size acceptance

[keryx]

One of the things my brilliant friend volondoinyaface said over this weekend was that we attach value to the size and shape of our body not just because of enculturation, but as a result of experience.

She was talking specifically about my thing with the shrinking - I associate weightloss with losing control or casting about, and also with incessant praise (and praise with intrusiveness), so there's logic to my fragmented response to this thing. I'm not just a puppet of social conditioning.

I think this is, in general, a better model for how size should exist in our minds. It's not that size should be utterly devoid of other significance, but that we should be free to associate size with experience just as one might do hair length or something. And that is the difference between size acceptance and a fat movement. In the latter, shifting size is almost automatically a problem, while the former leaves you room to attach any experience to size.

You know, in a glowing happy utopia. In the real world, fat is way too loaded to be purely about individual experience.

Comments

[arovd.livejournal.com]

fascinating. I ALWAYS lose weight between partners. asociating that with loss, change, and 'casting about' resonates with me on that front...

and intrusive praise drives me NUTS. also uninvited advances from random strangers. my weight is a protective cocoon.

[volondoinyaface.livejournal.com]

I think that's interesting also--I don't want to reduce our responses to our appearence and our preferences to a pavlovian kind of thing; I'd like to think there's some intrinsic part of me that prefers my body larger, rather than associating negativity and vulnerability with being small. However, as arovd has said, I have some very blatant examples of how negative experiences resonated in the way I presented myself afterwards. My weight, not quite as much, but it's definately changed as well.

I think it bothers me that I may be potentially attracted to the Other--anything distinctly not me, ethnically, racially, down to education, religion, class, and size--instead of just being attracted. If that makes sense. I want to be a genuine pervert and happy 2% person, instead of an emotional reactionary! But I can't dissect one beginning from another, not even with geniuses like keryx around to help.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

I tend to assume nothing is intrinsic, though I guess that's a pretty extreme view. But that doesn't mean the only experience that gives you a body preference is trauma, or that the connection is even obvious and not buried in a million things. I feel overwhelmingly positive about having purple hair, for instance - I had positive experiences, I know, but there's also an aesthetic preference I can't put a finger on.

The lesson that the body size thing might teach you about attraction is (I think) that it's impossible to live in a culture and dissect what's reactionary or programmed from what's experiential, intrinsic, etc. That doesn't mean we should try, just that it's one of those things you strive for without expecting success.