I have been lusting after this handbag for a long time.  Black patent is impractical, I know, but it is big and shiny and pretty and oh!  finally my boyfriend bought it for me, probably more to save himself from listening to my agonised sighs over something I can’t afford to buy than out of any actual altruism.  Its arrival sent me into paroxysms of glee, and frantic planning over what I could wear with it and finally deciding that actually, I need to overhaul my entire wardrobe and style and sent out in a brand-new direction.  I would name this new style – Hard Rock Lady Lovely Locks, perhaps.  Pretty Pretty Punk Edwardian?  Rockabilly Lolita?  The details of what this new style would actually be are hazy, so the names are “interesting” i.e. pretty shit.  Who cares?!  This handbag would be the jumping off point for a whole new stylish me, and I would finally feel comfortable posting outfit photos because I Look Awesome.

But reality and practicality intrudes!  I have no regular income for the foreseeable future, and to be honest I am happiest in jeans or shorts with a t-shirt and sneakers.  I have a month-long job coming up (more on that later) and with the money from that I have decided not to purchase any number of impractical and beautiful shoes I lust after, but instead a sensible and ugly pair of Birkenstocks.  (My mother is very distraught regarding this, and has been frequently heard to declaim, “You are not my real daughter!”)

Recently I have been posting some “what I wore” type posts, which while I have nothing against them, I prefer to focus on writing which was the original point of this website.  I would like to have photo-filled posts as an occasional refresher rather than the norm.  Besides this, however, and aside from my angst over whether or not I can actually dress myself, I have another reason for not wanting to put too many (full body) photos of myself up on the internet.

I am going to hark back to an early post about Why This Is Not A Fashion Blog, and focus on a particular point which I mentioned in passing:

Then came the rise of blogging.  And what were many of the girls of my age group doing?  Blogging about style and fashion.  I had the idea, the dream of starting a blog like that once…  When I was rich enough to afford nice clothes (haha poor student) when I had a nice camera (yes, but no tripod or remote) when I was skinny so I looked good in clothes (never a good reason) and so forth.

So awhile ago I had an “epiphany” about not hating my body anymore, about wearing what I want and not caring if my tummy looks jubbly etc.  This is all well and good, telling myself I am fine the way I am, and eventually learning to love myself for the way I am, but it is difficult when it is just me (and my boyfriend) battling against the world who is telling me that Fat is Bad and Poppy Gallico, You Are Fat!

Quick aside:  My problem with the word ‘fat’.  No fat at all is a bad thing.  Some fat is a good thing.  Too much fat is a bad thing.  Fat should not be a description of a body, because it is part of a body.  The greatest marketing lies corporations have invented is centered around what ‘fat’ is and that fat is ‘bad’.  We need fat on us to keep our body warm and to insulate ourselves.  Too much fat can be hazardous to health, but so can too little.  Same with fat in our diet.  Too much fat (particularly animal fat) is bad, but a little (particularly from plants and nuts) is good.  Fat is bodily accretions and something that should be part of a balanced diet.  Fat is not what your body looks like, and when it is labelled as a body type and as a ‘bad’ body type, everything else that contains the word ‘fat’ automatically becomes evil, thinking which is hazardous to our health.  However, for the sake of clarity and understanding, when I refer to ‘fat’ from now on I will be referring to the media-pushed, body-type fat.  Just let it stand that this definition irritates me to no end.

(related:  ‘curvy’ means Scarlett Johannsson body type.  ‘curvy’ does not mean ‘morbidly obese’.)

So this is a post full of deviations but I promise I am going to get back to my original point which actually, come to think of it, isn’t all that clear anyway.  Hopefully it will by the end?  Ok.  So the next step is our celebrity culture.  I don’t really need to hunt out magazines covers shouting “Dieting:  Celebs gone too far!” or “Stars Eating Their Emotions!”  You’ve all seen them, you all know them, you’ve probably read a few of these ‘articles’.  Of course, magazines are often trying to sensationalise nothing to sell copies, but we are constantly being told that when celebrities look like this, they are ‘too skinny’, and when they look like that, they are ‘too fat’.  Except as an occasional sop to the vaguely disgruntled masses, celebrities are never in-between.  These women are held up to be the most beautiful women in the world, but they can never be just right.  What does that tell the ordinary woman?  Well obviously our chest bones and spine aren’t protruding, so we are not ‘too skinny’, but then according to the media the only other thing we can be is fat and we all know how that goes…

