So, last Monday I attended a nutrition group at the place I (used to) go to therapy. Given the all-too-familiar bunch of anxiety I've been feeling these days, I knew it was either that, or go home and stick my face in the toilet.

Everyone feeling properly alienated? Awesome! Right, then.

On the coffee table was a book of paintings entitled "Zaftig," filled with the fleshly fruity women you never see in magazines, but are plastered all over museum walls. Zaftig is a German term for "full-figured" blablablah, Rubenesque, the Botticelli babes that once frolicked in Roman fountains and bathed with abandon by outdoor streams.

Beyond showing the paintings of those pillowy ladies, the book provided a good cross-section of varying fashion trends and the evolution (loosely used term, there,) of feminine beauty standards as reflected through art and the media.

So, yeah. The book appealed to me because it was objective, based on what I absorbed from my five-minute leaf-through of its pages. From what I picked up on this brief perusal, the material was not presented in favor of one set of standards over another. The non-waify women were more plentiful, as we are in life, and it was definitely nice to look at the paintings and say, "Ooh! She's pretty. And she looks like me!" But I didn't surmise a sense of blame of one figure being "right" and all the others being "wrong."

I mean, standards are just those. Standards.

They are things apart from each of us, bigger than any of us, that we have no control over in the social sense and, unless they impinge upon our livelihood, like in terms of employment or health, we should do our best to fuckin' let them go.

Oh, this is not a manifesto. A manifesto is an attempt to foist one set of beliefs on a HUGE population and eventually THE WORLD, so it seems to me. And manifestos seem doomed to failure, as such, no matter what the underlying ideals may be or how much I agree with them. They are fueled by hubris and self-righteousness.

But, Tuesday, after seeing the book, I looked for it online. My tenacious googling for "Zaftig" called up this site:

http://www.fatso.com

Yay. No, seriously. Look around.

It is touted as a manifesto, and on first glance, may look like an attempt of the overweight to overthrow society, but that's not the case. Look at the tenets of the manifesto, and there is no sense of superiority, just kind of a general Fuck You to anyone who tells you how you should feel about your body. It's an anti-manifesto, in that sense.

Some of the tenets of "FAT!So?" are:

"FAT!SO? calls for revolution. The revolution starts with a simple question: You're fat! So what?"

"So there's nothing wrong with being fat. Just like there's nothing wrong with being short or tall, or black or brown. These are facts of identity that cannot and should not be changed. They are birthright. They're beyond aesthetics. They provide the diversity we need to survive."

"Fat people are not, by definition, lazy or stupid. People who believe in such stereotypes, however, are."

"FAT!SO? invites YOU to be a fabulous fatso! Everybody: Size 6 to 16. Size 26 to 56. Because fat or thin, straight or gay, male or female, we have all at some point wasted our precious moments on the planet worrying about how we look. Fuck that! Just say the magic words: 'Yes, I am a fatso!' With these words, you create revolution. You turn fat hatred back on itself. As a fatso, you possess the ultimate weapon against fatphobia, body prejudice, and size oppression: fat pride!"

And etcetera.

I mean, whatever. The cool thing is, it isn't trying to shove some crap down your throat about Big is Beautiful or There's More of Me to Love. I mean, yeah, there are phrases like "fat pride" with exclamation points, but nowhere is it stated that if you are not attracted to clinically overweight people, or if being fat doesn't work for you, that you should and must change. Nor does it say that you could possibly be better or worse than anyone else, because of your size.

It's more about self-acceptance and all that Oprah shit, but from people who have lived it. It's more that beautiful is beautiful.

They're not trying to make you change what you find attractive, but rather to expand your definition of what is human, and not to immediately tie one's external appearance to assumptions of their internal handicaps.

Yeah, but whatever. So I was thinking about that, and about the cross-section illustrated in Zaftig, and about African tribal women who let their saggy tits hang out and stretch their necks with stacked gold hoops, and about some European women who let their armpits and legs get all swarthy, Vogue be damned, and I came to the conclusion that it's shit. It's all shit.

I mean, yeah. You see us Zaftigs spread-eagled throughout the Met, and you pronounce the name "Botticelli" like it's a big, decadent truffle. And you hold that now-defunct set of standards above your head when you need to, flying it proudly like a banner. But, do you see ol' Sandro B around these days? No? Good reason for that. He died in fuckin' 1510.

And I'm not saying that those "classic" standards of beauty are dead, or that people who don't fall into whatever standards are ... um ... standard at any given time are totally hopeless and will never be loved. Nor am I saying that those who do fall into whatever category is statistically ideal at any given time are to be envied or despised, or that they have it easier than anyone else. Because, hello? Tracy Lords. Almost everybody has to bash through a wall of petrified shit to find him/herself on the other side.

And I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't jump at the chance to wake up a size 6 tomorrow and find Dolce & Gabbana on the other end of my phone, begging me to don life-threatening heels and strut down whatever precarious runway they've got set up for their FABulous fall season show. Fuck, I'd be on the first plane to Milan before you could say "Naomi Wolf, I'm so sorry I sold out." In that regard, I'm no bigger than anyone else.

Because: sex.

