Size and body image can have profound and sometimes debilitating effects on a person’s sexual self-esteem and self-expression. Internalized shame and feelings of inadequacy are often super-charged by the constant stream of external judgment, a barrage of media and marketing pressure (individuals are exposed to an estimated 300,000 negative images or comments about weight each year), and socially acceptable prejudice against those who don’t conform.
People of size can be left feeling like a different species, and when they speak up, are often silenced by people citing health issues or the latest diet trend. Releasing the internalized shame and improving our body image can go a long way towards changing this pattern.
When people accept themselves as they are, and learn to love themselves and their bodies, they can start making a difference in the world. Shame creates stresses which are hard on the body and on relationships with others, and can reduce mental focus and initiative.
In this panel, we’ll examine the effects of internal and external shame, and discuss approaches and techniques for reclaiming confidence and self-love, as well as dealing with negative pressure from both society and those closest to us.
This panel was presented at CatalystCon East in the spring of 2013 by Cathy Vartuli of http://www.TheIntimacyDojo.com, Elle Chase from http://www.TheLadyCheeky.com and N’jaila Rhee from http://www.BlasianBytch.com.
Cathy: Thank you. Welcome everyone this panel is, “Does This Panel Make Me Look Fat,” so I hope you’re all in the right place. I’m Cathy Vartuli from the http://TheIntimacyDojo.com and I get very nervous when I speak in front of people and awkward and I sometimes stutter. This message is important enough to us that we’re up here sharing all this with you. We’re going to introduce each other … We’ll go through … Sorry, see I’m stuttering. There are some handouts up front if you want to get some just come on up. We’re going to each introduce ourselves and we’ll go through some of the information we have.
We’re doing this because body image is such a big deal in our world right now. I got interested in this because two years ago I was not dating. I hadn’t dated in fourteen years. Someone kicked my butt and I started dating. Nothing changed out there and nothing changed about this. Stuff changed here and I started dating a lot. In fact I got really sick of coffee. The Starbucks where I’d meet my first dates started laughing because I’d come in with a different guy like twice a day. I’m bisexual, but I was dating men at that time because that was the scariest thing for me. Nothing changed in the world, but we want to make things change in the world. We are going to be talking about awareness. The way our society does view people that are overweight, or fat, whatever word you prefer.
This doesn’t just affect people that are overweight. This affects people that are skinny. I have a friend who is a size two, men stop on the street, turn around and follow her. She’s blond, beautiful. The perfect epitome of what society says we’re supposed to look like. I’ll show you a PSA that I shot with Buck Angel a little bit later where I’m in my bra. She said, “I would never do that. I could never let anyone see my body that way.” It’s not just affecting people that are fat. It’s affecting our whole world and starting to affect men more and more too. I really think it’s important that we get this message out and raise awareness so we can start changing out there as we change in here.
Lady Cheeky you probably all know, she’s amazing. It’s a great website. Would you like to share what brought you to this?
Elle: I’m Elle Chase otherwise known as Lady Cheeky. I have http://LadyCheeky.com and http://SmutForSmarties.com. I’ve always been interested in body image as … Because when I came of age sexually I just completely denied it. It was because I grew up in southern California, I’m fluorescent white, I was rounder and bigger than the other girls and I didn’t identify myself as a sexual being. I let that get in the way for forty years; forty years.
When I turned forty I had this sexual awakening. I was able to find a way to still work on my body image issues and still feel sexy. I didn’t have to wait until, “Yeah, I’m okay with my body! I love my folds,” until I found my sexuality and felt sexy with … I’m straight, until I felt sexy with a man. I didn’t have to wait to be accepted by a man in order to feel sexy. I could still be denied if the person I was interested in and go, “Okay, you know, you’re just not into who I am physically. That’s fine,” and not take it personally because there’s a pot for every cover. There’s so many different likes and dislikes out there for people that there’s enough for everyone.
Once you discover that then it becomes a little bit easier to accept your sensuality and be able to express it in whatever way feels comfortable for you. That is why I think this so important because no matter what we look like, no matter what our body image issue is you don’t have to solve it until you can you have great sex and own your sexuality and love the parts of your body that you do like and feel comfortable being naked. That’s my spiel.
Cathy: Thank you. We also have N’jaila.
N’jaila: Hi.
Cathy: Great to have you on the panel.
N’jaila: I’m N’jaila Rhee I’m the owner of http://BlasianBytch.com, I also co-host/host a number of pod-casts, not all of them about sexuality. I guess I feel bad because I never had to have a sexual awakening, I was kind of always this sexual person, not despite my size it’s just who I am. I’m kind of a connoisseur of dick and enjoyment of it; my size never got in the way of that. I always found that as a sex worker, I’m a cam model and I was also an exotic dancer for a number of years. It was a up-the-hill battle to be treated as an equal to other women that were in the profession simply because of my size even though I was performing and doing the exact same things.
I always think this is really important because while I haven’t had serious problems getting sexual I’ve also had a lot of body issues. My mom is a small, Caribbean woman. First time she was a hundred pounds was when she was pregnant with me. I guess it was kind of a shock to her that she got this five nine, over two hundred pound daughter and she didn’t quite know how to deal with that. I think that it affects you. I’ve recovered from having eating disorders and it was also very hard to be able to talk to a medical professional and be taken seriously. When I was saying, “There were times that I won’t eat for a month, and I’d throw up my food. Food makes me unhappy, and I can’t deal with eating.” All these complicated problems that you would hope that medical professionals might be able to deal with, and the first thing they told me was “You know you’re overweight. You should really concentrate on losing weight.”
I think this is an important panel, like Cathy said, not just for big people or thin people because it affects all of us, and we all live in a shame culture that kind of robs us of the joy of our body.
Cathy: Thank you. I’m really delighted to have you both on the panel. So you found this slide.
Elle: I found this slide about a week ago. I thought that Wow! This really sort of encapsulates how I feel about body image. Here you see a cube and it really looks the same, but you can describe it in so many different ways. A box, cube, empty, clear, glass, and that’s how we can be described.
We can be described in many different ways, and none of those are untrue and all of them are valid. They just are. They’re all neutral, and it shows that you can label yourself one way, and society can label yourself one way. There is no one way that encapsulates everything that you are, and so if you think that you are too fat, too thin, ugly, whatever in the negative context, it is just as true that somebody else out there, if you’re looking for somebody else out there, thinks of that in a positive context.
