These photos by Howard Schatz, from his 2002 book, Athlete, have been making the rounds lately. Sam gave a shout-out to Schatz’s photos in her popular post, “Fit, Fat, and What’s Wrong with BMI?”
People–myself included–can’t stop looking at them. They are all pictures of professional athletes ready for game day, that is, they’re in peak physical condition.
What’s so absorbing about them is the range of body sizes and shapes depicted. The human body is for sure a thing of fascination and beauty. And there’s something awe-inspiring about a body that can perform the way the bodies of professional athletes can. So that’s one reason these images catch our attention.
Their real power, I think, is in the impact of the group shot. We know there’s diversity among human bodies–different shapes, sizes, proportions, colors and abilities. But though it’s obvious that a gymnast will, for obvious reasons, have a different body from a speed skater, and that a boxer needs a different body than a long-distance runner, it’s somehow not something we think about much.
Most of us default to a standard stereotype of “the female athlete.” But what that mental picture usually amounts to is an image of a fitness model–slender with visible muscles and a six-pack.
The range of bodies depicted in the series is a great reminder of the range of types even among professional athletes. There’s no one shape that is “athletic.” Schatz doesn’t just photograph women, either. We see an amazing range and contrast when men and women are pictured side-by-side.
Another point worth noting is that the fascinating bodies of these athletes are by-products of athletic achievement, not the goal in-itself (except perhaps for the body-builders). Olympic swimmers, for example, don’t get into swimming because they want the body of a swimmer. Intense focus on what the body can do ultimately yields a body that does those things.
You don’t have to be an Olympian to benefit from that message. As we’ve said before on the blog, a focus on what the body can do, on athletic rather than aesthetic values, and on things that you enjoy rather than things that will help you look a certain way will make for an all around more satisfying experience of activity that is likely to improve your quality of life on many levels.
The only criticism I have of the series (and I confess that I have not seen the whole book, so maybe it’s just a criticism of what has been reprinted on the internet) is that there are no disabled athletes included. Athletes who compete in the para-Olympics are amazing examples of outstanding physical achievement as well. Many of them can easily outperform most nondisabled people in their sport. Including their bodies alongside these other athletes would have given us a more accurate glimpse at a fuller range of elite athleticism.
Though Schatz represents an amazing range and that carries a powerful message, there is room for still more diversity in our representation of athleticism and the athletic body.
I’ve thought highly of Jennifer Lawrence ever since I saw her in the film Winter’s Bone. But lately, with her popularity as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games film series and the exposure she’s received since winning the Oscar for her performance in Sliver Linings Playbook, I’ve become a serious fan.
The thing I love most about her is her conscious, explicit, and vocal rejection of the body ideal of thinness so prevalent in Hollywood. In a wonderful interview with the BBC, Lawrence said that she faced some pressure to lose weight for her role in the Hunger Games because, after all, her character is supposed to be from a district where people are actually going hungry.
Lawrence says in the interview that in the face of that pressure, she told filmmakers that they had an opportunity to control the image that young girls and young women were going to see. Girls see enough of the unattainable body, subjecting them to unrealistic expectations. Since Katniss would be their hero, says Lawrence, they (she and the filmmakers) should use the film as an opportunity to rid ourselves of the uber-thin body as ideal.
Instead, she prefers a stronger, healthier look because, face it, “Kate Moss running at you with a bow and arrow just wouldn’t be scary.”
And while she is articulate and serious in this BBC interview, according to another report from earlier this fall, she takes a hard line these days if it’s suggested (as it was earlier in her career) that she ought to lose some weight:
“If anybody even tries to whisper the word ‘diet, I’m like, ‘You can go f**k yourself,” she said.
It’s a great attitude and it’s amazing that Jennifer Lawrence has taken her fame and her influence on girls and young women seriously. With two more films to go (they’ve divided the third installment of the trilogy into two parts), she’s got plenty of opportunities to keep working on the culture shift. As a role model for girls and young women with tremendous reach, Lawrence’s tough stance against the tyranny of thinness in Hollywood may just be a game-changer.
When I saw this “How to get a beach body” instructional flyer on facebook, I smiled. Yes, of course, take yourself to the beach and you’ve got a beach body.
It’s exactly the right way to think about the beach and the body needed to enjoy. And yet, sigh! If only it were so simple.
This is the time of year in the northern hemisphere when lots of women, young and not-so-young, start to panic about being “beach ready” or “bikini ready.” The media comes at us from all directions, with countless articles (none of which I will link to here) about how to get that bikini body.
The assumption, of course, is that the vast majority of us do not have it already. More than that, implicit in this rhetoric lurks normative femininity and the imperative that, if you plan to wear a bikini, you had better have the body for it.
Because bikinis are primarily worn in public, unlike lingerie, the idea of judgment is even more real and frightening. In a society that faults fat, cellulite, stretchmarks, pimples or hair anywhere but on our heads, it’s a miracle any of us can pick up the courage to step outside in such a revealing piece of clothing.
She hits it pretty well right on the head. It’s one thing to say, “go ahead and wear a bikini even if you don’t have the stereotypical bikini body. You’ve got every right.” I believe that. I really do. But it takes a lot of courage to don that skimpy little swimsuit. Courage and self-confidence. And we are socialized not to have courage and confidence in the bodies we have. I don’t think it’s an underestimate to say that a good 90% of the women I know (and I know lots of feminists!) are either wishing or actively seeking to change their bodies.
A couple of years ago, Jezebel posted “If I Hear One More Word about Beach Bodies I’m Gonna Strangle Someone with a Tankini.” Sam has posted on swimsuit anxiety already, right on this very blog, wondering why it’s so severe. Her guess is that we tend to compare ourselves to the models in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, and also that beauty pageants have cemented the association between swimsuits and sexy.
