I have a plan to write a long post about the responses to False Advertising a post in which Morphing into Mama says that she believes that to significantly change your appearance after you get married, for instance by cutting your hair or gaining weight, is false advertising.
Before I go any further I do have to quote Twisty:
And, lard-jesus no! MIM, who says she “works” to maintain her figure “for myself and my husband,” goes on to suggest that a person’s weight is indicative, not, as a rational person might imagine, of how much she weighs, but of her degree of “self-respect.” Overweight people, MIM asserts, are probably “depressed.” She asks, “can you imagine still maintaining the same level of physical attraction for your mate when he’s depressed?”
There has been a huge response to MiM’s post, and it’s that collective response that I want to write about. But before I can do that I have to express disbelief at the context in which she reached this particular conclusion:
Recently, in my psychopathology class, I was reminded of this conversation with Husband. My classmates and I were discussing a journal article on bulimia nervosa and speculative reasons were being tossed around as to why the majority of the women sampled were married.
“Maybe married women feel more pressure to be thin for their husbands,” one young, unmarried classmate said.
“Really? Because when I’m in a relationship, I get all comfortable and actually tend to plump up,” said another, very honest young woman to my left.
“Well, first I don’t think it’s fair to say that being married caused these women to be bulimic ““ especially since being in a relationship can make one conscious about one’s weight just as being single can. When you’re single, you want to be in good shape not just for yourself, but so that you can feel confident about how you look and feel like you can attract a partner. When you’re married ““ and especially after having kids ““ you’re conscious about your weight, which may motivate you to watch what you eat and exercise, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll develop an eating disorder. I am conscious of my weight, so I don’t snack, and I exercise. Personally, I think it would be unfair to Husband if I gained a bunch of weight and did nothing about it.”
She was having a conversation about why eating disorders were more commmon among married women, she thinks about her body, food and exercise, within her relationship, and her conclusion is that it wouldn’t be fair to her husband to gain weight.
I’m reminded of last year’s anti-feminist women’s rights co-ordinator at the local university. She wasn’t into ‘No Diet Day’ so she renamed it ‘Love your body day’. How do you love your body? By eating fruit and doing yoga.
I don’t want to blame her for thinking like this, there’s a lot of resources poured into to making women feel like this. It just makes me terribly, terribly, sad and angry.
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Not to be flip or anything, but an easy way to make sure your husband won’t turn into a sick controlling fuck should you “let yourself go” after marriage is to “let yourself go” before marriage. Not sure he’ll love you both fat and thin, made-up and clean-faced, long-haired and short-haired? Run a damn test, then! It’s easy and fun, and the best part is, if you find out you enjoy being fat and practical, you can stay that way.
I don’t want to fall into the trap of blaming women for what men do to them, but I am disgusted by some of the “empathetic” reactions that accept that this is just what marriage is like. Marriage is like that if you marry an asshole, and nobody has to do that. And if you do, you can leave him. And if you’re not sure if he’ll turn into an asshole in twenty years, you can fuck with your appearance for a while and see what happens. Of course, you shouldn’t have to run experiments to find out if your lover respects your human dignity, but hey, it beats waking up one day to find out being his wife means being a combination of consumer product and show dog.
Does anyone else find it amazingly ironic that this was in the context of “my psychopathology class”?
sophinsba I definately felt grateful that I wasn’t likely to end up in the situation many women described, because those sorts of men wouldn’t be attractive to me in the first place. I will explore the group response a little more in my next post on this issue.
Reading that blog, I’m reminded of one of those so-called “comedy” sitcoms where husband grows a beard and wife won’t have sex with him until he agrees to shave it off. Hijinks ensue.
Fortunately I tend not to involve myself in the lives of people who live in sitcoms.
(And seriously, the rest of her “psychopathology class” either had their words strongly edited or they need to take some remedial work in logical thinking if they could not disassemble her arguments like the cardboard cut-outs they were.)
I am a little curious about this:
It’s early still, but I’m not making the connection between eating fruit, doing yoga and anti-feminism. I’m guessing your point here is that a better “Love your body day” entails loving it as is, and I’m down with that. But in terms of how I treat my body, I have to agree that my body feels better, and I feel like I’m treating it better when I’m eating fruit and doing yoga as opposed to sitting on the couch and eating salty snacks. (Mind you, I love a good salty snack, but nonetheless…)
interesting to see this show up here. i definitely thought of many of the conversations i’ve seen / had here and at big fat blog when reading that post. maybe even a year ago before discovering these places i might have felt differently about that MiM post. but now, i have to say i was shocked at it, and several of the response posts agreeing with it. i found myself glad i don’t live in that world.
i think in one of the other blogs’ comments sections, a commenter put it best: “Sorry, I’m a person, not a possession.” That pretty much says it all, i think.
From MIM’s quote as borrowed by Twisty:
So when my husband suffers periodic bouts of depression, I can go fuck somebody else ? Or should I just cut to the chase and dump him ? I mean, not only is fat the same as depression in MIM’s fantasy-land, but aparently depression would also tend to transform one’s partner into a hideous unfuckworthy monster, even if said partner was male and/or thin.
Well, Thank You, MIM. I will certainly keep your helpful advice in mind. [snicker] Next time my husband is depressed, I’ll be sure to constantly inform him that he’s fat and that nobody would want to fuck him. I’m sure that will help my marriage a lot.
Hell, I wouldn’t touch this kind of “helpful advice” using a cat-litter scoop with a 50′ handle. >:
Are Maia and other posters here denying that it is reasonable to want to be physically attracted to your spouse?
