[Rockinonahigh]

Originally Posted by Medusa

That is incredibly fucked up.

Let me say this, I think it is incredibly brave of Superwoman (I'm calling her that until she decides to out herself) to do her journey in a visible, authentic way with unabashed resolve. It's brave not because there are vile haters out there in the world who let their own self esteem issues keep them from celebrating someone's health success, but because she is brave enough to do it with an audience. That, my dear friends, takes giant ovaries and that, to me, makes her a fucking BAD ASS.

On another note:

This is something that June and I have talked about at length. Back on the Dash site, when I was first figuring out I was a Femme at the age of 22, I felt such an enormous sense of affiliation and love with all ofthe fat people there who loved their bodies in ways I had never been witness to before. I was able to shed much of my insecurity about my own size by witnessing a few people I deeply cared about at the time own their size and space and demand the kind of respect for it that I had always been afraid to ask for.
It was and is amazing.
I am a firm believer that sexy comes and any size. I am also a firm believer that love should come at any size (both self-love and love directed). I do not, however, believe that any of us should be fetishizing size in a way that supports food addiction or destructive eating habits. That may look like many different things to all of us but for me, it means that I don't keep telling myself I'm fine the way I am while I shove Twinkies in my face and can't walk up a flight of stairs or am having a stroke due to high blood pressure while still shoveling over 6000 calories a day into my body.

It's hard for me to even type this because it feels like such a betrayal of my fat politics. The politics I have put a LOT of effort into over the years. Don't get me wrong, I am not ever going to dismantle my fat politics or start being negative about fat bodies but this re-examination has definitely churned some muddy waters for me.

There's another thing that I am remiss to talk about but I think it's important. I think that some of the fat politics that were happening in other spaces made a nice soft bed for willing food addicts to become even more unhealthy under the guise of....fuck, I've written and rewritten this sentence 10 times and am trying to say it in a way that won't sound like an attack. Let me just say that I gained a significant amount of weight when I felt that my fat body was more accepted/desired/fetishized/celebritized/etc. That's what happened for me and I own it and it wasn't because anyone else made it happen. I still hear the echos of fatphobia in "I'm not usually attracted to big girls but I'd date Medusa in a heartbeat" or "Medusa dresses so well for someone her size!" or "I wish I had Medusa's confidence!" (as if a confident fat woman was such an anomaly..and maybe it is but it felt like a headpat more often than not like "Oh look at you, with all of your ADORABLE little self-esteem!")

Sometimes I still feel like a traitor for even daring to make my body smaller, for having a goal of a healthier body, for being so self-involved that I'd want to focus on me. I know some of that is just the old stuff talking. But I also know that some of it is because I am coming from a history and a specific Butch-femme culture where there were some people who I idolized who were severely overweight and who helped me to find the love within myself after a lifetime of hating, both by watching and witnessing them and by creating an atmosphere of acceptance and love. That's a hard thing to examine if it means I have to let go of my safety zone, and for me that's exactly what it means.

Sorry for the gush.

<3

Girl u rock,tell it like it is.