I do not want to imply that I myself believe this.  I most emphatically do not believe that all skinny people are anorexic and all fat people are compulsive over-eaters.  I do not believe that skinny is pretty and fat is ugly.  I believe people are beautiful, no matter what size they are, with the disclaimer that they are healthy and happy.  But having grown up with the media telling me to assign people into categories, I have to force myself to really think about this and to chose to disregard what society tells me.  I do have a problem with labelling people skinny and fat.  It is putting people into groups, segregating them, assigning one group a certain stereotype and the other group another.  But arguing the dangers of these groups is not the purpose of this post.  Part of the point of this post is that this is not what we are told by our culture, it is about the messages I am bombarded with every day, in subtle and screamingly obvious ways.

In the media, there is no middle ground.  Women are either skinny or fat.  And this, for me, is what I have to consciously battle against.  I am not fat, I know I do not fit into the ‘fat’ category.  Fat is not bad and being fat is not bad.  I have fat, certainly, but that is a good thing!  But I do not fit into the category of skinny, which is the ‘acceptable’ category, and anything outside that is fat, and as I am told over and over, more times than I can protest in my head against, Fat Is Bad.  Feminist blogs talk about ‘Thin Privilege’ – that is, much like being white and a man, being skinny automatically means you are treated better in Western society than if you are heavy.  While naturally thin women do get the “Eat a sandwich” remarks, being skinny is far more often a positive thing in our society.  Being skinny automatically equals beauty, power, sex appeal, control, while being fat automatically equals laziness, ugliness, lack of self control, regardless of whether a skinny person has an eating disorder of if a fat person is healthy and fit.

But what about the in-betweens?  We are not skinny enough to be the beautiful heroine, nor chubby enough to be the jolly sidekick.  We do not have thin privilege, but we are not large enough to be told to “do something about it” – that is, we have no societally-dictated solution for our limbo state.  Instead we torment ourselves with fad diets and clothes that are too small, while feeling quietly guilty because really, even though the media is telling us we are not skinny so we are therefore the dreaded fat, we know that there isn’t really anything to be worrying about.  We may need to work a bit harder at eating our five + a day, and to skip the elevator and take the stairs more often, but all in all we are ok.  It is one thing to tell ourselves that, however, and quite another to believe it when everything else around us is telling us we are Wrong.

So if we are not skinny and we are not fat, what are we?  Skinny and fat could be the extreme ends of a spectrum, so the in-betweens would be normal, ordinary?  That implies, however, that there is something extraordinary or abnormal about being fat or skinny.  Average could imply the space between those two, but also has connotations of normal and acceptable.  It is also so divisive.  There are not three body-types in the world.  Women run the whole spectrum of body sizes and shapes.  Which is what is such a subjective view – a person who is skinny to an obese person may be fat to someone of my weight.  My spectrum of skinny through to fat is probably far different to someone in China, in France, in the U.S.A., in Kenya.  I am sure there are people who think I am skinny, and people who think I am fat, compared to themselves.  And the funny thing is, often where we place others on the continuum is not based on actual weight but based on what we think society would label them as.

Labelling yourself, diminishing yourself to a word that defines your body and so, evidently, who you are, is dangerous.  But humans are obsessed with categorising things, from the tiniest microbe to the biggest flaring ball of gas to societal trends.  Not having a name, a label, a group to belong to renders you less than human.  And this is where I get stuck.  I do not want to subscribe to patriarchial notions of body types and beauty, but there is still a part of me that wants to know how to describe my body.  I can say, I am short with pink hair, brown eyes, slightly spotty skin.  I have large breasts and small ankles, chubby cheeks and a dainty nose.  I have moles on my arms and hairy shins.  I have an innie belly-button and pink nipples, pointy elbows and my thighs touch from my crotch to my knees.  I can describe myself, until I try to say – “Well, I have fat on my tummy but I am not fat in the culturally proscribed Biggest Loser kind of way, but neither am I skinny, so I guess, well, I am average?  I guess?”  I can describe myself in so many ways that are not offensive or have harmful connotations, but I cannot describe my weight, my build, in a way that has been determined by society.