If you’re going to take the negative from somebody and from society in the world, you also need to take the positive. You have to yin-yang it because it is detrimental, and my feeling too is that when you go to describe yourself to somebody, I’ll always say, “Well, is he interested in a zaftig Jewish woman?”
Even that is sort of putting me in a box. You need to sort of look at yourself and say, okay, well, how would I describe myself neutrally? If you can’t get behind the positive of it, describe yourself in a neutral way because that’s the easiest way to get to the positive is my take on it. So, and then just focus on the positive part of yourself. Even act “as if,” which is a very old woo woo term, but it’s true. That’s my cube theory.
Cathy: I really like what you said because for me, I’m over 300 pounds, and until I started dealing with the shame, if someone said something nice to me, it was always “but I’m fat.” So I have 18 patents, a PhD, I have a career in engineering that I really love, and I do this because I love it too. But somebody would come up and say, “You’re smart,” I would hear “But you’re fat.”
They could be using cube, just definitions that were nice, and I wasn’t even letting them in.
Elle: Like she has a pretty face. It’s too bad that she’s fat.
Cathy: Yeah. So if some of that wasn’t out there, I mean I want to distinguish there’s all that stuff out there, and there’s plenty of stuff, we’ll show you some statistics. There’s plenty of stuff out there, but there’s a lot of stuff in here, and we have the most access to changing what’s in here the fastest.
Do you have anything to add N’jaila?
N’jaila: Okay. This is one of the slides that I came up with is, we’re all sexual, and everybody is different. All bodies, depending on the age, your sexuality, how you can be trans, you can be bi, you can be big, you can be small, tall, whatever. We’re all going to be sexual beings, and all of that is valid. Well, if you’re asexual, that is, sexuality, and it is still a valid sexuality.
We need to embrace that, that it’s not something that you have to wait for until you look like whatever your preferred group says is the ideal. You have to be you in the now, the sexual being that you’re going to be in the now. That’s the only way we can enjoy our sexuality.
Cathy: I love this picture because it shows all different body types. We’re not really given role models in general. It’s kind of fetishized or in the mainstream. Bigger women just aren’t shown as sexual unless it’s a joke, so I really love this, thank you.
So we’ve been going through the data on this, gathering all the statistics. This is just a fraction of what we pulled together. Zamora, there’s some handouts in front next to Ashley. It kind of felt like we were wading through a sewer because it was so immense how deeply this permeates our culture.
We are, from the moment we’re born, we’re figuring out how to fit into the world. How would we be valuable to the world? How do we survive in the world? Our brain naturally does that. There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s just what happens.
Our primitive brain, our reptilian brain, the part of our brain that evolved tens of thousands of years ago, is always looking for ways to be safe. When we see that we’re not a valued part of culture, or there’s something wrong with us, we want to push that away. So a lot of us are pushing our bodies away trying to say, “I’m not part of that,” and then we have no control, no connection to our sensuality or sexuality.
Do you want to share some of the statistics we found?
N’jaila: How young it starts? One of the most startling things we found was how early it starts for young people to value, to devalue their bodies and see it as a negative. We found an article where a mother who thought that she was raising a pretty confident daughter who was seven years old.
She found a diet list. This poor kid wasn’t even old enough to really know how to spell “diet” correctly, but she’s already saying, “Oh, I need to lose weight,” and “I need to be a better person,” and “My body is going to reflect that I’m a good person.”
These are the images that we’re seeing happening with younger and younger people. We’re seeing boys and girls and everybody develop eating disorders a lot earlier. Before, the onset of eating disorders happened around puberty or prepubescence, around 12, and now they’re seeing it in 5- and 7-year-olds.
Elle: When it starts that early, it gets embedded into these old tapes that you hear over and over again. There was this study done in Maine, that said the college students would prefer, rather marry an embezzler, a drug user, or a shoplifter than someone who is fat.
So it shows you where your value system goes because we’re told that a certain image equals value. I think, I was just listening to the Parenting Sex, Positive Parenting yesterday, and to me, that’s such an important part of just being any sort of activist is learning how to talk to your children about how to view people and how to see beauty, and how to see value in other people that isn’t about what they look like. When you take that out of the equation, you’re able to see the authenticity of each person and have a more vulnerable experience in your friendships, in your relationships, in your acquaintances, in your business relationships, and you grow as a person when you’re able to do that, when you’re able to go beyond seeing the outside of a person and seeing a whole person. That includes integrating your sensuality even if you’re not overtly sharing your sexuality.
You’re at work. You give off an energy of an integrated person, and you carry yourself in a different way. That way can be called confidence, but for me, it is what a whole person, what we hope a whole person is. We continue to learn throughout life, hopefully.
But sexuality is something that is so, sits at the children’s table of all of the senses, I think, and it is something that people with any body image issue tends to put on the back-burner because they’re not allowed to feel that way.
Cathy: Yeah, you’re supposed to wait until your slender and then worry about all of that. That’s not how it really works.
Elle: Nor should it be. No.
Cathy: So, l’d love…because this is so ubiquitous, it’s everywhere. I see it constantly. It becomes almost like a fish in water. The fish may not realize it’s in water because that’s all it knows.
As we go through these, I’d love it if you start to think a little bit where this affects you in your daily life. You may be a size 2 or you may be really happy with your weight and not feel like you have an internalized shame, but I bet that it affects some of your friends and family even if you have a really clear [inaudible 00:09:39] so to speak.
I know that I’ve cleared so much. I can say that I’m over 300 pounds and not… the first time I said it, I about choked because you never say that out loud. It’s so shameful, but it’s a fact. I have fat cells under my skin, but why does that make me a less valuable person?
We all have fat cells. If we didn’t, …
Elle: And why do I need to be ashamed of it?
Cathy: So if you can start, when we start looking at how it’s affecting us, when we start seeing it, it’s like all of a sudden the fish realizing there’s air up here and there’s water. There’s something different. Until we can see that difference, we’re just going to go along with the flow or be pushed by the media, pushed by society, which is kind of it’s own hamster wheel. It’s just spinning on itself because it works, because we have the shame, and so as we start releasing that shame, it stops working so well.
