jessiedress:

First, let me just say that I am clearly writing this for myself. This probably makes VERY LITTLE SENSE, and I’m not really interested in providing context.

Twice this week I’ve had crazy-interesting conversations with friends about body image/fat stuff. That sounds pretty normal and whatever, but in my daily it’s a pretty safe assumption that the only people I’m going to talk to about body stuff/fat stuff are fat posi/probably fat people who are into body activism and the convo is going to be super affirming of my views about those things/safe for me.

This week I’ve been stretching my boundaries a bit, in one case out of love for a friend, and in one case out of highness and curiosity. In the first case, I felt incredibly protected in the conversation, and I know that the friend I was talking to did too. The second conversation was (in hindsight) honestly one of the scariest conversations I’ve had in a long time (which I’m comfortable with), and I’m trying to unpack why that is. 

From those conversations (the details of which I won’t go into here) I have a few thoughts:

- Accepting (not loving, just accepting) the body you live in is REALLY FUCKING HARD work. I sometimes forget this, because I have spent so much of my life DEMANDING this of myself. (I feel) it is my obligation to be comfortable in my body, or at least PROJECTING comfortable at all times. I forget that it is OK for this to be hard. I appreciate the conversations I have that bring me to a space to remember that it is OK to struggle. 

- It is really really really hard for me to have conversations with people about (their) fat/bodies when I am not sure how they feel about fat bodies in general/the politics of attraction and desire/being attracted to fat bodies. In general I think this gets super wrapped up in power dynamics/issues of (queer) desire that are too complicated to get into here. The idea of being tolerated, or like, an exception to all the “rules” about what someone finds acceptable or whatever is really hard for me. (Hello, my name is jessie dress and my relationship baggage is totally showing here, and I’m ok with that, because our friendship-relationships are just as complicated as our explicitly not-platonic relationships.) And it’s really hard for me not to put that subtext on conversations with people. If I find myself wondering if you are skeeved by the thought of your body being/having been fat because you generally think fat is undesirable, and I can’t work out if that is something I’m projecting because I’m confused about your politics or if that is real, I am just going to want to ask you, “hey, do you think fat bodies can be attractive?” That’s a really hard question to ask or answer without pressure. 

- It really troubles me that some people are afraid to say “fat” in front of me (or maybe at all?!). Circle back to complicated power dynamics/queer desire issues because if you can’t/won’t say “fat” in conversation  … I just want to conversation top you and make you say fat!

Not about yourself, if that is not accurate about your body, but I want you to be unafraid to say fat. I want you to have to say fat as an adjective even if you are afraid. I want you to want to do that work because you are my friend, if for no other reason. To shed some light here, in one of the conversations I had with friends this week (the first one), my friend is totally comfortable saying fat in front of me, even in potentially problematic ways. In the second conversation, my friend LITERALLY could not say the word fat. So I kept saying fat. I kept saying fat because I knew it made them uncomfortable, and I was troubled by their discomfort. I kept saying fat hoping if I said fat enough times they would realize it was JUST A WORD and it had no power over them, no power over me.

- A long time ago I made the mistake of thinking that the way someone I know thought about her own fat body applied to the way she thought about my body. I’ve made a lot of progress in this department, but it is clearly still something I struggle with. I’m really glad to get to keep having conversations that engage me with this struggle. I wonder if this is less complicated for straight female-bodied/socialized people. I mean, I think queer/desire issues make the way we are socialized as female bodied people even more problematic in interacting with other bodies, socially or sexually or romantically or whatever. Especially in communities where there is a lot of blurring of social/sexual boundaries. Just a side note.

This is really rambly/incoherent, and probably inappropriate considering how many people I know IRL who follow me on tumblr. But yeah, it’s what I’m thinking about.