Anger No More

No more bitching about how I'm fat and expected to be thin. That's my early new year's resolution. I see a common pattern on this little blog: I don't like my body and I don't like other people's opinion about my body. None of that is positive!

From now on I'll try to be more accepting about myself and others.

Okay, maybe later.



Why is that places like Myspace are magnets for men who just want to cruise through your photo album and make perverted comments about your body? That's been my experience anyways. I had to delete a comment today by some guy I barely "friended", some gibberish about my big breasts, what he'd like to do, that sort of thing. The other week I had a guy asking if I would do certain things with him, things a little too lurid to describe here. Am I foolish for keeping my photo up? Maybe. I have some romantic notion that I'll stumble on the profile of a witty, extroverted lesbian and we go on to have a love affair to end all love affairs. I am so naive.

United Student Pride accepted my request to join their organization on my college campus! I am thrilled to be out of the closet on campus, because that is where the most beautiful and intelligent women are! I stated I was bisexual, because that is what I feel I am, though sometimes I'll be on one end of the Kinsey scale and other times I'll swing to the other end. Yet, I always end up in bed with an adult video, watching the pretty porn starlet, not the male stud, but the buxom babe, and it's her body that shoots me into outer-space, no matter how sincerely I might believe at that moment that my passion for women is just a phase. But now I'm getting all lurid, so I'll end here.

Positive Plus Size Role Model: Lane Bryant

It's not quite fury, what I feel, when I read hate-filled comments on the web about overweight and obese people, it's well...frustration. On the one hand, I want to please society. On the other hand, I want to be able to spot these cruel people and avoid them, even if that means being fat and hated.

It's not that I'm not trying to lose weight. I've already lost about approximately 15 pounds since April, sometimes more, depending on whether or not I just ate when I weigh myself. I'm still borderline, in the obese range, being 164, but I've made progress and I work out 2x a day, plus walking, plus dancing. So it's not like I'm lying in bed for the whole day shoving cakes into my mouth.

I do well in college, I work out, I am a nice person, I am a vegetarian who counts calories. But, according to the internet, I am still too fat to be considered "normal" or "likeable" or "acceptable", whatever euphemism there is for "worthless" you can think of, that is what a lot of society sees me as.

Why?

If I had that answer I might not feel such low self-esteem. It's interesting that America is the place where a woman can have sovereign control over her body when it comes to reproductive issues, but fat, no, that is forbidden to women.

People prefer a starving waif who could never naturally bear a child because she lost her ability to menstruate, who is moody and malnourished, whose main achievement in life is self-mutilation, over a plump woman. Society lords this fact over us every second, in every TV commercial, billboard, magazine ad, on the subway, buses, college campus, everywhere. Just everywhere.

I don't hate waifs. What I hate is the attitude that to be worthy I must emulate self-mutilators. I do not want to wreck my metabolism, fail out of college, get hospitalized, get anemia, get mood swings, all that baggage isn't worth it to me. Am I alone in this?

I thought so for a long time, until I stumbled onto the whole fat acceptance movement and their primary fashion spokesperson: Lane Bryant. Watching these women strut up and down the catwalk, toned, fleshy thighs, and overflowing bras, I realized that I don't have to view myself as unattractive just because society says so. I can be loved. I can be worthy of sex. I can wear a skirt should I choose to. Why am I so conditioned to hate my body? How can we let a whole series of generations believe that to be loved you must restrict your dietary intake into the danger zone?

I've decided to keep speaking up, even if nobody is reading this. Even if only one person sees this, maybe it will instill a new mentality or challenge their preconceptions. I can only hope my writing is not in vain.