Coming to terms: bodies through generations

KIMBERLY MACEACHERN

My mom taught me many things: the golden rule, self-reliance, the importance of laughter and, above all else, to hold your stomach in for God sake. Now, in my late 50's and after 34 years of marriage, I still worry if my stomach protrusion is showing. This is a challenge because I don't like billowy clothing.

I have been mislabeled as "big-boned." I get that from the Teutonic stock that produced my maternal grandmother-a classy and curvaceous woman who was obsessed with the rolls of fat on her back, despite the fact that they proved no impediment whatsoever to attracting intelligent and accomplished men.

My paternal grandmother was one of 9 girls who came in all shapes and sizes, giving me hope as a child that I might end up like the skinny ones. Concurrently I harbored a fear, no doubt buoyed by my mother's abdominal admonition, that I would follow the great aunt with the belly so big she could not cross her legs. (Don't get me wrong -I love and respect this powerful woman who was extremely self confident.)

You might think I must be scarred for life by these combinations of body imaging and you would be right. I have rarely felt "comfortable in my own skin". Like almost all women I suffer from a poor self-image, bodily speaking.  I am off the charts for weight and always have been.

Due in part to dense bones I am just plain heavy; so much so that I have never been a runner; but I can walk all day long.

Unlike most I don't see this as negative. Being a glass half full person I am grateful to my mother for instilling in me this focus on frontal fat. As a result I am very intent on healthful living. Virtually every week of my life I have exercised at least 3 times: there was the volleyball period, racquetball period, 20 years of aerobics, kundalini yoga, hiking, and on and on.

The other thing my upbringing imparted is a love for food and lots of it. Those Germans could cook and on the other side Mexican food was a staple. Drawing on the modeling of independent research my mother also exhibited, throughout my life I have paid a great deal of attention to all aspects of food-where it comes from, what it does to and for us, and the best places to buy it fresh. I figure that we have to eat so we might as well do it in the most optimal way. I ride my bike to the farmer's market every Saturday morning to fill in the holes of the CSA share I pick up on Wednesdays.

Bottom line is that I am the picture of health; I have no prescriptions and rarely get sick or go to the doctor. Every time I do go I am admonished to do the South Beach diet based solely on my height/weight numbers. I am not impressed with such a one-size fits all approach.

Given the longevity of the hearty women in my ancestry on both sides, and given that I don't drink sweet drinks, eat mostly fruits and vegetables, don't smoke, drink only in moderation and regularly exercise

(which ironically has actually caused my abs to get even bigger), I still gaze at my navel daily with dismay and likely will do so well into my 90's.  And I can totally live with that, thanks to Mom.

Skip dinner, be thinner

JAMIE WATSON

Tumblr users are sort of infamous for romanticizing mental illness. I think the most well-known example is the way they started toting the term “socially anxious” like a charming accessory. It’s annoying, sure, but mostly harmless. My own personal experience with Tumblr’s fetishization of serious diseases carried a few more consequences.

Tumblr can’t entirely be blamed for me developing an eating disorder. I suppose the potential was always there. During my Junior year of high school, my mother went on a “diet” of plain yogurt and chicken salad to combat the weight gain from the steroids she was taking for her lupus. She had always been on the heavier side, but soon enough she began to shrink right before my eyes. I thought it was amazing. Standing at five foot nothing in heels and weighing in at roughly 130 lbs, I thought, “If Mom can do it, so can I.”

Mom was in charge of the family meals, so one night I asked if I could participate in the diet with her. Mom’s eyes were too tired to look at me as she slowly shoveled a single spoonful of peanut butter past her cracked lips and said, “I’m doing this for my health.”

I flew to the Internet. The BMI (body-mass-index) charts said that at my height, girls were weighing in anywhere from 90 to 100 lbs on average, which meant I had work to do.

Mom wouldn't help me, but I wasn't discouraged. I figured it was time to take control of my body and show it whose boss.