This is all a roundabout way to elaborate on my quote (far, far) above and another realisation I had recently.  When fashion blogs started to become popular, the stylish women who wrote them seemed to fall into two camps:  Skinny and Fat.  Mostly they do not describe themselves as such, but looking at them the women were either much skinnier than I or much bigger than I.    The skinny women wore clothing that I knew would make me look like a bag lady – I just could not see myself fitting in to their fashion (literally).  The heavier women rocked outfits and celebrated their bodies in a way I could not relate to.  They have been pigeon-holed into a category by society and can choose to rebel against that by embracing what our culture has decreed is bad, unsexy and unfashionable.  And they are proving that they are none of those things.  When I first started seeing fashion blogs, however, there were no in-between girls.  You were either fashionably skinny, or rebelliously fat.  So that made me think, “Since I am not large, then I would have to be skinny to be able to have a fashion blog.”  Of course, I did not literally think this, it was subconscious and sly and not just the fault of fashion blogs, but of society for telling me for years and years what is acceptable and what is not, what is good and what is bad, and in my blind faith not questioning any of this but just feeling terrible about how I looked and thinking I would have to change to be worth something.  This can be boiled down to two points:

1. I only think I am fat because I am obviously not skinny, and in our culture you can only be one or the other.
2. I wanted to lose weight not for health, not really for beauty, but to fit into a category.

It is quite crazy that it comes down to this.  I totally disregarded the fact that I am not even that interested in fashion, but it was what every girl my age seemed to be doing and interested in and I juts wanted to fit in.  There are tons of other things that contributed to my poor body image over the years, but when I think about it, many of them are to do with feeling left out and just wanting to blend with everyone else.  I have skinny bits, but they are not skinny enough to wear high fashion with panache.  I have wobbly bits, but not enough to proudly proclaim that I am fat and fat is beautiful, too.  It is all about the human drive to have everything fitting into a neatly defined box, which in modern times we are becoming more and more aware that this is not as easy as we try to make it.  Gender is not as clear cut as we try to make it.  Standard dress sizes fit what average woman, exactly?  I tried on a dress in a store once – it was a ’standard’ size Small and fitted me around the ribs, but was about three inches too small around my boobs.  The woman who made the dress was in the store and whipped me up another that was Small around the waist and Medium around the chest.  I am not neatly categorised into a Small, Medium, Large, X-large, and the majority of other women aren’t either.  But still, I have this drive, this need to know what to ldefine myself as.  I think this is something that is not entirely the fault of media, either.  Humans have been doing it for thousands of years, from Aristotle to Darwin.  The media just happens to attach negative connotations to one label and force almost everyone, regardless of what their body shape or size is, to attach that label to themselves.

Back to fashion blogs.  Because I could not fit into either of those categories, I thought that I couldn’t be ‘fashionable’.  Based on my body shape, I felt I did not have the right to be fashionable.  I did not have the right to wear skinny jeans and ripped t-shirts, and I did not have the right to wear tight mini skirts and say fuck the haters, I am fat and divine.  But then I started to see blogs with average-sized women who were crazy stylish.  I still could not identify myself with them, however.  For a long time I have been unable to ’see’ myself in the mirror, see what I truly looked like without all the added baggage that I have accrued from fashion magazines and celebrity diets.  Because I did not know what I looked like, only that I was unhappy and disliked myself because I have fat and Fat Is Bad, I still thought that these attractive women had nothing to do with me and my shape.  This started to change when I saw a post by one of my favourite bloggers, Freelancer’s Fashion Blog.  She has fantastic style and dresses like I would like to dress, and if only I had the patience to learn how to do my hair like that!  She is in a burlesque group, and in this photoshoot I was thinking how gorgeous she looked, and how I wish I had the confidence and body to wear a bikini like that, when I was totally blind-sided by the realisation that actually, she has the same type of body as me. I would look like that in a bikini.

But it was still so hard to reconcile her body, wonderful and sexy, with mine, which I have spent so long telling myself is not.  It is still so hard to look in the mirror.  It is still so hard to realise that I do not have to label myself, that I am me and that is a pretty ok thing to be, and that I can be fashionable with the body I have and I do not have to be afraid. I can eat what I like without feeling guilty that I am eating the ‘wrong’ thing, or smug because I am eating the ‘right’ thing.  I can exercise without feeling pressured to, I can not exercise without castigating myself for being lazy.  I can happily try on a size whatever without being upset it is not a smaller, more acceptable size.  I can be in love with my body, and that is a long struggle, but it is much better to struggle against all those negative influences and towards happiness than to fight against myself and towards misery.  I do not have to hate myself because I do not agree that I am what a ridiculous, woman-hating culture tells me I am.

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