Trigger warning: this post contains discussions of body image, eating habits, and eating disorders. Please don't click through if doing so would jeopardise your health or sanity.
I can't help but to feel like this is the thin white girl's version of "but sexism/the patriarchy hurts men too!" and be deeply ashamed that I'm even writing this, much less considering posting it in public, even if it is a traffic-less, anonymous kind of quiet. But for a long time feminism didn't acknowledge that men were hurt by patriarchal systems as well. It was a useful critique, and acknowledging the ways in which a system is damaging to everyone is integral to changing it. I don't think this perspective is expressed much, if at all. I certainly have never seen it done so. It is not meant to deny thin privilege, or have the annoyingly chummy "it's okay, I suffer just like you do" tone to it. This is just another critique of the system, another reason why sizeism is a bad thing for everyone.
And while towelling myself down and contemplating food (should I admit to using a t-shirt to dry my hair instead of the same towel I use for the rest of me? Does it help that it's an old tie-dyed t-shirt that got washed in hot water one too many times and now has a permanent pink tinge?), I was once again staring at my shoulders and hips and general me in the mirror and wondering, how can anyone who's looked at me for ten seconds compliment me?
No, I don't think I'm fat, or too fat. That would almost be preferable. It would be normal, understandable, even womanly! After all, doesn't every woman wish that she were a bit slimmer, had smaller thighs, or a smaller butt? It's normal, part of being a woman even, to want to look like a model. If you're unhappy with your body, you just need to find a hunk of guy to love you, and maybe put on a shirt that shows some cleavage so you'll get compliments. Easy, right? I don't see what you're complaining about!
No. No, on so many different levels. See, I was born into a body that was fine. It did all the things a cissexual female's body was supposed to do, up until I was fourteen, and definitively, deliberately even, screwed it up. I didn't eat for days at a time, or only a tiny bit at every meal, or... I honestly don't even remember what I did or how I managed it. I just remember a haze of greyish-white apathy. I didn't care enough to eat, and my body showed it. At my (its? I still feel like a cheater connecting myself with any sort of eating disorder, because I didn't think I was fat. Or something.) worse, I was 5'6" and 90 pounds. And it still didn't have anything to do with how I saw my body, or me thinking that I was too fat, or ugly. The idea didn't even cross my mind. I was fourteen. I had better things to care about then whether people found me attractive, and beyond that only saw my body as a vehicle for my brain, and a tool that allowed me to type and talk and flip the pages of a book.
Yes, I got "better". Well, I started eating, because I started caring enough to eat. But if I stop caring, I could easily stop eating again. So is that me getting better, or whatever it is I had going away, or is me eating again just a symptom of some other change in my life? I don't know. The problem with "getting better" is that I don't think my body remembers what it's like to have enough food anymore, and that my weight set point is still around 100 pounds. Oh, I've also grown two inches since then, and am still at the same weight. A weight that feels horrifically and radically wrong for me. Every time I look at how broad my shoulders and hips are, notice how skinny my arms are, or feel the bumpiness of my spine I have this overwhelming feeling that this isn't how my body is supposed to look, or act, or be. I wasn't meant to be skinny, or at least this skinny, but I am.
As will happen since it took me years to get to a place where I could notice and think about and articulate these things, I got older. I became more and more aware of the way women are "supposed" to look, and how I fit in perfectly, but only because I made myself sick. So yes, I get compliments. Sometimes I get a heck of a lot more than that. Sometimes it's assumed that I'm a prostitute. Is my size a contributing factor? Probably. And every time any of that happens, I think about the male gaze, and women as objects, and how narrowly our culture defines beauty, and how appallingly insensitive we are as a culture to people who have or are recovering from eating disorders. But much more primal than that is the desire to ask "How the heck do I not look wrong to you? How can you think I'm possibly healthy? How dare you suggest that I have the salad instead of the pile of sandwiches I'm desperately wolfing down in hopes of ever feeling healthy again? And how dare you expect other women to do the same things I did so that they can look this way?"
I was incredibly lucky to be living in China until I was nearly sixteen, if only for the fact that they don't have our obsession with thinness. I was consistently told that I was too thin, that I should eat a little more, that it was perfectly normal to be eating whatever it was I happened to be eating. They weren't brainwashed in the way that our society is. Make no mistake, their society has its own set of issues, but the obsession with being tiny, even being effortlessly tiny, was not something that had invaded their consciousness to the extent that it has here. And for that I am intensely grateful.
So yes, sizeism hurts thin people too. The idea that women must be thin (but busty!) has so permeated our culture that I cannot ever dream of telling anyone I do not know incredibly well that I'm trying to gain weight, or that I'm not happy being a size two. It ostracises everyone except for the few people who are actually naturally a size two, and that can include thin people. No, we don't experience the same kinds of discrimination, or the same extent. But sizeism can make us hurt, unhealthy, confused, isolated, lonely, and angry. That is legitimate.
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