It was then that I started looking for my own diet. This is where Tumblr came in.

One day I stumbled across something on someone’s blog called the ABC Diet. The ABC Diet is a series of calorie restrictions over the course of one month, starting with 500 calories a day, and gradually going down to 400, 300, 200 calories, until finally you reach “fasting days” in the middle of a week. Exercise included. The blog advertised itself as “pro-ana.”

Ana is Tumblr’s adorable name for anorexia nervosa, and is usually coupled with her twin, Mia or Bulimia. I followed this blog and others like it. I read the sweet letters authors wrote directed toward Ana and Mia. These blogs posted pictures of skeletal women calling them “thinspiration.” They pined for bones. There were tips for getting through fasting days and impossible exercise regimes. I saw guides on how to throw up, and how to take care of your teeth after. Some would post advertisements asking for texting buddies who could “encourage” them. They would post “before” and “after” pictures of themselves. I was so encouraged by their progress, but it wasn't just a dieting thing; t wasn't just encouragement.

These people tore into each other and themselves. The more you hated yourself and others, the more people respected you. Every once in a while I would scroll past a picture of some girl digging into her wrist with a box cutter, and I would go on with my day and pretend I hadn’t seen anything. I promised myself over and over that I wouldn’t be like these people, even as I observed and reposted their pictures. I used to say, “I will not lose control.” I recited it like a fucking prayer.

I don’t know why I pretended it was glamorous. I don’t know why I made a new blog so that I could document my weight loss to the public. I don’t know why I listed my goal weight in my user information. I don’t know why that number kept getting smaller and smaller, but Tumblr kept the ball rolling for a few years.

I was on the ABC Diet and I was walking around my neighborhood for 3 hours every day, past the point of exhaustion. When I would come home I would be so dehydrated I couldn’t speak. My knees went to shit after a few weeks. Nobody knew. Someone at school said I looked great, and I cried because I thought they were lying to be mean.

I think the thing that got to me most were the mantras, things to tell yourself when you started getting “cravings,” and by “cravings” I mean instances when you needed to eat, because you had a body. “Drink Water, Look Hotter,” “Fuck Flab, Get Abs,” and my personal favorite, “Skip Dinner, Be Thinner.” There were even some mantras, which almost sounded positive, like “Each binge is a stumble in a long journey. Don’t let it stop you.” How nice.

None of it mattered, though. Pretty soon, the growling of my stomach became its own mantra. Then the growling stopped, and it was just the pain left to talk to me.

I must imagine it seems easy to you. It must look like I could have stopped at any time and pulled back from this constant stream of toxicity. The thing is, I thought so too. I thought I could go back to a normal diet any time I wanted. And before I could even admit I was caught in the current, the hunger pains and the promise of feeling attractive became addictive. I was addicted to the numbers. I snuck into my mother’s bathroom just to step on her scale in the morning, and I remember dropping to the floor and curling into myself with such heavy emotional pain time after time when the numbers just weren’t low enough. My younger self had never once imagined we would be here, contemplating suicide because of some tummy skin. I never thought of myself as one for self-harm, but I have a burn scar to show just how far Tumblr pushed me.

When I tell people about this side of Tumblr, most people don’t believe me. Most people would rather believe that Tumblr is a safe place for fandom and reading and activism (with the occasional porn post here and there just to mix things up), and I don’t want to discredit these things which can make Tumblr great. But I think it’s important to remember that Tumblr offers the user a constant stream of information, and I think my high school self is a perfect example of how impressionable people can be. The messages I received day in and day out destroyed my state of mind and my body. It is truly astounding when you think of how mainstream media does the same exact thing. Looking back, it feels like a dieting commercial crossed the line and then invaded my life. It felt like I was replaying this commercial over and over and over every day for almost three years.