So if you’re not sexy, you shouldn’t really be in a swimsuit, especially a bikini.
My concern isn’t so much why we have the anxiety in the first place, but rather why, even if we reject the idea of normative femininity as an imperative for ourselves, and even if we agree that the whole idea of a bikini body is infuriating bullshit, it’s still hard for many of us to wear a bikini and feel good in it. I myself wear bikinis through the summer, though as I have said here before, I prefer to be nude. But I really need to talk to myself at the beginning of the season to convince myself that it’s okay to wear the bikini. I’m never going to look anything like the swimsuit models in Sports Illustrated.
I can also say in all honesty that I have had the bikini body at different times in my life. I can only say this in hindsight because at the time I didn’t feel good in my bikini. The standards I set for myself were so impossibly high that probably the swimsuit models don’t even attain them without photoshop.
What does that tell me? It tells me that it’s more about self-acceptance than about anything else. In “If I Hear One More Word about Beach Bodies…,” Lesley, the author says,
Where I live, beach season comprises roughly one-sixth of the entire year, and if you think I am going to waste one second of that precious span worrying about whether the colorblocking on my suit is going to trick people into believing I’m shaped like Gisele Bundchen, then think again.
She gives a few tips for how to get over the anxiety, including “Your body is fine” and “Body-policing is never okay.” I think she’s totally right. She’s probably also right that mostly people aren’t looking at me anyway. We much more need to tell ourselves that our bodies are fine than to defiantly shout it out to other people. And it’s the body policing that we impose on ourselves that’s the most crushing.
It’s not all that easy to become immune to the cultural messages we receive about who gets to wear “sexy” clothing and who doesn’t. But there is something incredibly attractive about women who are comfortable in their skins. And yet, sadly, that level of self-acceptance is so elusive for so many of us, even those who, on an intellectual level, reject the notion that we need to conform to a narrow standard in order to be acceptable.
I had the privilege of attending the Feminist Porn Awards on the weekend. I have never in my life seen such an inclusive range of representations of people claiming their right to enjoy the bodies they have, not the bodies that mainstream society tells us you’re supposed to have. The films represented them and their sexuality and sensuality beautifully, as sexual agents taking pleasure in their bodies. It was truly eye-opening and inspiring on many levels.
I had been thinking about this post that day, not yet sure what I wanted to say exactly. But what I want to say is this: my ideal beach would be a beach full of the actors and filmmakers who are producing feminist porn. They do not judge or make assumptions about what we are supposed to look like to be worthy of embracing our physical selves. They actively seek out bodies of all genders, shapes, sizes, and abilities, representing them equally without fetishizing those that depart from normative standards of the mainstream. They seek to empower, not to shame.
And I am certain that their beach body is no more or less than the one they take to the beach.
As Sam pointed out some time ago in her post about body positivity and the queer community, there actually is a diversity of desire out there. Even among straight men there is a range of body types that they find attractive. Sam references John Devore’s article about the types of women that “really turn men on” on this point.
I’m not saying that we need to be a part of or even watch feminist porn to accept that the bodies we have today are beach ready no matter what they look like and what they can do. Rather, we can think of it as one model, among many, that’s strikingly more body positive, both in terms of size and disability, than the usual norms about beauty and the beach.
The 120 tips on strength training for women first came across my FB newsfeed yesterday morning. It looked like it might be useful post for me, a women interested in strength training. In fact, his intended audience is other trainers who are training women. That, I must say, is a scary thought, considering how consistently the list fails to take seriously the idea of women and strength training.
I started to read the post, written by “The Glute Guy,” Bret Contreras (whose blog and post I am of two minds about bringing further attention to, but it has to be seen to be believed). My hackles went up immediately, before I even got to the list, because it started with a disclaimer. Many of the things in the lists aren’t actually “tips,” he said, more like “observations.” And then comes the old “please understand that I intend no disrespect or offense, I’m not trying to be controversial” disclaimer.
I’m sorry but when I read that kind of thing, I just hunker down and prepare to be offended.
The first 1-13 are “exercise considerations,” like that “proper push-up form is more difficult to attain for women than it is for men” (okay, I think we all know this, but where’s my “tip”?) and “some women have ‘coregasms’ when training, and the hanging leg raise is the primary culprit (these orgasms usually aren’t welcomed as they’re inconvenient).” Wowza! That’s the closest thing to a tip in the first section — do some hanging leg raises if you can catch some private time at the gym.
I really started to shift in my seat when I got to the part that generalized about women’s “fortitude and dedication.” He says, “many women lack the fortitude and dedication to ever see incredible results from lifting due to ‘being a lifter’ rather than ‘being a student of weight lifting'”. As the fabulous Jezebel post (author: Laura Beck) today commented on this point, “what?”
There are lots of “tips” about what women need to be taught, what they will insist on doing “if you let them,” and what sorts of second rate measures they will “resort to” if they are not adequately coached by their trainer. I can just imagine the mansplaining that must go on in this dude’s sessions with his female clients.
In the comments, one commentator (Samantha — not sure if it’s the Sam B), notes that many women are newbies to weight training. She points out that men are often exposed to weight training earlier, by friends or family or in school. A newbie is a newbie — man or woman, you will need some instruction to be able to strength train safely and effectively.
After a while, it just gets ridiculous, as in this sequence from number 26-40:
Women differ psychologically compared to men (for example they’re motivated to train uniquely, and what revs up a man to max out doesn’t necessarily rev up a woman to max out)
It is common for women to miss periods (menstrual cycles) upon embarking on an intensive training regimen (not to be confused with amenorrhea which happens when body fat drops too low)
Menstrual cycles usually have a huge influence on factors such as training motivation, irritability/mood, water retention, and self-esteem during exercise
The size of women’s breasts and also butts can fluctuate markedly throughout the month, which can lead to frustration
Some women experience urinary incontinence when exercising, and the likelihood increases after giving birth
Woman are better than men at fostering camaraderie but not quite as good as men at holding training partners accountable for showing up
Many women don’t activate their pelvic floor muscles properly
Women tend to prefer different training music than men
More women than men like to offer up the phrase “they say” as proof of evidence (who exactly is “they”?)
