CRISTEN CONGER: Tweet of the week goes to Dennis Ricardo, who says, “Cristen Conger’s transatlantic accent is my favorite.” Oh, Dennis, do go on. I can’t believe it’s true.
This week on the show, I kicked things off with five must-know facts about teen depression. On Wednesday, I talked about what the sexiest part of the male body is, and it is not a penis. On Friday, I put on some wigs for 19 vintage slang terms for women, partially because I think we need to bring back choice bit of calico.
Now to this week’s Ask Cristen. First of all, thanks everybody who watched and commented on last week’s Ask Cristen video, “How to Love Your Face,” although it could have more correctly been titled, “How to Love Your Butter Face.”
Curtis006 had a great tip: Write down 100 things you love about your body, like, “Hell yeah, my heel bone supports me even when no one else does. I love you, heel bone.” And I think that was by far the most up-voted comment, and I really love that idea.
Ourpensareourlips had this to say: “As a trans guy, I fight with trying to accept my body all the time. It’s easy, and inevitable, to get caught up in the things I don’t like about my body, especially the ones that I can’t change. But the thing is, it’s just a body. It’s what contains me, but does not define me.” Amen, ourpensareourlips.
On to this week’s Ask Cristen question coming from Sydney Bleam who wants to know, “What about us ‘butter-bodies?’ I am heavier set, and I constantly get comments like, ‘You’ve got such a pretty face. If you just lost some weight, you would have all the guys.’ How do I respond to these people? How do I learn to be confident when people are always tearing me down?”
To those people who are making all sorts of butter-body comments to you, just respond with a question: Why does my body matter so much to you? How much weight should I lose so that I’ll be pretty enough for you? If they then respond and say “But I just want you to be happy. I just want other people to find you attractive,” just keep asking them questions. Put them in a position to where they have to explain their convoluted and stigmatizing logic so that, at some point, hopefully they will hear themselves saying this out loud, and maybe they will give themselves pause.
Hello Giggles writer Ramou Sarr, who was writing about this exact thing of the whole “but you have such a pretty face for a fat girl,” Ramou writes, “I’ve heard this one a lot, and this isn;t a humble brag at all because after you hear it a few times, you start to think that people are saying it not because they think it’s true, but because they want to make you feel better about being fat.
“Telling us we have a pretty face can sometimes come off as if you think that’s all we’ve got going for us, and we would be worthless without it. That’s not a compliment that is going to build someone up.
“I don’t want to sit here and try to fat-splain to everybody because I fully acknowledge that me, in the size and shape that I am right now, the experience of me walking out into the street, into public, going to a mall, wherever, being in school, is much different than the experience of a woman walking around who is twice or three times my size.”
Now this isn’t to say that I haven’t had body issues of my own, that I haven’t hated parts of my body, that my weight hasn’t fluctuated. Just because I’m thin does not mean I’m not going to talk about fat stigma. I don’t think that a lot of people realize just how unrelenting and constant fat stigma is.
A recent study published in the Journal of Health Psychology, which followed around 50 overweight and obese women throughout their day and just kept track of every fat-shaming comment or outright insult that people around them made either behind their backs or directly to their faces.
And on average, these women were the targets of three fat-shaming comments per day, from jerky teenagers making mooing sounds behind their backs when they walked past, to the dentist complaining that, “Oh, I think that you might break my chair.”
An even more recent study that was reported on in the New York Times that looked at fat-shaming in social media. Two of the most common words to come after fat in these fat-shaming tweets are “girl” and “lady.” A lot of times, this fat-shaming was specifically targeted to women.
One of the lead authors told the New York Times, “The study really clearly shows the connection between our anxiety around women, our anxiety around women’s rights, and weight stigma. When women get to choose what their body size is, and they get to choose what they eat and they get to choose what kind of clothes they wear, this is indicating a major paradigm shift. I think you’ve constantly seen backlash from the culture any time a woman tries to stake autonomy.”
And that’s not to say that fat-stigma is anything new. We have been stigmatizing and moralizing fat ever since the invention of dieting as we know it by a guy named William Banting in, I believe, the 19th century.
This reminds me of this great video that I found through Upworthy of this girl talking about how “it’s not the word fat that’s hurtful. It’s all the things you attach to the word fat.” I think it’s going to take a lot of time for us to weed out fat stigma, but I think that people are becoming more and more aware of it.
What, then, of Sydney’s question of how do I learn to be confident when people are always tearing me down? As I like to say, we’ve got to look inside first. Who’s the Sydney inside? Love that Sydney. Get to know that Sydney. I would recommend finding community. There is a growing body acceptance movement and active community online. I think in a lot of ways sometimes confidence is something that we have to practice.
Now though, I want to hear from you. What kind of advice do you have to give about this type of body acceptance and also fighting fat-stigma and fat-shaming. Let us all know in the comments below. And as always, ask me your questions, so I can give you some answers.
