Some of my fellow writers from the London Writer’s Salon know that I have been stewing with this post for a little while. It’s been slow going because there’s a lot in here that’s vulnerable to share and other matters, unrelated to this essay, have made me push the pause button frequently. It turns out that pausing to remove some of the static so I can get closer to what needs to be said has offered a different kind of rhythm for my writing. Not a bad one, just different.
A few days ago, I figured out why the universe had conspired to stall this post so that I would remember some key strategies for healing body hate that I’d forgotten. I will share those in my conclusion.
This topic may seem irrelevant in this moment when so much explicit violence to bodies is happening globally, but if we’re going to be thorough in our dismantling of oppressive systems, this insidious form of violence to the body needs to be named and disentangled from our nervous systems. The trance imposed by the mainstream media often makes this form of violence invisible, but the quiet and persistent suffering can be felt in almost every family and social circle. Our obsession with having the right-sized body can take up so much space in our consciousness that we have no energy left for activism, creativity, or spending intimate time with others, or to truly treat our bodies with love and care. Both pernicious and ubiquitous, there was a time that I saw body hate as an unpleasant and time-consuming neurosis rather than as a form of systemic oppression. There’s truly a conspiracy engaged in keeping us ignorant.
Reading the book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, back in the late 1970s, I began to recognize that there was something more systemic underneath the obsession. Examining the issue through the lens of patriarchy’s hold on women, brought me to read Kim Chernin’s Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness and The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity as well, but I wasn’t yet able to see the whole complex landscape that body hate lived within.
I might not have been overly concerned with the size of my body had I grown up in a different culture or a different family. Being the grand-daughter of immigrants meant certain expectations were placed upon me, partly because of the economic precarity that my parents had experienced due to the McCarthy era blacklist and the epigenetic trauma that they carried. Aside from getting a good education that fostered critical thinking and would offer possibilities for my professional aspirations, I was supposed to have an upwardly mobile body size. To that end, I was sent to Weight Watchers at age 12, and began the gruesome ritual of being weighed daily, counting calories, and measuring portions. I was not even chubby at the time, but the curves of my early puberty must have put my parents on high alert. Thankfully the torture of going to those meetings did not last long, but it made an imprint.
I didn’t realize until much later that both of my parents had problematic relationships with food. My father, born in 1916, had been overfed by his immigrant mother during the Spanish influenza epidemic, so he was definitely chubby when he started school. He was bullied and teased in ugly ways and by puberty, he reacted by becoming extremely careful about keeping a slender, athletic body. He took up sports like football and tennis. His hyper-vigilance about what he consumed and how much he exercised continued as an adult. He tried to coach me into not eating lunch when I was a teenager. His encouragement of such a behavior was a clear sign of his own disordered eating behavior; I took his comments as criticism and felt ashamed that I had an appetite. My mother had the so-called perfect body of her era (before she had kids); she liked to wave a photo of herself as a bathing beauty in front of me as a way of shaming me and admonished me for having an appetite. After three c-sections and menopause offered her a body type that was not hers or society’s ideal, she became hyper-vigilant about portion sizes and nutrition. Her lack of boundaries and her desire to make me “perfect” poured onto me. Almost daily, she would make deriding comments about my body, as did my older brothers when they still lived at home, and the combo was definitely not helpful to my self-esteem.
During my 5 years of summer camp, those two precious months of the year, I could be an athlete, eat what I wanted, and not worry about the critical comments of family members, but back during the school year, without Title 9 in place yet, there was no place for my athletic prowess or my self-esteem to develop, especially in relation to my appearance.
At age 12, I was sent to a so-called progressive camp in Vermont where two of my bunkmates decided to bully me because they thought that my hair was too short, my clothes were wrong (not cool enough), and I lived in the wrong state (NJ not NY). They started insulting me ruthlessly and calling me names when we sat down to eat in the dining hall, and I lost my appetite. I did not know how to respond to them and instead stopped eating anything other than dry toast and water. I didn’t know that starving myself in this way was unhealthy. I was trying to disappear in a situation that I could not control. There was no adult paying attention.
Without sufficient boundaries to protect me from the insults from family, social situations, and the dominant culture’s emphasis on monitoring and pruning the body on a daily basis, I began to take over-the-counter diet pills. I would secretly eat sugary foods and then force myself to throw them up (and this was before bulimia and anorexia were a common topic in the media). Thankfully, I soon learned that this practice might rupture my esophagus and rot my teeth, so I stopped doing it.
