i like my body/ and it is not your body
My weekend was great, thanks! I ran ten miles each morning, and running is the closest I get to approximating what it feels like to have properly firing neurons. I listened to two loves of my life, Jon Lovett and Stacy Abrams (about whom I will write more another time, but donât wait for that; Â go give her project to resist voter suppression your money here). I read books to the literal piles of humans I have made, dizzy with the sheer acreage of their cheeks. I had a conversation with my autistic preschooler about Ariel â the first proper conversation my daughter has ever initiated with me.
So, Iâm doing okay right now, thanks for not asking while I proceed to say some stuff.
Iâm saying this not because my voice is the one that needs to be uplifted in a conversation about either fat-shaming or ectopic pregnancies, but because I went to bed thinking about the distressing common thread between the current weird preoccupation of other seemingly uninvolved parties with the two phenomena. And because, while I think James Cordon, God among men, gets this, and I know that other survivors of miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and the million other situations in which abortion has been a Godsend â as in, the best option or only tenable option for a specific human being at a specific point in time âIâm just thinking that maybe the people who need to hear it, literally cannot hear it enough, or from enough people, until they have plunked their toned, tailored-suit-wearing man asses into some comfortable seats, ones from which it is somewhat labor-intensive to emerge, and sat a round or two out.
The first is this: you, fat-shamer, and you, pro-lifer who, surprisingly, is willing to âlet God decideâ if a college student with a fertilized egg threatening to rupture her fallopian tube and kill her should live or not â since the role your God presumably had in supplying the skill and technology to save her life wasnât a clear enough sign of His will, and despite the fact that God apparently canât be trusted to supply Her children with appropriate sexual and gender identities â you get a single body and that is your body. And that body, and control of that body, are just going to need to be enough.
Look: thereâs no reason to believe that someone who is insulting people over their weight has any strategic goal related to either health or weight loss. To claim otherwise, to walk back your antagonistic bullshit with a sanctimonious âbut Iâm concerned for [their] health!â : this a is mindbogglingly bad-faith argument. Because the human being you are shaming, or, honestly, any person acquainted with how people feel when youâre shitty to them, will point out that humiliating people and promoting discrimination against them doesnât effectively motivate them to change their behavior, let alone the physical body they inhabit, and you will say â what, that it should?
At that point, it will become clear that what you, the fat-shamer, want, is for these people to change their bodies in response to your comments about whether or not they can see their penises or get laid or give you an erection; that, basically, what you are doing is doubling down on a system in which if you are a woman, you should feel embarrassed and subhuman if your body is an inadequately hot commodity for the consumption of this unnamed but all-important (male) consumer. (You, right? Itâs you to whom weâre trying to make our bodies presentable?)
And if you, the fat-shamed, are a man, your worth is still determined by men, this time the ones who supposedly know how successful you are at getting women to have sex with you based on their opinions of your body, and who have decided that this is the metric by which your worth is established. (Side note: straight guys who know so much about what women want, Iâm guessing you donât want to rethink your premise that your estimation of other guysâ bodies is the one that matters when determining what women find attractive, but it would behoove you to do so. If there were one thing women donât like (thereâs not!), it would be straight guys mansplaining our sexuality to us).
Basically, what fat shaming is about in your sixties (because that is how old Bill Mayer is, friends!) is what fat shaming is about in sixth grade. Itâs just one more way that a certain group of people, a group  with relatively more power than others and a deep fear of losing it, maintain that power by saying: I am going to tell you what matters, and I am going to tell you whether or not you have that thing that matters, and I am going to make it so painful for you to not have it that you will remake your body to get me off your back, because it is weirdly important to me to exert this control over you.
My furtive eighth grade crush got fat shamed in middle school, and he was pretty fat. But, you know, so did I, and Iâve never had a medical doctor express concern for my weight. Discouragingly, it barely registered with them when I was losing my hair and hadnât had a period in a year. But other helpful randos, from grandmas to girls in my gymnastics class, started calling me fat at age four, and the only way I was able to stop them was to self-regulate so effectively that by the time I went to college, I was throwing up when I âlost controlâ and chewed too many pieces of Juicy Fruit.