I think it’s horrifying that little kids are so dissatisfied with their body already. We’re not teaching them how to love themselves at all. The number one wish of girls 11-17 is to be thinner. There’s a lot of other things that I would rather have people wishing for and putting bring energy into the world.
We were talking a little about society and the other voices in our head. We do internalize those voices. We carry them around with us, and we were talking about some of the things we tell ourselves. I used to wake up in the morning, and I’d look into the mirror and say, “You are a fat, ugly slob.” That’s what was in my head. Every time I looked at myself, if I got a reflection in the mirror or a window, that’s what I told myself.
I had learned that so thoroughly from society that I fed that back on myself. Society could be out of the way, and I was still telling myself that.
Elle: Wow. Does that resonate with me. I think…something turned for me, it was a catalyst that while my emotions were real, it was important for me to remember that what triggered them may not be real and that my emotional reaction to it is an invitation, is a sign for me to stop hiding it and to reevaluate it and then projecting those emotion that come up for myself is an attempt to cover up all those old wounds. Instead of saying no, no, no, that’s bad I can’t say that about myself, I go okay so I’m feeling this, where did I feeling this from? Oh, right, people used to say I’m fat ass when I walked down the hall in grammar school. Boys wouldn’t date me because I had rolls on my side. Okay well that may be true and so what? Their reactions don’t define me. Just recognize it as a trigger because just recognizing it alone. Don’t you think?
Cathy: Yeah.
Elle: Is enough just saying to yourself, I’m not going to look in the mirror anymore and say that to myself. You may still have those words go through your head but you recognize it and you move on. Kind of like meditation if you’ve ever done that. You recognize that you’re having thoughts and you go okay I’m having a thought put it away, I’m going to meditate and you say your mantra, whatever that is, penis. That’s what I use as a mantra.
I just feel that people often go from A to Z and you have to do the whole alphabet in between otherwise you’re not going to take it in.
I just got, somehow there was music in my head.
N’jaila: I don’t think a lot of people recognize how pervasive what the outside word does in your mind and how you register yourself. For me, I’m multi-racial and I would be ashamed to tell people that I was part Asian, because Asian girls are supposed to be skinny so then tell people that I was black and I was Asian, I was basically saying but I’m a broken Asian because I don’t have the right body type. I felt a lot of times people would try to justify saying bad things to me because I let. Everybody says, well you’re single, it’s true. Asian girls are supposed to be skinny and then I have cousins who are 100% Asian who are just as big as me and they would say, they would have people tell them, you don’t have a reason to exist because you’re not pretty and you’re not our ideal. Which is just cruel beyond belief that people feel that they have every right to tell you things like this because your body is not the same way. Things happen where we, it goes beyond size because we have color-ism in different cultures and we have ageism where you tell women, if you see an old man hear a story, if you see an old women throw a rock. Which is something I heard growing up in a Caribbean environment. There wasn’t that much value placed on older women because they weren’t what society said is what is useful. I think what you’re saying about primitive brain and we file all these horrible, negative things and it just makes us unable to rationalize anything positive that we hear. Like you said, you’ll hear, oh you’re smart, but I’m still fat or just like anybody would tell me a compliment I always figured it was backhanded and their making fun of me.
Elle: Ulterior motive.
N’jaila: There’s always that ulterior motive. I think once you recognize the messages you’re getting as these are society’s messages and they don’t necessarily need to be correct and the cognition that they have don’t necessarily have to be the same cognition that you’re internalizing.
Cathy: Thank you. One thing that really helped me was realizing how much is invested in making us ashamed of our bodies. All the media uses that. The shame makes us run out and buy make-up, or new diet aids, or a gym membership. Just the diet industry alone makes 36 billion, with a B, a year. That’s a lot of money, they have a lot of reasons to make us hate our body and as long as they can make us hate our bodies they have something to sell us. That gave me something to fight against when it seemed like it was everywhere, it was internal and external. It was like, wait a minute they have an agenda here. It may not be conscious, it may not be malicious, but they have an agenda. It works for them because we have the shame and we run out. They’ve said most people when they read a Cosmo magazine or any of the modern women’s magazines, their self esteem dips 30%. They’re telling us there is something wrong.
N’jaila: That has the same effect for men’s magazines. Men’s Health is supposed to be about getting healthy but they still photo shop muscles on guys that aren’t muscular.
Cathy: The 6 pack abs.
Elle: How about Seventeen magazine did more to me in my formative years that I could even think of.
Cathy: People are ashamed often around weight and their voices take it away because they’re fat. I want to show a PSA that I did with Buck Angel.
You can’t hear it. Oh well. I don’t know why, I know why, sorry. I turned off the sound.
Elle: But you can look at the image, delicious image.
Cathy: Sorry I had my sound turned off because I was tweeting earlier. It’s not long.
Hi everyone I’m Cathy Vartuli from http://TheIntimacyDojo.com, and I’m here to share with you that you get to go out and have a life right now.
Can you hear it?
I’m a bigger girl, I thought for years, 14 years, I thought I had to fit what the magazines looked like, before I could get out there and love people, before I could start dating. Those 14 years were spent really lonely and I didn’t get to connect. I held myself back. You don’t have to hold yourself back. We get messages all the time that we have to look a certain way to be lovable, in order to have sex, and that’s not true, our bodies work just fine the way they are. We get to enjoy them now, whatever they look like. A third of the country is technically, or by medical definition, overweight and another third is obese. A lot of those people are holding themselves back and waiting for their life to start. Don’t get to the end of your life and realize you didn’t get to enjoy your body and the people around you that you want to connect with. Get out there and start having a beautiful time.
Buck Angel: This public service announcement has been brought to you by Buck Angel Entertainment.
Cathy: Remember, own it, use it, or lose it.
