Do I even need to tell you that she's nowhere close?
"No, honey," I said. Again.
"My thighs are big," she complained.
First of all, no they're not. And in this case, that's important, because it goes to the heart of her self-perception. She is perceiving something about herself that is objectively not true. (She still eats, though, by the way, and is completely pleasure-driven in her eating. And I intend to keep it that way. Oh yes I do.)
What her thighs *are* is *packed with muscle* from five years of--and I know this is the root of the problem, but she loves it so much--dancing. Pound for pound, my daughter could kick your ass inside out. But how do I tell her that in a good way? In this culture, "strong" or "powerful" are code for "fat" when applied to women's bodies, and undesirable in and of themselves.
I pretty much want to kill everybody. Certainly everybody who has ever had anything to do with any kind of visual media in the 20th century, because the photographic image is the root of this entire evil. Where paint is generous to flesh, welcoming it for its infinite variations of texture and light-play, photography is hostile. Mechanical as it is, photography worships the hard, the flat, the absolute. It *can be made* to love the softness of our natural otter-shape, but given its choice, it would have us all be Futurist machines. The more we started to photograph ourselves, particularly in moving images, the thinner and harder we wanted to be.
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I love Marinetti's honesty, by the way, in that Futurist manifesto:
"We want to glorify war...militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman."
His bitterest enemy couldn't have said it better.
The beautiful ideas which kill. And contempt for woman.
Notice that children were so far beneath Marinetti's grandiosity that he couldn't even be bothered to mention them.
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Despite the wishes of Marinetti, modernity has been more than kind to us girls. It's given us physical and mental freedoms that the lovely women of our painted past couldn't have dreamed of. But the thing about female existence, and you may have noticed this, is that it doesn't work. Every dream, when achieved by women, becomes a nightmare.
Modernity mitigates but cannot change this fact.
Protection from the hazards of combat and toil long ago became gender apartheid.
Yet the chance to work rapidly became the obligation to work. Many of us are torn away from our babies when they're three months old.
The chance to be active and strong, and glorified in beautiful films and photographs, became the obligation to be skinny.
But let's be clear that the size-acceptance crowd should be careful what they wish for. The minute we all decide fat is beautiful will be the minute girls start getting force-fed like in Mauritania. Yes, force-fed, as in "Of course they cry--they scream." That being a candid admission in this article, made without shame or remorse, by a woman who runs a force-feeding farm.
This appalling practice is starting to be curtailed...but not exactly in an inspiring way. "We're fed up of fat women here," says a man in the article. Great! Wonderful.
Let's keep going. Notice how modesty, in the parts of the world which went that way, became forced covering.
Yet the cultures where women *can* be beautiful are, yes, cultures where they *have to be.* From corsets, crinolines and girdles to cosmetic surgery to TV shows where loudmouths tell you what to wear, we are hounded.
Which I guess is what the world has always done to foxes. Hounded them, heh.
We're prey animals. Yes inherently. Which is what causes everything to go wrong. Every dream to become a nightmare every freedom to become an obligation every liberty a cage. Our tragedy is that this does not curtail the depths of our souls.
But of course that's also our triumph. Nothing. Can measure or contain our souls.
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I quoted these words from Lyle Lovett before, and I'm going to quote them again: "Said disillusioned keep your head down, for if you do they'll never know. They'll have no answers to their questions, and they will have to let you go."
We'll fall silent into the arms of the protective kind of secrecy. We'll cheat cruelty where we can and steal happiness everywhere.
I brought out some cookies this morning, and my baby girl and I ate them for our breakfast with a smile.
