American Apparel, in “celebration” (?) of its inclusion of XL sizes for omg gross fat people launched a contest for fat ladies to have the chance to get a trip to L.A. and be the face of AA’s newest, grossest line of clothing that maybe might save their company (the ship tries to stay afloat on the backs of whales, AMIRITE???).  While the contest is concluded, the language is forever preserved on Jezebel, which includes such awesome and totally non-patronizing or demeaning language, like:

Calling curvy ladies everywhere! Our best-selling Disco Pant (and around 10 other sexy styles) are now available in size XL, for those of us who need a little extra wiggle room where it counts. We’re looking for fresh faces (and curvaceous bods) to fill these babies out. If you think you’ve got what it takes to be the next XLent model, send us photos of you and your junk to back it up.

OH MY GOD!  Cutesy puns to disguise the fact that they’re looking for fatty-fats???  Referring to bodies like mine as “junk”????  How could you NOT fall in love with this contest omg wtf!!???!!!1@!!*

In response to the contest, Nancy Upton, a student and awesome lady, decided she was going to make a big fat mockery of this big fat contest, and took a bunch of pictures of herself stuffing her face and bathing in ranch dressing.  She was very vocal about the fact that she was parodying the contest.

And then, guess what happened?  SHE WON!  She won, and then American Apparel sent her a super condescending email that basically said, “Know what, bitch?  YOU DON’T WIN!!”  Which actually seems like a perfect ending to all of this – Nancy had stated that if she was offered the job, she would turn it down anyway.

And that’s what happened.  The fat and feminist blogosphere got solidly behind Nancy and is appropriately outraged where applicable.  But in my opinion, there still remains a lot to unpack about this whole thing.

Autumn of The Beheld points to a very important issue regarding Upton’s photos – namely, that Upton’s satire really, really looks like the real thing.  The only thing distinguishing Upton’s photo set from any number of other plus size fashion shoots in which models are posed with food is that she explicitly tells us that what she’s doing is a farce.

via The Beheld

Says Autumn:

These provocative photos beg questions larger than I’m qualified to tackle: How much does the creator’s intent matter in art? If you have to know the background in order to spot the subversion, can it be effective? If the goal is to raise awareness of an issue and the only people who get the joke are already informed, have you succeeded in your goal?

While that’s a pretty big question fit for anyone who gets a boner for critical analysis (like me!), I think the results of the contest are pretty conclusive.  Oh, if only we could poll everyone who voted for Upton and ask them whether they thought it was a joke or not!  If everyone did, in fact, get that the photos were meant as a commentary (or even if they had just heard about it), it seems like a vote for Nancy Upton was really a referendum on the contest, and on American Apparel itself.

The language in the contest was objectionable, of course.  As April Flores, the one who was informed that fat women are “not [American Apparel’s] demographic,” points out, even the title of the contest – “The Next BIG Thing” – objectifies women by calling the “things.”  The cattle-call nature of the contest, allowing visitors to rate women – all of it is dehumanizing and offensive, and those who voted for Nancy Upton were also agreeing with what she said about the contest – that American Apparel “was co-opting the mantra of plus-size empowerment and glazing it with its unmistakable brand of female objectification.”

Additionally, Upton (among many, many others) has been pretty vocal about American Apparel’s horrible corporate culture, including its discriminatory hiring practices and the litany of sexual harassment allegations leveled against CEO Dov Charney.  I’d guess, then, that a vote for Upton was also a vote against the company’s sexist culture.

And that is what American Apparel failed to recognize when it distributed the same condescending email sent to Upton to several news outlets.  Iris Alonzo, the author of the email, clearly had no problem wagging the proverbial finger:

It’s a shame that your project attempts to discredit the positive intentions of our challenge based on your personal distaste for our use of light-hearted language, and that “bootylicous” was too much for you to handle. While we may be a bit TOO inspired by Beyoncé, and do have a tendency to occasionally go pun-crazy, we try not to take ourselves too seriously around here. I wonder if you had taken just a moment to imagine that this campaign could actually be well intentioned, and that my team and I are not out to offend and insult women, would you have still behaved in the same way, mocking the confident and excited participants who put themselves out there?

But clearly, Iris and American Apparel weren’t able to grasp that Nancy wasn’t making fun of the other entrants, or taking the fun out of a totally superfun contest – she was directly calling out the company for its bogus practices (like that Charney apparently attends meetings in nothing but a cock sock), and the reason she won was that nobody likes American Apparel.

