Authority = Questioned

Last night, while reading this awesome book, I realized that this has been my summer of staring social constructions of right, wrong, good, bad, moral, and immoral right in their faces and giving them the third degree. Some, it turns out, I like and want to keep (like monogamy, although if someone else isn't into it, that's a-ok too, as long as no one gets hurt). But most of them, I realize, are illogical at best, harmful at worst.

It started when I stumbled across this slideshow. Go watch it. I'll wait. Anyway, something in the back of my mind had always been calling shenanigans on the BMI and the whole "thinner is healthier" business to begin with, but the indoctrination was so heavy that I just assumed I was being stupid, as we women are often taught to think when we're going against the norm (especially involving beauty). But the more I read about HAES and the dark side of the weight loss industry, the more everything made sense. I could go into a lifetime of disordered eating and not listening to my own body, but we all have that story.

This whole not-second-guessing-myself on when and how I feel healthy started a coup. I realized that I had received some spectacularly bad medical care in the past. So, then I'm questioning the perfect, infallibility of doctors. And hell, since everything in my life is suddenly unglued, then let's just go all the way.

Why the hell do we have to wear clothes when it's hot, I wondered. So MS and I went here. I was absolutely terrified. It was awful and humiliating. Then I got out of the car. These were the nicest people I've ever met. There was zero judgment. Zip. Nada. After a lifetime of only seeing bodies approved by the entertainment industry, I was SHOCKED at the variety of shapes and sizes and colors and ripples and bulges and dents that people come in. I had always just assumed I was defective or looked weird or wrong and under their clothes, everyone else looked like the people from movies and porn. Not so much, actually.

Ironically enough, this is the least sexualized I've ever felt in my life. There was no "gaze." The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. As a society, we sexualize what is forbidden to be seen, ergo the Victorian eroticization of ankles. The gaze is like a lazer, its intensity ratcheted up by narrow focus. Widen it out more and more, and it defuses into the ether.

So now it's like a hunger. I'm looking at everything, trying to see what I believe in because society tells me to versus what I really believe in. I'm wondering where it will go next.