Most women don’t like getting weighed on scales, and many prefer to see how clothes fit as measures of progress (I don’t agree with this practice as I like to utilize all measures of progress)
Women like wearing pink workout apparel and take their training attire much more seriously than men (for example they tend to match their shoes with their shorts or shirts, etc.)
Women love putting chalk on their hands and then clapping hard – thereby getting chalk everywhere rather than keeping it solely on the hands (they probably do this because they saw gymnasts do it)
Women are not as natural as men at adjusting machines and apparatuses
Women love compliments – it fuels their fire to train even harder
We have a couple of things in feminist analysis that we tend to come down fairly hard on: gender stereotyping and gender essentialism.
Stereotypes of women paint a particular kind of generalized picture of them that often makes them seem less serious than men. The suggestion that women wear lots of pink (not sure how this “tip” will help me or my trainer) or that they have bad chalk etiquette (from emulating those darn gymnasts!) or that they are “not as natural as men at adjusting machines and apparatuses” (you know how women are with anything technical and mechanical) perpetuate stereotypes about women that insinuate that they have no place in the gym.
And if women would stay out of the gym, then there would be no conflicts about what training music to play over the speakers.
Gender essentialism with respect to women suggests that there are some essential biological features of women that identify them as women. The comments about menstruation and the fluctuation of breasts size and butt (?? really ??) size, suggests, among other things, that women are inevitable victims of their essential biology.
Apparently, according to Bret’s observations, women aren’t into science and research. No, women are satisfied with anecdotes (like Bret’s 120 anecdotal observations about strength training for women), maybe anecdotes based on what “they say” (see tip #34 in the grouping, “Anatomical, Physiological, Psychological, and Random Considerations.”
He gets a few things right. For example, “Women usually don’t want to be bothered in the gym – unsolicited advice from meatheads and cheesy pick-up lines get old quickly, yet men will nevertheless remain persistent.” Hallelujah! It’s sad that this is buried among crazy generalizations about the way women dress sexy and then get upset when men show an interest, undervalue their training partners, and make sexual sounding grunts (whereas, says Bret, men’s grunting isn’t sexual-sounding. Um, okay. Maybe that’s what they say, but I have heard differently, if you know what I mean).
This list is disturbing on many levels. Gender stereotyping and essentialism are both pernicious social forces that help keep patriarchal power structures in place. The list is full of them, thus reinforcing the notion that women don’t really belong in the testosterone-heavy space that is the weight room. What’s more disturbing is that the list has been compiled by a trainer who trains women yet fails to take them very seriously in their aspirations.
He is more busy observing how much pink they wear (might be useful to do some analysis on how many non-pink options are even available to women) or how fickle women can be: “Some women seem impossible with their complaints; for example one day they’re worried about getting too bulky and the next day they’re upset that they lost muscle size somewhere.” Silly women, can’t make up their minds what they want. Maybe they’re on their period and still reeling from the fluctuation in the size of their butt that month.
It’s more disturbing still that his intended audience is other trainers. Some have even confirmed his “findings” in the comments. But this all goes to the stereotypes. With this list of stereotypes out there, this could become the default frame through which women in the gym are viewed by unreflective trainers (who just listen to what “they” say). Women are portrayed as giggling, incontinent, know-nothings who “during casual conversation, when most women imitate weight lifting form to friends, family members, or peers, all of a sudden they get the form all wrong (for example they’ll imitate a deadlift like an upright row).”
It’s astonishing how a dude can do something that looks at first to be woman-friendly, namely, post a list of tips for strength training women, and have it go so horribly sideways by perpetuating stereotypes that actually secure his view that the gym is and ought to be a male domain. He had an opportunity to empower women and celebrate the fact that more and more women are owning their strength and working out with heavy weights. But he didn’t take it.
Lots of women are informed and educated about what they do in the weight room. They have a right to be taken seriously by their trainers and by others working out along side them. This tipsheet does more damage than good to the women who have claimed and are yet to claim their place at the gym.
Recently I wrote about my (personal, not for everyone) decisions not to get further sports nutrition counseling and to stop weighing myself. I committed to re-acquainting myself with two books that helped me a lot back in the early nineties when I was a compulsive dieter and exerciser with a diagnosed eating disorder (that I didn’t believe I had because I wasn’t skinny enough).
Intuitive Eating (IE) is based on ten principles, to each of which the authors devote a full chapter:
reject the diet mentality
honor your hunger
make peace with food
challenge the food police
feel your fullness
discover the satisfaction factor
cope with your emotions without using food
respect your body
exercise: feel the difference
honor your health with gentle nutrition
The authors introduce the concept of IE. They identify a number of different eating “personalities” who have an unhealthy relationship with food–the Careful Eater who is obsessed with nutrition, the Professional Dieter who is perpetually on a diet, and the Unconscious Eater who pairs eating with another activity, such as watching TV or reading, or just generally eats mindlessly because they are too busy, vulnerable to the presence of food (like the cookie jar or the donuts at meetings), or they don’t like to waste food (they’d rather clean their plate and then move on to their children’s or spouse’s plates), or they use food to cope with emotions.
The Intuitive Eater, by contrast, has what the authors consider to be a healthy relationship with food. They “march to their inner hunger signals, and eat whatever they choose without experiencing guilt or an ethical dilemma.” The authors believe children are born as intuitive eaters, but that social messaging leads many people to develop an unhealthy preoccupation with nutrition, weight loss, and food. The goal of the book is to help people who, in their words, have “hit diet bottom” become Intuitive Eaters.