So like, rather than whining about how mean and uppity Nancy Upton is, I think American Apparel had better take a hard look at its corporate practices – and its CEO – and make some tough decisions – decisions like ousting Dov Charney and his erm… “unique” brand of sexism.  I mean, really – I don’t think the schilling of t-shirts requires the know-how of a sexist hipster douchebag.  I’m pretty sure the t-shirts sell themselves… maybe with the help of scared girls in tube socks.

Think about how rarely you actually see a new (near-)naked body that is not a model or the equivalent (actress etc).  With new sexual partners, perhaps.  And if you’re straight, this is (probably mostly) going to be the body of the other sex.  At the gym perhaps?  But you’re not supposed to look, so you probably don’t look closely.  I realized when I saw this video (it probably lasted all of two minutes), that I had never really seen women’s bodies outside of the mass media. I didn’t know what women’s bodies looked like.  And I had been comparing my body to that of actresses and models.  I realized that day that things about my body that I thought were horrible deformities were completely normal.  Even though the bodies in that video were all different, they were also very similar, and my body looked just like theirs in some cumulative way.  From that point on, I knew I wasn’t gross.  A simple lesson.  And so important, but a really hard one to encounter in a powerful way.

I guess I don’t want to get too personal, but as a woman who has sex with other women… well, you’d think I’d be smart enough to connect the dots and draw some conclusion about the fact that I have never been with a woman who had a body that you would see on the pages of a magazine.  Maybe – duh – that means that most women don’t look like that (not that I’ve slept with “most women,” but you know what I mean).  You know, it wasn’t even something I had considered – it had never even occurred to me to compare my partners’ bodies to the bodies we see in mainstream media, so why did I automatically assume that that was the standard to which my own body should be judged?  And furthermore, all of those diverse bodies that I’ve caressed, held, tasted, and teased – I’ve thought them all beautiful.

I don’t think it’s until someone gives you a set of diverse bodies to look at and points out to you that you’ve been judging yourself based on a body type that is atypical that it really hits home – even if you’re not heterosexual and have seen a lot of women in various states of undress.

via perezhilton.com

A few days ago, Eld and I had a Tumblr exchange about bad books we feel compelled to finish, even though they’re bad, which was precipitated by my stating that I found the most recent installment in the Sookie Stackhouse series of novels by Charlaine Harris to be unforgivably awful.  The book, Dead Reckoning, had no discernible plot, completely dropped the ball on what should have been a HUGE DEAL, and it just felt like it was unenthusiastic about slogging through yet another formula Southern Vampire book (it would be unfair to call it a mystery – there was little to no sleuthing).  This is how the books work: Sookie cleans her house, Sookie finds out there are even more supernatural creatures that we didn’t know about (seriously, as the books progress, it gets kind of ridiculous – vampires, shapeshifters, werewolves, werepanthers, fairies, demons, maenads, men who are not rapists – just kidding!  all men are rapists in the Sookie Stackhouse novels!), Sookie has violent sex after which she is obligated to ice her pussy, horribly gruesome violence porn in which at least ten minor characters are slaughtered and/or dismembered, the end.

And I can say “the end” because I finished reading it.  I finished reading it, even though it was horrible.  I finished reading all of them, even though they were horrible (though not so horrible as the latest one).  Part of the reason is that I have this sick compulsion to finish reading terrible books, and I am in fact more likely to finish a terrible book than I am to finish one that I’m legitimately enjoying (I mean, I finish the vast majority of books I read, but I can think of a few occasions where I put a good book down and just never picked it up again, and zero occasions in which I’ve put a bad book down).  And another reason that I’m hooked on these books is that I just cannot believe some of the horseshit that goes down in them.

A while ago, I had this other blog that kind of stalled out and was eventually deleted, but one of my projects there was to recap and analyze each of the Sookie Stackhouse books.  So I’m going to try to condense all of that down into one blog post about how rape-y these books are.  Because they’re super rape-y.

Unlike some feminist critics out there, I don’t have a problem with portrayals of rape.  I don’t necessarily believe that if an author writes about rape, ze is necessarily condoning it.  Vladimir Nabokov wrote about a pedophile – in the first person, no less! – and I really, really don’t think anyone would dare argue that Lolita gives child molestation the thumbs-up.  But the Sookie Stackhouse novels are not like that – not at all.  While I wouldn’t argue that they condone rape, they certainly engage in some pretty heinous rape apologism – and that’s what we’re going to delve into.

The first thing you need to know about the Sookie Stackhouse books is that the vampires are scary, and they have fangs (unlike some other vampire fiction we know).  They are ruthless, untrustworthy, passionate, and they fuck.  In fact, it’s observed many times throughout the course of the novels that blood and sex are deeply intertwined, and that for vampires, one rarely comes without the other.