I managed to claw my way out of this shit-hole, but I’m still dealing with the consequences. I still catch myself pinching and pulling. I still check the nutrition labels on cans of soup and something in the back of my mind still asks, “Is it worth it? Do you deserve it?”

The answer is yes. Shut the fuck up, I deserve to eat.

I don’t really know what the right course of action is. The Tumblr staff is already taking baby steps to dismantle these harmful blogs. “Pro-ana” content is now against the Tumblr Terms of Service, and looking for thinspiration gives you a little message with a phone number for a national help line, which I guess is a good start. All the same, I would just like everyone to know that there are thousands of blogs run by men and women alike who call themselves “pro-ana.”  I would like to remind everyone that no matter what cute little labels you dress it up with, a disease is a disease, and it is not okay to romanticize that shit, because it is not glamorous. It’s real, and it hurts people.

And if you’re reading this and you’re dealing with an eating disorder, you can recover. This body is the only one you’re going to get. It’s not as energized as you’d like, sometimes it smells, sometimes it may seem like a big hunk of crap but it’s your hunk of crap. Please be gentle with it. You deserve so much better, and people on the Internet don’t know shit.

Country western hair

MELLIE MACKER

Occasionally, if I notice that someone on a baseball blog has written something egregious and erroneous, I won’t call them out on Twitter, but instead send them a courtesy email to protect them from their own shame. More often than not, my emails go unheeded, but twice I've received a kind response from the individual that I’m correcting. And once, I actually ended up having a really nice conversation with a blogger I greatly admire and he gave me some truly fascinating advice:

“Look, I don’t mean to be a downer but if you didn't play college sports and you don’t have Country Western hair, it’s unlikely that you will ever get a job in sports.”

He’s infuriating, but not at all wrong. The saga of female sports commentary is fascinating, and openly very sexist. Today, the most easily recognizable woman in the sports world is Erin Andrews of FOX Sports and formerly of ESPN--who is famous for getting naked once and saying incredibly stupid things even though she is a very intelligent college football analyst. Andrews has Country Western hair and though she did not play college sports, she was a cheerleader for the Florida Gators, which means that she’s hot and stood near football for a sufficient period of time to be recruited by national news networks.

But, in 2009, Andrews was filmed through a peephole in a hotel room without her knowledge and then subsequently posted on the internet. This horrifying invasion of privacy is the defining moment of her career. The harassment that was inflicted upon her as a result is all perfectly recorded for your reading pleasure if you Google “Erin Andrews” because Google loves to autocorrect her name to “Erin Andrews peephole”. Thanks, Google. You know exactly what I meant, I’m clearly not here to research a perfectly professional individual with a spectacular resume and an interesting story – I’m here to violate her privacy.

This is a woman who runs a television show about College Football and hosts men as correspondents, unlike the other 99.9 percent of all other sports programs on television that follow the opposite format. Sure, she says silly things once in a while, but “silly” is a total understatement when you breakdown the nonsense that emerges from the mouths of football analysts. Last weekend, I took a tally of the times that Jim Nantz and Phil Simms of CBS said “speed in space” – a phrase that means exactly zero things – in ten minutes, and the total was 86. That is stupid, borderline insane behavior. And while CBS commentators frequently field scrutiny for their total inanity, they never hear that they are stupid because they are men.

Erin Andrews, on the other hand, was deemed a “dumb blonde” by baseball fans across the nation because she accidentally stuttered to call Justin Verlander – one of the greatest pitchers in the last decade and arguably of all time – “Justin Bieber.” As embarrassing as that is, it was one single mistake that was picked at and scrutinized only because she’s a woman and therefore doesn't know anything about sports.

As for me, I sincerely doubt that I can take the pressure of that environment, but I’m not going to give up on the thing that I would most like to do with my life. So if you’re reading this and you know of a stylist who can make me look like Fara Fawcett’s hair had a baby with Cousin It, let me know. Maybe the Country Western hair isn't so much about the look as it is protecting yourself with a thick layer of hairspray for a helmet.