My self-image was rocked in a positive way for a bit when I traveled to other countries; I became aware that my looks had a different impact on people from other cultures. Their beauty standards had not been distorted by the mainstream media and I was seen as attractive just as I was. These experiences began to shift something inside me, but sadly, it was not a sufficient antidote to what I had already internalized. I dismissed the complements I received as aberrations rather than taking them in and continued to monitor my behavior with food in ways that made me suffer.
I navigated my 20s with a variety of approaches to diet and health. Due to my low income and personal preferences (I was mostly a vegetarian during those years), I tried to make a healthier relationship with food as best as I could, but those early traumas continued to generate shame if I ate food that might be considered fattening or “bad.” I took up swimming at the local YWCA and found that I could maintain a weight that I felt was healthy by doing a mile of laps daily. Towards the end of my time in NYC, I briefly lived with a man who was both a narcissist and a compulsive eater. That relationship should never have happened, but it did teach me a few things. I learned that body hate is not just living in the female body.
In 1986, I moved to southern California where fewer clothes are worn and superficial appearances dominate how many people value each other. I did not have sufficient comfort in my body nor the boundaries to prevent the toxicity of this attitude from permeating my psyche. Instead of dieting, which I had found, counter productive, I took up jogging on the beach, low impact classes, swimming laps, and continuing with my yoga. At the time, I convinced myself that I was just health conscious, but that kind of exercise obsession often indicates some underlying deep discomfort with one’s body. It wasn’t until I was a visiting artist at the Institute for Social Ecology that I began to understand the big picture in which body hate exists.
It was in the summer of 1991, while co-facilitating a course in “Activist Art in Community” with Bob, that Chaia Heller invited me to sit in her ecofeminism class. I became transfixed by what I was learning. I had never taken a class in feminism, not even in women’s studies (such a course did not exist when I went to college). In my early 20s, I had browsed through whatever I could find on the still sparse shelves of feminist books in the most progressive of bookstores. I read Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone’s work and started to understand my gendered journey more deeply. Despite forming some women artist support groups (one in college and the other in my NYC art world days), my analysis was not yet intersectional in relation to class, race, culture, ecology, etc. It took a while before I discovered the writings of bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, and so many others.
So imagine my gratitude as I sat in Chaia’s course, in a room of animated, bright women in their 20s (I was 37, at the time), chewing on these ideas in a more complex way. I had never heard the word ECOCIDE before, and Chaia explained it well, as the destructive force wiping out ecosystems globally due to the extraction/exploitation economy, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and more. It was good to have a term for the horror we could see tangibly. The term, ecofeminism, implied that our dominant culture had as little regard for women as it had for the ecological world, and from there we looked at essentialist stereotypes about the female gender, seeing women as closer to nature, etc.
One day, our class had a visitor, the poet Susan Stinson, who came to share her writing about fat oppression. Susan is a very dynamic and talented woman of size who had experienced the bullying voices and abuse of people who think it is their role to police the bodies of others. Her poetry spoke passionately about this prejudice that was widely practiced: shaming people for being the “wrong size.” Susan was using her words as an antidote to that shame and was fighting to reclaim her self-love.
After reading a series of powerful poems, Susan said to all of us, “I bet that you all think that you’re fat.” I looked at the young women in the room, all of whom appeared healthy and attractive, and thought, “is it possible that all these smart, lovely women, engaged in many kinds of social activism, are unhappy with their appearance?”
Chaia invited us to break into to small groups to examine our attitudes towards our bodies. Each woman was asked to name something that they liked about their body and something that they disliked. I listened carefully and soon became flooded with sadness. Each woman had a long list of what they disliked, and a very short list of what they liked. Several told stories about being put on diets by their mothers or taught to throw up their food by their friends. There were stories of self-harm, abuse, and so much that was hidden. The level of suffering that was shared disturbed me so deeply that I felt like I was going to explode. I realized I was going to have to make art about this.
Chaia concluded the session by saying something to the effect, if you can get people so intensely hyper-vigilant about what they put in their bodies, spending inordinate amounts of time and money on exercise and diets, judging and comparing themselves daily, then capitalism and ecocide win.
Later that day, I ran through the woods on the Goddard campus to the art building, impatient to see what would emerge on paper. I had been generously offered a table and some walls as my month-long studio space. Almost breathless, I started drawing and collaging a series of images that became an artist’s book. I recalled fragments of stories shared by the women in the class and phrases repeated to me in my own life. Before I knew it, there were dozens of images pouring out of me.
First titled, The Fat Book, later that summer, I printed in an edition of bound photocopy books at the Kinko’s on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice, California. As I was leaving the photocopy store, people seeing the cover and title, asked me if they could take a look. I was thrilled to sell my first copies to a few strangers.
