fifty frenchmen can't be wrong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
some_stars) wrote2012-03-29 06:13 pm
some_stars) wrote2012-03-29 06:13 pm
(no subject)
What I have discovered from entering the regular mainstream working world is that weight loss is the default conversational topic among women. It manages to pop up almost every day when I'm talking with my co-temp, and I hate it because it's super toxic and always wrong and there's nothing I can say to defuse it because even if I felt comfortable being all "no, that's all wrong, YOU'RE wrong, and I will tell you why," and even if I had the kind of brain that can remember facts and evidence and then produce them when needed, no one believes that everything they think about fat and diets and health is wrong--they don't believe it from thin male scientists, certainly not from an awkward fat woman.
But usually those conversations at least fade in a few minutes and we can move on to something else. Today was SPECIAL because today our supervisor stopped by our table and the two of them spent at least twenty minutes, I think more, chatting about how to lose weight and get Toned without bulking up and looking hideous and manly. Also there was mention of detoxing--drinking cayenne because it irritates your intestinal lining, which apparently is a good thing. And how you need to detox because food is full of toxins, like pesticides and antibiotics and additives, and you could just eat all organic but that's too expensive--all of which is both true and bullshit in different ways, and incredibly depressing all round. Agribusiness is poisoning our food supply and capitalism is pricing non-poisoned food out of our reach? Clearly the answer is punishing our wrong awful female bodies!
Needless to say everything they said was scientifically wrong and deeply disordered, and I was mostly silent--although I felt like I had to at least seem to be engaged in the conversation and make assenting noises and so forth, rather than bury myself in work while they talked over me. I think the most horrible highlight was when our supervisor was talking about how she didn't want to lift weights because she didn't want to get bulky, how she wanted ~definition~ but not to look all muscled. And she mentioned some famous woman and how she had gotten too muscled, and she (the supervisor) thought she looked gross and masculine now, and her hypothesis was that this woman had gotten addicted to exercise and it messed up her brain so now when she looks in the mirror she thinks she looks good, but she doesn't, she looks like a man. My co-temp (who btw is a semi-closeted lesbian who likes butch women) disagreed with this slightly, and they spent a minute dissecting this woman's body and eventually deciding that while they disagreed on whether any visible muscles were a hideous unwomanly abomination, this woman had definitely gone too far.
Somewhere in here I made one of my two contributions to the conversation--two flailing, deliberately soft-pedaled attempts to register some faint sense of no I don't agree with this, not to try and convince them but just to keep myself from drowning--which was that I missed lifting weights because I'd liked feeling strong. And I said, in a wistful tone, that when I'd been working out I'd gotten up to benching fifty pounds (which is a number I pulled out of the distant mists of memory; I think it was actually more)--and they both recoiled a little. A moment before, when my co-temp was trying to convince our supervisor to lift weights so she could build muscle and therefore burn more calories, she said, "You don't want to go lifting like thirty-five pounds and get all big. Lift those little weights, five or ten pounds, like when you're doing squats and lunges."
Oh, and the co-temp also made her usual plug of Weight Watchers--because you can eat anything! Anything you want! Of course then you have to starve yourself for the rest of the day, "if you go and eat a whole huge piece of cake," but clearly no one would ever do that.
(It's always "can eat," "can't eat"--I can't have that. I can't eat that. As though they were talking about allergies, or lockjaw. On Weight Watchers, you can eat whatever you want! Of course that's always true--but god forbid you ever look up and realize.)
I coped with this pretty well in the sense that I continued to make at least 75% of the right noises and laugh at the jokes, and didn't run for my purse Klonopin as soon as it was over. But it was a pretty close thing, and there was definitely some shaking and subsequent inability to focus on anything except needing to get out. And then an hour later when we left work I cried a tiny bit in the car. The thing is, it wasn't self-hatred that I was feeling that messed me up so bad--which is something of a miracle, because I have been the number one passenger on the body loathing train for the last couple years; I think having something so blatant to push against actually made me temporarily more down with the fat acceptance re: my own actual self. But what got to me was the realization that this is what life will be like, this is what women talk about and how they talk about it outside of a few tiny and mostly fringe subcultures, none of which are IRL for me at the moment. This is just going to keep happening, and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it and it's never going to change. The whole conversation started because someone told our supervisor that she was looking thinner today. That's considered an acceptable and desirable compliment that's supposed to make you happy and is totally appropriate to say.
And this was the nice version, the version where there's absolutely no explicit mention of me and my (fat, sphere-shaped, decidedly not Toned) body and what have I tried and I should try this, not even any significant glances or knowing tones of voice. This is just what I described to my mom as secondhand smoke, and I don't want to go back tomorrow, I don't want to go back ever again. But of course that would be pointless, because it's everywhere.
But usually those conversations at least fade in a few minutes and we can move on to something else. Today was SPECIAL because today our supervisor stopped by our table and the two of them spent at least twenty minutes, I think more, chatting about how to lose weight and get Toned without bulking up and looking hideous and manly. Also there was mention of detoxing--drinking cayenne because it irritates your intestinal lining, which apparently is a good thing. And how you need to detox because food is full of toxins, like pesticides and antibiotics and additives, and you could just eat all organic but that's too expensive--all of which is both true and bullshit in different ways, and incredibly depressing all round. Agribusiness is poisoning our food supply and capitalism is pricing non-poisoned food out of our reach? Clearly the answer is punishing our wrong awful female bodies!
