stillness is a lie, my dear
Earlier this year, Clemson University student Mackenzie Pearson wrote the commentary that launched a thousand thinkpieces: A meditation on the ‘dad bod,’ which is apparently ‘a nice balance between a beer gut and working out.’ She suggested that women find such men attractive for a variety of reasons, including the more casual approach to their […]
With the flood of ‘love your body’ rhetoric floating around, there’s a group of people who get continually left out of the discussion: people who don’t love their bodies, and are okay. There’s a whole panel at WisCon dedicated to talking about this very subject, and the people who lie at the intersections for whom […]
For those who don’t know, I’m getting ready to go to WisCon 37 later this month. WisCon is a great convention not just because most of my friends are there but because the programming is always fascinating, as are the talks around the dinner table/in the hallway/ambling around in Madison. As I did last year, […]
Where are the disabled bodies in conversations about natural beauty?
When people claim we are a secular society, I always laugh, because I don’t really know how else to respond. Christian attitudes and worldviews are very much wrapped up in Western thought, and they’re impossible to evade, whether you’re talking about ‘atoning’ for a mistake or exclaiming ‘oh my G-d’ when something shocking happens. Christianity […]
The reactions to my decision to get a tubal ligation at 27 have utterly fascinated me as a reminder of the immensely proprietary attitudes people seem to have about other people’s bodies. There’s a particular presumption of ownership over bodies assigned or read as female that really comes into play here; when you get sterilised, […]
I sometimes say that as a tattooed person, I am never truly naked. I bear ink on my skin that goes with me wherever and whenever I go; when I was in surgery recently, the people in the operating room commented on my chest piece, noting that it was quite a dramatic and interesting statement. […]
So many of the rules of fashion for non-normative bodies seem to boil down to a mandate to hide your body. Concealment is the order of the day, and it’s presented as the mode, chic thing to do; if you expose your body, if you admit you have a body, you are not fashionable. It’s […]
Perhaps nowhere is social exclusion of ‘undesirable’ bodies more overt, and accepted, than at the beach. The media deluges us in messaging about how to prepare our bodies for the beach, with a reminder that they should be plucked and properly shaded and ‘toned,’ by which they mean thin, and every year, this messaging seems […]
The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating and well-studied phenomena in medicine. It’s a critical part of clinical trials, of some medical treatments, of research to learn how and why people respond to medications. When people are given something and told it will make them feel better, it often does. When they’re warned […]