Thank you. It was so hard to shoot that, I was shaking the whole time and when it went out it had 10,000 views now. It was just important for me to get that message out because I was holding myself back for so long and most of the comments that came in were really, really beautiful. One of the things that I really noticed was the people that didn’t want to hear about it. The people that were negative almost always cited health concerns. So they were basically saying we care about you, we want you to shut up, we’re not fatist, we’re just concerned about your health. I was told my body didn’t work just fine, that I was killing myself. Just so you know I’ve had my medical stuff taken, I have great stats. The doctors take my blood pressure 5 times because it’s so low. Health wise I’m really fit. They would talk to Buck a lot, not to me, almost like I didn’t have a voice or I needed to be told what to do because I was fat. They would quote famous celebrities, Rosie O’Donnell who needed to lose weight. I noticed this, the more I talk about this the more people come up to me and say, I’m really concerned about your health. I appreciate concern, it’s great they care about me, but I don’t want them to take my voice away.
Speaker 5: There’s this book called Health At Every Size, I don’t know if you’ve read it but I feel like it really helps you have arguments when people start giving that health reasons.
Cathy: I’ve read that book.
Speaker 6: I was just going to say that you don’t have to give an argument, it’s bullshit. They don’t know you, they don’t give a damn about you. No arguments, it’s bullshit.
N’jaila: I’m in that group because for me I was an exotic dancer so while a lot of time I’d be dancing and booked at clubs it was a specialty night because it’d be for people who only wanted to see bigger women. Don’t worry if you want to make money off of sex you can do it at any size. I would have the guys that didn’t know that it was big girl night come up to me and be like you know you do all these tricks and you seem really healthy but if you could just lose weight you’d be so much healthier. I wanted to say can you do all the stuff I just did on that pole?
Elle: I can’t do it.
N’jaila: Well there’s nothing wrong with that. So a lot of times when people break out the, oh but it’s about your health, it’s just the nicest way of saying you need to shut up because you don’t look the way I see healthy and until you do, I’m going to invalidate your voice.
I’ve had a college boyfriend who was a chain smoker even though I was asthmatic when I was little, that’s why I got into dance because an active body deals with asthma a lot better, and he would come chain smoking into my dorm room saying you need to lose weight because I’m concerned about your health as he blows cigarette smoke in my face. So really a lot of times it’s a shield because if you look at these, these are some of the comments that people were making, these aren’t positive comments. Somebody who cares about your health isn’t going to try and shame you into shaping your body into what is physically better instead of what is internally better.
Cathy: Do you have anything you want to add to that?
Elle: Nope, nope, that was well said.
Cathy: Perceptions of others do influence us. One of the things I said earlier is I really like distinguishing internal versus external shame. When they’re all lumped together it becomes this massive block that we can’t get passed. When we start distinguishing it, we don’t really have control. I don’t really have control about what all of you are thinking. I can offer information, I can educate, I can share my perspective, but you think what you think, and you say what you think, what you’re going to say. I can change how I receive it and I have power there so as soon as you can start distinguishing how you’re carrying these messages, because you do have a choice, if someone tells me I’m fat now it doesn’t resonate as much with the shame that I used to carry. In the past I would hear… if someone said fat I thought it was horrible.
Elle: But now it’s just a description.
Cathy: It’s just a word. I am fat. I’d like to reclaim that word. It’s a descriptive word.
Elle: I think it’s important that we understand we should divorce ourselves from our own judgment and from the judgment of other people because when their comments become neutral, you listen to your own resonance more, and if you can get into that place where you can listen to your own instincts and your own inner voice, again, I know it sounds woo woo, but it’s true, then you can see, wow.
There’s a great book by Terry Cole Whittaker called What You Think of Me is None of My Business, and I have never in my life heard a more true statement, especially as this dwarfs into sexuality and your sensuality. Research shows that women who set up their own idea of beauty have a better body image and are more able to let themselves go during the sexual experience because the way to have better sex is to be able to let yourself go and commune with that partner, whether it’s a one night stand, whether you’re in a play party, whether you’re with your partner. To be able to create an intimacy can’t happen unless you absolve yourself of all judgment.
N’jaila: A lot of times, I have no problem calling myself fat, but I notice a lot of my friends, these people who care about me, they’ll be quick to say, “Oh, you’re not fat” and I just look at them and say, “Yeah, I am fat. What you’re doing now is really projecting your fear of being fat on me.” You want to say, “Oh, you’re not fat” because what they’re really trying to make me say is, “I’m not unattractive and I’m not unworthy of love” which I don’t put into that word “fat”, and when you confront people or you make it known that I am describing myself neutrally using a word that is valid, I am not packing it with all that other negative stuff that they might, and then you have to make them knowledgeable that that’s their problem, and they shouldn’t be projecting their problems on your body.
Cathy: You can politely tell people that. Shaming people is not a good way to make them lose weight or to learn. I try to gently educate them that I get that they’re trying to be polite. They’ve been taught that it’s rude to tell someone they’re fat, it’s rude to acknowledge it. I’ve started, when I meet people that I really want to know, I just mention that I know I’m fat. It changes the whole dynamic. It’s like we’re not ignoring the elephant in the room, pun intended, so they don’t have to just pretend, they don’t have to avoid the issue, it’s there. Do you want to share about this? Oh wait, so this is N’jaila’s.
N’jaila: Obviously everybody here probably knows that size discrimination and different forms of discrimination are very real and for me, obviously, I’m a woman of color and I’m also a sex worker, and I’ve seen discrimination from a lot of different angles when it comes to sizism, whether it’s … like I said before … I was going to the doctor, and I’m trying to tip-toe around the fact that I’ve recovered from an eating disorder, and he said, “Oh, you should really concentrate on losing weight.” This happens to a lot of people, and there is this thought that medical professionals are somehow super-human and they are just automatically better people, but they’re human, so the same biases that everybody else has about size and color and how those two things might come together, is still happening for medical professionals, where they might be treating an overweight black woman for depression and they’re going to let their own biases against those two groups color how they treat her and that’s becoming a major problem with our health industry.
I have a podcast called the Ultra Negro Show, and we have a segment called This Week in Black Women Ain’t Shit, because it seems like every week, there’s a new study that comes out describing what is wrong with black women and it’s always we’re all fat and we can’t deal with the fact that we’re fat, or we’re too fat and we’re too happy about it and that’s why we’re going to continue being fat, we’re fat and that’s why we’re not good mothers, and our kids are going to be fat.
It’s that weird, it is always about … it was a weekly show, and I started compiling this for that weekly segment, and I had a backlog of 30 articles and I only was doing it for a month. We then expand it.
