Burnout by Emily Nagoski & Amelia Nagoski

Author:Emily Nagoski & Amelia Nagoski
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473561267
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Bodies are imperfect, and sometimes they let us down. They are susceptible to disease and breakage and entropy. Our bodies can disappoint us, and the world can punish us when our bodies aren’t what they “should” be. So we are not suggesting that you “love your body,” like that’s an easy fix. We’re suggesting you be patient with your body and with your feelings about your body.

Your body is not the enemy. The real enemy is out there—the Bikini Industrial Complex. It is trying sneakily to convince you that you are the problem, that your body is the enemy, that your body is inadequate, which makes you a failure.

This stuff is difficult and messy. After you finish this chapter, you are going to have dinner with friends and hear them talking about calories and fat and whether or not they “deserve” to eat dessert or how nice it must be for you “not to care what you eat.” You are going to hear family members criticize themselves or others for the way they’ve “let themselves go.” You’re going to want to explain to them that people don’t need to earn the pleasure of delicious food, that de-prioritizing conformation with the culturally constructed ideal is not failure, and that “fat” doesn’t mean “unhealthy.” Sometimes you’ll say these things; sometimes you won’t. Sometimes you won’t want the argument. Both choices are okay; it’s all just part of the mess.

We’ll conclude this chapter with this example of our own mess.

At the same time that Emily was working on this chapter, she was also—oh, God—losing weight, in preparation for a large professional event, to which she had been invited as a keynote speaker. She knows from the research and from experience that she is perceived differently depending on her weight, and she wanted to be perceived in the thin way. So one Friday morning, she spent three hours writing about body acceptance, and then she went upstairs and, because it was Friday, she weighed herself.

Then she called Amelia and said, “This is so screwed up! On the one hand, I really will be taken more seriously as a professional and an expert if I conform more closely to the aspirational ideal. On the other hand, my efforts to conform to that ideal are in opposition to the very message about which I have been invited to speak, as an expert.”

“Yep, it’s a mess,” Amelia agreed. “But it’s also the new hotness.”

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