Needless to say everything they said was scientifically wrong and deeply disordered, and I was mostly silent--although I felt like I had to at least seem to be engaged in the conversation and make assenting noises and so forth, rather than bury myself in work while they talked over me. I think the most horrible highlight was when our supervisor was talking about how she didn't want to lift weights because she didn't want to get bulky, how she wanted ~definition~ but not to look all muscled. And she mentioned some famous woman and how she had gotten too muscled, and she (the supervisor) thought she looked gross and masculine now, and her hypothesis was that this woman had gotten addicted to exercise and it messed up her brain so now when she looks in the mirror she thinks she looks good, but she doesn't, she looks like a man. My co-temp (who btw is a semi-closeted lesbian who likes butch women) disagreed with this slightly, and they spent a minute dissecting this woman's body and eventually deciding that while they disagreed on whether any visible muscles were a hideous unwomanly abomination, this woman had definitely gone too far.
Somewhere in here I made one of my two contributions to the conversation--two flailing, deliberately soft-pedaled attempts to register some faint sense of no I don't agree with this, not to try and convince them but just to keep myself from drowning--which was that I missed lifting weights because I'd liked feeling strong. And I said, in a wistful tone, that when I'd been working out I'd gotten up to benching fifty pounds (which is a number I pulled out of the distant mists of memory; I think it was actually more)--and they both recoiled a little. A moment before, when my co-temp was trying to convince our supervisor to lift weights so she could build muscle and therefore burn more calories, she said, "You don't want to go lifting like thirty-five pounds and get all big. Lift those little weights, five or ten pounds, like when you're doing squats and lunges."
Oh, and the co-temp also made her usual plug of Weight Watchers--because you can eat anything! Anything you want! Of course then you have to starve yourself for the rest of the day, "if you go and eat a whole huge piece of cake," but clearly no one would ever do that.
(It's always "can eat," "can't eat"--I can't have that. I can't eat that. As though they were talking about allergies, or lockjaw. On Weight Watchers, you can eat whatever you want! Of course that's always true--but god forbid you ever look up and realize.)
I coped with this pretty well in the sense that I continued to make at least 75% of the right noises and laugh at the jokes, and didn't run for my purse Klonopin as soon as it was over. But it was a pretty close thing, and there was definitely some shaking and subsequent inability to focus on anything except needing to get out. And then an hour later when we left work I cried a tiny bit in the car. The thing is, it wasn't self-hatred that I was feeling that messed me up so bad--which is something of a miracle, because I have been the number one passenger on the body loathing train for the last couple years; I think having something so blatant to push against actually made me temporarily more down with the fat acceptance re: my own actual self. But what got to me was the realization that this is what life will be like, this is what women talk about and how they talk about it outside of a few tiny and mostly fringe subcultures, none of which are IRL for me at the moment. This is just going to keep happening, and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it and it's never going to change. The whole conversation started because someone told our supervisor that she was looking thinner today. That's considered an acceptable and desirable compliment that's supposed to make you happy and is totally appropriate to say.
And this was the nice version, the version where there's absolutely no explicit mention of me and my (fat, sphere-shaped, decidedly not Toned) body and what have I tried and I should try this, not even any significant glances or knowing tones of voice. This is just what I described to my mom as secondhand smoke, and I don't want to go back tomorrow, I don't want to go back ever again. But of course that would be pointless, because it's everywhere.
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by which i mean *hug?*
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I just eat at my desk and read t'internet.
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So I guess TL;DR: I'm sorry :(
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Your workplace *sucks* for being full of sad self-hating people. Cayenne pepper??
Maybe you should be a gourmand and start bringing in food magazines and talking about delicious meals and cooking and just fight back with what food is - lovely and wonderful and meant to help us, not hurt.
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*throws a life preserver*
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I have so much sympathy and I empathize completely and I am SO SO SORRY that you had to deal with this today (that we all have to deal with it all the time). I know exactly that feeling of being the conspicuously fat one in the conversation about thinness, and it SUCKS so much, because I always feel like people are just ~kindly not mentioning my body~ whereas inside I'm like, fuck you, this is my body, fuck you for thinking it's horrible, and then on the outside there are various layers of shame and guilt and anger and protest and awkward. I know I know I know that feeling and I wish so much that you hadn't been feeling some version of it today.
I don't know what else to say, because it is everywhere. I see it all the time, it's so hateful and vile and pernicious and constant, and I don't even know what to do about it some days. But buddy, I have your back, I do. I don't know if it helps, but for me sometimes it does, when I have to go out into the me-hating world, to know that other people feel the way I do, and other people know and recognize that it's bullshit, and other people would stand up for me even if they wouldn't stand up for themselves. Lots of love and empathy from me.
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Yeah.
Just....yeah.
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Secondhand smoke is a very good metaphor.
Lifting heavy weights and feeling strong is awesome. And I love how if you watch the female powerlifters and Olympic lifters on YouTube, they're not particularly thin and Toned either. And they're not ladylike. They grunt and sweat!
Those women who would never lift more than five or ten pounds: do they do their own grocery shopping? Or have children? I'm almost certain they lift more than that in their own day to day lives. But then, women's work doesn't count as exercise (or indeed work) and therefore never causes your muscles to grow.
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3 things
2) And I said, in a wistful tone, that when I'd been working out I'd gotten up to benching fifty pounds (which is a number I pulled out of the distant mists of memory; I think it was actually more)
You rock like a rocking thing for saying this, because it's such an excellent and sneaky intervention in the conversation, and maybe it planted a tiny seed of something different in their brains.
3) This is a picture of Alex Puccio and her muscles. Your co-workers' argument is invalid.
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<3
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Fuckin' Weight Watchers, man. The loon in the next cube has been pushing for Weight Watchers meetings in our building for years, even though she's been told repeatedly that we're publicly funded and cannot legally host them. She's a fundamentalist, so I suppose there something about the weekly public shaming that hits the spot for her.