This Is Big by Marisa Meltzer

Author:Marisa Meltzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Surely all of this is complicated by my personal politics. For as long as I can remember, I’ve considered myself a feminist. When I am actively dieting, the guilt I once felt about what I ate becomes replaced by guilt over being the wrong kind of feminist—or maybe no kind of feminist, a woman pursuing something as conventional and ennui-inducing as losing weight. I fear that instead of fighting for a world where all bodies are admired, I’m pandering, reshaping my body to make it acceptable to the world around me. There’s a thread of old-school feminist thought that says taking pleasure in being admired for our looks is participating in our own oppression, minimizing our brains and power. One of the most nuanced takes on food and society and feminism I’ve read is in Judith Warner’s book Perfect Madness: “It was as though there were good and bad kinds of controlling behavior. The bad kind was the kind that played into the hands of the ‘patriarchy’—promoting thinness, for example, or anything else that conformed to what was generally considered male notions of female beauty. The good kind took on the patriarchy—in the form of challenging the medical establishment, the food industry, or anything else that smacked of convention.” All these behaviors, she argues, make us feel good; there is a self-reinforcing aspect to it. “Food-and-body control is an opiate. A highly effective and highly adaptive way of drowning out the angst of existence.”

Liberated women are fully aware of the complicated politics involved in food, fat, and our bodies. We know how corrupt the diet industry is; we take to social media to applaud brands for expanding their plus-size lines. Most of us agree that the insurance charts for what is considered a healthy weight are unrealistic, that the standard definition of beauty is criminally narrow. We have a surplus of knowledge, and perhaps because of this, the only publicly acceptable message is one of body positivity and self-acceptance.

Good feminists, in short, do not diet. Or if they do, they don’t talk about it. We are trained to hide our dieting, or to make our dieting look less like dieting, because we are supposed to know better. A writer I know lived in fear that a guy she was dating would spot the prepackaged low-calorie food from a diet delivery service in her freezer; another tries to count her cashews away from her coworkers. Another friend has a private, secret Instagram just so she can follow fitness accounts.

I believe in body love. I also believe, beyond the personal ramifications of self-love and body positivity as a political act, that we all deserve space. I believe that for some women, being kind to themselves works. I do. But for me, the body-acceptance rhetoric just doesn’t hold up to any level of intellectual rigor. If I have not been able to rely on my body to do what I wanted it to and to please me, I have been able to rely on my brain.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.