And we looked at other groups and there’s … we had the Asians can abuse their child because they’re skinny and good, and different stereotypes that we permit to happen in our media culture, also it directly correlates to how we’re treated personally by medical professionals and in any profession that you do … like for me, as I said, I was an exotic dancer and I was a cam model and I had a lot of instances where I’d be hired to dance in a club or a party and there would be “the normal dancers” and they didn’t want us changing in the same changing room as them. There was two times, I was working at a club at Hunts Point, not the most safe part of the Bronx, and there was one changing room that had the bouncers protecting it, and they didn’t want us changing or showering with them, so they closed off part of the VIP and they made us change there, so we just had random guys keep on coming in and we had to try to shut the curtains, and they just said-
Speaker 7: When you said “they” was it the owners?
N’jaila: No, it was the other dancers, and they just wanted nothing to do with us, and I would be performing, because usually for strip clubs, there’s the main stage and side stages, and for the first half of the night, they wouldn’t let the bigger dancers dance on the main stage, they only wanted us to dance on the side stages, and this happens so often that I stopped dancing at clubs because I figured this is cutting into a) my income and b) it’s forcing me to dance or perform in situations that aren’t as safe as the other dancers because the other dancers had the dressing room that had the bouncer that stopped people from coming in. We didn’t get that. Bouncers were walking other dancers to the train station, to their cars. When we were done, we were just done. This also works with different situations like I see here, high class, mainstream. Those are code words for usually thin and white.
There’s different levels of sex work. For escorts, a lot of the more high class agencies will have a driver for you, will have security for you, will give you W-2s, will be a lot more interested in your wellbeing, but they don’t accept women of color and they don’t accept women of size, so that forces a lot of women that are outside of that mainstream lens to then either work independently or work under pimps and it just becomes more dangerous because you’re not an ideal. You’re expected to do for things, different acts, for less money than an ideal person.
For porn performers, they are paid less if you’re a woman of color and you’re paid less if you’re a woman of size, and it all makes it seem like you’re not going to be taken seriously. As non-serious as people take sex workers, being a sex worker of size, you’re taking even less seriously, so it’s real, and for sex work, it could cost you your life if there’s a difference between having a driver and walking to someplace means you’re going to be out in the open.
At Hunts Point there’s a high murder rate. It’s dangerous and I just want to-
Cathy: I really appreciate you bringing that to … I wasn’t aware of that distinction. I want to know that kind of thing. That’s not okay.
N’jaila: It’s not okay, and also it sends a message that the value of sexuality for people of size isn’t worth the ideal sexuality, which is false. Oh, we have a question.
Speaker 8: Actually, this is just a comment because there is a flip side the way it approaches to hypersexuality of women of size and especially women of color and size.
Njaila: That usually is … it’s a fetishation, and it happens to women of size and also on the flip side of that, there’s websites that focus on extremely thin women and the fantasy that they’re selling is that these women are starving for your approval, and I also notice while I’m a BBW performer, I don’t usually perform in BBW spaces because I don’t want to feed into the feedy feeder because that is a fantasy based on de-powering me. They want me to be so fat that I’m immobile and I’m a slave to my desire for food, which obviously for me, a recovery anorexic, that’s really not my case.
When I look at communities that talk about the sexuality of fat women and fat women of color because a lot of times, there is a concentration on that, especially fat black women, and it has a connotation that … it builds on the assumption that we’re immoral and we’re this lazy, fat, welfare queen in the ghetto and we just need to suck this white cock to make a payment on our delinquent loans and everything.
The fantasies that are around the hypersexuality of fat women really is about our … it’s aligning our own lack of morals with our bodies because we can’t say no and we’re insatiable and we have no control over ourselves.
Elle: That was powerful. (applause)
Cathy: I really love these slides. Who taught you what was beautiful? We see it all the time everywhere and N’jaila, thank you for getting these slides together for us. The Photoshopping that’s done all the time everywhere, so these are the before and after on your left and these are the same people, and they just melt them away in Photoshop and it creates something different that no human, no healthy human, probably could attain and we’re inundated this, we see this everywhere.
N’jaila: I got this because my brother is a graphic artist and graphic designer. He works with Photoshop all the time. His girlfriend very much wants to look like these women in the magazine. He actually took a picture of her and he used Photoshop to manipulate it to make it look like this in the magazine, to show her that these women look like you. This magic that happens, it’s all fake. She looked at it and it still didn’t help her because she still was like, “I want to try to be like them.” Even though they are, in actuality, like her.
You’ve got Photoshop where they take out people’s midsections so it doesn’t look like they have internal organs or ribs. Nobody has any lines on their face. Nobody has pores. We have this unrealistic view of how our body should be. Every man has rippling muscles and no body hair, (laughing) which is unnatural and weird. (laughing)
The picture that disturbs me the most is the before and after with Kourtney … or Khloe Kardashian? Yes, the Kardashian. For me, Kardashians are aliens, I’m sorry. She just had a baby and they’re trying to publish this image saying that right after giving birth, she’s back down to a size 2. That’s, first of all, horrible for women who have just given birth. It’s completely unrealistic and unhealthy to push somebody who’s just given birth to a baby, a little human, pushed out of their body. You’re not going to be a size 2, 2 days later, which is what that picture is basically selling.
Cathy: It just shames us constantly.
Elle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Cathy: Someone who is close to normal will still feel shame and that’s why it works with the media. I love the idea of questioning your idea of beauty. Why is someone that is larger not beautiful? Why is someone who is different not beautiful? We can experience sexual pleasure and sexual desire. We start noticing people in different shapes when we’re not inundated with it constantly.
Elle: I find these photos, not one of these women is not beautiful. I was speaking with a friend last month whose best friend just transitioned into a man. She was speaking about him as far as body image. He had lived his whole life in a woman’s body, hating his body so much, being born into the wrong body and finally was blessed to have this operation. He was finally in this new body after so long and was able to experience the love of his body and being able to merge his sexuality with that body, and see the beauty, even though he wasn’t completely healed. He wasn’t the complete package that he had envisioned for himself. It didn’t matter because he was suddenly in the right body. He was suddenly matching his sexual self.
