[Medusa]

Originally Posted by June

I'm kind of fired up this morning.

I was emailing with a friend (she can out herself here, or not. Won't be hard to figure out who it is)

And she is actually getting HATE mail shaming her for her "betrayal" of the "Fat Community" because she decided she didn't want to end up with Diabetes and wanted to live longer.

Who the fuck is she betraying? The Major drug companies who make Lipitor and Insulin?

She's not betraying me, a woman of size.

She's not betraying anyone, and if we feel shame because she has the gumption to get up and move and eat healthier foods, that's our problem, not hers.

She's lost over a hundred pounds on her own. No surgery, no magic pill. Hard work -- Not so she can "get laid" SO SHE CAN LIVE LONGER!

Not only should we be encouraging and congratulating her, we should be looking at her as a role model. Not to be thin, to be healthy. She knew at 400lb+, she was NOT healthy.

I cannot believe that people would send her hate mail. In fact, it enrages me.

And no, I am not a self-loathing fat person. I am a 50 year old woman who feels pretty good about herself most days. But I also know that I am NOT as healthy as I could be and I do NOT move as much as I should. I am not diabetic, I do not have high blood pressure, and I don't want to get it, even though there are all kinds of pills out there to combat it.

I have started walking and doing Yoga again, because, this woman, my friend, woke me the fuck up and made me look at my own lifestyle in a different way.

I don't even own a scale. I don't care what the scale says, I care that I don't get up in the morning with stiffness, that I can walk twelve blocks uphill and not stop, that my body stays flexible as I age.

I have said this before, I do believe in size acceptance. I do not believe in Health At Any Size. I do not think it is healthy when someone cannot walk more than 20 feet without resting because they are out of breath. I do think it's possible that people who are obese by the Medical standards are healthy because they move their body and eat well, even if it's more.

I have a really great yoga dvd done by a woman of size that I will send to the first person who PM's me (give me your address). Because of the way I am, I need to actually go to the classes and wasn't so good at following DVD directions. I am a visual learner

I think I am done ranting now. For the moment.

That is incredibly fucked up.

Let me say this, I think it is incredibly brave of Superwoman (I'm calling her that until she decides to out herself) to do her journey in a visible, authentic way with unabashed resolve. It's brave not because there are vile haters out there in the world who let their own self esteem issues keep them from celebrating someone's health success, but because she is brave enough to do it with an audience. That, my dear friends, takes giant ovaries and that, to me, makes her a fucking BAD ASS.

On another note:

This is something that June and I have talked about at length. Back on the Dash site, when I was first figuring out I was a Femme at the age of 22, I felt such an enormous sense of affiliation and love with all ofthe fat people there who loved their bodies in ways I had never been witness to before. I was able to shed much of my insecurity about my own size by witnessing a few people I deeply cared about at the time own their size and space and demand the kind of respect for it that I had always been afraid to ask for.
It was and is amazing.
I am a firm believer that sexy comes and any size. I am also a firm believer that love should come at any size (both self-love and love directed). I do not, however, believe that any of us should be fetishizing size in a way that supports food addiction or destructive eating habits. That may look like many different things to all of us but for me, it means that I don't keep telling myself I'm fine the way I am while I shove Twinkies in my face and can't walk up a flight of stairs or am having a stroke due to high blood pressure while still shoveling over 6000 calories a day into my body.

It's hard for me to even type this because it feels like such a betrayal of my fat politics. The politics I have put a LOT of effort into over the years. Don't get me wrong, I am not ever going to dismantle my fat politics or start being negative about fat bodies but this re-examination has definitely churned some muddy waters for me.

There's another thing that I am remiss to talk about but I think it's important. I think that some of the fat politics that were happening in other spaces made a nice soft bed for willing food addicts to become even more unhealthy under the guise of....fuck, I've written and rewritten this sentence 10 times and am trying to say it in a way that won't sound like an attack. Let me just say that I gained a significant amount of weight when I felt that my fat body was more accepted/desired/fetishized/celebritized/etc. That's what happened for me and I own it and it wasn't because anyone else made it happen. I still hear the echos of fatphobia in "I'm not usually attracted to big girls but I'd date Medusa in a heartbeat" or "Medusa dresses so well for someone her size!" or "I wish I had Medusa's confidence!" (as if a confident fat woman was such an anomaly..and maybe it is but it felt like a headpat more often than not like "Oh look at you, with all of your ADORABLE little self-esteem!")

Sometimes I still feel like a traitor for even daring to make my body smaller, for having a goal of a healthier body, for being so self-involved that I'd want to focus on me. I know some of that is just the old stuff talking. But I also know that some of it is because I am coming from a history and a specific Butch-femme culture where there were some people who I idolized who were severely overweight and who helped me to find the love within myself after a lifetime of hating, both by watching and witnessing them and by creating an atmosphere of acceptance and love. That's a hard thing to examine if it means I have to let go of my safety zone, and for me that's exactly what it means.

Sorry for the gush.

<3