"Our bodies are wild horses to be broken"
Trigger Warning for eating disorder and pro-ana discussion, as well as diet culture commentary and some anti-organized religion ranting from yours truly.
Lesley has written a couple of powerful posts at Two Whole Cakes this week, including today's doozy*
The Winners Are Dead It touches every one of us, this compulsion toward control, this unwillingness to trust our hunger, to have faith in the ability of our bodies to govern themselves, and to live in concert with our needs. Our bodies are anarchists (we think)! Our bodies are out to destroy us, by accumulating fat we don’t want, by putting it in places we’d rather it not go, by constantly demanding food, care, attention, nourishment, energy that we can’t spare. Our bodies are wild horses to be broken, to be saddled and bridled and worn down. Our nature is chaotic and not to be trusted. Managing this requires constant vigilance, and never “letting go” - never ever can you “let yourself go”. While our bodies are demanding food, our culture is educating us on the terrible dangers of allowing our needs and desires take their own course, and on the moral implications of failing to keep them in check.
There's a whole thread deeply involved in body policing that stretches back to Judeo-Christian religious philosophy and sin and how we must control ourselves at all times and resist all temptations - this mindset that hails a God that supposedly created us in His image, which means we are like God in all ways, but simultaneously put in us urges to do all sorts of things that are inherently ungodly (like stuff our faces and have lots of sex) and the way we prove our devotion to that God is to deny the most basic urges He supposedly put into us. It sets everyone up to fail from the start, basically, because what we're programmed (by God) to want to do is somehow sinful and the only way to be really faithful is not do things we want to do. This is, IMNSHO, a really sadistic view of God. I mean, what kind of person/being/whatever would do that to anyone?
(To be fair, I completely blame that mindset on the faulty and power-driven interpretations of men, not on God/Yahweh/Allah/Deity-of-your-choice. I also understand that the various interpretations of Judaism deal with both food and sex, which is the other big primal urge we must control, in different ways so lumping all forms of both Christianity and Judaism together misses a lot of nuance. If any one wishes to explain some of those nuances in comments, go for it.)
That denial mentality carries forth into the "if I enjoy this it must be bad" mindset where we equate eating tasty food with a moral failing. We talk about eating fries or chocolate as "being bad" because if it feels good, it must be one of those things God doesn't want us to do. Even in the modern age where it's uncool to talk a lot about religious morality, even though we don't dress it up in the specific language, "if it feels good it must be bad" still weighs very heavily on Western culture.
Thus we come to "people who are fat are moral failures" because clearly all us Fatty McFattersons have been doing those things God doesn't want us to do** like eating without restraint and eating bad stuff all the time. This I think is one of the reasons why the "if you're fat you must be lazy and eat too much" mindset is so friggin hard to dislodge from most people. You're fat because you did something bad and because you were bad, this is your punishment.
It also relies heavily on the "just world" thing (which crops up in rape culture too) where people want to believe they have control over their lives and that the world is fair, so "if I follow the rules, bad things won't happen to me." This is, of course, utter bullshit, because horrible things happen to good people every day, but we can't cope with the randomness of that, so we find reasons why it can't happen to us.
This also explains some of the visceral hatred for FA advocates. Many people, including Lesley, have mentioned that some of the anger over FA is almost jealousy. "How dare you just go around doing what you want to do without restraint? That's NOT FAIR! I follow the rules and if I have to suffer all this, so do you!"
None of this touches the gendering of body policing either. Women's sexuality, as I noted in the comment at Lesley's, is something that religions, particularly the Abrahamic ones, have been squashing relentlessly for millenia. The idea that a woman's sexual appetites are so destructively powerful they have to be contained for the sake of society is deeply embedded in our culture, and this ties tightly into diet culture. Women must be controlled, limited, sculpted, shaped, bodies made to do something other than what they naturally want, whether that be an issue of removing hair from random body parts or about what our ideal weight is. The beauty standard is always with us; only the criteria change. All appetites women have must be curtailed, whether it's for food or sex, because the disruption would be scary and create havoc.
That last idea is also utter bullshit, obviously. There's nothing genuinely terrifying in women eating as much or as little as they honestly want, or having as much or as little sex as they honestly want. Unless, that is, you're a man used to women eating as little as you want them to eat so they look hot for you, and women having sex with you, only with you, whenever you want it. Then, well, yeah, that is a terrifying, world-ending scenario that must be prevented at all costs.
* - doozy is an awesome word
** - built on the assumption that people are fat solely because they overeat, not because of uncontrollable factors. This is key to this mentality, since avoiding the terrible fate of being fat requires that you can do something about it.