I thought, “What a beautiful way to look at it,” because here I was, for 40 years, overweight and hating my body. I was lucky enough to be born into the right one for me. He is basically just born into this new body and just celebrating every little thing, being able to feel stubble and be able to orgasm as a man. I think that’s something that we should all sort of think about in the back of our minds when we are questioning our idea of beauty. Buck Angel is a very attractive man. How did he feel when he transitioned? How did that look for him?
That makes sense, right? When you question your idea of beauty? That is what it meant to me when I saw that.
N’jaila: It’s actually funny that you bring up Buck Angel because my brother is transgendered. Even though he finally made his transition, I’d always be jealous because he was a cute girl and now he’s a cuter guy. He’s still, as somebody who isn’t at his ideal weight, will go, “You know, I have the right body but now I have to really work on my muscles. I have to really work.” It seems like a never ending cycle, even if you are finally in the right body, now you have to make that body right.
Elle: We’re never taught to be OK where we are.
N’jaila: I feel like when I first saw these pictures, I almost felt like it’s a relief. Then, at the same time, I had to recognize I have an internal coil where I go, “Oh, I hope nobody is going to say anything horrible about the images.” [crosstalk 05:09] We are so conditioned to say beauty is A and it can’t be anything else, and like I said in the example where I was giving, where somebody told me that I was too fat and too brown to be Asian. There are people who don’t feel like they can say that they are women and don’t feel like they can be feminine because of their outer body.
Cathy: When we start reclaiming that, it’s really powerful. I notice people that are skinny are used to getting … people feel comfortable, generally, expressing appreciation towards people who are skinnier. We are taught as a society that it’s shameful to think someone who is overweight as attractive.
People that are overweight are tending not to get that reinforcement that they’re sensual or sexual. I love it when someone comes up and says, “I love your curves.” It’s really reassuring to me. It feels delightful. I don’t think we get as much of that externally. We can start giving that to ourself internally. We can start saying when challenging the beliefs, “When did I start thinking this about myself? Who taught me? Did they know what the hell they were talking about?”
Elle: I’m a big believer in, as if you can’t already tell, integrating one’s sensuality and sexuality, no matter what. I think when you get to that point, you really start to open up authentically with other people. We’re the only species that can feel sensuality. It’s there for a reason. It fleshes us out, pun intended. It makes us feel more like who we are.
Sensuality is such a human connector, and by cutting ourselves off from that for whatever reason, we cut ourselves off from relationships with people. Shutting people off immediately, “Oh, I don’t date fat people. I don’t date black men. I don’t identify as a lesbian.” How do you know? How do you know? Until you’ve tried it, and it might not be your bag, but until you’ve tried it really, how do you know? Opening yourself up to another person like that just gives you a wider breadth of what you like and what you don’t like, and I think, makes you a richer, happier person going out in life.
I had an experience recently where I had a sexual experience with a man who works in the porn industry. He was flirting with me, whatever, and I thought, even now I thought, “Oh, God. What’s the deal? Is this some weird thing? I make him laugh, but I’m fat.”
Cathy: What does he want?
Elle: What does he want from me? I did an inventory about what can I possibly give him. I don’t have anything he would want, but he pursued me and we ended up going out on a date, we had a great time and we ended up having sex. I was like, “This is very interesting,” because the sex was actually very connecting and very appreciative of my body. It was an interesting thing to witness like, “Wow, he likes my ass. He likes my curves.” He liked the other things about me, like my hair or whatever and had a very hot, sensual, connective experience.
Even if it was just for that one night, it showed me just because someone happens to work in the porn industry and can probably sleep with what that ideal is doesn’t mean I am any less sexy to him and any less desirable. I think it’s important to understand that about yourself, is that there is sexual currency in every atom in your body. Every cell in your body is sexual currency.
N’jaila: A lot of times, I communicate with other cam models, and especially a lot of the other BBW cam models, and they always ask me, “You’re on cam and you’re there for 4 hours. How do you deal with it? How do you deal with showing yourself off or just being there in the moment?” I always say, “For me, I value my body and if I didn’t value my body, I’d be kind of a F’ed up person to charge people to see it.” I always say if you’re not performing well … it has to be a connection from your sexuality. You have to then transmit that to whoever you are performing for or performing with. If you can’t be in the moment with yourself and be OK with your body at the moment, it’s not going to happen.
I do see a lot of the bigger cam models, there are a lot of women who didn’t think they would ever be on camera, doing whatever we do, as a bigger person, and they’re still like they do not want to show their bodies. They point their camera just to their face. It shows that, even as a sexual professional, you have your same hang-ups. You still have to work through your fear of your own body.
I noticed with some of the women, as soon as they start vocalizing the issues that they have with their bodies and really examining why they have those issues, they’re able to, instead, see customers who are talking about them and see it as, “Oh, this person isn’t coming for a freak show. They want to be a part of my sexuality. I have time now to reflect on why that person is interested in me sexually,” and internalize it as a positive instead of a negative.
Cathy: That’s great. I think this is really important.
Elle: Yeah.
Cathy: We’re running out of time, so do you want to go through this with me?
Elle: You go…
Cathy: Okay, so sexy is not how we look a certain way. Sexuality is who we are, and we bring all of ourselves to that. You can still have a bad body image and be working on that and feeling sexual.
Elle: Yes, that is something I actually wanted to touch on. I think I may have brought it up, so stop me if you’ve heard it. But like I just said, I just recently had sex with this guy and I was hating my body but I was still feeling sexy. I was still able to be in the moment with him and feel my sexuality, even though I was very aware of my rolls. And by rolls I don’t mean play roles. I mean fat rolls. And I was still able to enjoy that experience.
It is inherent in who we are that we are sensual beings. So that’s going to come out. And you can still work on your body image and still feel sexy. You can still have those days where “I just feel gross, I’m PMSing, I hate everybody, and I hate my vagina.” And you can still feel sexy! Because we all have those thoughts, we all do.
N’jaila: I don’t hate my vagina.
Elle: This would be the exception. This powerful woman right here.
But owning your sensuality is palpable. When you feel it inside, other people do. And that’s what they call confidence. Or, that’s part of what they call confidence. And it creates sexual attraction and chemistry with the people that you want to attract, the people who want to feel that, and who feel that in you.
Cathy: I love these slides, N’jaila. Thank you.
