I'm liveblogging "Our Bodies, Our Blogs" just for my own interests.
How did Laurie Toby Edison get into this work?
She was raising two kids ten years apart in age. Her younger daughter was teased for her weight. She was getting harrassed at school, and she was dealing with the barrage of the media messages about the beauty industry. There was an epidemic of anorexia in the fifth grade. The actual precipitating event was a lunch at a conference, and a friend was in tears. A man she thought was her friend said that he would never go to a nudist colony because his biggest fear was meeting a 300-pound woman with an appendectomy scar. She ended up being "the token skinny" on a panel of women discussing body image.
You start looking at the way that women with disabilities get treated, the way that older people get treated, women in Japan getting their eyes cut so they'll be round.
This experience made her a photographer. That was the gift.
Wendy McClure: First she started blogging about the Dove campaign because men started writing mean-spirited articles about the "realistic" women on the billboards. There was a sense of entitlement. Part of her resents the idea that the idea behind the campaign has to be "sold" to her. There were people saying "Why do we have to look at this stuff," the idea that "if a woman isn't eye candy, she's disgusting. This was not just morning radio - it was the Sun-Times. She just started writing about it, and it was fun.
She has the attitude about things like loving yourself and positive body image. She's cynical - allergic to term "positivity". I don't really get "love your body day". There's a lot of ugly stuff foisted on women. The size/body stuff is only part of it. When it comes to fat women, the gloves come off as far as what guys feel about women in general.
She felt like, "I'm not going to stop writing about this."
Yvonne Marie - Experience online has been very personal. Has posted lots of images of herself online. She gets a lot of reader feedback.
She does it for herself. She posted her body after her daughter's birth, stretch marks, etc. She thought she was a beast - felt like the only woman who looked like that. When she would get e-mails from women showing their bellies, it would make her feel better, like she could relate to people and not feel so alone.
Jen wants to know what Laurie's idea was behind the book of male nudes.
She says she realized that there was nothing more invisible than fat, female bodies. Also, there are few representations of "real" men nude (not talking about porn here.) Men are put in boxes also.
Audience: Women who have a hard time with their bodies struggle a lot with shame as well. The hardest part is letting go of shame of being big, internalizing your shame with eating.
Jenny: has the blogging community been supportive.
Audience: She calls herself a fat-ass, a lard-ass, to be blunt about it online feels nice.
Karina - Celebration of Curves - Has been writing about her experience of "fake it til you make it", where she just got so exhausted from looking in the mirror and feeling miserable. There's no amount of dieting or exercise she did...her mother had her on a diet her whole life. Nothing changed the words when looking int he mirror that were ugly or hateful. She made herself stay in the house until she could say three nice things about her body. Beauty can be found in every shape and size. She'd better feel that way when she looks in the mirror. Since she's done this, life has gotten progressively better. Some people might call it affirmations, but it's been a great experience for her.
A guy posted a comment on her blog about how fat people are lazy. She looked in the mirror today and thought, "fat and ugly" and she wrote a post about it.
Wendy McClure says there's so much diet narrative in our culture. What do we do about it?
Laurie says men go through body image issues also. She doesn't want to make it a female problem only. About diets, the thing that disturbs me, is she knows people who eat well, exercise, but haven't lost weight and they feel like a failure so they stop. The idea is to eat well and exercise - you shouldn't have to feel like a failure because you haven't become skinny.
Lena from Cheeky Lotus - for Yvonne. She knows she was successful with her weight loss and lost quite a bit of weight. Wanted to know if she felt she'd been disconnected from her readers when she lost weight.
Yvonne said no, she'd lost a lot of weight but she still had a lot to lose. She felt like her readers were supporting her and cheering her on.
Beth - Bethyclaus.com - I have been known to call myself a lardass. With a lot of oppressed groups we see them taking the words other people use to try to empower herself. I have to question that when we can say "Shame on you, Chicago Sun Times," but then we use the word.
Yvonne had never questioned that kind of talk before. It had always been disturbing to people who knew her. Now she does.
Wendy has tried not to go there, her pet peeve is when people, if they're not talking about your weight they're talking about her self-esteem. She's protective about her own self-esteem. She hates on discussion boards when there are squabbles between people who are dieting and people who aren't.
Rachel - has spoken with Yvonne on the phone and emailed for several years now. Before she started reading blogs she was very judgmental of people for how they looked. You'd see someone but not think they're going to be good friends. She met her and did not think of her in any particular way...just saw her as a person.
Jenny: Hates "you have such a pretty face". Do we not have a right to take up more space?
Kate Harden - fat acceptance blogger. Fat does not equate with "lardass".
Tanya: Iateapie.net - Why do you think that people are so obsessed with or even care what other people look like?
Heidi - is here on behalf of Quaker and Tropicana. How do you feel about government organizations and NGOs? How do we feel about guidelines and rules that don't work for everybody?
Laurie says people are so barraged with this stuff that it's hard not to get sucked in. If women took all the energy they spent on weight loss and put it someplace else, amazing things happen. She doesn't want to have fat and health debate here. Health at any size standpoint is that most HMOS believe that diets will fail.
