azurelunatic | This thing, please do not do it.

Crossposts: http://azurelunatic.livejournal.com/6740278.html

Entry tags:

rant

This thing, please do not do it.

Contains: passing mention of disordered behaviors, a great deal about process in dealing with a mental minefield; self-denigrating behavior of third parties; body image, as influenced by the unthinking words of third parties; meta about insults with homophobic and misogynistic examples as well as the body-shaming stuff.

I am trying like all fuckery to get over my cringe-and-depart reaction upon observing "fat" as a neutral description for a human being.

My issues, let me show you them. I am fat. I am not altogether comfortable with my current body. In addition to the usual difficulties of changing all the things, I was exposed in my formative (childhood through adolescent) years to a primary role model in an unhealthy pattern of yo-yo and fad dieting, and proceeded to fuck up my own metabolism with behavior that fits the description of anorexia pretty damn well, though thank fuck I was not able to actually sustain it for more than a year. It is a lovely minefield in my head, and it is a testament to the skill and care of the various people involved in helping me with it over the years that I'm now getting around to poking at *that* portion of it at all. Right now I actually have it pretty well mapped, so I know most of the things that will set me off, and I can generally notice something that is going to set me off before it does so, and take steps to get whatever-it-is out of my sphere of notice. (My toolbox for this included, as recently as 2008, hysterical screaming fits upon not shutting the fuck up when I said I could not discuss this thing.) I'm not even able to approach the topic with the usual array of geeky tools in any degree of safety, because it was not my mother, it was my father, and he brought his full array of geeky tools to the task of yo-yo dieting and shared what he was doing proudly, loudly, and without possibility of escape.

I am slowly, gradually, tentatively, stretching out my web of attention to the fat-positive areas of the blogosphere, at my own pace and with many retreats into the safe areas of the internet where one does not discuss these things. (I did not describe myself, back when DW was enjoying a "please describe yourself for those in your circles who cannot view images" meme. I just couldn't. I may, eventually.)

In certain ways it's easier to deal with people who are deliberately trying to hurt, insult, or offend classes of which you are a part or an ally. It can be a great big warning label: "I think you and yours are subhuman and don't deserve dignified treatment." It's not water off a duck's back, but merely by existing as part of a class that faces this bullshit, one develops a certain level of basic resistance. Sometimes one doesn't notice the constant background noise provided it's from a stranger or an already established enemy. The dudebro with the "no fat chicks" shirt has helpfully labeled himself. Thanks, dudebro, and please continue to stay the fuck out of my space; I suspect I'm not even interested in getting close to yours.

I have learned a great amount about how to go away when people say things that are well-intentioned or neutrally meant. I am learning ways to deal with it that don't involve exploding when friends are trying to be helpful. I am justified in getting cranky when people use things that happen to be in my minefield to be mean to/about others. I am ... actually not dealing so well ... with it when other people talk cruelly about themselves.

The phrase that's been bothering me recently comes with various optional bells and whistles. Here's one possible iteration: "Whip me with a noodle if I don't get up off my fat ass and go scoop up dog poop."

When it's used by a person who I would consider fat, or having a fat ass, it doesn't jerk my brain around as badly. Even if it's not intended as a reclaiming act, I can read the statement as neutral or reclaiming if I really have to. When it's not, I don't get that escape. Even when I know for a fact that the person who is saying this would probably rather die than hurt me, the only means for me to escape being hurt is to remove myself from that space. Usually I have to calculate the level of social ruffle that would be caused by me removing myself, and then the amount of fallout that would occur from that, and whether that would be worse than enduring remaining in the space. (Hasty departure can get parsed as attention-seeking, and that gets judged. Ideally the only people who would notice such a departure would be the person tripping off whatever mine, the people responsible for keeping the space in order, and people who know how to talk to someone who's just won the Instant Bad Day prize. Unfortunately sometimes it becomes an exercise in While We Are Trying Not To Do Something Stupid, Let Us Have A Teachable Moment With Someone Who Really Means Well, Understands That We Are Upset, And Wants To Know Why. It becomes hilariously intersectional when the person has difficulty in picking up social cues and genuinely wants to improve, but needs extensive coaching in that, and oh god, right while I am trying to prevent the sort of meltdown that results in more than *one* bad day is really not the time that I am best equipped to put on my Motherfucking All-Patient Educator Hat.)