Okay, mostly, I think Freud was a dickweed megalomaniac, a man with a lot of important ideas, but who had the unfortunate combination of a big brain and a warped personality, which made for a potentially questionable ultimate agenda. SO! But? I think he had something about the power of the libido over our motivations.

And, we humans, in so many ways, are simple, silly critters. We want to be sexually desirable, and can't blame ourselves for functioning within the set of ideals are the part of our given realities. Today, that means the fashion model/Hollywood actress crappity crap, which isn't crappity crap at all. It's a lot for one person to contend with. Oh, and I should include the chiseled GQ boyos that chill out next to the Cosmo motherfuckers.

(Sorry, fellas. I know that standards are getting increasingly stringent for you, too. Didn't mean to be so estrocentric. Could I be any more obnoxious? I think I could!)

So, the clothing and stuff that are sold, that are "hot," are mostly made for those standard ideals. But, I can't wear them. Simply can't. In order to fully keep up with fashion, I would have to strive to fit the current ideal, which is not my natural state. Whether those ideals are attractive, or whether people are "programmed" to think they're attractive, is totally irrelevant, because, regardless, this is the reality in which I function.

Not well, might I add.

The only men who consistently express attraction to me are my friends' fathers or my fathers' friends; i.e., older men. Either they're still functioning according to foregone beauty standards, or they're so old that their collective sight is failing. (Kidding.)

So I walk by store-fronts and see the little outfits on the limbless, headless dummies in the windows, and despite my high-flying banner, I think to myself, "Maybe someday." And then I think, "Mrrgh."

Because, FUCK IT. I have fucken had it. It's boring and it makes me tired.

Last ... Wednesday, was it? One of the maintenance men at my office commented that it looks like I've lost weight. When I thanked him but protested, knowing full well that I haven't lost an ounce, he went so far as to ask me to stand back a bit and do a little spin-around, so he could make a more in-depth intake of my middle. And I kind of wanted to tell him to shove it. Because, how is that a compliment?

The truth is, these days, I'm trying so hard not to care about that shit that even a comment in praise of my physique is actually a negative, because it doesn't pertain to who I am or what I look like, but it alludes to how any change to be literally less than what I presently am would be a positive change. And I'd rather not think about that, anymore. I don't want to love my body or hate it. I just want to hang out. But that's easier said than done.

Speaking as an American, we are a nation in which bigger is better in everything save for waistlines and mercy. Speaking as a human, we are a species with too much at our disposal, and too little immediately available to deal with it all. We are privileged to have members of our species smart enough to make things as leisurely as possible, and to put grand revolutions into motion.

As a result, we invent and build upon ideas until they take on lives of their own, creating Frankencultures and subFrankencultures that we can't control, and instead separate ourselves from so that we can turn on them and blame them for our own individual piles of shit. TECHNOLOGY! INDUSTRY! THE CORPORATE MONSTER! HAUTE COUTURE! THE MEEEEEEDIA! Whatever. The shit remains.

Take haute couture, for example. High fashion is not meant to be a way of life, generally. It's an art form, and the models that sport it on the runway, in the artistic medium, are basically just easels with pretty faces. And, good for them. But they are static in that medium, and it's folly for most of us to emulate that.

(Okay, now I have to recognize that none of what I'm saying is particularly revelatory for "first-worlders" unless you live under a rock. I realize that. Anyway!)

Any problems one may have with those Frankencultures are perfectly valid, but they don't dismiss the fact that The Shit Remains. So, you can try to go with it and fit in with it, or you can separate yourself entirely from it all and go live in a tent in Nepal. But, rest assured, while you may be living quite nobly out there, away from it all, The Shit will not go away.

You can't shove your daddy out of your life and expect never to think about him anymore. He'll still haunt you in your dreams until you come to peace with yourself. There's plenty of room in your Sherpa commune for tons of invisible baggage. You can deal with it on your own, but you MUST deal with it. And if you go to live in a teepee, I'll sit back, all cozy in my creature comforts, pour myself a nice big Diet Coke, and make fun of you.

I hate this metaphor.

In fact, let's just wrap this all up.

1. There are, and have been, too many conflicting superficial standards to hold to a single one. They're all pretty irrelevant.
2. Frankencultures are not anyone's fault, and it's silly, tiring, and depressing to blame them for everything.
3. Freud was an ass, but he had something on the libido thing.
4. Hm .. Sherpas? What?
5. Deal with your shit.

I fully realize that this is either the kind of bullshit that will be dismissed off-hand, or will serve to empower someone for about an hour before he/she realizes that the issues at hand are too big to be wrapped up in so many words. And I'm not going to insult anyone's intelligence by insinuating that this pseudo-intellectual crap isn't already part of the collective unconscious. It's just helpful for me to put it all in one place once in a while.

Whatever. Fatso. Hee!

[Cop-out conclusion.]

By the way, I'm not the only person who hasn't been updating lately. Where the hell is everybody? Does this happen every seasonal change?

~ Last Five Entries ~

Moths, and Relative Nonsense - 08.18.05

I Finally Have Internet Access in my Bedroom. But, No Ashtray. - 08.09.05

Here I Am - 08.02.05

One-Armed Paper Hanger Earns her Wings - 07.29.05

Sugar & Lemon - 07.28.05

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