The second thing you need to know… is a brief plot synopsis.  In the world of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, vampires have “come out of the coffin” after the invention of synthetic blood – which obviously means that they don’t need to prey on humans to sustain “life” (they don’t need to, which doesn’t mean that they don’t).  The first novel, Dead Until Dark, is set in the fictional Bon Temps, Louisiana, two years after vampires have made their existence known to the world.  This is where we meet Sookie Stackhouse, a waitress and telepath, who gets all gooey in the groin over the first vampire she meets.  His name is Bill Compton, and he just happens to live in the house across the cemetery.  AND THIS IS WHERE ALL OF THE TROUBLE BEGINS.

Right out of the gate it’s established that in these books, rape and sexual assault are the weapons of choice.  Whether she’s forced to watch sex acts against her will (on page 57, we’re introduced to a group of vampires considerably more frightening than Bill, and the way that threat is established is through a lot of heavy petting and one of them receiving fellatio while Sookie, too frightened to run away, watches), or the local detective is trying to bait her telepathy by imagining her fucking her brother (Dead Until Dark, 104), it seems that the best way to scare Sookie is to put her into extremely uncomfortable sexual situations.

And because it wouldn’t be good, trashy genre fiction without it, “forced seduction” and the threat thereof plays a large role in the steamy scenes as well.  Take, for example, this scene which occurs on page 101 in Dead Until Dark:

Oh boy, could he kiss.  We might have problems communicating on some levels, but this wasn’t one of them.  We had a great time for maybe five minutes.  I felt all the right things moving through my body in waves.  Despite the awkwardness of being in the front seat of a car, I managed to be comfortable, mostly because he was so strong and considerate.  I nipped his skin with my teeth.  He made a sound like a growl.

“Sookie!”  His voice was ragged.

I moved away from him, maybe half an inch.

“If you do that anymore, I’ll have you whether you want to be had or not,” he said, and I could tell he meant it.

“You don’t want to,” I said finally, trying not to make it a question.

Okay, here is where we have to draw some lines between real life, and the conventions of fiction.  In real life, if someone told me that they’d “have” me, whether I wanted it or not, I really, really doubt I’d find it sexy (unless it was something my partner and I had previously negotiated, of course) – in fact, I’d probably be scared shitless.  In this book, and in other literature – especially romances – we don’t read this situation as a rape threat because it’s been previously established that Sookie is game, and we know she is game because she is narrating, and we know what she is thinking.  We also know that Bill and Sookie would have been humping a long time ago were it not for some strategically placed barriers, like social taboos and miscommunications (because it’s not romantic if two people meet, decide they want to fuck, and then fuck – no, no, there has to be an obstacle).  There’s been a considerable amount of research and speculation as to why we’re okay with rape in genre fiction (here is one that I like in particular, and here’s another).

But see, that isn’t the big problem.  The big problem occurs in book three, when I guess someone decided that all of those rape threats were no good unless they were actually carried out.  At the end of book three, which is called Club Dead (I know), Sookie ends up rescuing a half-starved Bill from where he’s being held captive by the vampire king of Mississippi (I KNOW), and then some bitch locks her in a trunk with him, where he rapes her.

I mean, he really rapes her.  I KNOW!!!

Thankfully, Sookie terminates the relationship after that point (though they were honestly on the rocks before that), but remains reluctant to really place any blame on Bill for what happened.  It’s argued first that Bill, starving as he was, couldn’t help it or wasn’t aware that he was even doing it.  It’s then argued that the blame lies with the woman who pushed Sookie into the trunk, and this isn’t just Sookie trying to rationalize what happened – other characters also say it’s the woman’s fault (her name is Debbie Pelt, FWIW).  It isn’t even until book five or six that Sookie even calls what happened in the trunk a “rape.”  Bill is never held accountable for his actions (except that he loses Sookie as his girlfriend), and Sookie even becomes friendly with him again after a little time has passed.

Where Harris really fails is that she puts forth a situation – Sookie’s rape – and then refuses to really deal with it.  I’d never argue that an author can’t allow hir main character to be sexually assaulted – but if you’re going to have that happen, you must treat it with the gravity it deserves.  For example, don’t have another one of your characters say this to the woman who was raped a few hours after it happened:

“Had it occurred to you,” he said, after we’d rolled out of the city’s center, “that you tend to walk away when things between you and Bill become rocky?  Not that I mind, necessarily, since I would be glad for you two to sever your association.  But if this is a pattern you follow in your romantic attachments, I want to know now.” (Club Dead, 215)

Hey Sookie – this dude just raped you, and I feel like I should probably shame you a little bit for not sticking around to work it out with him, and I also want to know if it’s your wont to run away from your rapist, in case you and I get into a relationship with one another and I rape you.  I mean, running away from your rapist – is that a pattern?