I recognize that some people do actually need to motivate themselves drill-sergeant style, by insulting themselves to motivate them to do something. (I have found that this sort of pep talk does not increase my productivity, but some people juggle geese.) I am of the camp that believes that give or take various social factors, the insults a person picks says a lot about the specific sorts of things that they have been programmed to find despicable, and the culture of unacceptable things that they are helping to reinforce. A kid who calls stuff "gay" contributes to the concept that it's not actually okay to be gay, even while "gay" the "my lunch is so gay" weakens the association between "gay" the slur, and "gay" the sexual orientation. The sysadmin in the UK who calls their malfunctioning server a "fucking cunt" is being significantly less personally hostile to any women or owners of vaginas/vulvas than the sysadmin in the US using the same phrasing, because that phrase has come into widespread enough use in the UK to start detaching from its origins and be used thoughtlessly and without attention to the meaning. "Motherfucker!" from me rarely literally invokes an actual instance of someone having sex with their maternal parent. It's profane, habitually invoked, and has a satisfyingly heavy weight of syllables when I shout it when I drop a malfunctioning server on my god-damn-mother-fucking-JESUS TOE FUCK SHITCAKES. (So basically I believe in a two-layered profanity stack: the top layer, which has been leached of deeper meaning, but makes interesting statements about what is a speakable bad thing in the society; then the bottom layer, which is what gets pulled out to get fancy, which is the stuff that's either societally or personally the worst thing ever; it's so bad that it's unspeakable to reference the topic casually, horrible to call someone it without cause, and actually bad to really and truly *be* that. This is why US-socialized guys invoking female genitalia upsets me: I rather like my vagina, but this dude thinks calling me a vagina is the worst words he can pull out. This dude thinks that calling another dude a vagina is the worst he can say. This dude holds vaginas and their owners in deepest contempt. That is problematic. The words he is using are merely a symptom.)

To add to the fun, a person who is using "fat" to seriously shame themselves into not procrastinating, or into overcoming pain, or whatever, is likely at a higher base level of self-loathing than I am. As much as their choice of words in my presence is making me cringe, I do not think I'd want to be inside their head for an instant.

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The word 'cunt', in Scotland - or at least the part that I grew up in, the Clyde coast/Glasgow area - is so far removed from its direct meaning that you might have to pause and think about it for a minute.

When I was going through a training programme to build servers at IBM, someone shouted to one of the other guys 'some cunt was here looking for you earlier' (or words to that effect). This meant both that another GUY had been at the training factory AND didn't necessarily imply any major hostility towards the 'cunt'.

My use of language is probably not appropriate in, say, London.

The exercise-tracking website I made with its comedy self-deprecating domain probably didn't help. For what it's worth, you probably don't want to be inside my head at times - I have a brutal self-loathing. Expressing it through weak lols is probably better than ignoring it, but I hadn't thought about what impact it might have on other people. In the end, it's probably for the best that the bike broke and the site became redundant.

The website only caused a minor cringe, so that was actually helpful in letting me explore what some of the parameters were.

I'm glad that it wasn't a major source of woe. :o)

I know I'm a frequent offender in the use of the word in a neutralish fashion. Objectively, but any standard, I'm quite large. There is nothing inherently good or bad about that.

But I note I almost never use language about 'my fat ass' or such (at least I try not to). Because it is really only relevant for a few things when there are literal sizing issues.

Insults have roughly zero postive motivating power for me. Zero.

Hmm.

This whole thing is something I didn't know.

I don't have cohesive thoughts, but you were heard.

I have no idea if I've done this or not but it's entirely possible, as I can imagine myself saying something like that. I will try to not. Part of MY baggage is that I inherited my dad's often COMPLETELY UNHELPFUL tactic of dealing with things that bother him by making stupid jokes about them, then being mildly and stupidly surprised that other people find this off-putting despite the fact that I hated it when he did it.

My own personal self-loathing is more closely related to the fear that I am disgusting because I am lazy, rather than the fear that I am disgusting because I am fat. My stepmother has fibro and depression and a whole lot of other shit wrong with her and manages to do more than what others expect of her because she is masochistic that way, and I am not, but I often accept other people's judgements that I am a lazy good-for-nothing because I'm not willing to ignore my pain the way she does, because if I were a good sick person I'd suck it up and suffer instead of insisting that if my creativity goes out the window I need to rest.

