"fat girls didn’t get to be pretty"
Fascinating post from Marianne in the aftermath of WisCon: Thoughts On A Pink Bathing Suit; Hacking Fat Gender And Considering FemmeBut the fat girl-child is, alas, often the desexualized girl-child and I don’t mean that in a creepy way - maybe it’s the de-gendered girl-child? It’s the way you don’t get the frilly dresses, you don’t get the makeup, you don’t get the social assumptions that assume you’re going to be boy-crazy and think about clothes all the time.
There’s a freedom to that, certainly, but as with anything else that determines identity for you instead of helping you develop it on your own for yourself, it’s vastly restricting. Because I wasn’t really allowed to be a girl. Nothing explicit, really, just…. It wasn’t even an option, really, except in fits and starts. I wore a lot of jeans and I ran around with the boys in my neighborhood because the girls were mean. I was into the metal music that the boys let me listen to instead of the New Kids on the Block and I rode my bike and largely wasn’t even aware that I was being barred from femininity.
To be fair, none of it seems deliberate. I had that whole defense mechanism in place really quickly and there were those back-to-school skirt outfits. But I was teased when I actually wore them and it was made pretty clear to me that fat girls didn’t get to be pretty. Putting a dress on a fat girl was like putting a dress on a pig. That’s the crux of things, I think, when I consider my own gender presentation and my own discomfort with certain kinds of femme style (for myself, not for others).
That portion particularly hit home with me, because I almost never dressed like a stereotypical girl growing up in terms of wearing dresses except on special occasions when it was mandated (like Easter). I wore pants and t-shirts all the time, and nothing in pink ever. Partly that was personal choice but even my personal choices were affected by my 3 older sisters, none of whom were particularly girly - and given that I wore a lot of hand-me-downs from them, that had a ripple effect on what clothes I had available to me - so I have no real idea how much was some kind of inherent preference on my part and how much my taste was influenced by what I thought I should be, through their example.
(I still don't like pink much, for a lot of complex reasons. On a basic level, it makes me look flushed. I also can't wear yellow because it makes me look like I'm dying of consumption.)
In my ongoing effort to find peace with my body, I've done several closet purges to get rid of clothes I don't wear. Right now I have over ten polo shirts in my closet, and I've got a set of pants that are various types of cotton fabric, ranging from jeans to cargo pants to trousers, all of which is what I wear to work. For winter I have sweaters. I have a few shirts that are more formal, along with a dressier pair of pants for days when I need them, but I made a conscious effort to get comfortable with the fact that my preferred mode of dress even for work is as plain and comfortable as possible while not wearing t-shirts with logos. If other people look down on me for this, and some of the other female faculty here definitely do, fuck 'em.
Interestingly, on my recent vacation, I was the only one of the three of us who brought along anything dressy, and by that I mean "anything that wasn't a t-shirt," and I mean that literally. We went out for upscale dinners twice and I was the only one who bothered to dress up at all, if wearing a nice shirt even counts.
Part of me wonders if I would dress differently if I had come to FA earlier in life. I suspect I'd still be most comfortable in t-shirts and jeans no matter what, but I remember making more of an effort to dress up when I'm out with friends, because it was more common for us to do so, and more importantly, I knew they didn't care and would tell me I looked good either way.
I also had gotten a fairly cheap bathing suit from Just My Size and I'm so glad I did, because I went swimming twice and if you go to a beach like this and don't want to swim, I think you're crazy. I very nearly didn't bother getting the suit, but the last time I went to a beach I wanted to swim and couldn't. And when the moment came, I felt self-conscious in that suit for about a second. Then I was enjoying the water too much to care (and also jamming my big toe badly in the sand somehow. I'm talented).
One of the cool things about the beach is the range of bodies you see there. Sure there are the superstar bodies on some people that make you kind of groan because they're so thin/ripped/tanned/whatever you kind of want to be sick, but there are also old people, fat people, little kids, gawky teenagers, all of them more focused on the water than their bodies. And you get into the water and it doesn't matter anymore how you looked, just how well you can swim.
