1. As a feminist, I am sick of hearing other feminists admonish women who try to lose weight. There is nothing anti-feminist about weight loss or weight gain or weight maintenance. The assumption goes like this:
weight loss = insecurity(unrealistic body ideals)+patriarchal beauty complex(objectification of women)
And that's probably true a lot. But not always. And I hate hearing women told, "Don't control your body that way! Control it this way! Don't abide to that standard! Abide to this standard!" In the end, we just need to let everybody act for themselves & quit judging what someone looks like, doesn't look like, eats or doesn't eat through our own experiences, perspectives, or agenda.
2. As a female, I find that it's difficult, nay, impossible to escape the experience of embodiment. Women are objectified and judged constantly, whether for the presence or absence of a feature, the conformity or nonconformity of our physical persona, or how sexually accessible/inaccessible we are presumed to be. Beyond objectification, we are, it seems, always ultra-performative. The female version of not performing any gender is still in itself radical for just that. Female ambiguity or androgyny or just gender/performance apathy is read as boldly as anything else, if for no other reason that the female body is always being assessed, always sending a message no matter how much it intends to be silent.
3. Everyone is invested in some way in the way they experience their physicality within themselves, in relation to others, in within the context of their societies, but there's not a lot of space to deal with what that means. And I'm not pretending that we all -- spanning gender, age, and creed -- need to have a pow wow to discuss our ever-morphing containment within our bodies, our relationship to our spatial preoccupation, etc, but granted how much of our lives, worlds, and norms are dependent on and constructed based on physicality, let's offer it its own space, and make it one that's not already prefaced on someone else's doctrine.
