[orbgoddess]

black trans women are goddesses in our own right

www.instagram.com/orbgoddess

[eastofthesunwestofthemoon]

“In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.”

— Donna Tartt, in this 2013 interview by Laurie Grassi for Chatelaine (via boykeats)

[heavyweightheart]

The [late 19th century dietary reformers] believed that teaching people to eat right would keep them away from alcohol and labor unions, and improve their character and morals. Drunkenness was seen as a “disease of ill-feeding.” … Good meals provided in homes were bound to be more attractive than the street and the saloon, and would mitigate the allure of “rash movements” and protect workingmen from falling prey to “demagogues and partisans.” One woman writing about the relationship between diet and “labor problems” explained, “Not only man’s physical and mental but his moral well being also depends upon the kind of food he eats.” She went on, “by using every possible means to educate the wives and daughters of working men to be more intelligent homemakers, we can do more towards the solution of the labor problem than all the anarchists, the communists, the socialists or even the labor organizations … have ever been able to do.”

Biltekoff, Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health

did i mention: diet culture has always been a system of social control and is reactionary to the core

[partisan-by-default]

For First Time Ever, Scientists Identify How Many Trees to Plant and Where to Plant Them to Stop Climate Crisis

Researchers have identified exactly where we can plant a certain amount of trees in order to stop the climate crisis in its tracks.

The researchers calculated that under the current climate conditions, Earth’s land could support 4.4 billion hectares of continuous tree cover. That is 1.6 billion more than the currently existing 2.8 billion hectares. Of these 1.6 billion hectares, 0.9 billion hectares fulfill the criterion of not being used by humans. This means that there is currently an area of the size of the US available for tree restoration. Once mature, these new forests could store 205 billion tonnes of carbon: about two thirds of the 300 billion tonnes of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution.

[myrain42]

Untitled, no. 8 of 12, from the series, Spirals, 2005

Louise Bourgeois

[she-initiates-deactivated202006]

“Beyond their energizing subjective change, emotions have crucial survival value. They orient us, interpret the world for us, and offer us vital information. They tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth. Imagine how disabled we would be if we could not see, hear, taste, or sense heat or cold or physical pain. Emotional shutdown is similar. Our emotions are an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus, and an essential part of who we are. They make life worthwhile, exciting, challenging, beautiful, and meaningful. When we flee our vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion. We may even become emotional amnesiacs, not remembering ever having felt truly elated or truly sad. A nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound as ennui, as the sense of deficient emptiness.”

― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

[ellaenchanted2004-deactivated20]

“The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”

— Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts 

[heavyweightheart]

The BMI scale is a tool of European colonialism, all over the world

[heavyweightheart]

The BMI scale was invented by a white Belgian mathematician in the 1800s and is a crude formula which divides weight by height squared to determine a person’s “health status.” Europeans are the tallest people in the world. The BMI is a meaningless measure of health in any population, but it especially pathologizes populations which tend to be shorter, and sometimes stockier in build than tall white Europeans (e.g. many indigenous groups in Latin America, Alaska, the Pacific Islands, etc.). All populations on earth have internal diversity of shape and size, but certain phenotypic patterns are prevalent in certain regions. The BMI is an ersatz health measure based on a European standard which is imposed via colonization (an ongoing process) in regions where indigenous people have been violently murdered, displaced, forced to assimilate, stripped of autonomy, etc. by Europeans. 

Aboriginal people around the world who are living in European empire have their bodies’ sizes and shapes pathologized by homogenizing standards, including the BMI. They are subject to patronizing speculation (even mine) about their bodies and health. They are forced into life rhythms and systems–including concepts of health–that don’t honor their autonomy and traditions. We call them “overweight” and “obese” when that is not the framework they use for themselves, esp after centuries of hunger and violence under colonialism.

As oppression has taken its toll on the bodies and lives of indigenous groups (there are thousands of sanctimonious studies about indigenous ill health), indigenous people–women especially–are being told that it is their “unhealthy lifestyles” (their eating and activity patterns) which are pushing them up the all-important BMI scale and causing disease. There is rarely talk of the health detriments of oppression and colonization, or of the fact that many indigenous groups have and still do experience high levels of food insecurity. There is no acknowledgement that humans are body diverse and that white European standards of health are politically motivated and inept. There is a myopic focus on food/body/activity when the devastations of colonization loom far larger. 

What else?

There’s more to say about this than I ever could.

[cwhapd]

[meesoohl]

[sound-wave-entropy]

Jay DeFeo is best known for this monumental painting, entitled The Rose, which she started in 1958 and completed over the course of eight years. The piece consists of white and gray paints layered so thickly onto the canvas that, in some ares, the paints are almost eight inches thick. She used so much oil paint that she called it “a marriage between painting and sculpture.”

The Rose measures 7.5 x 11 feet and weighs 2,300 pounds,

[namek-deactivated20190919]

today you, tomorrow me.

[heavyweightheart]

all these books examining diet culture’s historical development from rigid puritanical rules about correct eating to all-pervading mandates around a “””healthy lifestyle””” are like *gif of lady prancing thru the door onto stage but w foucault’s head superimposed on hers* bc those particular institutionally imposed punishments of the body went out of vogue and were superseded by the disciplines that run much deeper and wider in our lives–not a mere diet but a commitment to constant vigilance, anxiety, and enjoyment of whatever is sanctioned as healthy at a given time. 

the moral, as always: this is not about health, it’s about social control

[passionpeachy-deactivated202312]

you will look at this picture of moomin holding two ice cream cones now

[lohver]

today my prof said to my class “you don’t truly love someone until they’ve hurt you and you still think of them as the greatest person in the world. Love is the most violent act.” ok ok ok

[lesbiankermit-moved]

men are so fucking weird and scary? don’t let any man ever convince you love is supposed to be painful or violent. don’t let any man justify his wrongful actions by saying they’re just part of what True Love is.

[timemachineyeah]

Ugh that post has gotten me thinking about fat acceptance in a way I haven’t in years. I’ve read more studies about weight and health than probably any other topic I’ve ever researched. And every time I see someone wail about health I am just like

Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?

Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?

Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?

Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.

Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like

Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money. 

These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them. 

Anyway, if you want a place to start reading about the issue, this article is a pretty good launching pad. 

[heavyweightheart]

This casual rant is like a primer on weight science. Amazing. I second their book recommendations, and would add to the list Body Respect by Drs Bacon & Aphramor, Body of Truth by journalist Harriet Brown, and What’s Wrong with Fat? by UCLA professor of sociology Abigail Saguy.

[vympr]

Scientist bakes sourdough bread with yeast derived from 4500 year old Egyptian pottery

i'm losing my mind @ this thread......historie......

[hamotzi]

another comic for class! we were given a list of paintings and told to pick one to use in a story. i used 6 paintings here, and these are all the artists in order of their works’ appearances:

Telemaco Signorini, Piagentina; Winslow Homer, A Shady Spot; James Bingham; James Bingham; Walter Langley; W. David Shaw (very small on the last page, not the portrait)