Category Archives: body image

Fetishization!

I see a lot of people get confused about the topic of “fetishization.” They’re all “people complain about fetishizing trans people/fat chicks/bi women/women of color, that means it’s anti-feminist to be attracted to trans people/fat chicks/bi women/women of color!” And then half of them are like “therefore FEMINISTS HATE YOUR BONERS!” and the other half are like “therefore I must self-flagellate about my evil evil boner.”

No. Feminists do not hate your boner, and you should not self-flagellate about your evil evil boner. It is not anti-feminist to be attracted to trans people/fat chicks/bi women/women of color. It is not even anti-feminist to be attracted to a trans bi fat woman of color!

Fetishization is not about attraction, it’s about using your attraction as an excuse to objectify people. The misdefinition of objectification is one of the very few things I get legitimately angry about (my sources of anger are few and geeky), so let’s review what it means with the help of Granny Weatherwax:

“And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

 

“It’s a lot more complicated than that–”

 

“No it ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

 

“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes-”

 

“But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

Basically, “don’t fetishize me” means “don’t treat me like a thing because you’re attracted to me.”

One of the really common ways that fetishization plays out is the assumption that  people you’re attracted to exist for your boner. For instance, dominant women in the kink scene regularly report submissive males assuming that because she’s dominant and female that she wants to dom them in exactly the way they want to be dommed. I mean! She’s dominant! In public! Clearly that means you don’t even have to ask before you lick her boots and call her Mistress.

Similarly, fat women who post pictures of themselves on Tumblr often get reblogged onto porn blogs, because clearly the only reason someone would post a picture of themselves on the Internet is so you can talk about how much you want to stick your dick in their fat jiggling ass. Fat women also often face problems with chubby chasers whose apparent thought process is something along the lines of “we have so much in common: you’re fat, and I like fat women.” For fat women and other women culturally considered unattractive, there’s also this really nasty “look, people who are attracted to you are so rare that you should be willing to fuck literally anyone who’s attracted to you” angle.

(PSA: you should not be willing to fuck literally anyone who’s attracted to you. Sex is amazingly much better if you’re attracted to the person you’re with and they care about you enjoying yourself too.)

Furthermore, a lot of the reasons that people give for being attracted to certain kinds of women are… really really gross. For instance, you should not believe “bi chicks are hot because two girls fucking is hot!” As a bi, poly, and female-presenting person, I have met approximately ten million people who believe this. I am sad to disappoint all of them by pointing out that when I fuck a lady, it’s because I want to fuck that lady, not because I want to give some other random dude a boner. It’s almost as if my sexual orientation is not entirely related to giving dudes boners. (I also hate threesomes and have no interest in being the third in your marriage. Sorry to crush all your Hot Bi Babe dreams.)

“I like Japanese girls because I love sushi and anime and I want a girl I can–” NOPE. You know there are Japanese women who grew up in Iowa and like McDonalds and Glee, right? You can’t assume that every person of a particular ethnicity shares all the traits you associate with that ethnicity. (Not to mention “I want a Japanese girl because Japanese girls are submissive and moe and I have never actually met a Japanese person” guy. Do not be that guy. If you become that guy I will fly to your house and light all your hentai on fire.)

“I like trans women because they’re the best of both worlds! A combination of male and female!” No, trans women are women, stop invalidating people’s genders. Furthermore, ‘best of both worlds’ implies all trans women have penises, which is just… not true.

“Ozy, you’re saying I can’t be attracted to anyone!” No, I’m not. It is perfectly fine to be interested in women who want to have threesomes with you, or women who like sushi and anime, or people who combine male and female– just don’t call those groups “bi women,” “Japanese women,” and “trans women,” because that isn’t true. Similarly, it’s perfectly fine to be attracted to women with penises or people with typically East Asian features or fat women, as long as you’re not an asshole about it.

A related issue is whether it’s possible to fetishize conventionally attractive, privileged women. My intuition would be “yes,” but for some reason the feminist movement has decided to go with “fetishization” for fetishization of marginalized groups and “sexual objectification” for fetishization of conventionally attractive and privileged women. I don’t get it.

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On Weight Loss And Health

TW for discussion of dieting and, in the comments, eating disorders.

Let us grant for a moment that being fat is unhealthy. (I’m not really sure whether it is, as I haven’t looked into the subject, so I’m stuck with the heuristic of “well, a lot of people with impressive-looking degrees say one thing, and a lot of people with blogs say the other.”)

