Exactly!
Fair, but your healthy weight and someone else’s might be entirely different things.
Weight =/= health. You can’t tell how healthy someone is just by looking at them in 90% of cases.
By Jaclyn Friedman for Good Magazine; full text at the link.
The rules are set up to ensure we fail.
Don’t want to have sex with Rush Limbaugh? You’re a humorless feminazi. Want to use contraception while having sex? You’re a filthy slut. Have sex without contraception and find yourself pregnant? You’re an idiot. Need an abortion? You’re a murderer. (If someone raped you causing you to need that abortion, you’re a liar, too.) Decide to keep the baby and raise it yourself? You’re a child abuser. The conservatives waging this war against your body are doing it on purpose. If we accept their terms, we will always lose in the end.
Katniss doesn’t start out a revolutionary, just a girl who loves her family and her friends and is determined to help them all survive. For fully half the series, she mostly accepts the Capitol’s rules and plays to win, believing she has no other choice. She’s good at it a lot of the time. She manages to keep herself and her friend Peeta alive until the end so they can survive together. She plays the silly, harmless lovesick girl so well on their Victory Tour that she even begins to convince herself. But every time she starts to succeed at their game they change the rules on her. It’s when she realizes that her very presence is a violation of the rules that she’s truly able to claim control over her fierce heart, strong body, and determination to live a life with freedom and dignity, and becomes a real threat to the Capitol.
When the government tries to control women’s sexuality, men get hurt too.
Not only do Katniss’ male friends Peeta and Gale suffer the side effects of the self-alienation born of her oppression, the emotional wounds they inflict on each other while trying to navigate a fundamentally unjust system teaches them exactly the lesson Snow wants them to learn: to distrust each other. (Poor, long-suffering Peeta gets this memo in the most brutal fashion.) Though they’re sometimes framed that way, neither the story nor the current culture battle are really a war between the sexes: when women can’t acquire contraception and our sexuality is policed, men lose out too. When we forget that, we’re distracted from the reality of what we’re really up against.
Like The Hunger Games, this is actually war between the haves and have nots, with women’s bodies as a battlefield. The war on women is funded by a handful of exceedingly wealthy white men whose daughters and wives will never have to worry about having the resources to access comprehensive health care. This war is disproportionally a war on poor women and women of color (let’s not let the whitewashed Hollywood casting distract us from how powerfully Katniss embodies both of those realities in the books)—and the people who love them. Which should be all of us.
Forcing a sexual agenda on girls is damaging and dangerous.
With all the “Team Peeta” vs. “Team Gale” squealing, it’s easy to forget that when the story begins, Katniss doesn’t seem to be sexually interested in anyone. It’s only when a romance with Peeta is forced on her that she becomes confused about her relationship with Gale.
One of the remarkable things about Katniss is her unshakable sense of self. The more other people focus on her love life, the more resistant she becomes to having one. Many girls face worse fates. When we communicate to girls that the most important thing about them is what they do or don’t do with their sexuality—especially before they’ve had a chance to define that sexuality for themselves—we put them at greater risk for depression and eating disorders, and make them more vulnerable to manipulation.
Even well-intentioned paternalism can hurt us.
When Peeta declares his feelings for Katniss in front of the entire nation, he’s ostensibly doing it to “save” her—to make her more sympathetic to the crowd so more people will want to help her. And he does it without consulting her, believing he knows better than she does what’s good for her. It works in the short term, but things go awry pretty quickly.
So beware so-called allies who tell us we’re overreacting, or that the battle for our bodies shouldn’t be a priority. And remember that President Obama telling us that teen girls can’t be trusted to use Plan B appropriately is no different from Republican legislators claiming they know what information a woman needs before she decides to terminate a pregnancy. Whatever their intentions, they’re all contributing to a world in which our bodies aren’t ours.
Ultimately, the sexual message of The Hunger Games is that Katniss can’t fully inhabit her own sexual and romantic desires until she’s free of others’ agendas for her body. The same is true for all of us.. We’ve got a long fight ahead of us, but we can prevail by focusing not only on who we’re fighting, but on why we fight. May the odds be ever in our favor.
Excellent observation. I want it on my blog.
YES. WE DEFINITELY SHOULD.
I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this message, anon. A+ and four for you.
You’re totally right. The FA movement has been appallingly narrow, and a large part of it has been focused on aesthetics. There’s a reason for the latter part of that, I think, because the majority of us have never felt beautiful and up-ending the social constructions of beauty and claiming them for our own has been important and a big driving force of the movement, especially considering how women’s looks are valued in Western society. But! We are doing this at the expense of WOC and we are doing this at the expense of women who fall outside of the “inbetweenie” line. So I see the value, but I also see huge problems with it.