Thatâs the goal of fat-shaming, fat-shamers: someone who has accepted your right to tell them who they are and what their worth so unreservedly that she can graduate Phi Beta Kappa on the one hand, but still believe that she is âtoo fat to sit downâ on her graduation night. And â as one person with a running leitmotif I like to call âpathological need for controlâ running through my adolescence and early adulthood to another â- can I suggest you slow your roll and take a look in your own goddamn mirror?
I canât speak to why a person might experience exerting control over the bodies of other people as catharsis, why what they need to self regulate is to make someone else feel worthless. I can only imagine that this bullshit behavior comes from the same sense of existential dread that makes two missed days at the gym feel like that a night in one of those sky cells on Game of Thrones to me. But I can be compassionate towards you and also take a hard pass when it comes to âtoleratingâ your âopinionsâ about the value of people around you, or your right to patrol the size of their bodies or to determine that they need to be harassed into having a body you like better. Your feeling about thigh gaps or whatever is your deal, but the fact that you think other people should be treated badly or should endanger their health in an effort to make their bodies acceptable to you is also, 100%, your deal, and not the problem or the responsibility of the people in those bodies. Take your body and do whatever you want with it, but shut the mouth part of it first. Â
Similarly: Iâm not going to explain to anyone why a fertilized egg in oneâs fallopian tube is 1. not a viable pregnancy and 2. not something to âwatchfully wait" over. âWatchful waitingâ is appropriate when the risks of intervention are significant, or the benefits unclear, or both. In the very few cases in which this might be what a doctor would advise, that decision is made though a cost-benefit analysis with the mother, because the mother is the patient being treated. There is no âchildâs lifeâ to consider because, as with any pregnancy, but maybe especially an entirely nonviable one, there is no child yet.
If you are anything but shocked by the idea that someone should be expected to âwait and seeâ if their medically treatable and potentially fatal medical condition will kill them or not because of how another person, living in another body, feels about the situation, then you donât give a shit about life. Not the life of that woman, which you are endangering. Not the lives of any existing children she has or partner she has or parents or students or siblings or friends. What you are saying, again, is that you decide what this womanâs life is worth â and your expectation is that she accept that when it comes down to it, your random feelings about her body both define the value of that body and should be factored into the clinical decision making of her medical provider.
As with our fat-shamers above, Iâm just wondering where it came from, this idea that youâre entitled to control the bodies of other human beings, and the weirdly aggressive efforts to do so.
Are you ok, Representative? It seems to me you are not.
It doesnât even matter that an ectopic pregnancy is not viable. Because pro-life arguments are about âpreserving lifeâ the way fat-shaming is about âpromoting healthâ: that is to say, theyâre not about that at all. Itâs about being unwilling to either take responsibility for working out whatever damage you have, or to acknowledge that the way you are choosing to work that damage out is by violently exerting control over the bodies and lives of others.
Forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy she doesnât want is violent whether that pregnancy is only somewhat likely, as it is in the case of a viable pregnancy carried in a country with the highest material mortality rate in the developed world, or pretty effing likely, as in the case where the pregnancy is lodged in a tube that will not accomodate it. When you legally compel another human being to risk her life carrying a pregnancy in her body because of how you feel, that is violent.
I want to have compassion for you, person who sees no better option than hurting other people to deal with whatever it is life has handed you. Iâm something of a poster child for irrational or detractive ways of dealing with the parts of the world I donât like: see above, where a teenage permutation of me was vomiting gum bile. But I also feel like we donât serve anyone by looking the other way while they evade the responsibly we all have to handle our own shit.
Certainly you get that, right? If a personâs body size, the pregnancy they carry, their health status, are all issues of personal responsibility, surely you, too, can own up to the fact that you have this thing where, instead of overdoing it at the buffet  â or, I donât know, getting pregnant in the wrong part of your body?  â you insist that other peopleâs bodies should be altered to your specifications, and that you should decide if those bodies are fed, or wear shorts, or receive medical care. You can acknowledge that this is a weirder and less palatable approach to managing your dark feelings than is eating too many carbs or whatever it is you think weâre all doing with our insufficiently controlled, overweight, inconveniently fertile bodies. You can set aside that weight-loss tea youâre sipping and consider that maybe, the one whoâs âready for a changeâ is you.