(And if you're swimming on Waikiki, how well you can dodge the army of surfing novices and boogie boarders swarming out there, because holy crap, that place was crowded. Also, rocky, which I didn't expect. And very shallow. I digress.)
Anyway, bodies and bathing suits and gender performance have been on my mind a lot lately.
There’s a freedom to that, certainly, but as with anything else that determines identity for you instead of helping you develop it on your own for yourself, it’s vastly restricting. Because I wasn’t really allowed to be a girl. Nothing explicit, really, just…. It wasn’t even an option, really, except in fits and starts. I wore a lot of jeans and I ran around with the boys in my neighborhood because the girls were mean. I was into the metal music that the boys let me listen to instead of the New Kids on the Block and I rode my bike and largely wasn’t even aware that I was being barred from femininity.
To be fair, none of it seems deliberate. I had that whole defense mechanism in place really quickly and there were those back-to-school skirt outfits. But I was teased when I actually wore them and it was made pretty clear to me that fat girls didn’t get to be pretty. Putting a dress on a fat girl was like putting a dress on a pig. That’s the crux of things, I think, when I consider my own gender presentation and my own discomfort with certain kinds of femme style (for myself, not for others).
That portion particularly hit home with me, because I almost never dressed like a stereotypical girl growing up in terms of wearing dresses except on special occasions when it was mandated (like Easter). I wore pants and t-shirts all the time, and nothing in pink ever. Partly that was personal choice but even my personal choices were affected by my 3 older sisters, none of whom were particularly girly - and given that I wore a lot of hand-me-downs from them, that had a ripple effect on what clothes I had available to me - so I have no real idea how much was some kind of inherent preference on my part and how much my taste was influenced by what I thought I should be, through their example.
(I still don't like pink much, for a lot of complex reasons. On a basic level, it makes me look flushed. I also can't wear yellow because it makes me look like I'm dying of consumption.)
In my ongoing effort to find peace with my body, I've done several closet purges to get rid of clothes I don't wear. Right now I have over ten polo shirts in my closet, and I've got a set of pants that are various types of cotton fabric, ranging from jeans to cargo pants to trousers, all of which is what I wear to work. For winter I have sweaters. I have a few shirts that are more formal, along with a dressier pair of pants for days when I need them, but I made a conscious effort to get comfortable with the fact that my preferred mode of dress even for work is as plain and comfortable as possible while not wearing t-shirts with logos. If other people look down on me for this, and some of the other female faculty here definitely do, fuck 'em.
Interestingly, on my recent vacation, I was the only one of the three of us who brought along anything dressy, and by that I mean "anything that wasn't a t-shirt," and I mean that literally. We went out for upscale dinners twice and I was the only one who bothered to dress up at all, if wearing a nice shirt even counts.
Part of me wonders if I would dress differently if I had come to FA earlier in life. I suspect I'd still be most comfortable in t-shirts and jeans no matter what, but I remember making more of an effort to dress up when I'm out with friends, because it was more common for us to do so, and more importantly, I knew they didn't care and would tell me I looked good either way.
I also had gotten a fairly cheap bathing suit from Just My Size and I'm so glad I did, because I went swimming twice and if you go to a beach like this and don't want to swim, I think you're crazy. I very nearly didn't bother getting the suit, but the last time I went to a beach I wanted to swim and couldn't. And when the moment came, I felt self-conscious in that suit for about a second. Then I was enjoying the water too much to care (and also jamming my big toe badly in the sand somehow. I'm talented).
One of the cool things about the beach is the range of bodies you see there. Sure there are the superstar bodies on some people that make you kind of groan because they're so thin/ripped/tanned/whatever you kind of want to be sick, but there are also old people, fat people, little kids, gawky teenagers, all of them more focused on the water than their bodies. And you get into the water and it doesn't matter anymore how you looked, just how well you can swim.
(And if you're swimming on Waikiki, how well you can dodge the army of surfing novices and boogie boarders swarming out there, because holy crap, that place was crowded. Also, rocky, which I didn't expect. And very shallow. I digress.)
Anyway, bodies and bathing suits and gender performance have been on my mind a lot lately.