Is the New Brand of Body Positivity Actually Hurting Us?

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Trigger warning: disordered eating and body issues

My body and I have a complicated history. My earliest memory of my learned “fear of fatness” was in third grade, at a local ice-skating rink. There was a girl in a very sparkly outfit doing jumps, and I told my mom I wanted to be just like her. “No you don’t,” she responded, “she’s fat.” While my mom (and my entire mother’s side) tend to be long and lean-ish, my father’s side (particularly the women) tend to be curvier, and often, clinically obese. I was always a slightly larger boned child, so my parents were adamant (and ever vigilant) that I shouldn’t follow in my paternal footsteps.

I know this “worry” came from a good place, but it often left me feeling picked on and angry. Like the time I stepped away from the dinner table and overheard my mom tell my friends to “encourage me to eat less.” Or that time my dad looked at my fro-yo (while we were with company) and asked, “Do you really need to finish that?” But this fear for my (possibly fat) future didn’t stop there. From ages eight to sixteen I was highly competitive in Tae Kwon Do, so I was regularly crash dieting before tournaments and getting weighed in public. And when I say crash dieting, I mean full windbreaker workouts in the sauna and multiple days of just flavored water and gum. Nothing like having your weight yelled out in a room full of middle school mean girls to make your self-esteem crumble. My early college career was punctuated by liquid diets, steamed veggies, and fat free grilled chicken. No matter how “thin” I got, I’d look at photos and zero in on the size of my arms, or the lack of thigh gap. In short, my early years were a mess of internalized fatphobia, and my harshest judgments were reserved for myself.

As I got older and my body filled out, I added another complication to the mix: I realized my gender is fluid. Though it’s not obvious to most, I do identify as gender-queer, and while it was easier to move along the spectrum when I was less shapely, my curves can feel like burdens of femininity. Loose, androgynous clothing catches on my chest, and skinny jeans look less Patti Smith/Ruby Rose and more Jennifer Lopez/Amber Rose. My irrational fears became tri-fold: fear for my health (though my doctor assured me I was fine), fear of being alone (though I’ve had my fair share of suitors), and finally, fear of my making my identity invisible (even though, deep down, I know all gender is a performance).

My lovely (gender-nonconforming) humps

Most days, I think I’m past all the illogical negative thinking. I wear crop tops, don’t own a scale, and (mostly) never shame myself about eating dessert. My sweetie thinks my body’s bangin’ and I can actually take the compliment. Also, therapy happened.

But in the time I’ve grown, there’s been a cultural shift. Gone are the Kate Moss/Fiona Apple “thinspiration” of my younger days, and instead the word on the street is “body positive.” Apparently, buxom people (mostly women) decided to band together, rise up, and support one another. (While flexing their incredible combined spending power.) The messages of self-love are everywhere: Beyoncé thinks you’re flawless when you wake up. Feminist Instagram wants you to #honoryourcurves and tell the man “#effyourbeautystandards!” Dove hopes you realize how beautiful you are inside. Pantene just wants to remind you that you’re worth it. Aerie (American Eagle’s underwear line) wants you to be proud of your flaws! Musicians, models, heck, even (read: especially) brands… all of a sudden everyone wants me to know that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. Which, in theory, seems like a pretty great thing, right? (And to be fair, is probably really awesome for the next generation of girls.)

But for me? It’s not that simple.

Why? Because a few weeks ago I tried to go ski pant shopping and couldn’t fit in a single pair of pants on the women’s side. Turns out, absurdly, the largest size the store carried was a ten. I ended up crying on the street corner, eating consolation red velvet cupcakes. And as I sat there feeling ugly from changing room lights that highlighted my cellulite, ashamed of my diet and the resultant hips, wondering if this was the universe telling me I was too fat to ski… I was reminded just how deep the self-loathing runs. I was totally blaming myself for the store’s shitty sizing choices. The fatphobic programming didn’t just disappear because it’s no longer trendy to have body dysmorphia. Stores don’t magically all carry a full range of sizes, leading ladies didn’t become body diverse overnight, and all the broken body standards I was taught to aspire to aren’t undone by a few ad campaigns, pop songs, or hashtags.

You should go and love yourself

And that’s why logging into the interwebs and seeing body positivity and self-love as intersectional feminist requirements makes me cringe sometimes. It’s wonderful movement, and I fully believe that other people’s beauty comes in all shapes and sizes… just not my own. Body positive? Shoot, I’m aiming for body “I don’t hate you today” or body “I’m grateful you exist and take me places” or even just body “you’re okay I guess.” It’s dangerous to feel like a bad feminist just because I haven’t undone years of insecurity about how thick my thighs are. There shouldn’t be guilt in feeling the shame you were taught—by the majority of society—to feel.

So for the rest of us—who maybe haven’t managed to love ourselves in all (unflattering overhead) lights: it’s okay to not be okay. I propose #Bodymeh as an acceptable feminist Instagram hashtag. Our accomplishments don’t count for less because we still secretly think we’d be more attractive if we lost a few pounds. Maybe some days we don’t think we’re beautiful and who cares? (And who said beauty’s always a goal?) As far as I’m concerned, it’s fine to feel ambivalent about your body some days, not like it other days, and only like it from particular angles or in particular outfits. And if you (like me) want to strategically hide your curves to instead of honor them? I’m not judging you.