Wendy - talking about taking this beyond fat/size..as soon as you put a picture of yourself online, people feel entitled to talk about it. Back when she started putting her photos online, commenting wasn't a regular thing. There was this sense of distance...if you did put up something, just the idea that someone would talk about it, it was crossing a line. Now that line isn't there anymore.
Jessica Ashley from Sassafrass believes claiming this space for women without talking about men is okay. There are so many bloggers here right now who are owning who they are in the journey, being excited and hopeful about their bodies, she respects this about the conversation. She chooses to approach writing on a fitness blog as "feel good about yourself". She's writing it to herself as well as other women. Do you have ever have feelings about being fraudulent to your readers?
Yvonne: That's been int he back of her mind. She's very honest. She felt like a failure because she was losing so much weight and talking about it.
Laurie: I always try to write real and true.
Woman from beautyandthebreast.org: Blogging is a personal journey, but can it also be something else - a counterpoint to cookie cutter images posted and produced elsewhere...not just for you yourself but for a lot of women to take it upon themselves and understand.
Laurie: Body Impolitic discusses issues of body image - it's not really a personal blog, just twice a month. You're talking about girls getting breasts for their 16th birthday The broader image is "the body modification stuff".
Cory: WHen you've thought through an issue long enough, you need the counterpoint that other people can provide. That's the point that you guys are trying to make: this is a community that can work together. What if it were energy to use to try to help each other in a different kind of way> That's what I as a blogger feel disconnected. I read this and that story, but I don't get a sense of a larger community.
Jenny: The power of the community is so important for changing the perceptions. Honest dialogue is the first step.
Shauna: Dietgrrl - started out at 350 pounds, full of loathing and anger. Through the process, self-acceptance came. She started out thinking there was something wrong with her. She realized how much energy she had wasted with all this hatred, and realized it could be redirected.
Jenny: YOu're a role model.
Shauna - I'm not trying to preach. It's about finding balance.
Dani: A big problem that women have in society is we have this fine line that we don't differentiate between which is through who we are and this body image. It's a cycle in your mind. I don't think any woman, whatever you look like. The things that people write to each other and we think in our own minds and write, the comments ands upport you get through the community, you would never say to another person what you would say to yourself. I would never go up to someone and say "Hey, lardass," but you would say that to yourself.
For panelists who have blogged about body image issues: Is there danger in blogging about this? That commenters need help beyond commenting on a blog...a community of bloggers is wonderful, but if you are suffering from an eating disorder, if you started that conversation, what would you do?
Wendy: Has gotten a lot of distressing e-mails from readers, not showing up in comments. A lot of them are about "how do you come to a place of acceptance?" If I suspect eating disorders, I suggest seeing a therapist. It's all I can do from behind a computer.
Laurie: Needs to say again that there's this very big picture. We make this very personal. Everybody is being barraged with this stuff in society, every time you see a magazine, newspaper, everything. You're not just dealing with this issue because it's about you. It's because there's society and this huge industry telling you there's something wrong with you. It's important to recognize that it's in this context.
Wendy: The whole "let's give ourselves a hug thing". I don't want to give myself a hug. I want to kick the guy with the "No Fat Chicks" t-shirt on in the balls. What do these companies get out of feeding these messages. She'd love to see the activist blogs.
Laurie: You don't get the job if you're fat, older, of color - these are all body image issues. That for me is the most important part. Feeling good about yourself is obviously important but the world itself also has to change.
Cristin Jones - Eat Like Me - Take photos of everything she eats every day. Similar to if she called herself a bad name, calling a food a bad name, she gets the same kind of flak. People call her out on it. She gets a lot of comments from eating-disordered people, telling her about symptoms. She will not answer questions like this on the blog. She'd be doing a disservice to you to do this over a blog. You owe the reader the best help they can get.
Susan Wagner wants to know if panelists think that blogs can change the culture. Laurie says it depends on the blog - what the blogs are saying.
We shouldn't tell people what they can and cannot say about ourselves. It's important not to censor what women say about ourselves. Wendy agrees with that.
Jenny: Examine your motivations for self-deprecations.
Laurie: You should be able to say any damned thing you want to on your blog. When you're in a cafeteria or public space, it's different.
Reader: Mother had a double-mastectomy, her sense of herself as a woman. She's five weeks pregnant - looking at pictures on flickr of pregnant women. All these experiences as a person, not just as a woman, but those are important aspects.
Jane: Mamacita...Almost didn't come to Blogher because she has a very large readership and didn't want them to see me.
Jenny: "Stand up, Jane".
Jane: No. My body and self-image is bad because my body's bad. Started packing on weight when children were in grade school. We had 40 kids in the house every night. Their moms were at the gym, looked so good, I looked like this. I looked like my mom. And I couldn't get the weight off because I never had time.
Curvy woman: we have such a limited ideal of what the sexy female body looks like. There's areal human being behind the boobs - keep showing positive images of femal bodeis. Some of my best friends are skinny.Some of my best friends are skinny and they worry about the size of their thighs. We all have body image issues.
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