N’jaila: This is part of a body project. A lot of times we throw around words like obese like overweight without, and, it goes back to what we were saying before, people are concerned about your health. Medically, these are people who are morbidly obese, obese, and overweight. And you can see, they just look like everybody else. They’re not monster, they’re not freaks of nature. They’re all regular, functioning women.
Elle: Women you pass on the street.
N’jaila: Yeah. And I love this slide because it shows that it’s normal. They are normal, functioning women. A lot of times we throw out words like “Oh, I don’t want to be obese.” It’s a number. It’s a calculation. There’s the BMI chart and it’s just your weight and your height, and that gives you a number. They assign … going up, higher, is more obese, and lower is … It goes morbidly obese, obese, overweight, then there’s the “normal” weight, and there’s underweight. They are numbers on a chart, it’s not who you are. It’s not “Are you a good person?” it’s not “Are you a bad person?” It’s just numbers on a chart.
Cathy: That was really powerful.
Just to address the myth that you can’t be overweight and healthy, there’s some new studies that have come out where they say that you can be fat and be healthy. It’s about the fitness of the person. And you can be skinny and unhealthy, which makes a lot of sense. But the doctors seem to have always focused on the numbers on the scale, which is a really quick way for them to evaluate you. And weight’s a really easy scapegoat for all the problems going on. So they can just kind of point at that and say “It’s your problem. Go fix it.”
N’jaila: It’s also interesting that the medical reasons for being afraid that somebody is overweight are almost exactly the same as the medical reasons that we’re afraid when people are underweight, but we have people striving to be underweight. Everybody wants to be 5’10 and weight 89 pounds, which is medically dangerous. So I feel like when people can’t say “fat” and “healthy” in the same sentence, what they’re really doing is moralizing bodies. They’re basically saying , “You can’t be diligent about your body and serious about your health if you’re fat.”
Because fat people are fat because, you know, sloth. It’s one of the seven deadly sins, and it’s ingrained in us that we’re like this because we’re lazy and we can’t take responsibility for ourselves. But I’ve done fitness tests with some of my smaller friends, and sometimes they get a little angry because they couldn’t finish, and I could. I’m sorry, I had to do a lot of cardio, you have to hold your weight up on a pole. So fitness, I think, is important to talk about.
I just say I think everybody should work out, no matter what their size is. Because I like moving my body and that’s just me. I’ve been dancing since I was like three. It always just made me feel good. Not because I was losing weight, but because I like moving. That’s probably why I like having sex so much, or the orgasms. Either way. I think once you can say “I strive to be healthy” instead of “I strive to be thin,” your health becomes what’s at the forefront, and not a physical ideal. And I think that’s a much healthier mindset than “Be thin, because fit is beautiful, and health is beautiful.” Health isn’t beautiful, it’s a state of your body.
Cathy: Thank you.
Elle: Thanks.
Cathy: We want to make sure we have time for questions. I don’t want to leave people in a negative space though. I wanted to talk about that. You can build your confidence just like you build muscles in the gym. You can start sharing your fears with friends. When they get out of your head they’re not so big anymore. And you find out other people that say “Oh! Me too.”
Elle: The people you trust.
Cathy: Yeah. And you can practice feeling sexy, as awkward as that sounds. The first time I put on a burlesque DVD I was alone in my living room and I was beet red and awkward. But you can kind of get out there, I mean, N’jaila you’re already practicing that, which is beautiful. But what is it that you’ve been waiting until you’re skinny to do? Or waiting until you’re perfect to do? Or waiting until the zit clears on your forehead or your chin or whatever? What have you been waiting to do? Get out there and do it now, whether it’s dating, dressing up, working out, socializing. Just get out there and start doing it. Start challenging the voices in your head. Start feeding yourself nicer words. Practice. Look in the mirror and say something nice to yourself.
Elle: Or say something neutral, if you can’t think of something nice to say to yourself. Just don’t say something negative.
Another powerful thing to do for people who don’t like their bodies is to hang around your house naked. It sounds easy, and it also can sound a little trite, but I didn’t do that until recently and let me just tell you, it’s fantastic. Because you may not have those days where you like your body and you have no make-up on or whatever and your hair’s dirty and your catch yourself in the mirror and just go, “alright.” You know? Some days it’s just, “Oh. I’m there. I’m alive.” And some days it’s like “I look pretty good.” Getting comfortable seeing yourself naked, there is nothing more powerful than looking at your body naked, objectively first. That’s important. Again, don’t go from A to Z immediately. Look at yourself objectively first. I have nice skin, I have nice hair, my mother used to say you have such nice nail beds. You know, I was like six. So there’s always something and then from that it grows.
N’jaila: For me I think it’s important to know that confidence isn’t a set destination. It’s the whole journey of just getting okay with yourself. Like I said, I swing around and I perform and there are days where, you know … I have ADHD so they put me on a medicine and I took it and it made my face break out and I called out of work, I didn’t want to be seen. And then I realized, like, this is so silly. A, I’m an adult woman and that’s not the proper way to respond. But I realized that nobody cares at my job how pretty I am. It’s basically me having to deal with myself, and I had to realize I was using “Oh people are going to look at me and think that.” That was my excuse I was using. Really it was “I’m not okay with what I look like right now.” And once I was able to vocalize that, even to myself, I just put my hair up, put my clothes on, I was able to go to work. So everybody has their bad days, even the people that you might think are the most confident. We all have bad days. And you shouldn’t take those bad days as meaning this is how I’m going to feel forever, because you’re going to have a good day, eventually.
Cathy: Thank you. So we’d like to have time for questions or comments. Yes?
Speaker : I wanted to throw a couple comments out there. I certainly had body image issues for a long time, and it was funny because I would talk to some of my friends about it and they’re like, “Oh shut up, you’re skinny.” Like my issues were less valid. And I’ve always been somewhat skinny, but I had scoliosis, I had to wear one of those big plastic back brace things for like six years throughout middle school and high school. It was a big deal, I mean this is when girls get tits and are starting to feel sexy. And I never had that. It was just this weird awkward thing to go through. And then after that, I had kids, and I love them, they’re great. But even though I didn’t gain a whole lot of weight, I have stretchmarks. Because I grew tall fast, because I had a belly all of a sudden. When my tits finally did come in they weren’t very big but still stretchmarks everywhere. It’s not always specifically about weight, I think there are other things people don’t like about themselves, scars and birthmarks and all kinds of things that can really make you feel not sexy.