I don’t know about the bit about depression—it seems to me that she’s trying to rationalize something that needs no rationalization—but I do think that it’s horribly inconsiderate for anyone not to put in a reasonable effort to appear attractive to his spouse.
And I agree with Alsis(!)—I demonstrate my love for my body by not abusing it. It’s one thing to say that we shouldn’t lower caloric intake to absurd levels in a misguided attempt to lose weight, but it’s quite another to say that we should eat whatever we feel like and not bother with exercise.
Oh…Wait. That was Bomboniera, not Alsis. My world is right-side-up again.
If your spouse would like to be attracted to you again, physically, and your attitude is “tough- you failed the test! You have to desire me no matter what I look like!” I can see how that would suck a little for your spouse. This isn’t a gender issue at all- how can it be construed as such?
I think that most people expect that their spouses will change mentally over the years. Or rather, that living over a long period of time with somebody will reveal things to you that you previously weren’t aware of.
So I guess if you’d dump your spouse because you discovered she had developed a really annoying and unattractive habit of slurping her coffee, it would be consistent to dump her for gaining weight as well. After all, marriage is a contract and if after five, ten, twenty years you find too many changes in the person you made out the contract with, perhaps divorce is the right answer.
OTOH, if after five, ten, twenty years, you feel that you are still a good partner to your dissatisfied spouse even with your odd slurping noises, weight gain, and occasional depression, you’re pretty much SOL. Especially if the dissatisfied partner has also changed in some way over time but doesn’t think their own changes are worth any scrutiny or merit any criticism.
Married or single, gauging progress (or lack of it) based primarily on a person’s physical changes (or lack of them) seems to me like a piss-poor attitude to go through life with. Then again, my husband and I are both overweight, so make of that what you will.
Elena, of course it’s a gender issue. One need only turn on the television and see the many sitcoms where the main character is a man who is of average attractiveness (which translate to unattractive in Hollywood land) married to a beautiful woman. Or the fact that we live in a world where women face incredable pressures to conform to a very narrow standard of beauty at any cost.
Elena, no one is “denying that it is reasonable to want to be physically attracted to your spouse,” but wanting to be physically attracted to your spouse does not obligate your spouse to fulfill that want.
Furthermore, it’s certainly a gender issue, because the physical attractiveness expectations for women are much greater than those for men.
If your spouse would like to be attracted to you again, physically, and your attitude is “tough- you failed the test! You have to desire me no matter what I look like!”
What an odd thing to say. Nobody has to desire anybody. Perhaps you’re confused about the issue.
Furthermore, it’s certainly a gender issue, because the physical attractiveness expectations for women are much greater than those for men.
Exactly. when is the last time you heard anyone say “he’s really let himself go since he got hitched”?
Bomboniera I described that women’s rights officer as anti-feminist to explain why she was taking the action. International No Diet Day is an event of long standing. Renaming the event Love Your Body Day isn’t necessarily problematic, but it is if you start saying that the only way to love your body is to act in ways that have a suspicious resemblence to dieting.
The reason it reminded of me MiM’s post is how quickly efforts to address eating disorders become promoting of eating disorder behaviour
Responding to alsis in comment #7: That’s probably what people told Bill Clinton when he was young and chubby. So if you want me to behave like Bill Clinton, then go ahead and follow that advice…:P
You’re not helping my feminist cred here, Aaron.
Besides, Billy has never struck me as the depressive sort. I’ve heard some argue that his philandering is a classic needy “oh, please love me and prop up my ego” sort of thing, but I wouldn’t call the desire for ego-salve an automatic sign of depression. Honestly, are philandering and depression some kind of matched set ? Could somebody get Dr. Phil on the phone ?
Considering that we were both saddled with depression, I’ll say yes, it’s quite possible, and also please note that sex can be as damaging as it can be helpful when you’re both depressed and hypersensitive to each other.
Fortunately, the quality and quantity of our sexual activity wasn’t the only thing keeping us together.
How in the heck did I manage a double block quote?
I think people mistake attraction and love for attraction to a physical image and they are two different things. Sometimes we love someone for what they look like right away, then grow to love them more completely, other times we think they are ho hum but fall in love with their personality, their “self”. Marriage is about being in love with someone, and wanting to spend your life together. When you love someone, they are gorgeous to you no matter what. Oxytocin sees to that! People change over marriage, we get old, our hair turns grey and falls out, we develop handicaps sometimes or injuries but the point is we stay in love because we love the person, not the image. Falling in love with someone’s physical self is the dating scene, the bar scene. Gaining weight is the least of the changes peoeple face in marriage and if it is all about “physical attraction” no wonder half of marriages fail. Any person who expects his spouse to maintain a certain look wants a trophy wife, not a friend and partner. We don’t “owe” it to men to look a certain way, they don’t owe it to us to keep all their hair or grow their penises, etc.
i eat fruit daily & practice yoga several times a week.
i don’t think of myself as “dieting”, ever. it’s just how i live. it feels good to me to live this way.
i think going “on a diet” is a bad idea. the very notion suggests something extreme, unsustainable, to be practiced temporarily until some arbitrary amount of weight loss is achieved and then dropped, to go back to the same habits as before.
now changing one’s diet, that’s a different thing. especially if it involves changing to something healthy, balanced, and moderate, that can be maintained over a long period of time, in order to effect better health.
eating fruit & doing yoga can be part of either the former or the latter — part of an extreme effort that is short term & ultimately damaging to one’s health or part of a larger lifestyle change that has positive consequences.
I can’t wait until she falls out of love with her husband for his audacity to go bald. Only assholes do that.
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