So for what it's worth, should it help you to know this, if I HAVE said something like this, it's not that I think my ass is disgusting (its relative fatness is debatable, but it fits some definitions of fat and I tend to think of it that way without too much self-loathing) but rather that I secretly think the fact that I don't do what I know I ought to do is disgusting, even when I objectively ought to know that I can't.

I believe (strictly from observation - and anecdotal observation at that - not actual experience) that "fat" used that way is actually a kinda synonym for "lazy". Which use has problems of its own.

Slightly rambly:

I support your process. Mine is different and probably unhelpful to yours: I've been making a deliberate effort to use "fat" as a neutral term, rather than avoiding it like I used to. So I will describe myself as "fat," or as "a little bit fat" (since right now I'm in that in-between state). I'm also starting to work on removing the emotional weight I attach to "obese" and "overweight." (Though I think the current definitions of what weights fit those categories is seriously messed up.)

I do still usually avoid calling other people fat unless I know for absolute certain that they use the word to describe themselves, though, since it does carry the weight of an insult for a lot of people. (And for that matter, I'd probably feel insulted if someone called me "fat" and meant it as an insult--but part of my upset would be that they were perpetuating the belief. Etc.)

Regarding this:
That is problematic. The words he is using are merely a symptom.

That's a very good point, and I need to mull it over a bit to see how it fits into some other things. Thank you.

Yes, this. The idea being, I suppose, that "people with a bigger [X] size than average do so because they are not motivated enough to spend a lot of energy on looking how other people think they should look." >.<

I hate that sometimes people take the most hardcore examples of human behavior and figure everybody who isn't like that has something wrong with them.

So you've given me all manner of thinky thoughts, as well as a sense of guilt for using the phrase "off my fat ass" on twitter the other day. Sorry. :(

More so since I don't consider myself fat, per se; I tend to go with "plump", "slightly overweight", etc., which is closer to the truth, imo. I'm aware that there are some people who would call me fat as easily as they would call someone much more visibly so, but I'm also aware that those are generally the type of people who like stick-thin and perpetuate "if you are X tall you should weigh no more than Y, and damn the skeleton!" (I... would quite possibly be scary thin at the "proper weight" for my height. I don't like thinking about that.)

I think, as one of the other commenters said, I do conflate fat with lazy, at least with regards to myself, because if I just got up and did more I'd be... maybe not necessarily thinner, but healthier? Stronger? Something. And it is laziness that stops me, for the most part.

But I've been working on not judging other people's weight, simply because I cannot possibly know - without knowing them - whether there is a medical condition behind their weight, and no one likes being judged for something they can't help.

I.. may need to mull this over some more.

Using it neutrally is not particularly problematic to me. Depending on the day, it might or might not upset me, but occasional exposure to the word being used neutrally and appropriately, like, "I'm fat, so ARGH FUCKING INCONSISTENT AND BADLY MEASURED CLOTHING SIZING SYSTEMS GO DIAF" (actually, I think people of every gender and size can get behind that one) (and, DIAF, another common internet insult that's sort of horrifying once you unpack it) is actually desensitizing me. Desensitizing to that is a good thing. I can, for example, hear a phone ring without flinching most of the time now. (See: Shawn, 1996.)

the thing is, I would NEVER judge anyone else that way. just myself.

I really loathe the word "obese" but I think that's because I've worked in health care since 1997 and I see how it gets thrown around casually and used to problematise and label and categorise and medicalise people in ways that are never ever ever EVER helpful.

Overweight is just confusing. I mean it makes sense when applied to a suitcase on an airplane (particularly a small one where there are fuel calculations involved) but not so much a person.

Neutral is actually helpful to my process, because it helps desensitize me to the actual word. (Though it does make me more aware of when it's used cruelly, because instead of automatically flinching away when I hear it, I have to analyze it, and if my number one expectation is no longer bad, then it hurts more when it turns out to be bad.)

That's what I think of too when people say things like that. And it so often seems to be untrue that I find it to be highly annoying. And even in cases where someone might be thinner if they were less lazy, they are often still getting more done than some thinner people. As far as I can tell, genetics and health have a huge affect on weight, which is often more relevant than diet and lifestyle. Oh, and drug use. Some medications simply cause weight gain or weight loss, and there isn't much you can do about that if you need them. So, often it's more about judging people for the medications they need to take, which does not seem at all sensible to me.

Yeah. And the whole "X percent of obese people don't know it" and how that's not because there are hordes of super-fat people running around oblivious, it's because you can look like *me* and be obese. (I'm so not the popular concept of what "obese" looks like.)