I was certain that a feminist publisher would want to pick up this winning artist’s book, but alas, after sending out queries to multiple publishers, my photocopied project was rejected over and over again. “We don’t do that kind of book” was the common response. I tucked in my ego for a bit and moved on.
Thankfully, there was a keen interest in the topic of healing body hate among curators and fellow artists in the southern Californian community. This was not surprising in a culture where appearances count for so much. I was invited to create an installation based on the content of the book for a few college galleries and alternative art spaces for the next few years, and during that time, quite unexpectedly, the book arrived in the hands of an eager publisher.
In the fall of 1992, we were briefly visiting an old friend from my college days, and I had brought her a copy of The Fat Book as a gift. Another friend from our first summer at the Institute for Social Ecology came to visit us and saw the book on her coffee table. He leafed through it and got very excited and asked if he could take it. I was startled to hear this, and said, “no, but I can send you your own copy.” He said, “please do it soon. I am a publisher and want to share this with my team.” I had no idea that this man had started a publishing company, but this was the miracle I was waiting for, and I sent him a copy as soon as I returned home.
The publishing team asked me to create a more marketable title for the book. Back then, the word “fat” did not have the caché that it has now. One Size DOES NOT Fit All was published by Aigis Publications (now extinct) in 1993. Used copies of the book are still circulating and available for purchase online.
In the months before the published version came out, I had mounted my 3rd exhibition of One Size DOES NOT Fit All for the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. They invited me to partner with a space in the community so that the work could be seen by an audience who might not venture into the museum. I asked them to find a women’s clothing store because I wanted to put a rack of sculptural clothing next to fitting rooms (the site of so much self-abuse). SBCAF partnered me with a new women’s clothing chain called, CP Shades. Their fashionable and well made clothes were designed to be worn by women of many sizes so it was an appropriate location for the work.
Each piece of sculptural clothing that I created for the rack was initially soaked in wall paper paste, and then shaped into positions that represented the uncomfortable feelings that many women have about their bodies. I then painted each piece, hung it on a hanger with a tag that included a line from the book. Women who were shopping for clothes were often astonished by what they found on the rack. When they read a few tags, they were able to understand the work, and sometimes laughed. There was a clipboard hanging on the rack where they could leave their own stories about their journeys with their bodies.
Once the artist’s book was published, I had one last installation in Los Angeles at the Barnsdell Art Center in Hollywood. In this version, I created a pink boutique in which to display the sculptural clothing as well as pages of the book.
In 2006, many years after the book was published, the chair of the women’s studies program at Indiana University, contacted me and said that my book had changed her life when she was a grad student. Her university was doing a year-long focus on the body. They had funds to bring me and my work to campus. I was thrilled and went back to the original images created for the book, scanned them into the computer, revised them in Photoshop, and had them printed out large and in color for the gallery show.
This body of work continues to be quite popular. When I open my current studio to visitors, a crowd usually forms around the original small ink drawings and collages. I am always pleased hear them discussing the resonance of the images in their lives.
Go to Part 2.
This fetish with the control of women's bodies is a perversion and, yes, it does reflect our attitude toward the earth--as you note. I worked in television journalism for years and don't think I ever ate a meal; now, in my 70s, my stomach cannot digest a full one. Although I no longer buy into the myth about women's bodies, I still carry the messaging in my mind: Do not eat. Do not eat. Do not eat. It's sort of like being a small country freed after living for years under colonial rule. The mind remains colonized even as the person (body) is free. I hope you'll write more and do more art about this as we fight attempts to control the body in the medical arena (over reproductive justice).
I have strong stirrings after reading everyone of your posts. This made me respond immediately. I had an older half brother. His mother died in childbirth along with his sibling. He was 24 years older than me and out of the house and married before I was born. His childhood was turbulent than mine as I grew up as a spoilt only child with opportunities not afforded to him. He had six daughters and all had and have lifelong challenges with weight issues. The oldest was possibly abused by my brother and spent much of her adult life in an assisted living facility until she succumbed to OCP in her 50's. Two more died within four months. One of liver disease from drinking. The third had gotten stomach surgery as an extreme measure that appeared to gain her a more normal weight range however that had side effects. The week of her daughters wedding the bride came by to pick her up to buy flowers for the ceremony and found her dead on the kitchen floor of a heart attack. Their mother was pregnant with all six in ten years and was agoraphobic for decades and died in her sixties. I am not sharing this as a rebuke of anything you say. I admire appreciate your wisdom. As a man however I am torn between accusations of fat shaming when I make any mention of this within my family. I have three daughters also. I never found an acceptable way to share my lifelong concern for their health and welfare. Especially as the trauma remains silent and hidden. This has made grieving difficult.