The first four principles help to change the diet mentality, where food is the enemy and needs to be controlled and restricted to reach the ideal weight. Principles 5 and 6, feel your fullness and discover the satisfaction factor, nudge us in the direction of a more intuitive relationship to the food we eat. Principle 7 addresses the issue of emotional eating and offers alternative modes of self-care that are more successful. Principle 8 calls upon us to stop body-bashing, and, as Samantha has recently urged, respect the body we have.
Principles 9 and 10 are introduced last for a reason. The authors think that both exercise and attention to nutrition (The Careful Eater) can be used as covert ways of implementing The Diet Mentality. Not only that, many people with a history of dieting and food obsession have negative associations with exercise in particular. They strongly suggest that people work with the first 8 principles to become comfortable Intuitive Eaters and only then pay close attention to exercise and nutrition.
I can’t go into the principles in detail, but I want to say a bit more about my favourites.
Of course, I love the idea of rejecting the diet mentality. I’ve spoken of it here, here, and here.
Feeling your fullness (Principle 5) is the one that challenges me the most and that I have worked with most closely since I started this approach back in early January. The authors claim that “the ability to stop eating because you have had enough to eat biologically hinges critically on giving yourself unconditional permission to eat (Principle 3: Make peace with food).
In order to feel your fullness, the authors recommend conscious eating. Instead of moving into autopilot, they suggest paying attention, eating without distraction, pausing part way through a meal to register whether the food still tastes good and whether you’re still hungry. Samantha is doing the same thing with her recent attention to mindful eating. They introduce the idea of comfortable satiety, where you’ve had enough to eat but are not overstuffed. Respecting your fullness means stopping at comfortable satiety. In order to achieve this, you need to eat engage in mindful or conscious eating.
Their approach to both exercise and nutrition focuses not on weight loss but on how good both make you feel and how they act as methods of self care. In fact, the authors note that exercise is a great stress buffer. A good relationship with exercise, when it is a part of your life that you actually enjoy instead of see as an obligation, can go a long way to curbing emotional eating.
The IE approach appeals to me for so many reasons. I am convinced that diets don’t work for long term weight loss and I despise food tracking and monitoring. So the idea of learning to identify and respond to my body’s natural hunger signals provides an exciting alternative and a reason for optimism. Since I started focusing on mindful eating and respecting my fullness I have been much more capable of eating when hungry and stopping at the point of comfortable satiety.
I am eating foods I enjoy, engaging in exercise I enjoy, and have no hard rules around the foods I choose. My tendency is towards nutritious foods anyway. I love salads, legumes, soy, whole grains, and fruit. I have a sweet tooth which I satisfy with a whole range of things, from medjool dates and dried pineapple to my favourite vegan chocolate cake and home-baked coconut cranberry chocolate chip cookies. I have discovered a few things too, like I prefer mangoes to french fries. I have total permission to eat either, depending what I feel like.
The recommendation to toss the scale, found both here and in Overcoming Overeating, has been the single most positive change for me. I love not weighing myself and instead tuning in with how I am feeling.
On my recent sailing trip to the British Virgin Islands, I maintained an easy level of activity with snorkeling, kayaking, and swimming with a few push-ups and burpees thrown into the mix, ate when I felt hungry and stopped when I felt satisfied, and drank one totally indulgent virgin cocktail (I don’t drink alcohol) a day.
I am sure that I gained no weight and quite possibly lost some (of course I can’t be sure). What matters most is that I feel really good, like I took care of myself, ate well, and kept moving during my vacation. Though I experienced a bit of self-consciousness in my bikini at the beginning (I adjust more quickly to being totally nude than being in a bikini, as explained here), I respected my body and didn’t engage in body-bashing. After a day or two I felt good.
A couple of other things about the book.
Since the original edition came out in the early nineties, there have been quite a few studies on the approach to gauge its success as a health strategy. The authors have included a chapter about the science behind the IE approach. The chapter adds scientific validity to the author’s suggestions and makes a strong case that Intuitive Eaters experience both mental and physical health. Moreover, they cite studies that show it as a viable solution for the prevention of eating disorders and obesity.
It includes chapters on raising children to be intuitive eaters, and on using the IE approach to treat eating disorders. It also has a Q and A appendix to answer common questions about Intuitive Eating, such as “If I let myself eat whatever I want, won’t I eat uncontrollably and gain lots of weight?” The authors do not believe this will be the case because “when you have made complete peace with food and know that what you like will always be available to you, you’ll be able to stop after a moderate amount. If you’re only giving yourself pseudo-permission, it won’t work, because you don’t really believe you’ll always have access to food. So check out how genuine your permission-giving is.”
Finally, the book has a really helpful appendix that outlines strategies for implementing each of the principles.
I’m a total convert to this approach to eating. I don’t think about food all the time and don’t spend a lot of time planning my meals and snacks. I just make sure there I’ve always got lots of good food that I like on hand for when I am hungry. I do pay attention to nutrition though I am not a slave to it, and I am as active as I want to be, minimally doing at least one weight training or yoga session a day and one “cardio” activity a day.
I never track and I no longer weigh myself.
If you are ready to do something different and truly willing to commit to never dieting again, I highly recommend that you read this book.
For the most part I love the body I’ve got and while I aspire to being leaner, more fit, faster, more powerful, that will all be a bonus. Really, even my ‘get leaner’ goals are cast in terms of being kinder to the body I have now. I feel like it deserves better treatment.
When I express the view that I love my body–it’s me after all, not a home improvement project–many people are surprised. They think it’s remarkable you can be overweight (fat, big, whatever) and still love the body you have.
