Do you all read Big Fat Deal?

You really should. I've said both privately and publicly that I have some general disdain for some body acceptance blogs/groups because for the most part, they're really not accepting of all bodies, just the fat ones. And we all know that's crap. As women, we tend to get marginalized when it comes to our bodies and rare is the woman who feels as though she fits the standard, thin or fat. I can't abide those who jump on the "She's-losing-weight-so-therefore-she's-a-lemming" bandwagon that is so rampant in some body acceptance movements.

My body, my choice. Suck on it.

But Mo's blog is different, and she's sharp and witty about addressing the issues that women face as a result of what the world at large thinks about our bodies. Not that they should give one wit, but clearly they do or we all wouldn't be as conflicted as we are about the issue. Anyway, Mo does a fine job and this post in particular made me reflect on something that I ... well, reflected on recently.

I was at my boyfriend's grandparents' house a couple of weeks ago. We all went out to dinner and then the old home movies got dragged out. Namely all of the ones of my boyfriend as the cutest baby in the history of babies, except for myself, of course, which means when we have kids our children will be unstoppable with the cute. World-dominating cuteness is what I'm saying.

I'm sorry. Please excuse the thumping of my uterus.

Anyway, the movies were filmed around 1975, 1976, more than 30 years ago. Ah, thirty years ago. You know, the halcyon days of the American body. A time when everyone was in shape, ate smaller portions because larger ones weren't available and obesity wasn't threatening to take over the world like so many alien invaders. That is if you believe the media reports of the past five years or so.

But as I watched these movies, I couldn't help but notice the varying body types - some fat, some thin, some in between. Generally speaking, just as reflective of any family gathering I go to, at anyone's home, in present time. Now, granted, we're Midwesterners, and we're always considered the Fatlands, no matter the decade, but still. It wasn't as though everyone back then was somehow trim and thin. Which, of course, begs a series of questions that I'm not going to publicly ask here for myriad of reasons, the largest of which is that I don't have time to dig up scientific documentation and the least of which is that this is just an observation I had, not the set up for some huge argument.

It's just that, well, to my eyes, fat people have been around for eons. The idea that somehow we need to slap words such as "epidemic" and "death" onto being fat, as if the state of being fat is novel, or not just the way some bodies are built, or that those who are fat are something to fear. The reason for why when I diet and exercise I don't get much smaller than I am now is because my people are big people. My mother, at my age, was my size. Almost to a tee (or T or whatever). And the only reason she was 100 pounds when she died was because all she did was smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and work on being pissed off at the world.

And since that's what it takes for me to be that thin, I'll take a pass. This is how I'm built. Move on. Don't make assumptions that I just can't commit to my health enough to skinnify myself.

I've said for years now that what I think it truly plaguing us as a society is our laziness, our inability to think for ourselves, to educate ourselves and then form our own opinion. I just think that before we buy into every Fat Is Evil argument, we do some thinking for ourselves.

Posted by Erin at 08:51 AM | filed under: Inspiration