And this is typical of the way this rape is treated moving forward in the series – and it’s something I was never able to forgive Harris for.  It’s one of the reasons, I imagine, that True Blood changed this scene up so that Bill simply drank from Sookie – almost to the point of killing her – and did not rape her.  Because when you allow one of your characters to get raped, you have to deal with it – you can’t treat it like he farted in bed or forgot to bring milk home, or even like he cheated.

It’s a real shame.  While these books are certainly not masterpieces, they are fairly progressive in their cavalier attitude toward homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender expression.  It’s just too bad that all of that got ruined when Harris refused to acknowledge that she allowed one of her characters to get raped.  I guess I’ve never forgiven her for it.

And yet… I’ll be reading the next one when it comes out – you can be sure of it.  And I’ll hate it all the way through.

_________________

PRINT SOURCES

Harris, Charlaine.  Dead Until Dark.  New York: Penguin, 2001.

Harris, Charlaine.  Club Dead.  New York: Penguin, 2003.

Me, of course, I’m a “real woman.” I pilfer paper towels from the office kitchen instead of carrying special wipes made for special people. I stash dirty granola bar wrappers and unwanted flyers in my bag because I’m too good of a citizen to litter and in too much of a damn hurry to wait for a trash can. I carry around makeup from 2007, because who am I to think I’m so privileged as to deserve new cosmetics when these work perfectly fine?

It is not me being “real”; it is me short-changing myself on self-care. I used to think that self-care was anything that was utterly nonproductive. Cleaning my purse doesn’t feel like self-care; it feels like work. Zoning out on the couch with a box of graham crackers and watching five consecutive episodes of Dexter, however, was “self-care” because it was my fucking time, goddammit, and I’m not going to pick up the phone and I’m not going to answer your e-mail and I’m not going to exercise or even do a fucking Sun Salutation because I am far too busy caring for myself, do you understand?

You will not be surprised to learn that this form of self-care rarely results in me actually feeling cared for. My version of “self-care” has long been to wait until I am at the very end of my gas tank, and then to do the only thing I have energy left to do—which is pretty much nothing. But it gives me enough of a break to get back on track, until I’m running on empty again, and again, and again. And again.

Oh my god, I thought to myself – THAT’S ME!

Autumn goes on to talk about how self-care can actually require a little bit of effort, a little bit of work.  Sometimes, it’s about cleaning your damned house a little, or shaking all of crap that collects in the bottom of your purse out.  Self-care includes stuff like exercise and washing one’s face, as well as doing the shit we need to do to decompress.

You know, I didn’t used to be this chronically lazy.  I have avoided vacuuming the rug in the living room for like, a month now.  The wool rug.  That sheds like a motherfucker. (This is also attributable to the fact that my cat has puked on it twice in the past month in what appears to be indelible vomit.  I’ve wept over those stains as I feverishly sprayed Resolve at them, and only succeeded in bleaching out the surrounding area.  I no longer like this yack-stained rug, and vacuuming it feels like working on keeping a shitty relationship together.)

I think part of the reason I gave up on self-care has to do with fat acceptance – or rather, it’s just a step on my “journey” (as much as I loathe the word).  It should come as no surprise to those who have read me elsewhere on the internet that I still struggle with a lot of issues – food issues, image issues.  For as many years that I’ve been doing this, I still haven’t quite gotten to the self-acceptance part, and it’s making me wonder if I’ll ever get there.

Perhaps part of my problem though, is that when fat acceptance hit me like a revelation, I took the opportunity to shut down on myself.  I think I needed it.  I’d grown up in the land of “lite” and “free” foods, under extreme imposed calorie restrictions, and with the constant reminder that I was a “beached whale,” and that no one would ever find value in me so long as I looked the way I do.  I think after twenty years of being terrified of being fat, and being scared of the repercussions of gaining any weight, that I really did just need to turn off and learn to not feel guilty about being me.

At first, I kind of thought that was the end of my “journey.”  That I would grow into the “bad fatty” trope, and that would be okay.  And it would have been okay, except I’m realizing that that’s not quite the person that I am.  Who I am had been hidden from me.  All of the skiing and soccer playing and backpacking and bike riding I did as a kid was done because I was forced to do it.  I’d never learned how to feed myself because eating was not my responsibility when I was growing up – that responsibility had been taken away from me, because the fear was that if I was allowed to be in charge of what I consumed, I would turn into the Blob.

