I've had short hair before, but I've always had it longer in the front to frame my face and make it look distinctly feminine. So why the extremely short, extremely male 'do? I wanted to see how many people I could fool into looking twice to see if I was male or female.

I don't know about you, but I am getting sick of the media. Television in particular. But not just television. Commercials.

I recently saw two commercials in a row that deeply disturbed me. True, I was watching reruns of CSI on a channel that is geared towards older men, but still. Businesses and television stations alike need to learn when to draw the line.

Commercial One: It's advertising a summer sale at a local matress store. Rather than images of beds and lots of graphics and emphasis on prices and things like that, every time the commercial mentions the summer's "HOT" deal, the commercial flashes to a woman with huge breasts getting out of a pool, dripping wet, in a red one-piece. I was just happy she wasn't naked.

When I got out of the shower tonight I stood in front of the mirror for a good five to ten minutes just looking at myself. I was scared by what was staring back at me in the mirror.

Time to do anything but work, blog, eat and sleep these days is limited. I don't put on make up, I don't really do my hair, I never really stand in the mirror naked or half dressed. So I haven't noticed that being skinny has now become looking scary skinny. No one else has noticed either. I guess my t-shirts and baggy clothing is covering up the reality; that I have become Nicole Riche very scary skinny.

The first clue was that my bathing suit, a juniors small was kind of baggy when I put it on last weekend at a pool party. I of course covered up in gym shorts and a t-shirt so no one noticed, but I thought it was kind of odd. Clue number two was that I rubbed my back earlier today (I have my period, so I am having lots of back pain) and I didn't feel the normal layer of fat under the skin. Just my hip bone.

In the past few months since my house burned down I have lost weight. I am not sure how much since I don't own a scale, but I bought pants in size 4, 3 and 1 for work. My size 4 pants I can take off without unbuttoning, my size 3 pants keep falling down even with my belt on and I just noticed my size 1 pants are starting to be big around the waist as well. Actually, my belt isn't small enough anymore.

I'm not proud of my weight. I'm proud of the muscles I have now that I carry around heavy things at work and chasing around my toddler at home. But the skinny look, I just didn't work for it. If anything it's probably a sign that I am not healthy. I don't always eat three meals a day and I should probably be eating closer to 6 since I am still nursing my daughter. It doesn't help that the food where I work sucks and some days my dinner is an orange and a yogurt. At least some science leans towards calorie reduction as the way to live past a 100, so maybe I will live longer?

I am fat. When I say this, I'm describing one particular aspect of myself. I am not criticizing or judging, nor am I inviting other people to do so or asking for assurances that I'm pretty. In my mind fat is a descriptor like any other. It is not a judgment.

I have a very active life. I skied almost every other day this winter, and had an eight hour ski patrol shift every Saturday. I walk everywhere it is practical to do so and some places it is not. My kayaking season started today and will last until it is too cold to do anything but look forward to skiing. My fat body can do all of these things as part of my routine.

At Scarleteen I routinely hear from young women who are feeling insecure about their boyfriend's use of porn. For me, what stands out about these women is the pressure they feel to satisfy every one of their partners sexual needs. That pressure appears to be internal - their partners are described as quite comfortable with an independent sexuality, e.g. their use of porn and masturbation. I've always thought of these women as unnecessarily jealous, making a big deal out of something relatively minor. It's not like they were taking a feminist stand against porn -- they just didn't want their partners using it.