Pronoun games

KAT ZUBKO

I don’t remember the first time someone used the pronoun “he” to refer to me recently, but I do know that people refer to me that way close to 50 percent of the time now.  Customers started to call “sir” across the aisles of the bookstore I work at to get my attention. At first, I ignored them. I didn't know whether they were referring to me, or to one of my coworkers. After a while, I answered to it. I've never corrected people for calling me “sir” or referring to me as “he”. I find it suits me as much as female pronouns do.

I identify as gender-queer. I am a female-bodied, masculine-of-center person. I don’t have a problem being called a butch lesbian, although the term “woman” has always been a problematic one for me. I don’t identify as a trans-man, although I have considered whether or not I am trans. I don’t know why I started being read as a man about six months ago. I have been masculine-presenting for years and have never been read as male in the past. When people suddenly began referring to me as “he” and “sir,” I was confused because although I am not trans, I was thrilled.

My friends, waiting in the wings to support whatever trans-identity I might one day adopt, asked whether or not the thrill I received from being read as male was an indication that I might actually be trans.

“How does it make you feel when people refer to you as ‘he?’” they asked. “Do you feel like it fits you better?”

The ultimate answer was I felt that neither female, nor male, nor gender-neutral pronouns fit me better than any other. I thought about it quite a bit and came to the same conclusion I did before: I am not trans, but gender-queer. Yet the question remained: Why did I find being called “sir,” “buddy” and “bro” so exciting?

The answer is complicated, but it can be boiled down to this, at least for me: When people, usually men, read me as male, I feel as though I am part of a club that I have never been included in before. I tend to be read as male by men more than by women. Interacting with cis-men when they perceive me as male is vastly different from when they interact with me as a butch woman.

I am hard-pressed to explain why these interactions are different, but they definitely are. When men perceive me as male, it is as if we are in on something together, something that women are not privy to. It is if I am winning a game, a game of male performance. Of course, the men who read me as male do not think of it in those terms; it is a world they are already immersed in, and I imagine that they take for granted most of the time.

Pronouns, like all terms in any language, are part of a language game. Ludwig Wittgenstein coined the term “language game” to describe the way we use language to get on in the world. For him, mastering language meant mastering the rules of the game. We learn these rules from interacting with other speakers of our language. We master the pronoun game early in life without thinking about it. We learn the difference between genders, and that men are referred to as “he” and women as “she”. However, it is a bit more complicated than that.

 In the pronoun game, we use reductionist ideas of what it means to be male or female, which are the genders we are given as children. “He” refers to someone with a penis who has secondary sex characteristics as well, just as “she” refers to someone with a vagina and corresponding secondary sex characteristics. Because we don’t all walk around naked, in our culture at least, we have to infer certain genitalia based on those secondary characteristics. Things such as body shape, facial hair, voice pitch and mannerisms give clues as to which pronoun is appropriate. Gender performance and proper names offer us more clues so that we quickly learn which pronoun we ought to assign to an individual.

The pronoun game is a way of getting on in the world, just as all language games are. It is a heuristic, which provides us with a nice little packet of information about a person. Upon hearing one word being used to refer to a person, “he” for example, we can assume all sorts of things about that person, depending how critical we are about gender constructions. When we hear someone referred to as “he,” we can assume that person has a penis, is able to grow facial hair or liked playing with trucks as a child rather than dolls. An exhaustive list of all of the assumptions we are given by gendered terms is massive, but impossible to pin down exactly.

The constellation of our assumptions somewhat depends on how critical we are about the social construction of gender, though to a great extent, these assumptions go largely unchallenged until we reach a certain age, if they ever are. These assumptions, in turn, give us information about how we ought to act toward a person. We rarely if ever think, “Oh, he referred to that person as ‘her’, so that means it is impolite for me to ask how old she is.” But that is exactly the kind of thing we can deduce from the use of the pronoun “she.” Of course, gender performance and the physical differences between men and women offer us clues about how to act toward someone based on gender. Pronouns, however, allow us to deduce a system of assumptions and values without ever having to set eyes on a person.