Often what I think is truly remarkable about this is that it’s my attitude that stands out as noteworthy. I’m always shocked at the number of people–almost all of them women, almost all of them lots smaller than me–who are ashamed of their bodies. And I mean really ashamed, unhappy to the point of tears, and to the point of not doing things they might want to do but can’t do because they think they aren’t thin enough. Only thin people deserve nice things and exciting experiences, according to this world view.
But here’s another anecdote. It will be sadly familiar to almost every woman reading, I think.
After a hot sweaty summertime soccer game, one of my teammates offered us all a field trip to her backyard pool. Swimming pool, snacks, and fruity drinks, post game. Count me in. Yes.
I drove to her house, ripped off sweaty soccer duds and threw on a bikini and ran to the backyard and jumped in the pool. (Yes, I wear a bikini. Started once I realized the plan I had as a twenty year old–I’ll wear a bikini when I get skinny–was based on a vitally flawed assumption. Also, I have a long torso, regular bathing suits don’t fit, and it’s pain to get them off to pee. And yes, I know the trick. But I like bikinis. Not tankinis either. I like unreconstructed belly baring two piece bathing suits. So there.)
But lots of my soccer friends hid behind towels, put clothes on over their bathing suits which they didn’t take off til the edge of the pool, and almost everyone had to make some self-deprecating comment about how bad they looked in a bathing suit. (I was tempted to mention Tracy’s solution but I’m not that brave so I didn’t.)
So I didn’t have the full blown body positive evangelical conversation with my soccer team that night. We chatted a bit and then moved on. But when I do feel drawn into these conversations–usually when it’s my turn to make a self deprecating remark and I refuse–here are a few of things I say, context depending:
1. My body, our bodies, are amazing things. I love what my body can do. This body thrived in pregnancy and childbirth, can bike 100s of kms, can lift a lot of weight, etc etc and so focusing on what it looks like, as judged by mainstream standards of beauty that I reject, seems to look past the most important stuff, the truly miraculous bits about our bodies. (Read more about this here.)
2. Being thin doesn’t seem to help with body shame either. Often it’s my thin friends who are the worst, especially as we age. It’s like they’ve never had to think about these things, to worry about how they look, until now. And I’ve been thinner too and I haven’t felt less anxious or less self conscious at a smaller size. In a weird way it’s worse. In the game of looks, I’m then ‘in.’ and it matters more. Better to be outside of those beauty norms all the way maybe.
“I’m typically not bothered much by traditional standards of beauty and whether or not I match them. Life’s too short. We all die in the end. The people who care about mainstream beauty don’t much interest me much anyway so why should I be concerned with what they think?
“We all die in the end anyway” might strike you as a gloomy thing to think or say. But really once you adjust to that big piece of bad news everything is small potatoes. It’s quite liberating. The joys of philosophy.”
4. And I usually thank the people in my life with whom I’m closest and I say thanks to to the queer community of which I’m a small part. Why that last one? Why the queer community?
To be clear it’s not the ‘hippie hairy herbal tea drinking love your body 70s lesbian feminists’ I’m thinking of, though knowing some of them in my teen years probably didn’t hurt. It’s the ‘queer deliberately outside mainstream beauty norms but still someone’s cup of tea sex positive queer community’ I’m thinking about.
Think ‘kink inclusive, trans inclusive, gender deviants welcome queer community’. And no, it’s not a perfect world. Still lots of work to be done especially on race and on disability. I know.
But the queer community is mostly where I’ve enjoyed learning about the specificity and details of our desires and attractions.
Tracy and I were amused recently to see that someone found our blog searching for “women with big tits wearing neon green bras.” I posted that one on Facebook and one friend commented “neon green?” and another just “bras?”
Details matter.
How is this connected to body positivity and loving the body you’ve got?
Think about it this way, it doesn’t make any sense to think about being attractive simpliciter. What exactly would that mean? There’s only attractive to particular people.
Whatever you look like I can assure you there’s someone out there who thinks that thing that you have is THE thing to which they’re attracted. In the world of the internet there’s probably even a group for women with big breasts who like to wear neon green bras and the men and women who love them.
So when friends say. I don’t look attractive when I’m this size, my first response is to wonder to whose standards they’re appealing. Who is the person who would like them but doesn’t because they’re too fat?
Mostly when straight women say they just want to look attractive they mean to look attractive to men. But still I wonder, which men?
The desires of men who like women are far more diverse than the world of men’s magazines would ever have you believe. Men whose desires don’t fit-maybe they like hairy legs, or women with crooked teeth, or they’ve got a thing for women with glasses or women in their fifties on motorbikes –are hurt by gender role stereotyping and hetero conformity too. Don’t believe me about the diversity of heterosexual male desire, read John DeVore‘s The Types Of Women That Really Turn Us On over at The Frisky.
There are men who like fat women, men who like muscles, women who like bald men, men who like men who are really hairy, women who think men wearing socks with sandals are the hottest (okay, maybe not that one) etc. My point is that it’s a wild weird world out there in terms of attraction.
Once you start thinking this way you realize that men who like skinny 18 year old blondes just have a particularly boring, mainstream fetish*. You can kind of accept it, yawn, and move on. Oh, right, youth. Hmm. He likes thin women. That. That’s his thing. Ho hum.
You can even work up to thinking, in an amended version of a common phrase, your thing is not my thing but your thing is okay, and move on.
And if that’s all he likes, you might even feel sorry for him for leading such a narrow, limited life in a world rich with possibility.
And yes, I know this is isn’t the whole story about body image and insecurity. Often it’s our own standards we don’t live up to. And queer people can struggle with body image as well. But to the extent that it’s about worrying that someone will find you attractive, I urge you to put that worry on the shelf, close the door, and say goodbye.