I like to have conversations in the workshops I leave about what makes people love other people - not what attracts them or what they find sexy, but qualities that make them care very deeply about other people. Usually looks are not prioritized on that list; intelligence, sense of humor, compassion, etc. definitely are.
I think we need to break away from building from the foundation of aesthetics, too. Not that there isn’t room for feeling beautiful (there’s always room for feeling beautiful), but I think that ALL people should learn to value themselves based on their accomplishments and their goodness, and the parts of themselves that make them uniquely them — or, as you very succinctly put it, some non-beauty themed talks of self-appreciation!
My cholesterol is fantastic, my insulin is normal (which is an incredible feat for me because I have polycystic ovarian syndrome), my heart rate and blood pressure are “beautiful” in the words of my doctor, and I take three boot camp rec center classes per week and eat very well for a college student.
Also?
I’m fucking gorgeous (and funny, as evidenced by my facial expression, clearly). The only ugly person in this exchange is you.
— Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” (via sundayafternoonsocialclub)
Relevant. Relevant. Relevant. (via ethiopienne)
relevant on all fucking counts.
(via queernonymoose)
Virginity:
- is sexist
- is heteronormative
- commodifies sex
- commodifies young cis-het white women
- contributes to rape culture
- contributes to slut-shaming
- erases queer folk
- erases transfolk
- frames a woman’s worth as inversely proportional to the number of dicks that have been inside her
I’m not ignoring you, I’m just finding sources to answer your question! Which I really appreciate, by the way :)
Yup. Very succinct.
I find posts like this irritating. As someone who is overweight and who grew up overweight, I never let it bring me down. I didn’t ask people out as a child or a teenager because /I/ wasn’t attracted to them. I didn’t and don’t care about fat jokes on TV. I was taught that how you see yourself is how other will see you. And I saw myself as a good person, a human being with faults and morals just like everyone else. That was and is how I conduct myself: As acting like the person /I/ see myself as. If people don’t want to appreciate that, I don’t want anything to do with them. And that’s how I’ve always been.
People are far too obsessed with what others’ opinions are. Who gives two shits? Opinions are like asswholes. Everyone’s got ‘em. Put on your rubber boots and get ready to wade through some nasty shit. Don’t let other people pass judgement on you.What a coincidence! I find people like you irritating.
Please understand that your lived experience speaks for no one else’s and that you are contributing to shame culture by essentially telling people who are the victims of systematic and rewarded bullying to suck it up. That is deplorable, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
So wallowing in self-hate caused by a broken and shallow society is fine then? Because that’s all posts like the one I commented on are doing. They’re crying out for sympathy for something that’s under their control (I’m assuming that the people who commented on the post don’t have some sort of disorder since none of them outright said that they do indeed have something wrong with their bodies that keeps or kept them from loosing weight). Also, I’d like to note that the entire point of the post was decrying societal ideals by drawing on an example of /that person’s/ lived experience.
Now, I’m taking a fairly calloused stance on the subject but no where did I say “suck it up” I said people shouldn’t let it bother them. They are two different stand points. One’s telling people to look past the ridiculousness of letting shallow minded people bother you and the other is the one that actually promotes bullying.
It doesn’t appear you read my original post.
At what point, ever, do I suggest wallowing in self-hate as a course of action? I want everyone to love themselves. I fucking LOVE myself. But loving myself and occasionally feeling pressured, put down, and depressed by the “broken and shallow” social norms regarding fat bodies are not mutually exclusive. They’re not mutually exclusive for anyone, and it’s important to know that “little voice,” as I call it, isn’t a unique experience.
Of all the 2,000+ reblogs on this, only you and a handful of other people had anything negative to say. You’re one of the only ones whose negativity wasn’t a variation on “lol fat people are gross,” but what you’re saying is, I think, worse in some ways, because you’re invalidating a shared experience that has been important enough to the people who’ve engaged with my original post that floods of them have come to me, thanking me for making them feel less alone. Only through sharing our experiences and building a positive community of support — note that word, please, positive — can we overcome that social bullshit.
Why I’m voting for Barack Obama again in 2012, in the words of Susan B. Anthony:
No self respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her sex.
Lovely. That post has gotten popular enough that the people who have nothing better to say than varying shades of “lol fatty, lol ur groce” have come out to play.
These things are really important contributions to the conversation, guys. For real.
