queerbychoice | Keep Your Journal Entries Off My Body. And Also Other People's Bodies.

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Keep Your Journal Entries Off My Body. And Also Other People's Bodies.

Recently, far too many many of my LiveJournal friends have been writing journal entries asserting that for one reason or another, they are ugly. Invariably these people cite specific things about their bodies that they assert are ugly. I find this to be intolerably rude and completely unacceptable behavior to subject myself to having to encounter on my LiveJournal friends page, and in cases where I do not have extremely good other reasons for wanting to keep a particular person on my friends list, I will frequently defriend people for it. In this entry, I would like to explain as carefully as possible all the things that are intolerably rude about this behavior.

First: Whatever aspect of your body you are declaring to be ugly, YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY PERSON WITH A BODY LIKE THAT. Other people whose bodies possess the same trait you are complaining about in your body are in all probability reading your entry in which you declare their body type to be ugly. The fact that you belong to a particular group does not make it acceptable to harass members of that group by calling them ugly.

Second: What exactly are you getting out of publicly humiliating yourself, anyway? Why do you have this compulsion to stand yourself in front of a group of other people and point at yourself and yell "You're so ugly!" at yourself in front of a watching audience? Would you ever be caught dead treating anyone else that way? Well, it doesn't make you look any less immature to me when you do that to yourself than when you do that to other people. Especially considering that, as I explained above, you are doing it to other people anyway, whether you acknowledge it to yourself or not. Unless the aspect of your body that you're complaining about is some freak mutation that's totally utterly unique in the entire history of humanity, such as eight-foot-long tentacles sprouting from the bottom of your torso in place of legs. But even then, you never know; someone somewhere might still have a mutation that vaguely resembles yours, and your insults aimed at your own body could still make them feel bad about theirs, too.

Here is are some examples of acceptable and unacceptable ways to initiate a discussion of your insecurities about your body:

Bad: "I can't stand how [insert body trait here] my body is! It's so ugly!"
Good: "[insert person or people here] said that [insert body trait here] is ugly, and that made me feel bad about my body."

Here are some examples of acceptable and unacceptable ways to react when other people assure you that your body is totally sexy, beautiful and amazing exactly the way it is:

Bad: I don't believe you! You're just saying that to try to make me feel better, and you didn't say it convincingly enough! I can read your mind and I know you don't really mean it! [Or any variation of this that doesn't quite outright say it, but heavily implies the same thing.]
Good: Thank you. [Optional:] That makes me feel a bit better.

If someone tries to make you feel better, it is very unkind for you to respond by tormenting them with continued false accusations that they must secretly think you are ugly, and by making them feel that they have to spend the rest of their day looking up new synonyms of "beautiful" in a thesaurus to be able to clear themselves of your false accusations. The polite response is to thank them. It is not necessary for you to claim that they have permanently alleviated all your insecurities about your body for the entire rest of your life and you will never feel bad about your body ever again. This is unlikely to be true. But if the person was of some help to you, it would be nice for you tell them that they helped; and even if you don't feel better at all, it would be nice for you to simply thank them for their effort and refrain from dragging the conversation on for the next hour and pointing out to them the entire extent to which their brief comments have unfortunately failed to solve every insecurity you've ever had. If you focus people's attention on whatever little their efforts did succeed in doing for you, not on what their efforts didn't succeed in doing for you, people are far more likely to enjoy interacting with you, and far less likely to end up feeling that they just completely exhausted themselves pouring every bit of energy they could spare into a futile attempt to make you feel better that ended up accomplishing nowhere near enough to justify making such an effort ever again.

And here's an excuse I'm tired of hearing: First a person posts something like, "I desperately need to get rid of all this disgusting ugly fat on my body!" Then when someone asks them to stop insulting fat people, the person replies, "I was just complaining about my health!" No, you weren't. The words "disgusting" and "ugly" have nothing whatsoever to do with health. If you were merely concerned about your health, your post would be concerned exclusively with, say, foot pain, or some other health issue that might conceivably be improved by weighing less. (Though speaking as someone with more than my share of foot pain, I suspect that arch supports or other shoe inserts may really be what you need.) There is absolutely no health-related justification for using words like "disgusting" or "ugly." Please dispense with the ridiculous pretense that there's any connection.

And tell me: Do you ever say to yourself, "Wow, I wish someone on my friends list would hurry up and write about how much they hate their body for being [insert body trait here]! I just love reading entries like that! I can't wait for the next installment about how much more miserable [insert person here] becomes each new time s/he looks into a mirror!"?

Do you? Because I really doubt that very many people ever look forward to those kind of posts at all. I certainly don't. I'd sooner read daily word-for-word transcriptions of every homework assignment or paid-work document you ever write all year round, or detailed descriptions of your every bowel movement. I'd sooner read a daily count of how many breaths you took per minute all 1,440 minutes of each day. I'd sooner listen to 8-hour-long phone posts that consist of nothing but recordings of how much you snored in your sleep each night. I'd sooner read practically anything than be subjected to continual details about how ugly you think you are.

