I have been thinking a lot lately about mental and physical health. It is a tricky thing to consciously lose weight when you have kids at home watching what you do, especially today when we are so much more sensitive to diet culture. When I grew up, weight was moral-- very openly. If you ate the right things, you could be the right person. Weight was a behavior, a proxy for health. And! the books I read in elementary and middle school confirmed diet culture/created it/reified it in a pretty horrifying way, as my recent eBay rabbit hole confirmed.
1. Nothing's Fair in Fifth Grade: I adored this book when I was a kid, and nothing in it seemed problematic to me. A re-read reveals IT WAS ALL PROBLEMATIC. And in addition to everything written on every page about Elsie, THE KIDS HITCH A RIDE TO THE MALL in an old man's truck and have to escape and this is just, like, a throwaway b-plot. IT IS A WILD RIDE
2. Blubber by Judy Blume: I mean. Ultimately this book was about exposing the cruelty of bullying, but also? The residual message is not necessarily anti-bullying or anti-fat-shaming. The skinny popular kids are never really punished and the privileged perspective of the bully is sort of... I don't know... reveled in.
3.The Cat Ate my Gymsuit: Yikes, you guys. Marcie loses wight (after both of her parents tell her she's fat and she is negatively rewarded for her appearance at school), and even though she still has problems, MUCH IS SOLVED by weight loss. Her fatness defines her.
Dorothy read Nothing's Fair and WAS SHOCKED by it. Which is GREAT. We have made SO MUCH PROGRESS since I was a kid, but also! It has only been one generation. There is much more work to do.
The Cat Ate My Gymsuit! I remember that one. I reread Blubber recently and wow. I don't even think we need to go that far back - remember Monica's fat past on Friends? No wonder we are all fucked up.
ReplyDeleteI come from a family of disordered thoughts/actions when it comes to weight and food. Thanksgiving at my grandparents house was horrible. A feast of carbs and sweets, everyone eating the feast, everyone talking about how horrible it is to be eating the feast, how we all need to lose weight, etc. So many sentences began with, “Oh honey, once you lose weight…” UGH. I was lucky, I was pretty thin until menopause, so these statements were not pointed at me. But it was horrible and the message was clear. Thin = Good. Fat = Bad.
ReplyDeleteBooks like these, yeah, they just rub it in.
We've really come so far, but not far enough. I love how "skinny" is no longer the holy grail, and there's much more focus on fitness. But... my daughter goes to the gym and lifts weights and openly admits that she doesn't care about being strong- she's just doing it to look a certain way. I've always been SO CAREFUL never to talk about how my body looks, or criticize myself or my kids in that way, but I guess it's still ingrained in our culture.
ReplyDeleteI loved ALL those books when I was a kid. I think I reread and then had my kid read the gymsuit one earlier this year. It is very telling to see what was acceptable in the mid/late 1900s!
ReplyDelete(This is Suzanne.)
I would love to see you write a book on just this. How our seemingly innocuous media shaped our generation, and now moving into a more body neutral mentality we're forced to silently heal our past messaging. It's A LOT.
ReplyDeleteYeeeees, so much this. As much progress has been made, it's a frigging drop in the bucket, and a huge number of people still think fat-shaming serves a purpose. My mom is a great cook, and yet I never really enjoy having dinner there - the weird combination of her wanting me to eat everything and being insulted if I don't, but the fact that she also wants me to lose weight.
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