Well, it happened anyway.  My mother’s worst fears came true.  I am supahfat and…. nothing at all has happened as a result.

I quit smoking about two months ago, after ten years of being a smoker, and eight years going through about a pack a day.  The reason I gave myself was that I could no longer afford it, which is true, but after about the three week point, I realized that it was more than that, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was.

And then, Autumn’s post about self-care hit me like a freight train, and I realized that I am finally ready to be in charge of my own self-care, and I’ve realized that it’s going to involve more than “decompressing” at the end of the day.  What I really realized was that I don’t need to be afraid of doing work to care for myself.  Before, I was afraid that forcing myself to be productive would just lead me back to old patterns of behavior, back to the guilt, back to feeling like I was a failure if things didn’t turn out exactly the way I’d planned.  It doesn’t have to be that way, though.  I’m in charge now – no one else – and I think it’s time to go vacuum the pukey rug in the living room.

I just finished listening to the episode on on Riot Grrrl, and it was remarkable.  They played tracks from Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Sleater-Kinney, Le Tigre, and more, and interviewed Sarah Marcus, author of Girls to the Front, a book on the history of Riot Grrrl.  If you have a boner for Kathleen Hanna like I do, you should really take 3/4 of an hour and listen to the episode, which you can download from iTunes, or stream it online.

Copyright Brian Haley/DCL via TLC.com

I’m not going to lie – the image to the left creeps me the hell out.  It might be due to the fact that I have so many regrets about my own childhood that I feel like kids should be kids and like, they shouldn’t be Photoshopped and airbrushed into oblivion.

Mike Adamick, writing for Jezebel, has a similar aversion to the whole pre-pubescent beauty queen thing.  He says:

 I would wager a lot of parents would never, ever let their kids enter a contest where looks are everything — where bodies and images are dissected, graded and given points and sashes. But I don’t even want my daughter to even know about them. I don’t want her to watch a second of those shows or to even know they’re out there, waiting, available.

Yeah, I don’t blame ya, buddy.  If I were a breeder, I think I’d try to delay exposing my kid to that stuff, too.  But here’s where Mike’s analysis gets a little creepy.  He says that he and his daughter enjoy watching baseball games and shows on the Discovery Channel together, and one day, when they were about to settle in to have some father-daughter time on the couch, he flipped on the TV, and it just happened to be tuned to TLC, which just happened to be airing a rerun of “Toddlers and Tiaras.”  Says Mike:

I heard my daughter’s little feet padding toward the family room, her head probably filled with Mike Rowe’s sweet, manly voice or images of a baseball game. And here I am, watching a rerun of Toddlers and Tiaras.

Mike Rowe’s sweet, manly voice.  Um…

Briefly ignoring how fucking creepy that phrase is in context, let’s really examine what’s going on here.  I get not wanting to expose your daughter to the pageant world, where young girls are judged on their looks (and spray tans).  Yup, that’s pretty sick.  But it seems to me like Mike is a bit over-exuberant about the fact that his daughter enjoys “boy stuff” like baseball and Mike Rowe’s manliness (but seriously – who doesn’t enjoy Mike Rowe’s manliness, amirite?)

A couple of days ago, Eld wrote about wanting to try wearing makeup, and we ended up riffing on internalized misogyny a bit in the comments.  Pretty much every feminist I know of has gone through a phase in hir life where ze completely rejected anything “girly.”  Understandable – it’s kind of a revelation once it really hits you how much of your gender expression was taught, and how much society expects you to “act like a girl.”  But many of us then go so far as to loathe anything girly – and then, we start loathing anyone who doesn’t reject the girly stuff.  Seriously – how many women have you known in your life who have said something along the lines of, “I don’t get along with other women,” or even, “I hate girls?”

And women are rewarded for that type of behavior.  I remember during my first year of college, I was sitting in the dining hall with a girlfriend of mine and a couple of guys from a different dorm that we didn’t know very well.  As we were eating, a girl that I’d seen around campus marched up to the table, completely ignored my friend and me, and exchanged a few words with the guys.  I don’t really remember what she said, but I remember being kind of shocked by it (anyone who really knows me will tell you that I like to lie to myself and pretend that I’m vulgar, but I’m really kind of a prude – I guess I’m okay with that).  When she left, I asked the guys what they thought of that, and they said they loved it.  They told me that this girl “acted like a dude,” and they all universally thought it was the most awesome thing ever, and all of them – universally – were seriously mooning after her.