What’s the connection between loving the body you’ve got and fitness? That’s the subject of a future post.
*A footnote, in a blog post, sorry. I debated whether or not to use the word “fetish” here but I decided to stick with it. We typically use “fetish” to mean a sexual taste or predilection outside the mainstream. He has a foot fetish. She has a fetish for popping balloons. Whatever. But the fetishization of youth and thinness is so mainstream as to disappear from our view. It’s what’s normal against which other tastes are judged. I think it’s time for that to end. Let’s, non-judgmentally, call the preference for youth and for thinness what it is.
There are quite a few advantages to having grown up with a body outside the norm and to having lots of comfort with the size and shape one is.
One of the times it really hits me is when considering some sporting activity that requires tight fitting, shape revealing clothing.
“But it makes me look so fat,” shrieks the thin to normal size woman on seeing herself in a fitted bike jersey and cycling shorts. (Don’t get me started on the reaction of said person to a skinsuit worn in time trials in both road and track cycling.)
“I’m not wearing a unisuit until I absolutely have to,” said one of the women I do Masters’ indoor rowing with. No one looks good in those things, she went on to explain. Another rower, former university athlete, said the unisuits explained the lack of sexual tension/romantic attraction between rowers. I laughed.
When I joined a Masters’ swim team and went to order a team swimming suit for racing, the coach automatically ordered a size down. It’s your race suit, she said. They’re supposed to be very tight. You don’t want any excess fabric. It will slow you down.
The worst of all might be the bikini tri suit, a two piece affair you’re supposed to swim, bike, and run in. I’ve never worn one of those but not for modesty or body shame, more worries about thigh rubbing and discomfort. Okay, and the belly jiggling while running might be distracting! 🙂
But I don’t really worry about being seen as fat in sports specific clothing because lots of people think I’m fat no matter what I wear. If you’ve been seen as fat in regular clothing, sports clothing is less worrisome, more life as usual.
I wasn’t aware of what a barrier fear of ridicule and feeling fat is to women’s participation in sports and outdoor activities until I read the results of a study on the reasons why women choose not to exercise. The whole story is quoted below but here’s the one number that got me and that counts against both cycling and rowing: “67% of women say they wear baggy clothing when exercising in order to hide their figure.”
If that’s right then unisuits and cycling shorts (tight fitted, worn alone, no underwear underneath them) might rule out rowing and cycling.
Mountain bike shorts and baggy bike jerseys have their place, I think, and that place is a nice stretch of single track, when riding a mountain bike.
On a road bike it’s much more aerodynamic not having excess fabric flapping in the breeze.
I guess there are two very different responses one could have to this clash between women’s body self consciousness and sporting attire.
But the other response, and I admit I’m not that comfortable with it is to see what we might do to make performance oriented athletic clothing more attractive on a wider range of women’s bodies.
Looking good isn’t the prime purpose of sports performance wear and that is likely much more of an issue for women than for men. I think gender and the need to look good while working out is a topic for a later post. Happily, for me I actually like the way I look in cycling clothes. I feel most like me and that makes me smile.
Of course, if you do suffer from extreme body anxiety or you are modest for religious and/or cultural reasons, let me recommend Aikido! We wear very baggy white pajamas that cover skin from ankle to wrist and reveal next to no details of our shape.
Low self-esteem among barriers to getting active as charity highlights benefits of walking, cycling and other pursuits
The charity Mind says that lack of self-confidence and low self-esteem causes nine in ten women aged over 30 to avoid taking part in outdoor physical exercise such as cycling, and has launched a campaign to encourage females to overcome barriers that are potentially harmful to both their spiritual and mental wellbeing.The study, based on a survey of 1,450 women, was carried out as part of the ‘Feel better outside, feel better inside’ campaign from the £7.5 million Ecomind initiative, run by the mental health charity on behalf of the Big Lottery Fund.
While initiatives such as the Cycletta series of sportives, endorsed by Victoria Pendleton, and British Cycling’s £1 million National Women’s Cycling Network, launched last year, both aim to get more females on two wheels, the findings of Mind’s research suggest that for the vast majority of women there are huge barriers to doing any kind of outdoor physical activity, let alone cycling.
According to the survey, nearly all respondents – 98 per cent – were aware of messages telling them that getting involved in exercise would help their mental and physical health, however Mind said that low confidence in their bodies, low self-esteem and other barriers to exercise prevented many from getting active.
Its research found that eating comfort food or finding a way to be alone, both at 71 per cent, going to bed, at 66 per cent, or spending time social networking with a response level of 57 per cent, all ranked higher than taking part in physical exercise.
The charity highlighted some of the specific barriers that prevented women from taking part in exercise:
2 out of 3 feel conscious about their body shape when they exercise in public
Many doubt their own ability compared to others; 65% think it’s unlikely they’ll be able to keep up in an exercise group and almost a half feel they will look silly in front of others as a result of being uncoordinated
60% are nervous about how their body reacts to exercise – their wobbly bits, sweating, passing wind or going red
2/3 feel that if they joined an exercise group, other women would be unwelcoming and cliquey, with only 6% feeling they would be very likely to make new friends.
It also highlighted some of the ways in which women who did participate in exercise sought to overcome what it described as “the risk of embarrassment”:
Over 50% said they exercised very early in the morning or late at night solely to avoid being seen by others
Almost 2/3 of women choose to exercise in a location where they’re unlikely to bump into anyone they know
Over 50% don’t leave the home when exercising, so as not to be seen in public – even though exercising outside is more effective for lifting mood then inside
67% wear baggy clothing when exercising in order to hide their figure.
Beth Murphy, head of information at Mind, commented: “We all know that walking, cycling, even gardening are good for our mental health, however for many of us exercising in the great outdoors can be incredibly daunting, especially if already feeling low and self-confidence is at rock bottom.