This entry was originally posted to http://miera-c.dreamwidth.org/642408.html: Please comment there if you are willing
Lesley has written a couple of powerful posts at Two Whole Cakes this week, including today's doozy*
The Winners Are Dead It touches every one of us, this compulsion toward control, this unwillingness to trust our hunger, to have faith in the ability of our bodies to govern themselves, and to live in concert with our needs. Our bodies are anarchists (we think)! Our bodies are out to destroy us, by accumulating fat we don’t want, by putting it in places we’d rather it not go, by constantly demanding food, care, attention, nourishment, energy that we can’t spare. Our bodies are wild horses to be broken, to be saddled and bridled and worn down. Our nature is chaotic and not to be trusted. Managing this requires constant vigilance, and never “letting go” - never ever can you “let yourself go”. While our bodies are demanding food, our culture is educating us on the terrible dangers of allowing our needs and desires take their own course, and on the moral implications of failing to keep them in check.
There's a whole thread deeply involved in body policing that stretches back to Judeo-Christian religious philosophy and sin and how we must control ourselves at all times and resist all temptations - this mindset that hails a God that supposedly created us in His image, which means we are like God in all ways, but simultaneously put in us urges to do all sorts of things that are inherently ungodly (like stuff our faces and have lots of sex) and the way we prove our devotion to that God is to deny the most basic urges He supposedly put into us. It sets everyone up to fail from the start, basically, because what we're programmed (by God) to want to do is somehow sinful and the only way to be really faithful is not do things we want to do. This is, IMNSHO, a really sadistic view of God. I mean, what kind of person/being/whatever would do that to anyone?
(To be fair, I completely blame that mindset on the faulty and power-driven interpretations of men, not on God/Yahweh/Allah/Deity-of-your-choice. I also understand that the various interpretations of Judaism deal with both food and sex, which is the other big primal urge we must control, in different ways so lumping all forms of both Christianity and Judaism together misses a lot of nuance. If any one wishes to explain some of those nuances in comments, go for it.)
That denial mentality carries forth into the "if I enjoy this it must be bad" mindset where we equate eating tasty food with a moral failing. We talk about eating fries or chocolate as "being bad" because if it feels good, it must be one of those things God doesn't want us to do. Even in the modern age where it's uncool to talk a lot about religious morality, even though we don't dress it up in the specific language, "if it feels good it must be bad" still weighs very heavily on Western culture.
Thus we come to "people who are fat are moral failures" because clearly all us Fatty McFattersons have been doing those things God doesn't want us to do** like eating without restraint and eating bad stuff all the time. This I think is one of the reasons why the "if you're fat you must be lazy and eat too much" mindset is so friggin hard to dislodge from most people. You're fat because you did something bad and because you were bad, this is your punishment.
It also relies heavily on the "just world" thing (which crops up in rape culture too) where people want to believe they have control over their lives and that the world is fair, so "if I follow the rules, bad things won't happen to me." This is, of course, utter bullshit, because horrible things happen to good people every day, but we can't cope with the randomness of that, so we find reasons why it can't happen to us.
This also explains some of the visceral hatred for FA advocates. Many people, including Lesley, have mentioned that some of the anger over FA is almost jealousy. "How dare you just go around doing what you want to do without restraint? That's NOT FAIR! I follow the rules and if I have to suffer all this, so do you!"
None of this touches the gendering of body policing either. Women's sexuality, as I noted in the comment at Lesley's, is something that religions, particularly the Abrahamic ones, have been squashing relentlessly for millenia. The idea that a woman's sexual appetites are so destructively powerful they have to be contained for the sake of society is deeply embedded in our culture, and this ties tightly into diet culture. Women must be controlled, limited, sculpted, shaped, bodies made to do something other than what they naturally want, whether that be an issue of removing hair from random body parts or about what our ideal weight is. The beauty standard is always with us; only the criteria change. All appetites women have must be curtailed, whether it's for food or sex, because the disruption would be scary and create havoc.
That last idea is also utter bullshit, obviously. There's nothing genuinely terrifying in women eating as much or as little as they honestly want, or having as much or as little sex as they honestly want. Unless, that is, you're a man used to women eating as little as you want them to eat so they look hot for you, and women having sex with you, only with you, whenever you want it. Then, well, yeah, that is a terrifying, world-ending scenario that must be prevented at all costs.
* - doozy is an awesome word
** - built on the assumption that people are fat solely because they overeat, not because of uncontrollable factors. This is key to this mentality, since avoiding the terrible fate of being fat requires that you can do something about it.
This entry was originally posted to http://miera-c.dreamwidth.org/642408.html: Please comment there if you are willing