October 21st marked this years annual "Love Your Body" day celebration. Love Your Body, from NOW foundation, that emphasizes an increase in more diverse and genuine representations of women in the media. In honor of this, I would like to introduce you all to a piece done by newcomer Amy Rubio entitled "Thin Rant".
My Thin Rant
What is Beauty?
Who gets to say?
Why is skinny “better” than being fat?
I don’t know what beauty is!
I don’t choose what beauty is!
I don’t see why skinny is “better” than fat!
Just because I am tiny people tell me they hate me.
They tell me they wish they had my “problem.”
They tell me I am lucky!
Lucky.
So I am lucky to be 30 pounds underweight.
Lucky to have to worry about being sent to the hospital
And get force-fed through a tube.
I am lucky to have people tell me to shop in the juniors section
Where I can get pants with butterflies and glitter! Yay!
Lucky to know the feeling of my pants falling off my non-existent butt.
I am lucky to be a size DOUBLE ZERO in pants.
Lucky to technically not exist. Twice!
Lucky that I don’t have to constantly weigh myself.
I don’t weigh myself!??
I had to get weighed in once a week all of freshman year
So that my mom didn’t have to worry about me wasting away!
Just because I am skinny it does not mean I am healthy!
It does not mean I get to eat whatever I want.
Being skinny doesn’t make me immune to diabetes or cholesterol.
My own doctor called me anorexic to my face.
Without even glancing at my medical history.
I don’t eat salads in public anymore for fear of people thinking that.
And I like salads…….
I hate all the dieting commercials!
If I tried to lose weight I would lose my life!
There are no commercials for women like me.
Women who need a diet that helps to gain weight.
I am just as self-conscious about my body as the next girl.
I hate my legs! They are twigs!
I have as much curve as a washboard!
I look like I belong strapped up to tubes in a hospital!
I know this.
So please, don’t say you hate me.
Don’t tell me I am lucky.
But most of all, don’t wish you had my problem.
It’s the problem you have, just at a different end of the same spectrum.
I have body image issues just like every other girl.
I am not perfect. I am not model material.
I have health concerns and trouble with clothes fitting.
Above all, I was born this way.
Just as anyone else was born the way they are.
I did not choose to be this way. I just am.
Don’t blame me for my genetics.
Don’t try to make me feel bad for being skinny.
Take a long hard look at society and the media.
That is was needs to be changed.
Not me.
Not you.
Amy is a fourth year Women's Studies major at ODU who, while not writing about such pivotal issues, loves to be in nature, to scuba dive, and to take pictures. Her inspiration behind writing this piece came from some encouragement from her mother and because she felt that the dialogue surrounding underweight women has been largely absent. She says ' the majority of people focus on being overweight and the issues that go along with that...so I felt it was important to let people know what it is like to be underweight and that thinness is not the light at the end of the tunnel.'
We look forward to hearing more from you, Amy!
5 comments:
I notice how women are never happy with their weight. How they wish they could be effortlessly thin, especially through sickness. Every time I hear a girl say that they are happy because they became sick and lost x amount of pounds, makes me sad.
This woman feels upset that she is envied for her illness. She doesn't see being thin as a blessing but a burden. Above all, she just wants to be healthy.
I wish that as a feminist, I could say the same thing. I have gained 10 pounds this year, mainly because I stopped taking medicine that made me sick. I didn't feel thin then and I don't feel thin now. I didn't even feel thin when I weigh 115 pounds in high school, a time when I didn't have my period for 6 months and (according to my mom) I had lost my ass.
I often wonder, if I will ever be happy with myself. My body type is genetics, my mother, grandmother, aunts, and cousins all gain weight in their bellies, arms and thighs. Instead of seeing this as a unifier, I see this as a burden.
I wish I felt different about my body type. The women in my family that I have listed before envy my body because it is young AND the fact that my ass and thighs are bigger than theirs.
If I could have one wish, it would be that females feel confident about their looks- whether they are thin, extremely skinny, big, etc. Change has to come from within first before the outside changes.
So I say, Amy eat your salad and eff everyone else!
Amy, my heart goes out to you. Eat your salads. I don't hate you.
Amy -- I didn't see your name on this the first time I read it, but I knew it had to be you. Excellent stuff! Feel free to drop me a line sometime to let me know how WMST is going.
-- C. Rhodes
I have a general idea of how much I weigh, but I don't keep up with it---if I was 'over' weight or 'under' weight, would I then be forced to keep note of my daily weight? Am I privileged that I don't 'have' to do this? And if so, I should be so grateful that I'm simply at a perceivable "healthy" weight where there are no immediate health risks, and therefore not critical about the recent weight I gained? You got me thinking about that...
I think we all just want to be healthy, though..no matter what our actual size. I feel I'm maybe somewhere in the middle when it comes to my own personal weight, and that is all I ever want for myself. I'm 5' and about 130-140 lbs. However, who is defining healthy? I know that according to governmental data, I'm not just overweight, I'm obese! I don't feel unhealthy.
Despite this, though--I don't know if I'm getting really out of bounds, but we do tend to have preconceived notions about what healthy is-and not just for ourselves: we judge others as well, even if it's not malicious. And it comes out with lines like 'real women have curves' or 'this is what a real woman looks like'. ANd these sentiments come from WOMEN. So I'm more real than Amy because I'm curvy? And that is womanhood?
I've always hated that line! I think it was a good try at creating social awareness towards curvy woman as more the norm than what you see on tv/fashion. But it drew a clear line.
So Amy, putting your story out there debunks all these notions of you being (1)anorexic and you being (2)beautifully thin. I think people judge bodies as healthy or not when they see that woman's race, too. Are you ethnically appropriate or not? I think that's what Liz is saying. I remember a lot of black guys in my high school used to talk to me about my body as being what they would like=not what white men would like. But yet, I've dated black and white men....it's a blurry place.
I just want to add that my thinness is kind of a medical mystery in that I should have been overweight. I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism when I was 16. Not to be confused with hyperthyroidism.
Hyper symptoms would be weight loss, fatigue, breathlessness, muscle weakness, etc.
Hypo symptoms would be weight gain or increased difficulty losing weight, fatigue, weakness, etc. The symptoms are similar but the main difference is weight gain or loss. I expected to be diagnosed with hyperthyroidism but instead I had hypothyroidism. The reason I never gained weight is a mystery. My geneticist thought that maybe my body was unable to lay down fat for some reason. Either way, I have always had a problem gaining weight but at this point I am just happy to maintain what I am at which is around 85 pounds. I know, I know. WOW! My one wish is to one day say that I have reached the triple digits but as of now that is not possible.
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