The thing is that sustained weight loss is really hard. Of the people who have lost more than thirty pounds and sustained it for more than a year, 90% exercise at least one hour a day and 78% weigh themselves at least once a week. I think that overweight and obese people could very reasonably look at these results and say “actually I would rather not exercise that much, thank you, I’ll take the health risks.”

At the same time, focusing on weight loss means that some people will choose demonstrably unhealthy methods of losing weight, such as juice fasts, fad diets, eating so few calories that they’re literally starving themselves, smoking, etc. On a less disastrous level, a weight loss emphasis also results in really terrible advice about diet in women’s magazines (“eat candy canes, not cheese, candy canes contain fewer calories!”– this is not a straw man, this is an actual article I read).

On the other hand, a lot of advice typically given as weight-loss advice is still good for you even if you’re not looking to lose weight. It is not like eating lots of vegetables, cutting down on your sugar consumption, and exercising regularly are suddenly bad ideas if you happen to do them and still be obese afterward. For that matter, it’s not like eating nothing but cupcakes and refusing to exercise are mysteriously good for you if you happen to be thin.

So I am puzzled about why we continue to emphasize weight loss as opposed to “eat more plants and less sugar and do some form of exercise on the regular.” Why do we say “do X to lose weight!” as opposed to “to live longer” or “to be stronger” or “to be healthier” or “to be happier”? Other than diet industry profits, of course, because people trying and failing to lose weight buy lots of diet books and unused gym memberships. Which is just sad.

The Cotton Ceiling

About a year ago (yes, I’m very up on the news, in my defense I was doing other things at the time when this post was remotely relevant), there was a big flutter in the trans community about the “Cotton Ceiling.” Originally coined by transfeminist Drew DeVeaux, the Cotton Ceiling refers to how trans women are nominally accepted as women within queer communities, but treated as unfuckable and undesirable eunuchs when it comes to actually dating them.

(For the record: I’m a fairly masculine nonbinary trans person who was assigned female at birth and who almost exclusively dates and socializes outside the queer community.)

I am actually fairly sympathetic to a lot of the trans-exclusionary radical feminist critique (this is a fairly representative example) of the Cotton Ceiling. Because, yes, you should be allowed to say no to sex for any reason or no reason! “I don’t want to have sex with women with penises” is a perfectly valid reason not to have sex with someone! Facile “so you should have sex with any arbitrary trans woman you happen to come across” solutions to the Cotton Ceiling problem have the potential to get really nasty, social-pressure-y, and even coercive.

Where the trans-exclusionary radical feminists lose me is where they finish up the sentence “you should be allowed to refuse sex with people for any reason” with “NO LESBIAN WOULD EVER SLEEP WITH A TRANS WOMAN BECAUSE TRANS WOMEN ARE SECRETLY MALES AND NO TRUE LESBIAN FUCKS MALES.” Because that is, uh, treating trans women as undesirable and unfuckable eunuchs? Which is exactly what Drew DeVeaux was complaining about?

You have to be a very unique person to, in the course of arguing with someone, prove their argument correct.

I find it amazingly transmisogynistic that this conversation is happening about trans women. At this point, bottom surgery for trans women is much more advanced than bottom surgery for trans men is, and far more trans women get bottom surgery than trans men do. If you are not attracted to women who have penises or don’t have breasts, then there are lots of trans women you can fuck, while if you are not attracted to men with pussies, you’re going to be looking for a trans boyfriend for a long time. And yet trans women are considered unfuckable within the attracted-to-women queer community, while trans men are OMGTEHSEXY. Fucking transmisogynistic bullshit.

I’m really not sure if there’s a non-transphobic reason to choose not to date someone you’re otherwise attracted to just because they have a trans history. Maybe if you really value your partners being able to bear children? I dunno.

(Spare me the bullshit ‘socialization’ arguments. As if trans people get identical socializations to our cis counterparts. As if all cis women have identical gender socializations, regardless of race, class, religion, neurodivergence, ability, survivor status, region of the country, what their family was like, who they had as friends, what school they went to, or any other factor.)

Obviously, there are people who are repulsed by the mere fact of a woman being trans. (Or of a man or nonbinary being trans, of course.) And it is cissexist to do so. If you are attracted to women and really see trans women as women, you’ll consider the possibility of dating trans women who are attractive to you, the same way you’d consider dating any other group of women. Claiming that you won’t date any trans women, at all, ever, is a sign that you have some internal cissexism that you need to work on.

