no boys allowed in the room!!!!

I worry way more about getting old (and therefore less desirable) than fat. My body aging makes me pretty sad, actually, because there's no one who remembers me when I was young and had no stretch marks or cellulite and was fresh and blushy and whatever young people are. Anyone I meet from now on can only know me as I am now, which is less lovely and more used-up than I was then. They can love me for my mind instead, but my body will always be a compromise. This actually had me falling apart a little on Saturday.

Welcome to my therapy!

In my experience a thing that's just as bad as the negative comments about weight is the amount of praise that people (parents and otherwise) give to other people who have lost weight. From the reactions of people the two times that I lost significant amounts of weight in my life you would have thought I'd won a freaking noble prize or something.

Yeah for real!

It just serves to reinforce the whole skinny is good/fat is bad, diets are good and being successful at one makes you a disciplined and worth person stuff which in turn has made me have an extremely fucked up atttitude towards food which are all either "good" or "bad" in my mind. Not in taste, mind you, but in value. I hate this shit and the sheer about of time it takes up in my thoughts/life etc. Bah.

It's fraught for everyone, that much I know for sure.

it = this issue of bodies/eating/foods/other people

I know I have said it before but the amount of praise my mom gets for having a weird, mysterious degenerative disease that's cause her to slowly drop more and more weight makes me absolutely vitriolic. She's done nothing in her life but help others and it's those same recipients of that help who aren't praising her for her selfless volunteerism, but for losing weight. Which comes with it a lost ability to carry things or stand for long periods of time.

body policing is so fucking awful. i'm thankful that my family isn't that bad (or that direct) with weight issues, anyway. what hell.

my mom was going on vacation in alaska and was commenting on her 'blubber' and how she'd fit right in with the whales they'd be watching and...wtf. she's become a size 10 these days and is 70 yrs old. i should have pointed out to her that she wears the same size as me, but i'm always just so boggled at such comments that i don't respond.

many xps "more used-up than I was then." oh god i hate this term.

hey can i share something that is not related just as a small intermission?

i have been sorting this huge box of photos and found a bunch of pics of political people and volunteers and parties and meetings from the late 70s/early 80s so i have been posting the pics here http://campaigners70sand80s.tumblr.com/

peruse if you like to look at unprofessional snapshots of natural 70s people engaging with each other

x-post to Abbott - Yeah, you have. It's so completely fucked up and infuriating. It makes me really sad for you/your mom. Sometimes I think I could seriously write a book detailing the differences in the way people treat you and the things they think it's OK to do/say when you're skinny v. chubby (The fact that I'm 5'10" (well nearly) and the largest I ever was was a 16 is a whole other fucking issue that def says something fucked up about our expectations of women and weight).

LL that's a great tumblr! I love old pics and I love your love for old pics. When I worked at a newspaper at age 18 my favorite thing was raiding the box of ancient, unclaimed photos. They're not at my house but when I get them back I should post some of them.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6adhjEt5u1rzge1ho1_500.jpg

nice arms, eh?

Yeah, I love that shit. Otherwise discarded photos of real people. Thanks for looking!

xps shit, abbott. that's awful about your mom.

(i went thru a size 2 phase thanks to my health ish and SO many ppl said i looked great. ugh. i looked absolutely skeletal, and i knew it, but it fucked with my head.)

One of my very first jobs was scanning fingerprints for the NY DCJS. It was an awful job, but the mug shots from old arrest records almost made up for it. We did a box from the 30s/40s that was just incredible.

Woah, that's awesome.

In my experience a thing that's just as bad as the negative comments about weight is the amount of praise that people (parents and otherwise) give to other people who have lost weight.

O! T! M!

So like five years ago I took myself out of the game and quit dieting and also decided that I wasn't going to participate in diet talk (or I'm so fat conversations, or I was so bad I ate a brownie conversations). And it is SO CONFUSING to people! It's kind of hilarious, actually, although refusing to engage in these conversations and letting the other people be confused by it goes against all of my training and inclination as a person who makes social situations work.

xp that dude looks like jjjusten a little bit.

lol I was thinking he looks like Jason Lee but Jjjusten looks like Jason Lee so that makes sense.

Ha, yes.

Whoa WCC mugshots? that kind of thing totally makes me drool.

my personal favorite

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6ad0snN2X1rzge1ho1_500.jpg

Well YEAH! He's cute even by contemporary standards.

That guy is cute.

lol x-post

he has a nice smile

Lots of those campaigners are cute!

Maybe I just like the '70s Kurt Vonnegut look

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6adk2Pw0H1rzge1ho1_r1_500.jpg

some more mugshots for you, LL, here: http://thehairpin.com/2012/06/are-you-allowed-to-smile

I do too -- my love for Donald Sutherland in the 70s is well documented, I'm afraid.