It’s Been 12 Years and I Still Have Wedding Regrets

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Surely everyone has a few wedding regrets when it’s all over and done with, don’t they? Little regrets like not getting to spend as much time with your new husband or wife on your wedding day. Or wishing you hadn’t ordered so many canapés before the main meal or kicking yourself for inviting the uncle who you knew in your heart would not behave within the realms of social acceptability. Please tell me I’m not the only person to have wedding day regrets. Please? If only so I can feel better.

As a British couple, when we got married twelve years ago, our ideas about our wedding ceremony were that we had no ideas. You see us Brits, unlike Americans and Canadians, are only just now slowly coming around to the idea of what a wedding ceremony is truly all about. We’re only just about getting past our ridiculous stiff-upper-lipped-British-ness and starting to have ceremonies where we don’t simply become legally married and act like casual bystanders to our own marriage-in-the-making, but are actual living, breathing participants of our ceremony and do and say the things that we have decided to do and say!

Let me give you a little background to our own ceremony, so you can see why I might be full of regret. We got married in stunning Puerto Vallarta, Mexico where we lived and worked back in the early 2000s. We couldn’t have wished for a more beautiful place for our low-key, family and friends–orientated wedding day. When it came to our ceremony we knew that in being atheists, a civil, non-religious ceremony would be top of the list. If I’d even known about the words Humanism and Humanists at the time that we got married, I would have been hunting down a celebrant to marry us, but that’s another story all by itself.

So we set about sorting out our civil ceremony, with the help of our venue and we spent a hell of a lot of time laughing-crying-laughing hysterically at all that needed to be done, just to get legally married, also know as the bullshit bureaucracy. There were the blood tests and other the medical tests, not to mention the pre-marriage wedding course and video on procreation and how to live a family life. I am not joking.

My role as a wife is to be beautiful?

In getting our heads stuck in all of this, this is pretty much where our minds stayed for the duration of the planning. All we ended up thinking about in terms of our ceremony was the fact that a) it was actually going to happen after all of the poking, prodding, and blood-giving we went through, b) it was going to be non-religious, and c) that it was going to take place in the venue of our dreams. And so on the day of our wedding, when the registrar (a lovely women, at the least!) tells you that your role as a wife is to be beautiful and to support your husband and then tells your husband that his role is to be strong and to protect his woman (not even wife!), you kind of begin to wonder how these words (and all the rest that followed in the same vein!) were ever allowed to be said at your wedding ceremony, without you even knowing about it beforehand. And then when you are asked to love, honor, and obey, you start to wonder why you didn’t really know anything about your ceremony at all.

During the ceremony we managed to make a joke out of all of the ever-so-slightly sexist, overly macho, anti-feminist marriage rites, which was the only way we really could deal with it. If we hadn’t had, our friends and family who know us inside out, certainly would have joked about it for us. In fact, most of them did. Thankfully, our ceremony ended on the note that we wanted it to; loud, harmonious and joyful, all the best combos, but no sooner had it finished, for me, the nagging began.

I couldn’t shake off the registrar’s words, nor the sounds of the laughter-not-laughter. You know, the kind of laughter that comes out of your mouth to hide the rest of the emotions that you’d rather not come out during the middle of such a precious event. Yep, that kind. I couldn’t let it rest either that there was also so much I wanted to tell my husband and so much that I wanted to pledge and promise him, which at the very least would have overshadowed everything the registrar had said. It makes me feel sad that I never got to say these things to him or to shout out loud in front of our nearest and dearest how much I loved him and why I was making this commitment to him, which had nothing to do with beautifying myself for him! And there’s nothing I regret more than the realization of not getting to do all of this when it was far too late.

I laugh until I cry about it

My husband thinks, even to this day, that I’m over-reacting. He says that what is most important is that we got married with our loved ones present, not what was said, or on our part, what wasn’t said. But now, even to this day, I still disagree with him. As far as I’m concerned, what was said (and not said) matters more than anything. Especially because what was said was what we attested to and what we attested to was not what we would have wanted to say, if given the choice. We were not invited to or given the chance to say our own vows, which was partly the marriage registry system’s fault, partly our naivety and ignorance, and partly due to the lack of wedding resources that championed owning your wedding day. Nor did we have the chance to express ourselves personally in any way other than our choice of music to start and end the ceremony.

Don’t get me wrong, our ceremony, our being together with all of our family and friends who had flown thousands of miles to support us, was very very special, because they made it special. However, it just did not feel like it was our ceremony. That’s all. It was a ceremony, but not our ceremony. There is a huge difference. On a good day, when I’ve had a glass of wine, I can laugh about it. On a bad day, when I’ve had too many glasses of wine, I can laugh until I cry about it.

If I could turn back the clocks, I would not have been so sheep-like in the run up to our ceremony, accepting everything as it was and not thinking more about what we wanted it to be. I would have not been so goddamned stereotypically British. I would have asked more questions, been more curious and, I suppose, not been so concerned with how the rest of the day was going to be, which enabled me to lose sight of what, in the end, was the most important thing for us.