For me, the use of the pronoun “he” while referring to me makes me feel like I am pulling something off. I have been able, albeit unintentionally, to perform the male gender to the point where some people refer to me with male pronouns and other male terms. The person referring to me this way, as far as I know, is unconsciously playing the pronoun game to the best of their ability. Enough signs, whether physical or behavioral, lead them to decide that “he” is the best pronoun to use. I am partially thrilled because I am exploiting a lacuna in the system of reference in play. There is no correct pronoun for me to use to refer to my gender because I identify as neither man nor woman. I have exposed a flaw in a system of reference and occasionally this flaw becomes apparent to the other person if they are tipped off to the fact that I am female-bodied. I don’t know how often this leads other people to critically examine the use of pronouns, but at least their assumptions about gender have been momentarily challenged.

I would like to leave it at that, to simply say that being male-gendered is thrilling for its deconstructive potential. The other side of the pronoun coin, for me, is that when I am referred to as male, I feel like I gain male privilege in that instance. That male privilege, however brief it may be, is something with which I still have to reckon. It is something that I haven’t yet fully understood. 

Media Defined Identities, Not Just For Women

JACOB EVANS

My arms look like those little noodley strands of goop that you get when you push Play-Doh through a strainer. In fact, overall I look kind of like a wet trash-bag full of mashed potatoes. If society’s ready to start talking about how the media perpetuates unrealistic standards of beauty and gender roles, can we at least mention the fact that society expects the sweaty bean-bag chair that is my body to look like Arnold in his prime?

The arms race that is boyhood is a constant string of unrealistic expectations placed on me for the sole reason that I have a penis. After realizing that no amount of my penis was going to make me Bruce Willis, I kind of gave up on the notion of manhood being something worth achieving.

I was raised thinking that my level of manliness was measured in the number of doors I kicked down and galaxies I saved. It’s really not until you reach your teenage years that potentially achievable expectations are thrust upon you, but they are all absolutely horrible expectations.

Suddenly, your manhood is based on the number of women you sleep with (with no consideration given to whether any of it was actually consensual), your willingness to put yourself in danger for the amusement of others, and your emotional callousness.

Thankfully, I was already convinced I would never be a “real man”, and I never cared as much about those things as my peers did. I may be sitting here typing this with a hand I broke on someone else’s face, and I have all the feelings of a Roomba, but I never really considered those to make me very manly.

Then you reach adulthood, and suddenly, every boy becomes a man, and you realize that isn’t always a good thing. My ideas of what it means for me to be man come from what I learned from my step-dad. To me, manhood is about taking care of those you love even when it’s hard to do. To millions of others, it’s still about how many women you sleep with (or rape), and if anyone wonders why men often act so oppressively toward women and even each other, I can’t help but wonder if it stems from the fact that the only way little boys are taught to behave when they reach adulthood is like monsters.

I get very frustrated when my concerns about how boys are educated about manhood are shut out because “women have it worse”, that may be true, but I really believe that’s mostly because boys are basically trained to make it that way.

How To Grow Dreams With Your Child

SHANNON YOUSO

I was 19 with a baby and nothing that spoke to parenthood was speaking to me. Motherhood was a club reserved for grown women with in-laws and white walled homes; no place for a scrawny girl with wide eyes, tangled hair and a beat up book of poetry in her pocket. In a society that is terrified of tacitly condoning teen pregnancy, I was marked as unfortunate and shuffled away from any belief in my potential. Friends blinked at me with sorry eyes. Last they heard, I was studying abroad and my life was going to play out like the opening of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Everything changed the moment I learned my fate.

