FAT IS NOT A FEMINIST ISSUE!
Sorry for the radio silence…but…I’ve been off having a life - I know that’s a strange concept to most bloggers who seem to exist only in the weird emptiness of cyberspace but there it is. I mean I could blog every other day (if I could be bothered) but do you really want to read about where I went to have a coffee - or what happened to me at work? Hell most of the time I don’t want to be there so the least I can do is to make sure that you poor fuckers who are living vicariously through me have something interesting to read about. Fair enough, instead of reading the ramblings of someone who is rapidly turning into a grumpy old woman, I could tell you all about Nietzsches theory of cosmology. But lets be honest here, do you really want to read intellectual stuff- like healthy food, intellect is fine in theory but in practice I’d rather just have a big Mac. (and I know I know 25 million hectares of rain forest are cut down in order to provide land for beef cattle to graze on but you know what - I’ll have mine with double cheese and pickle. I’m sorry, I’m alive therefore other things are going to die.) Agree with me, disagree with me (since I’ll never meet you I don’t really care one way or another!) don’t give a damn, but if you want intellectual then go read a book - any uni web site will give you a reading list that will keep you busy for years…I’m bright, 5 A levels (and I did mine before they made the courses easy - media studies indeed!) and an a honours degree prove that I don’t need to name drop. As the late lamented Paula Yates (http://www.who2.com/paulayates.html)said when a journalist suggested that she was seen as a bimbo by the public ‘I could tell you about the essays I write about renaissance artists but do you really want to read them.’
Since I last checked in I’ve moved house, had nearly two months worth of houseguests, got on with my book, proof read my brothers book (he just got book deal - which leads me to wonder maybe a little less life and little more writing would have stood me in better stead throughout my twenties!) Rediscovered both my cleavage and my sex life ( I must admit the one led to the other!) with my partner ! extremely unfashionable I must admit…to actually find that you still fancy your guy ( thought I better be gender specific here although I know that’s terribly unPC ) like mad after seven years! Wilde (http://www.cmgww.com/historic/wilde/) would definitely have something to say about that, nearly as bad as talking to your husband throughout dinner, (there you go two famous people mentioned so far, shall we go for a threesome (sorry, one track mind at the moment!), cooked up a storm and worked out the vagaries of Adobe Premier. Oh did I mention I’ve been to work and kept the house clean as well….
I’ve also - due to the rediscoverage of cleavage - started exercising, I mean its all very well when your tits start growing but when your hips do too that’s when its time to take action. Man it hurt - I used to be fit and then when we moved to Edinburgh I got so busy working that I didn’t have time to exercise - a paltry excuse I know but the only one I got. Exercise started to be the thing I’d do tomorrow…bad mistake!! especially after a year, so the Dave Prowse ( Darth Vader to all you film boffs - a very nice man and not a bit as scary as he appears on film) exercise book came out and the masochism began…( not that I’m averse to a bit of masochism so long as it doesn’t involve wearing strange rubber outfits but if that floats your boat then go for it - just don’t tell me about it)
I mentioned my poor aching muscles to a friend of mine - (surprsingly enough I do have them - friends that is, not muscles) who immediately started to bemoan the fact that I was buying into the whole standardized view of what women ought to look like. Now I know that this isn’t going to be popular (like I care) amongst a lot of women but you know what - Fat is not a feminist issue - fat is eating too much (with the notable exception of several very rare ailments). Now whatever shape you are - cool. If your happy with how you look -great. Personally I believe that size doesn’t matter unless it matters to you… I like to be thin, that’s what makes me feel good - if I get bigger than a certain size then I don’t like it cos my clothes don’t fit properly and my trousers start to cut off my blood supply at the crotch, but I don’t think that the world should be the same shape. But if you aren’t thin and you want to be then please - do the world a favour - either do something about it and its very easy, just eat less crap and take some exercise or shut the fuck up…You aren’t fat because men control media and force some twisted view of femininity on you (and even if they do - surely being a post modernist women you can be ironic and look like a fifties icon, after all Marilyn Monroe would equate to a size sixteen nowadays and no-one can dispute that she was beautiful) you’re fat because you eat too much and exercise too little. As my granddad was wont to say when anyone complained about their weight - ‘no one fat came out of Belsen’.
(Before anyones sensibilities are offended by that and I must admit that without this addition it could come across as very offensive, I should just mention that he was in a concentration camp for the duration of the war)
Now I’ve experienced this from both sides of the coin so I think that I have a right to comment (although if I hadn’t I’d still stick my twopennorth in) I also don’t believe that the western portrayl of women in the media leads to eating disorders. As a young teenager I was anorexic. Living as we did then 6 miles away from the nearest village, with no television and no magazines to hand I only saw large, wonderful, Beryl Cook like farmers wives who looked fantastic because they were happy. So there was no pressure to conform unless it was to have another slice of fruitcake. In my experience, eating disorders are about control and the lack thereof. The one thing, often the last thing that you are able to control about your life is your food intake.
From sixteen until the age of twenty I had what kind people called puppy fat and less kind people called flab. I didn’t have anything nice to say about anyone that was thinner than me and spent all my time and conversation making nasty comments about other (thinner) women. Until one day I realised that maybe I should stop bitching about those that were thinner and just get thinner myself. It took a long hard look in the mirror and six months of extremely hard work to lose the excess weight, it took standing in clubs with a bottle of water instead of several jack daniels, it took no crisps, no ice-cream no seconds and sit ups till I vomited (thank you Dave Prowse for the times I went to your gym, you took charge of my workout and I threw up in the changing rooms!) ….and I discovered several important facts… the main one being that you can be thin or you can be bright but you can’t be both. And the worst part I discovered about this fact was the following… Its not men that start to treat you like a bimbo - its other women. Men don’t treat you any differently unless you start treating them differently, you don’t suddenly become a sex object. In fact and heres something I bet you didn’t know - most men don’t prefer skinny women because then we don’t look like women we look like men without dicks. Its the other women you have to look out for. They’re the ones who will automatically assume that the weight you lost must have been your brain cells, They’re the ones that castigate women for having boob jobs, lipo, botox, good skin, their picture in a magazine, looking better in that dress than they do…and the reason (and listen to this guys it’s a trade secret that I’m giving away here ) every pound we add on the woman further along the bar is a pound we can take off ourselves, every bit of cellulite we highlight is a bit we can tippex off our own thighs, every tarty outfit ‘that women’s to old…doesn’t have the figure…has a nerve to be wearing’ makes our own clothes fit just that bit less tightly, every blonde we dismiss as a bimbo jumps our own IQ up another point.
Yeats http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5379/yeats_index.html got it all wrong when he said that we paint the our face to search for the one we had before the world was made - we aren’t searching for anything or anyone, its our armour against the slings and arrows of other women.
And now - with the time at 01.42 and the third rendition of Sweet Home Alabama I’m going to do some proper writing
(Aren’t you impressed? I named checked five people and two of them recognised intellectuals to boot!)