I am absolutely not saying that women should act one way or another, but they are rewarded just as much for rejecting anything girly (and for hating other women) as they are for behaving like “ladies.”  So as a result, we end up with a bunch of misogynistic women, which helps no one.

So listen, Mike.  It’s awesome that your daughter likes baseball and Mike Rowe.  I like baseball, too, and when Mike Rowe was on “Wait, Wait – Don’t Tell Me,” I found him to be a pretty charming, likable dude (shut up, I like radio!).  But the message you’re sending your kid when you praise her for liking “boy stuff” and treat “Toddlers and Tiaras” like something shameful is that boy stuff is good, and girl stuff is bad.  Unbeknownst to you, I’m sure, you’re teaching your child to hate other women.

I’m all in favor of keeping young girls away from pageant culture, but also let’s be mindful about what behaviors we’re positively reinforcing in our young girls.  Because girls who like “Dirty Jobs” and sports are no better than girls on the pageant circuit – they’re all girls, and they all deserve to be valued.  Say it with me: there’s no wrong way to be a girl.

I was going to continue all of the doom and gloom today.  I was.  I’ve been reading about a lot of really messed up shit.  Shit like how a Missouri school made a girl write and hand deliver a note of apology to her rapist, who then raped her a second time a few months later.  I can’t even…

But as messed up as the world is, I feel that there are other ways to resist and make a difference.  Like humor, for instance.

We feminists (well, any activist, really) get a lot of shit for being “humorless” because we’re totally going to kill your buzz when we bitch at you about making rape jokes and stuff.  In fact, I was told by an exboyfriend’s buddy a couple of years ago that women – not just feminists, but all women – are not funny.  And I know he was an expert on such things because he’d spent some time in jail for breaking into a veterinary clinic (this logic makes sense!).

So imagine my surprise when about a year ago, I discovered that women can be funny!  And I found it on the internet, too!

The Rumpus (which is a blog I read because I am a book dork) has this amazing series called Funny Women, which showcases humorous writing by women, and allows me to be super redundant. As I was reading about the fucked up state of our rape culture in my feed reader this morning, I came across column #61: “My Imaginary Wet Hot American Summer,” which reminded me that being hilarious is a fantastic way of giving the finger to every petty criminal who told you that your vagina rendered you chronically unfunny.

Elissa Bassist was an awkward girl who never got to go to summer camp, so she wrote about her imaginary camp experience:

Shwayder Camp, Idaho Springs, 1997. This summer has been—without rival—the best summer of my life. Life, I am sure, will continue on this trajectory.

For one thing, I am really tan. For another, I’m super heterosexual.

I’m the most popular Jewish girl at Jewish sleep-away camp. The reasons I am popular can be broken down into simple math, which is good for me because I am a lady:

Number of cigarettes I’ve smoked this summer: 7!!!

Number of times I was told I looked hot in my two-piece swimsuit: about a million.

Number of boys who’ve loved me at camp: all.

Number of times I’ve Frenched: 0.

I’ve had a few boyfriends so far, but I haven’t gone to first base with any of them because my body is a temple like Temple Emmanuel.

It’s a fantastic series, and I suggest you start with column #1: “I Am Sorry That I Didn’t Write a Comedy Piece.”  Because there are many ways to resist.

I have all of these invites, but I’m not going to offer them to you, dear readers, even though Google+ would be a fantastic tool for me to do that whole self-promotion thing that I’m so bad at.  I’m not going to offer you invites, because Megan E. King is not my real name, and I, like many people on the internet – or, like many authors of this very blog! – do my meat-life things with my “wallet name,” and my internet life things with this name, and Google says that I cannot use Google+ with this name.  You see, Google is a jerk and has this “real name policy” (or “common name” – but they really mean the name that’s on your driver’s license) that it enforced by mass-suspending thousands of Google+ users a few short weeks ago.  Everything I’m reading is now is indicating that policies have changed so that users are notified and given a grace period before their accounts are suspended, but according to opponents of the policy, that doesn’t go far enough.

And so, #nymwars began, thanks, in large part, to Skud.  You see, Skud’s G+ account was suspended because Skud is not the name that appears on her driver’s license.  It was recently reinstated, and since then, she has been using the platform to talk about why this real names policy is bullshit.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that I’ve been intimately connected to what’s been happening with #nymwars.  I haven’t.  Truth be told, I’ve been kind of away from the internet for a couple of days.  But #nymwars is important, and it ought to be important to you, even if you do use your “wallet name” online.  The fact is that pseudonyms protect people – and you like protecting people, don’t you?  I THOUGHT SO!