Ultimately, however, the Cotton Ceiling isn’t about fucking individual trans women; it’s about the community norms that treat trans women as unfuckable. (Here I want to link to Monica Maldonado’s excellent Hating Transsexual Bodies series, but unfortunately she took her site down.) The problem is acting like trans women just aren’t attractive or sexy at all; in fact, trans female bodies must be as much like cis female bodies as possible, or they’re gross gross gross forever! That is wrong.

I think it’s important here to point out that the toxic, transmisogynistic dynamic in the queer community is directly caused by the overall toxic, transmisogynistic dynamic in our culture. Queers didn’t invent transmisogyny, the elevation of masculinity over femininity, or the patriarchy. We just came up with exciting new forms of it. (Arty photos of teenagers binding their breasts with Ace bandages! “I date cis women and trans men”!)

Which, ultimately, is my problem with the concept of the Cotton Ceiling. If we are going to challenge people’s lack of attraction to trans women, we should challenge cis straight men’s lack of attraction to trans women too. Why are some cis straight men so repulsed by trans women, and others so creepy and fetishizing of trans women’s bodies? Why do some of them regard murder as an appropriate response to their being attracted to a trans woman?

On Learning To Love Yourself

Sondosia had some really interesting things to say about self-love, which has started to get me to think about the problems I have with the way a lot of people talk about self-love.

“Love your body!” “Everyone is beautiful!” “You’re an amazing person!” “You’re more awesome than you know!” “You’re perfect just the way you are!” Most things that get classified as a “positive affirmation.” Anything put on black-and-white pictures of overweight women doing yoga or birds flying into a sunset. You get the idea.

The problem is that they always sound false to me. I mean… I know I’m not perfect just the way I am. I forgot to turn in a form for long enough that I have to petition the provost to persuade them that, yes, I am attending this institution of higher learning. That is not the act of a perfect person! That’s actually the act of a somewhat ridiculous person!

As for the beauty thing… well, yeah, everyone’s beautiful in the sense that everyone is sexually attractive to someone, and that human bodies in general are pretty cool-looking. But conventional attractiveness is still a thing. While I’m fairly conventionally attractive (thin, white, clear skin, symmetrical features), I doubt hairy legs, bound chests, and haircuts that make one look like a teenage boy are going to be all the rage at Cosmo any time soon.

I would rather have a clear-headed assessment of my flaws and virtues than a smarmy “you’re perfect just the way you are.” For one thing, as a mentally ill person, I’m pretty inclined to declare that my flaws are everything, everything in the world, I suck at all the things. It is very difficult for me to get from “I suck at literally everything” to “I’m fabulous and amazing.” On the other hand, it is fairly easy for me to go from “I suck at literally everything” to “I am forgetful, antisocial, and excessively poor at sales, but on the other hand I’m a pretty good writer, a kind friend, and a Lawful Good Paladin.”

Once I know my flaws, I can say to myself that it’s okay. Everyone has some flaws; mine tend, at worst, to cause minor annoyance to myself and other people. I’m not a horrible person or secretly Hitler. Now that I know what my flaws are and the ways that I differ from Society’s Norm Of How People Should Be, I can work out how to deal with them if I want to– or I can just accept them as a part of myself. You know what? I’m antisocial. I’m staying in on Friday night to watch My Little Pony. I’m cool with that.

And I’d like to be able to point out that I’m forgetful without people being like “stop being so mean to yourself!” I’m not being mean; I’m being accurate. Yes, in high school, I was a creepy, ugly, socially awkward loser. Yes, I am peculiar to the point that it is astonishing anyone wants to date me. I don’t want to put my energy into denying that; I want to put my energy into being like “yep, and I accept that about myself, and I’m awesome anyway.”

I want to make it clear here that I’m absolutely not saying anything about what other people should like. If you happen to find that “everyone’s beautiful” and “you’re perfect just the way you are” make you feel better about yourself, go for it! There is room for more than one way of handling self-image in this world, and what works best for you is going to be rooted in your psychology and lived experience. Ultimately, you should do what makes you feel good.

But for me… you can stack up all your “everyone is beautiful” posters. I’d rather have “prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked female.” And “maybe I am ugly. I’m still fucking awesome.” I’d rather accept my flaws than pretend I don’t have them. And I’d rather have self-compassion than self-love.