Yet I am in the unfortunate position of really, really liking an awful lot of other things about quite a few people who write endlessly about how ugly they think they are. As a result, I really am not ever going to remove certain people who are guilty of this from my LiveJournal friends list, no matter how much they continue to inflict these posts on me. However, if you are one of those people, I think you should know: The poisons of your self-hatred are polluting my emotional airspace. Trying to read my friends page and coming across entries in which you claim you are ugly is like trying to walk down the street and having a giant truck drive by that spews out a gigantic cloud of carbon monoxide that leaves me unable to breathe properly for the next five minutes, and with a lingering sensation that my risk of eventually developing lung cancer just significantly increased. It makes my life significantly less pleasant than it would otherwise be.

What would be nice would be if all such people who are going to go right on writing endless journal entries about how ugly they think they are would just, say, create an opt-in or opt-out filter for such entries, so that I wouldn't have to see those entries or choke on all the carbon monoxide. Perhaps the filter could be called "People Who Don't At All Mind Hearing About How Ugly I Think Various Body Types Are, Which May Well Include Their Body or Their Future Body or Their Dearly Beloved Friends' Bodies." But somehow, I suspect that if people did that, they would not find very many people who would want to be included on such a filter.

While I'm on the subject, I do actually have something nice to say, too. I would like to personally thank

keryx for consistently being the best emotional air purifier (at least for eliminating this particular form of emotional air pollution) that I have yet discovered on LiveJournal. If only more of the people who hate their bodies would read her journal, maybe fewer people would keep wallowing in hatred of their bodies all the time.

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not that i've wished for people to feel the need to self-censor around me, but i've had to ask friends of mine to not talk about their own body-image issues around me, on occasion. i've had a long history of body-dismorphia - at one time replete with a fairly serious eating disorder, and it has taken me a long time and a lot of deprogramming to get to a point where i have a mostly positive relationship with my body.

anyway, all this to say that i think it's totally reasonable to ask not to hear about it when it becomes problematic, (as with above), and/or excessive. i'm sympathetic to people with body issues, of course, but there's only so much one can do/say/suggest in terms of affirmation and/or reëducation.

I really do like hearing when people have made major progress toward feeling better about their bodies. Congratulations on deprogramming yourself!

I hate my body because it gives me migraines. Is that ok?

Does hating your body stop your migrains? Do you think your "body" is a sentienet entity, different from "you" who is hurting you on purpose? I know that migrains are not a stroll in the park, but there are ways people manage them. Self hatred isn't one of them.

Si

Let's put it this way: I find it difficult to imagine that anyone else whose body also has migraines would be offended by your calling their migraines painful.

I'm an unofficial Margaret Cho groupie, and here is what she has to say about beauty (see the 3/23/06 entry). http://margaretcho.net/blog/

Stan Dale, who started HAI, hai.org , as a vehicle for his Sex Workshops, and was the first radio personality to take questions about sex on a major AM station talk show, KSFO ca 1970, was also at one point hired to teach sex education to Playboy's playmates of the month. He found out that when asked about their bodies, they all found fault with one part or another, and didn't spontaneously talk about what they did like.

I am tired of talk about body image, too. The fault, IMHO, lies with our not being taught about inner beauty. The same body may look appealing or ugly depending on the personality that inhabits it. We should be asking what is beautiful about each person we meet, rather then writing them off as ugly for failing to meet the social/industrial stereotypes.

Si

Yeah, I saw that entry by Margaret Cho when you linked to it in your journal, and I liked it a lot.

"The same body may look appealing or ugly depending on the personality that inhabits it."

Exactly!

Here here! I hate all the "fat = ugly" implications I come across on an average day. To be fair to your lj-friends, though, the pressure doesn't just come within; it comes from friends, families, media, etc. (Speaking of media, I always thought it was fucked up that most of the magazines my mother reads have both chocolate cake recipes and how-to-lose-weight articles in the same magazine. The magazine should really pick one theme and stick with it!)

I used to think that fat = ugly. That's because it's what everyone TOLD me. My father used to leave diet articles taped to my computer, and he's told me before that he was ashamed to be seen in public with me. Another year, we didn't celebrate Christmas, because how could he feel like celebrating when his family is so ugly? My brother always called me names like 'cow' (he still makes comments about how much I eat), and my well-meaning mother used to tell me to change out of my school clothing before my dad got home, because the clothes gave me a "pear" shape. To top it all off, my school uniform was second-hand and very ill-fitting, and that didn't help matters at all.

When I was 17, I left home. For the first time ever, I could pick out all my own clothing, wear whatever the hell I wanted, buy and eat whatever food I wanted, and since I lived alone, I didn't have to put up with anyone in my home telling me about how ugly I looked. Would you believe that my body issues more or less vanished? I was as heavy as I had ever been, but I really started to like how I looked.