It’s entirely possible that my mom was just an over-protective helicopter mommy, but do you remember all of the media scares about young girls being abducted by internet predators about ten years ago?  Have you ever seen those “To Catch a Predator” specials on Dateline?  My family was pretty broke when I was young, so the first time I had real access to the internet (besides the limited access I had through the school library) was in 2000, when my dad bought me a computer for my birthday.  And I remember that my mother was scared shitless.

I am certainly not advocating that we should all be scared of the internet, but what’s wrong with a little caution if we want to exercise it?  What about the woman who is being stalked online by an ex?  What about the woman who fears that her job would be in jeopardy if the conservative organization she worked for got wind of her super-liberal, super-queer activities on the internet?  Oh wait, that’s me.

What about people who don’t like their legal names?  What about Madonna (is my age showing?) or Lady Gaga?  What about people who have had a presence online way back when nobody used their real names (like, ten years ago – that was meant to be snarky, by the way), and people looked at you funny if you used your actual name in your email address?  I remember that, and I wasn’t even online until 2000, folks.

I promise there is a point to this post.  Bear with me.

On her newly reinstated G+ profile, Skud said in a recent post:

Google Plus is Google’s attempted answer to Facebook. They are shit-scared of Facebook’s increasing dominance of the Internet and people’s pageviews and attention and information, and want to claw back as much of that as they can.

In order for G+ to threaten Facebook, it needs to get widespread mainstream acceptance. Not just among the Internet nerds who were excited by GMail and Wave and stuff like that, but by the sort of people who type “facebook.com” into the Google search bar because they don’t know how their browser works.

Vic and his team believe that those people (shorthand: “the mainstream”) are scared off by Internet culture, pseudonyms, and the wild and wonderful diversity most of us love. When they talk about “dress codes” what they mean is “we don’t want to scare off the mainstream people”.

Skud goes on to tell us that we fix this not by quitting Google+ – we fix this by reaching the mainstream and communicating to them how important pseudonyms are.

So that’s why I’m here – signal boosting.  And that’s what you ought to be doing, too.  People ought to have a right to their anonymity or pseudonymity, if they choose to exercise that right.  So the best thing that you can do is to talk to people.  Talk to people who don’t move in geek circles and aren’t involved in #nymwars.  Talk to your friends and family about why it’s so important to be able to protect yourself online.

And because many other people have written about this much better than I have, go and read what they’ve written:

s.e. smith for Tiger Beatdown >> The Google+ Nymwars: Where Identity and Capitalism Collide

What this is really about, of course, is capitalism, which some people advocating for legal names will admit, in a sort of roundabout, weird argument. They say ‘it’s not about safety, of course, the service wants real names because then it can sell the data,’ like this somehow ends the argument and the discussion can stop now. This is actually the core of the argument, and it’s the thing that everyone should be talking about, because it has extremely serious implications for online identity, and for the way people use the Internet.

Tim Carmody for Wired.com >> Google+ Punts on Kafkaesque Name Policy

I’m a sucker for literary references, and also for concise, pithy rundowns of online phenomena.  He’s also got a suggestion that I really like:

Google+ is already something of a nerd magnet, so many people on Google+ have ideas (including full schema) on how Google should handle names. I’ve endorsed an approach I call “polynymy,” letting each user choose a range of names, nicknames, alternative names or handles that they can use within different circles.

This way, I could totally offer you all Google+ invites, and still protect my pseudonymity!

Also check out My Name Is Me, a photo and text project meant to support the continued use of pseudonyms online.

Essentially, this is not a couple of internet dorks whining because they can’t use their screen names on Google+.  This isn’t even about protecting the people who are afraid they’re going to be stalked or harassed online.  This is really about your freedom online.  This is about you being the one in charge of how much or how little information you share about yourself.  If you like personal freedom, you like pseudonymity!

Do you have other links?  Share them in the comments!

In a classic case of “there’s two sides to every story,” a pretty visible FA personality called Jess Weiner wrote this thing for Glamour which is literally titled “Jess Weiner’s Weight Struggle: ‘Loving My Body Nearly Killed Me.'”

Crickets?  Is that what that sound is?

Marianne Kirby put her “ranty pants” on and ripped the article a new one.  And then Kate Harding (of the now defunct, but once dearly loved Shapely Prose) wrote for Jezebel and gave Weiner a chance to respond, and in doing so made what Weiner said seem somehow… less asshole-y.

Oh, you’re interested in knowing what I think?  Thought you’d never ask.