More evidence for "fat is not necessarily lazy," in case you find it useful: I am fat and an avid cyclist. (10 miles today with commute + errands; did a 46-mile day a couple weeks ago.) A friend of mine is fat and an even more avid cyclist; I'm in awe of her biking. And we are both awesome. *grin* And yeah, cycling gives me strong legs, but it hasn't caused much weight loss. I'm cool with that.

I hear you :/ It's... scarily easy to be hard on one's self, sometimes.

Our general statement as a group would be more close to "I will have to whip myself with a noodle if I don't get off my ass and go scoop dog poop"

No qualifier of ass used.

And we too have a bit of a mine-field in our heads from having a parent who was a yo-yo dieter, and we actually had not ever heard of fat-positivity till about a year ago.

We liked this post.

Right, I get that exercise does not necessarily equal weight loss, but is generally a contributing factor, just like diet, genetics, and medications, etc.

Maybe chalk this up to another case of too hard on oneself? (Which is kinda scary because I have good body image compared to a lot of people, and that makes me a bit sad. :( )

ETA: This... isn't meant to sound as brusque as I realized it does after I posted. Sorry!

Edited (My issues with articulating, let me show you them.) 2011-10-04 01:50 (UTC)

I...think the only times I have used "my fat ass" in a descriptor, it was usually "fat pregnant ass" and had to do with me being a very large late-term pregnant woman who needed to deal with something that a medical service provider had fucked up in some way, and was kind of trying to use to my advantage the desire of whoever I was dealing with to not have a large and very angry pregnant woman yelling at them, or just sitting there and refusing to leave. So I suppose that is reclaiming-ish?

This.

The "proper weight" for my height would be dangerous for me. I know what my high school fighting weight felt like, and what it took to get under that, and I am absolutely determined to never, ever do that to myself again, and I also know how very easy it would be to slip back into those habits, and worse, how well-meaning people would encourage me in it.

With more exercise you'd have more endurance, likely; I do know a few people where more exercise means that their resources are dangerously depleted and stay that way for quite some time. So that's not even absolute. Humans are complicated.

That sounds like it's on the list of uses that don't make me cringe.

"Motherfucking All-Patient Educator Hat"

I should really get one of those. Really.

75% less swearing while wearing it!

I think this is related to the euphemisms thing. If you look at the euphemisms a society has, and then you look at the places where concepts have had to be re-euphemized because the previous euphemisms were too well-known, you get a good picture of the things that a society can't bring itself to talk about.

Related: I've found a response to the self-directed eating judgement talk that actually seems to tone down the talk without causing drama. Do you want it? (The sort of talk that's all about what the speaker just ate and "shouldn't" have, as a way of bonding with the listener.)

Makes sense, yes.

AND VERY YES. I wasn't even thinking about that one, but oh god yes, that one drives me up the wall.

(in an offhand voice, with shrug under the "Eh")

"Eh, I'm not the Food Police or anything. As long as you're not eating live kittens, it's none of my business."

Followed by a graceful change of subject.

(Note: I don't think this would work well for vegetarians, because thanks to PETA, the kittens statement is not as clearly over the top. I haven't managed to translate this for vegetarians yet.)

(Second note: this only works for comments addressed directly to oneself. It does not work in group conversations, especially not where there are several people using this form of bonding.)

Clarification on the "vegetarians" note:

I don't think this would work well if said by a vegetarian. I have no idea if it would work if said to a vegetarian.

(What you're trying to avoid is any perception that the statement is anything other than hyperbolic. Sometimes there's enough judgy stigma associated with vegetarianism that it's hard to go hyperbolic enough to be sure of clearing it.)

I wonder if "as long as you're not eating the endangered [insert hot-button plant of the day]" might work, especially if it's toxic.

Nice!

"As long as you're not having a redwood sandwich"? They're sort of the charismatic megafauna of plants.

:D

Thousand-year redwood sandwich? Ow, splinters where no splinter should be.

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cursewords and euphemisms map the charged concepts in a society

Re: cursewords and euphemisms map the charged concepts in a society

Re: cursewords and euphemisms map the charged concepts in a society

Re: cursewords and euphemisms map the charged concepts in a society

Re: cursewords and euphemisms map the charged concepts in a society

Re: cursewords and euphemisms map the charged concepts in a society

Re: cursewords and euphemisms map the charged concepts in a society