When I went vegan, I started to lose weight. I always wore my clothing baggy, so I didn't really notice that they were getting baggier. The change was so gradual it just slipped by me. When I finally had to wear suspenders one day because even my belt wouldn't hold my pants up, I stepped on a scale and realised that I had lost 80 pounds!

So I went out and bought a new wardrobe, and this one was a lot more form-fitting than any I had previously. After that, people really noticed the weightloss, and even now I still get comments like "oh my god! you look so good now!"

And I hate those compliments because of the "now" at the end of them. "You look good now!" sounds the same to me as "You really were ugly before you lost that weight!" It grates a bit on my nerves and contributes to "What if I gain the weight back?" anxiety, because now I'm seeing first-hand how thin people are generally treated nicely and complimented a lot as compared to fat people (but behind the compliments is a subtle rudeness). Maybe I'm hyper-sensitive to it because of my experiences; people treated me rudely because I was a fat person, and people treat me rudely because I'm a thin person, and because I've experienced it from both perspectives, I can see it very clearly now.

Anyways, just wanted to share my thoughts. I think it's unfortunate that people give into the societal pressure to hate their bodies. Unfortunate but not suprising, given out culture's attitudes towards weight and towards women.

"detailed descriptions of your every bowel movement."

You don't want that. I'm a vegan, so that's a lotttttttt of journal entries. ;)

Oh my nonexistent goddesses! The fact that you survived that kind of behavior from your family and were able to enjoy the way you looked as soon as you moved away from them is completely miraculous. Be proud of yourself!

i was tempted to yell out "yes!" to the paragraph about people's excuses for fat negative comments, but that's not really appropriate behaviour when working at a library. i'm tired of people pretending after the fact that they're concerned about health or just feeling comfortable in their bodies when they've already said they think fat is gross.

and yes, it is quite rude. we all feel ugly sometimes, and i hope after reading this your friends list will realize that there's a difference between talking about feeling ugly and declaring oneself ugly.

I want to get in shape, but it is less because of looks than because of health. I am simply not as healthy as I used to be. I get tired more easily, and diabetes runs in my family as well as heart disease and every other disease overweight people have a higher chance of getting. I also feel like that this is something I can help.

As for what you said, I agree. When you down yourself, you are downing others in that group. You are reaffirming norms about appearance.

I think one is not only insulting X group of people but it also is unbelievably classist many times. Poor people cannot afford to get braces, they eat food with more carbs so they may be overweight, they may be just too wiped out or not have enough time from their high demanding job(s) to work out.

This is the best articulation of the impact of self-hate on others that I've seen in ages. If you fixate on physical traits you hate for yourself and make that public, it hurts other people with those same traits.

At the same time, there are times when I feel similar things, and I hesitate to speak them aloud. So they fester in my head until I'm convinced for a moment that I'm just awful, and if I verbalized them instead, I'd see what those thoughts look like and how damaging they are to anyone.

It's a tough balance, the LJ f-list. I want my friends to have a safe space where they can discover that they don't really hate themselves, but I also want to not be chased all over the internets by fat-hating thinking.

That's exactly why I included good examples of how such insecurities can be discussed without hurting anybody, along with the bad examples.

Yes. Thanks for saying that... I might link to this at some point.

In that case, I shall have to make it public so you can!

Oops -- I even thought I checked whether it was posted protected before saying that! Well, obviously you should only make it public if you want to. I might ask permission to quote some or all of it at some point, but I'm not immediately planning to link to it.

I don't mind; it was already a borderline post in terms of whether I wanted to make it public or not, and the further down it scrolls from the top of my journal, the less I will mind making it public. Just let me know when/if you want to link to it, and then I'll make it public.

I'm way late, but I just want to reply to one part of your post:

Whatever aspect of your body you are declaring to be ugly, YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY PERSON WITH A BODY LIKE THAT.

That's true, but it doesn't have to be as you imply, I think. I mean, there are things that I find attractive (or at least, *not unattractive*) on other people, but that I would never do/want for myself. Like, at any given time, my weight generally fluctuates between 160-170 lbs., and for whatever it's worth, I'm 5'6". (This is probably just rehashing what I wrote in my brief email to you yesterday, but whatever...) Now, I can find my 165 lbs./5'6" body unattractive, but still find other very similar bodies attractive.

If I say something about myself (critical or positive), I don't want people to assume that I'm saying it about everyone who has a body that's somewhat like mine.

I agree with the bigger picture of this post, though. I'd like to see more positive self-images in general, too.

I should add that there are days when I'm okay with my body, and days when I'm less okay with it. Just as there are days when I'm okay with who I am as a person, and there are days when I'm less okay with that, too.

"If I say something about myself (critical or positive), I don't want people to assume that I'm saying it about everyone who has a body that's somewhat like mine."

You can not want that all you like, but I think practically everyone is going to go right on assuming it anyway.

Here's to more days of liking your body!

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Keep Your Journal Entries Off My Body. And Also Other People's Bodies.

personal perspective

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Migraines

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Body Image Stuff

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