Jess Weiner is in recovery from an eating disorder.  As a person who is also in recovery (and currently struggling with food and eating issues), I know for a fact that it is overwhelming to both keep quiet that little monster inside of you that wants you to shun food and that craves that empty, hungry feeling, and also to be mindful of your health.  Since my disordered eating intersects with my fatness and with my socioeconomic status (which is low), eating is the bogeyman for me.  Eating is terrifying.  It’s often a struggle for me to read my body’s signals correctly, and sometimes I end up feeding it when I’m not really hungry, and sometimes I wait until I’m far past the point of hungry.  I unlearned my body’s signals many years ago.

While I’m anxiously trying to figure out when I should feed my body, I’m struggling to be able to have enough food around, period, to feed it with.  To be quite honest, my health doesn’t even factor into the equation.  And even if I was food-secure, I’m not sure that I would be able to handle thinking too much about how healthy I am.  That little disordered eating monster gives me enough to worry about as it is.

So I can easily understand how a person might be suddenly caught off guard by hir health.  I fully expect that to happen to me one day… you know, if I ever get into a position to have access to healthcare again.  I don’t mean to beat a dead horse but disordered eating?  It fucks with you.  It makes something very simple an extremely complicated, emotional, anxiety-inducing issue.  Sometimes, just getting something down (and keeping it there) feels like an accomplishment – regardless of what it is.

I can empathize with Ms. Weiner, surely.  What I have no sympathy for is the title of the article.  First of all, Ms. Weiner didn’t “almost” die.  She was diagnosed “pre-pre-diabetic.”  And then she altered some behaviors and her health improved.  She did not almost die.  And even if she did, her self-acceptance was not what did it to her.  I’d say it was a lack of awareness of her health and her body.  By her own admission, she hadn’t been to a doctor in 16 years.

Instead, Ms. Weiner (and Glamour) chose to take a shot at the fat acceptance community.  I’m not sure if you’re aware of this or not, but there is a very large contingent of people (most of them perhaps on the internet) that believe that self-esteem fosters TEH FATS, and that the best way to “fight obesity” is shame, shame, shame.  Like, we fatty-fats are not allowed to feel good until we’ve become former fatty-fats.

The diet industry relies on shame to be profitable.  It tries to make you feel shitty enough to spend your hard-earned money on a product which, let’s face it, probably isn’t going to work anyway.  But now, they’ve got this extra ammo.  Not only are they going to make you feel ugly, they have testimony from a formerly proud fatty that says that all of that self-esteem you’ve worked so hard to earn IS GOING TO KILL YOU!!!!

Media sensationalism FTW!

I actually kind of liked high school.  Imagine that.

That is not to say, however, that I skated on just being the fabulous, unique person that I am.  Far from it.  I tried my freaking ass off to have the right sort of interests.  I’ve been told that bookish teenagers are always nerdy, but I was careful to be the Bukowski Man, meaning that I read stuff like Tom Robbins and, well, Bukowski, because they’re cool.  It’s cool to like Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson, but it’s not particularly cool to like, say, George R. R. Martin.  I avoided video games until well into my twenties because I thought they were for nerds, and I could never, never be a nerd.  Nerds waste their time on nerdy things.  I was Bukowski Man, so ensconced in my snobbery that I was incapable of smelling my own bullshit.

And then… something broke.  I just stopped giving a shit.

You know, I kind of feel cheated.  I feel like I spent so long avoiding geekdom that when I finally embraced it, I was too far behind to ever really catch up.  I could never be respected as a proper nerd because my youth was spent being a reasonably popular and well-liked kid.  This is called impostor syndrome, but it speaks volumes about my regret.  I regret not being more myself when I was younger.  I regret that it took me so long to figure out who I am and what I’m about.

I’m pretty sure I got here because of feminism.

Feminism is like a gateway drug.  Once I learned that there is no wrong way to be a woman, I learned that there’s really no wrong way to be a person (unless you’re Pol Pot or something).  Feminism taught me that I have no obligation to be pretty, or proper, or “girly.”  I also had no obligation to reject those things.  It seemed only natural from there to conclude that I had no obligation to be “cool” either.  “Cool” is a construct.  It’s subjective, and it’s worthless once we grow out of that adolescent tendency to arrange ourselves into a hierarchy of grooviness.  I’m not the first, and I won’t be the last, to groan over all of the things I wish I’d known then that seem so simple and intuitive now.

I may have been kind of cool, but I was really thick.  It’s a personal tragedy.

I don’t know if I’ll ever see myself worthy of ascending the annals of geekdom (listen, folks – the grass is always greener), but I am so grateful that I found the strength to stop trying to be the person that I was told I had to be.  It feels pretty nice to just… be.