20 June 2017

Today I stumbled across a feminist blog and it just drew me in. I felt inspired to write what it is like for me, being a feminist in a traditional female job (Secretary) in an almost exclusively male environment … and then I read her pieces about weight-issues.

I confess the term fat-shaming was new to me – but its meaning, of course, is all too familiar.  I’ve been on both sides of the weight-issue scale: Underweight and Overweight. So, personally, I disagree with the term ‘fat-shaming’ – I’d much prefer ‘weight-shaming’, because being underweight leads to just as much shaming from society as being overweight. Trust me on this one, I have actually been there. The first sixteen years of my life I was seriously underweight.  Serious as in I don’t remember any time in my childhood where I didn’t have to take some medication, supplements, etc daily. Serious as in regular fainting spells. And, of course, this made me easy game for every bully – and I got bullied a lot! And not just name-calling, I mean physically bullied. But personally, what was worst for me is that my little sister throughout our childhood saw herself as fat! She was perfect – not underweight, not overweight; yet she persisted in comparing herself to me and next to a seriously underweight older sister she decided she was fat. Nothing I said or tried worked. That nearly broke my heart.

Being an underweight child, my parents were accused of not feeding me, or not feeding me properly, etc – and that, of course, made me feel guilty for not being normal. Like my sister, some other kids also felt fat compared to me, and labelling me as abnormal made them feel normal – it’s a childish reaction, but we were children. Well, teenagers, but there’s still a lot of child in teenagers. I was as uncomfortable with and ashamed of my abnormal body-weight as any overweight teenager. Even well-intentioned comments made me uncomfortable. I resorted to hiding under baggy tops, T-Shirts, etc.

Around mid-twenties I started to put on weight. At first I thought ‘Great!’ but of course the weight-gain didn’t stop and by thirty I was as overweight as I had been underweight a decade before.

When I stopped drinking, I started to loose weight again – at an alarming rate. But it has since come back … all of it! Part of me wishes I could loose 10 kg. I call myself overweight but sometimes I look in the mirror and think ‘ugly’. I’m not yet as comfortable with my weight as I’d like to be, but I’m working on it. I’ve decided that the effort to be happy with who I am and how I look is more worthwhile than the effort to become what I think should make me happy. What others think I should be. Mostly vague, nameless, faceless ‘others’ – you know? Them! With a capital ‘Th’. Meme’s like the one I saw the other day, help with my effort: “Me: ‘I’m fat.’ ‘They: ‘You’re beautiful’. Me: ‘Did I say I was ugly?’”

But then there is all the propaganda about weight. I’ve recently gone through some old clothes of mine, and came across a Vest I had bought some twenty odd years ago. Funny thing, I bought a similar vest recently. I compared the two (the dark one underneath is the old one):

They look about the same size, don’t they? Keep in mind, the dark one has been through the wash for twenty years. Well, I looked at the labels and guess what? The dark one is size L and the light one is size … guess? Go on, try and guess! XXL!

So what was large twenty years ago, we label extra, extra large today! Try wrapping your mind around that - it's frightening! 

I’ll keep putting in my effort to love my body – rolls, folds and bulges. I’m worth that effort! You want me to feel ashamed? You want me to rather put effort (and let’s not forget: put lots of money, too!) into changing my body? Here’s my response: YOU are NOT worth the effort! Whoever this ‘you’ may be.