But two websites that really made a huge difference, that I direct a lot of people to … I direct a lot of guys to because I think they’re becoming too disenchanted or becoming too obsessed with the photoshopped images of what people think people actually look like, that’s all imaginary, you know, it’s all fiction, it’s totally imaginary … but Shape of a Mother and This is a Woman. And they’re kind of linked, they have a lot of stuff back and forth, but it’s amazing because you go on there and it’s a lot of women’s individual stories, their individual discoveries, and pictures of themselves, and you know. I used to like my tits, they were up here, and now they’re down here. That’s the other thing; I breastfed my kids. They were great; I loved it. I was super happy to do it, big lactivist. I got awesome tack-on porn star boobs. I went up to like 36-DD. I was like, “Yes! This is awesome, I finally have tits.” Then I stopped breastfeeding them, and now they’re deflating. I joke with my friends, it’s like a fried egg nailed to a two-by-four or something. They’re just not there anymore. [crosstalk 00:35] … padding. They’re just not there anymore. There’s always going to be body image issue. It’s important to not marginalize people’s issues, even if they’re not what most people think.
I love my friend; she’s fantastic, amazing, and wonderful. Every time I say, “I need to gain weight. I want to gain weight.” ADD medication; I lost too much weight too fast and I felt uncomfortable. I felt not me, I didn’t like it. People are telling me, “Oh, you look fabulous.” I’m like, “No, I don’t need to eat. I don’t feel right. I don’t like myself.” [crosstalk 01:13] She’s like, “Oh, shut up, you’re skinny.” Thank you, but that’s not …
N’jaila: A lot of people don’t realize that everybody is going through it. I have a friend who is a size 00. She’s always been naturally very thin, she was prematurely born, she was always a very small child. She’s always been underweight, and that’s her big struggle. A lot of people will completely shut her down when she complains about it. I always say, “Hold on, you can’t diminish what other people feel just because you’re at a painful place.” The issues with stretch marks and body marks, I think it’s always great to realize how we show the Photoshop. A lot of the women that you see on those make-up commercials, they’re like 14 years old, so they don’t have any acne or anything because they haven’t gone through puberty yet.
Also, we have this thing where everybody looks perfect, nobody has scars, nobody has birth marks. I was like, they do, they get Photoshopped off. Now we have this unrealistic, almost alien human ideal, but we need to recognize that it’s not real, and people are different. We come in all shapes, sizes, colors and those colors could be blotches of different-colored skin on your body. There are people who don’t like the fact that they have white-blond hair and they feel it makes them look old. I have a cousin who has very, very kinky hair and she feels like it doesn’t make her attractive, and men won’t find her attractive because she has kinky hair. She has hundreds and thousands of wigs and different straightening things because that makes her feel attractive.
Elle: Yeah. I think, for me personally, I think it’s the perceived flaws in people that make them more attractive to me because that’s realer to me. I dated a man who literally had 500 scars all over his body from a childhood disease. I thought those were the sexiest things ever. It’s not like, “Yes, I got that in Uruguay when I was fighting the Russians.” It wasn’t that. It was, “Yeah, I had to go to the dermatologist every three days and get something removed.” “Ooh, yeah baby.” I found that so human when he owned it. Even so, I just found it so human to see a body in its natural state, not altered by anything. I have friends who are very skinny and still hate their bodies, who are, I think, gorgeous and turn heads.
We’re focusing on fat today because that is our issue. It’s also the one that society is focusing on. For crying out loud, our First Lady, God love her, I adore her, is focusing on an anti-obesity campaign. Words really get moving, but there is that secondary, “Would you like fries with that Coke?” pun intended. Here’s the Get Moving campaign anti-obesity, you know what I mean?
Cathy: I’m so sorry, we’re out of time. We’d love to talk about some of the stuff after. I think one of the biggest points [crosstalk 04:41].
Speaker 2: I want to value what you all are saying, and I think that this particular intersection of people of size, large-bodiedness, is a more intense problematic in a lot of ways. Part of it you pointed out to in the “Let’s Move campaign.” Meanwhile we have at least 20% of children are going hungry everyday in our country. We’re not talking about feeding people, we’re talking about eating less. I love Michelle, but I think it’s a hugely offensive mistake and it’s aligning with a particular concern about childhood obesity that’s connecting to mothers being bad mothers. [crosstalk 05:26] It’s an assumption that immorality that aligns with race and class.
While we can all feel good about ourselves, we can do that internal work, we’re still facing a huge structural constraint that’s particularly exploitative for people of color, who are the ones who suffer in this country from lack of nutritional food, exercise because it’s a structural issue that there’s not parks where we live, there’s not access to gyms where we live, and these things. Adding on to these people as if it’s their blame when in fact it’s a structural issue of racism and poverty in this country. I think we can feel good about it, but we also need to attend to, this is structural racism at work actually.
Elle: There’s so many tentacles that go out.
Speaker 3: I have one thing. It’s super quick. When we start discussing body image and size we have a tendency to focus on female bodies. We really need to make sure that we include trans and queer bodies. We need to make sure that we include male bodies because they also suffer from societal pressure, they also suffer from race and class issues. They also feel pressure to look and be and feel a certain way. They also have issues with themselves on a regular basis. Hanne Blank in her book, Big Big Love says, “Do the white t-shirt dance.” You said walk around the house naked, some people still have that fear of being naked. Buy the white t-shirt, put that thing on, and walk and wear it. Get it wet if you need to.
Elle: Preferably.
Speaker 3: That would be so super helpful because you get to see yourself in the plainest blankest.
Elle: That’s powerful.
Speaker 3: I really just want to make sure that everyone in this room has felt like they were some form of [inaudible 07:28] that we all are [crosstalk 07:31]
Elle: Appreciate that, thank you. Thank you for coming. [crosstalk 07:36]
N’jaila: There’s handouts in the front row for people who came a little later and didn’t get any. There’s supplemental information.
Elle: A special thanks to Kelly Shibari, by the way. Kelly Shibari, bringing us all together.
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