“At these times you can feel like the only person in the world experiencing this, but Mind’s research highlights that far from being alone, 90% of women are in exactly the same boat,” she continued.
“It’s time we start talking about how exercise makes us feel. We urge women to take the first step, invite a friend on a nature date and begin to support each other in taking care of our mental wellbeing.”
Mind cited the positive impact that taking up outdoor exercise had brought to the life of one 37-year-old woman, who said: “I have been taking anti-depressants since last February, but honestly feel that exercise has a more noticeable effect than the drugs.
“I can’t believe I am saying this, but discovering outdoor exercise changed everything. I was petrified, I knew I would sweat, go red, have trouble keeping up and that everyone else in the group would be super fit. I was so incredibly scared and thought I’d be humiliated.
“However – the other people in the group were all normal – all different shapes and sizes – and no one cared what you looked like or did.
It was the most liberating experience ever. My initial reason for exercising was to lose some weight, but from that first session I realised just how good it could be for my state of mind. From there my confidence grew,” she concluded.
The Ecominds section of the Mind website contains a variety of hints, tips and online tools aimed at encouraging women to become active by helping the overcome some of the issues discouraging them from taking part in outdoor exercise.
There isn’t a lot of feminist literature on the experience of losing weight and keeping it off so I was very happy to read Ann Cahill’s paper “Getting to My Fighting Weight” published in the Musings section of the journal Hypatia (25 (2):485-492, 2010). It’s a very gentle piece of philosophy, light on prescription, rich in personal experience and narrative.
I love the idea of “fighting weight” as a concept that goes beyond boxing and martial arts though I admit that’s what I originally thought Cahill’s piece would be about. I expected a piece on “making weight” or “weighing down” the way one does for fitness competitions, races in light weight rowing, and martial arts competitions.
Cahill also notes there isn’t a lot of feminist work out there that is positive about the experience of losing weight and staying at the new weight. One possibility of course is that this phenomenon is so rare. Estimates vary but most agree that only about 1 in 20 people who lose weight keep it off for more than five years. Most feminist literature looks at weight loss as part of the larger effort to control women’s lives by imposing an impossible regimen of dieting, self monitoring, and self regulation.
The philosophical literature which Cahill cites will be familiar to many of us. Most feminist philosophers of my generation will have read, in grad school, the two B’s: Bordo and Bartky. Bartky’s 1990 book Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of oppression and Susan Bordo’s 1993 book Unbearable weight: Feminism, western culture, and the body were the first feminist philosophy works that discussed the political dimensions of women’s efforts regarding our appearance and the high cost we pay for this concern.
Bordo’s book came out the year I graduated but I read some of the articles that went into it along the way. Bordo’s writing about eating disorders was the first time I’d thought about dieting’s effect on women’s lives in the context of feminist philosophy.
Maybe for younger scholars, Cressida Heyes’ work will have played this role. Heyes’ terrific 2006 paper, “Foucault goes to weight watchers” is also published in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia (21 (2): 126–49).
Cahill is a beautiful writer and I love her language when she talks about reconciling her decision to lose weight with her feminist values:
“I realized that maximizing my ability to move, quickly, effectively, strongly, was entirely conducive to my feminist aspirations and
activities. I wasn’t aspiring to skinniness or frailty, just the opposite: I wanted to bring strength and vigor to whatever struggle I chose. I wanted to get to my fighting weight.”
I don’t know of any philosopher who has set out to write principles that ought to guide our efforts at weight loss. Cahill doesn’t do that exactly either but she does describe the principles she chose and why they mattered to her. I admire the guidelines she adopted, on feminist grounds, to guide her weight loss journey. In short, there were to be no changes that couldn’t be permanent, no classes of foods off limits, no special or different foods, and no displays of food denial. I liked reading about her choices and how she approached them as a feminist and as a philosopher.
Instead, Cahill dropped weight through the methods of food journaling, calorie tracking, and exercise. Both Tracy and I have blogged about our different reactions to food tracking here on our blog. Tracking and the Panopticon was Tracy’s post on this subject which I followed up with Another Perspective on Tracking. It was interesting in the weeks that followed that post to hear which side of fence our friends lived on. “I’m with you, I track everything,” said one friend, while another agreed with Tracy that the process was “nasty and oppressive.” Everyone had done it and we all had a view.
One of the more philosophically interesting parts of Cahill’s project was how others saw her results.
“I might have called it getting stronger, or deepening my bodily flourishing, or becoming more intentional about the intersection of my material existence and my material culture. But in the context of contemporary culture, what I had done was ‘‘lost weight,’’ and people’s reactions to that weight loss were a fascinating part of the experience.”
Cahill strikingly writes about the downsides of losing weight. Like me, she isn’t so happy with the phenomena I call “skinny face.”
One thing that may have made Cahill’s experiences different from those of many of us is that she came to her plan without a history of body loathing and dieting. Prior to this it sounds like she didn’t even weigh herself regularly. And even now she doesn’t dislike her former, larger body. That’s so lovely and rare.
“I don’t look back at photos of myself from a year ago and shudder. That was a different body that I lived, with its own set of possibilities, practices, and abilities. And there are certainly cultural contexts where that body would be more useful and conducive to my survival than the one I’m living now. Come the apocalypse, those extra pounds would come in handy.”
I did wish Cahill spent more time addressing the dreaded D word, “diet” and I wanted to hear more about how she’s been keeping the weight off. I’ve been down her road of significant weight loss (a few times actually) but I’ve never succeeded in staying at the lower weight. At times I also wanted to hear her draw more general conclusions and principles but Cahill sticks wisely with philosophical reflections on personal experience.