Another topic: I went on vacation by myself recently for the first time ever in my life and it was so incredibly fun. Even though on the plane I kept thinking of crazy Lise's encounter with a macrobiotics flame in The Driver's Seat. Staying in a hotel by myself, flying by myself, doing what I wanted when I liked – all a blast. I think if I ever get in a relationship again I'll still take vacations by myself. I like the feeling of being a woman just having fun by myself and deciding shit!

OMG there are few things I love in life as much as taking vacations by myself. BIG FAN, lifelong devotee!

Nice work.

My aunt in Germany does that all the time! A couple of years ago she went to Egypt and London by herself both for a week. She's married but I guess just likes alone time and I'd guess my uncle probably appreciates it too. I think it's pretty awesome.

I love flying by myself! I've never GONE anywhere by myself, though; I'm always meeting people where I'm going. I tell myself that's one of the reasons I haven't traveled more widely: because I'd be going alone and it makes me sad/uncomfortable--well, that and the expense.

I'm at the point where I literally could no longer imagine having to travel with someone when I go on holiday.

I love solo vacations! I have and will continue to take them even though I am coupled. I kind of treat business travel as solo vacation, even though it is for work. Still get to fly alone, hotel alone, choose what to do on off hours, etc.

I went to Europe, Asia Minor, the Middle East and North Africa for over a year by myself when I was 19-20. Made lifelong friends. Beat going to college.

I've traveled alone but never gone on actual vacation alone. I don't know if I would. Not because I wouldn't want to (I like doing things alone, generally) but because of time/resources. Plus, we haven't gone on that many vacations together thanks to finances and then law school and then introductory levels of vacation time.

Meaning that going on vacation together is still enough of a novelty that I don't want to not do that.

I like the idea of vacationing alone, however. Maybe some day.

ugh, i am so so sorry about your body-policing moms - it's bad enough that too many acquaintances and random strangers do it, but your own mother? I feel embarrassedly fortunate in this regard in that my mom always thinks i look nice when i put nominal effort into my appearance.

xp - i can vouch that it helps to have a partner who needs extended periods of alone time too

Ugh my dad is pretty terrible about just saying whatever comes into his head which often includes remarks about people's looks (it's a weird habit, he'll also just walk around saying out loud the names of stores and signs he sees and 50% of the time make some dad-pun on them). So after 18 months of not seeing my parents I was staying with them and my dad was constantly making comments about every female presenter on tv, all appearance-related so it took me about 10 mins to flip. He commented 'why is she wearing so much make-up?' and I was all BECAUSE PEOPLE LIKE YOU JUST SIT THERE CRITICISING EVERY PORE OF THEIR BODY EVERY MINUTE and to his credit he did shut up for a bit after that.

thankful (well not really thankful) that my mom focuses on hair policing.

She's all passive aggressive about it, like "so that's what you're doing with your hair these days!"

When my mom saw my most recent haircut she said, "So you're back to the Ramona Quimby." <3

here is a topic i relate to

which brings me to an interesting point!

yesterday someone told me "i like what you've done with your hair" -- i hadn't seen him for a while, and he doesn't know me all that well, and i am not easy to get to know ANYway but relations with him have been strained more often than not. and he says, "i like what you've done with your hair."

huh?

I don't know how to navigate the possible subtext of that. At all.

I think it just means he thought your hair looked nice?

I find that very difficult to believe for some reason, but I guess there's really no telling what he meant since I didn't ask him. I just changed the subject. I don't often feel awkward around people, but something about that particular moment made me really feel weird and uncomf. Not because I thought he was being sincere, but because it sounded like a robotic thing to say.

It also sounds like he's at least 20 years older than you and it's 1946.

"I like what you've done with your hair" just sounds like one of those "how to win friends and influence people" kinds of tips, you know, that they learn in smarmy books. Start conversations with people you find difficult to talk to by leading with a compliment.

Anyway, I was just thinking about this thread on the way home.

And I was remembering how, when I was in my late teens and early 20s, I learned to bond with other women by putting down our own appearances. That whole thing of "my thighs are fat" "oh no my thighs are much fatter" as a way of bonding with other women over one's insecurities.

And I was thinking about what we have been doing on this thread today, which is bonding over how destructive it is to face body policing, and coming up with solutions and solidarity of how to resist it, and bonding over our experiences and how we've overcome them (or tried.)

And it's funny how it's a similar sort of bonding experience, except that whole thing when I was 17, that used to make me actually feel kinda yucky at the end of it. And the thing that we have been doing today, it actually makes me feel better. But both through the process of bonding through sort of complaining about something. But what a difference it makes, to complain about pressure, instead about our actual selves.

And I just wanted to say, that's awesome, and thank you ladies.

And that is 5 paragraphs in a row I have started with the word "and" which is a total grammar sin but I'm not going to change it.