It happened in West London, where I was attending a university that looked like a castle. I trudged through miles of thick fog to find the clinic. When the doctor told me, I shattered into a thousand heaving screaming disasters. The doctor drove me home in pity and said “You're going to be okay” but I didn't believe her. I was a sharp individual turned into a sad statistic. I was a book left out in the rain. But I found my way through sobs to stillness, and I dreamed of a little girl asleep on my chest. Her hair smelled like sunlight and I could feel her soft weight as she breathed. And I was in love with her.

To be honest, I wasn't so ambitious before my daughter was born. I never wanted to change the world, I just wanted to travel around and observe it with my mouth shut and a pencil in my hand. Something shifted when the love I felt for my child mixed with the judgmental looks, the raised eyebrows, the near certainty that I wasn't qualified, wasn't worthy. It lit a fire that glowed in my ribcage and sizzled like Pop Rocks. Yes, young moms have it rough. But with support and sheer will, we are capable of shrugging off the boundaries placed around us and we can flourish.

Young parents can be magnificent. While our peers are partying all night, we're up feeding the baby and washing bottles. We have the stamina for it. We burn our candles at both ends with youthful energy! We play and learn alongside our children unhindered by decades of tense adulthood.

We roll with the punches. Not everyone can do that; it's like a superpower. When life hands us a gnarled mess of chaos, we bend with astonishing mental flexibility to figure out what needs doing and make it happen.

As young parents, we are in a unique position to follow our dreams and bring our kids along for the journey. Our children learn how goals are achieved because they witness the work and are with us in our accomplishments.

For a while, what I imagined for my child seemed desperately far away. I wished for a place of our own, for a community in which people treated each other with kindness. I imagined us growing food from the ground and making art out of everyday life. Eventually these ideas grew into goals. While working to support my family, unhappy to be in the city we lived, I imagined what I wished we had in Phoenix. These thoughts were the genesis of what became The Bergamot Institute, and my daughter was an enormous part of its inspiration. As I wrote the 501c3 application in the evenings after work, she was with me, hearing all about it. Now we run community programs for artists and my daughter is guiding kids and leading activities, proud of what we do together. I am still working toward goals, they are ever-expanding and my kid is always a part of them.

There are families everywhere working hard, building communities and raising smart compassionate people. Scores of them do not resemble the status quo or fit into common family stereotypes. These differences are often what make them so brilliant. Our differences should be celebrated and uplifted, not hidden in shame. My fellow young parents, we are on the greatest adventure there is. We are not bound by the limitations others set for us. Using our fresh perspectives and our willful enthusiasm, we can embrace the dynamic lives we live and create the environment want for ourselves and our children.

Shannon's 7 tips for taking life by the horns with a kid on your hip:

Following your passion and making a difference in your community allows you to build the world you want for your children while teaching them how to build the world they want for themselves. It takes dedication but that's just like raising a family. So stand tall, young parents. You were made for this. 

1. Create a stable home environment. Find a job and make yourself valuable at it. This will win you favors like leaving early to pick up your child, or taking her to work with you. This will pay your bills so you don't need to stress about them. Live within your means. This may not be glamorous, but it makes everything work.

2. Get over the dread of asking for help. I still struggle with this, but the fact is you cannot do everything on your own. If you don't have a supportive family, create one.

3. Spend as much time as possible actively engaged with your child. Be crazy together. Be quiet together. Just sitting together in the grass is perfect.

4. Visualize what you want your life to look like. Smell it. Taste it. Feel how it will feel. Share your goals with your kids and encourage them to dream. Now break your big goal into tiny steps.

5. Work on the first step. Your life is very full so this will take some sacrifice. Renounce boredom and bad habits, to start. You'll be surprised how much time and energy you find.

6. Keep at it. There is no finish line, it is an evolving path. Just keep moving forward. When you complete step one, celebrate! Start on step two.

7. Treasure your time. Notice the magic. Pay attention because each single day is the most important day of your life.