If you’re a feminist interested in the phenomenon of weight loss and you have access to the holdings of a university library, I strongly recommend that you go read Cahill’s Musings piece. For the rest of you, well, this is why I care so much about open access publishing. The beautiful and important work of feminist academics ought to be more widely available, not locked away behind the firewalls that guard the ivory tower or the paywalls that guard the publisher’s websites.
And if you’re like Cahill, someone who has lost weight and kept it off, do her experiences accord with your own? I’m both personally and professionally curious.
From the New York Times: “The report on nearly three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people. The report, although not the first to suggest this relationship between B.M.I. and mortality, is by far the largest and most carefully done, analyzing nearly 100 studies, experts said.”
This is in keeping with a declaration made by The New York Times in 1912 when they declared Elsie Scheel, “the perfect woman” at 171 lbs.
Blogger Kate Harding described Scheel in these terms: “Miss Elsie Scheel’s BMI would have been 26.8, placing her squarely in today’s dreaded “overweight” category. At Banana Republic, to pick a random contemporary store, she would wear a size 8 top, a 12/14 bottom, and probably a 12 dress with the bust taken in.” (Kate Harding is the author of the BMI Project.)
That’s okay. I’m not worried. I’ve been in the overweight category all of my adult life, even at my thinnest. Given my 122 lb base of muscle and bone, I’ll always be overweight. Which is, I’ve argued here, part of the problem with weight and BMI as measures of anything meaningful.
I often wonder about the effect of news like this on the naturally lean. One of thing that interests me is that it seems it just doesn’t matter how big the health benefits of being overweight are, no one would suggest that underweight people try to gain weight. It’s just too tough. Why doesn’t this work the other way?
I posted recently about vegan sports nutrition. I know I can fuel my body sufficiently on a vegan diet. A sports nutritionist confirmed that for me. And she was impressed with the choices I make, even before she “counselled” me. In fact, she had very little to say about how I should change my eating, given my level of activity.
Samantha posted about why she hates Weight Watchers. I have also had my ups and downs (literally) with WW and other programs. There are lots of reasons to be wary of any program that focuses on weight loss as the sole goal. And there are lots of programs like that out there.
When I was in my twenties I (twice) lost a considerable amount of weight through a centre called “Physician’s Weight Loss Clinic.” I am 5 feet, 4 inches tall and when I joined I weighed about 120 pounds. On their 700 calorie a day diet (!!) and with *daily* weigh-ins, I went down to 105 pounds (that’s 11 pounds lower than the low end for my height at WW; WW would refuse me or demand a doctor’s note).
Forget any form of activity on the Physician’s Weight Loss Clinic plan. I could barely make it through a work day at my summer job in an air conditioned office answering phones at a desk all day. I’m sure the nurse who did the weigh-ins had an eating disorder. By the time I reached goal, I had one too.
As Samantha said, apart from the fact that these programs don’t usually “work” for long term weight maintenance, they do not have a good handle on what active people require. They do not support, encourage, or even understand eating for performance.
Sports nutrition is a far cry from the calorie-restricted plans weight loss centres and programs offer. And sports nutrition counselling provides solid information for the athlete who regards food as fuel for enhancing her performance. In general, I had a positive experience with it in that respect.
So why have I decided that it’s not for me? I have a history of food obsession, chronic dieting, and disordered eating. The diet industry fostered the attitudes and behaviors that resulted in an almost complete disconnect between my physical hunger signals and my actual desire for food. I had no sense of proper portions and still today struggle most not with what to eat but how much.
At various times of my life, I have attempted to “recover” what I lost: a natural, intuitive relationship with food as a response to hunger and physical need. The most hope for a new approach came to me through the work of Geneen Roth (especially Breaking Free From Compulsive Eating) Jane Hirschmann and Carol Munter (Overcoming Overeating), and Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch (Intuitive Eating).
The approach, popularized in the early nineties, teaches people to re-connect with their hunger signals and to stop demonizing some foods as “bad” while others are praised as “good.” All of them said to throw away the scale and commit to never dieting again.
When I first encountered these works, I was a PhD student in a demanding doctoral program. I spent most of my day thinking about food and judging my body harshly. I starved myself for weeks on end and worked out for hours every day. These authors promised relief from the obsession with food and, more importantly, from the body hatred that fuelled my workouts.
This month, after some reflection, I made a decision to return to the authors and books that gave me so much hope twenty years ago. I will be blogging more about that at some point soon.
So what does all of this have to do with sports nutrition and sports nutrition counselling? Given my history, it is beyond easy for me to convince myself that a solid “plan” is not a diet. Even the diet industry avoids the word “diet” these days.
But for me, no matter how sound the information I receive from a nutrition counsellor is, it starts me down the path of what I call “mediated eating.” The eating is mediated by information about what and how much I should be eating. And that disassociates me from my body, my physical hunger signals, my intuitive relationship with food.
For me, that is dangerous. It fosters old patterns of behavior and soon I am back to an obsessive relationship with food. Eating is then mediated by the desire to change my body. My body is no longer acceptable as it is.
And the cycle starts all over again. I can feel that creeping back into my life right now. It started with the nutrition counselling. I want to nip it in the bud.
Now, maybe someone who is blogging about being “fittest at fifty” is just fooling herself if she thinks she can have that as a goal and yet not have an at least somewhat mediated relationship with food.
We will have to see. If I want freedom from the obsession with food, weight, and body image, I need to accept that for me (not necessarily for you), sports nutrition has all the psychological trappings of any other plan.
And that’s why I am no longer interested in sports nutrition or sports nutrition counselling.
These photos by Howard Schatz, from his 2002 book, Athlete, have been making the rounds lately. Sam gave a shout-out to Schatz’s photos in her popular post, “Fit, Fat, and What’s Wrong with BMI?”
