Because I Have to Hate: Weight Loss Culture

The onslaught of weight loss commercials is just beginning as the new year approaches.  I am so sick of living in this weight obsessed culture.  I have been robbed of YEARS of living a life all because some fucking corporation wanted to sell more diet food or workout DVDs or magazines or size 0 clothing.  I have been lied to over and over and over again and made to believe that I was somehow less of a person with each pound away from my "ideal BMI" I got.

I have been sold beauty myths that have served to keep me focused on every imperfection that I could find in the mirror rather than on what I could do to stand against the false narratives that every person in our culture seems to be fed from birth.  I have watched friends and colleagues and clients all struggle against the medicalization of these weight myths - that to lose weight is the ultimate test of goodness and health when IT IS NOT.  I have starved and vomited and binged and broken blood vessels around my eyes and blown out my gallbladder and given myself ulcers and eroded my teeth all for the lie that the weight loss industry has sold me since childhood.

WELL, FUCK THAT.  I refuse to believe the lie.  I love my body regardless of size because it is a Darwinian miracle that it exists at all.  And it doesn't matter that I was a lower weight when I hiked Mt. Rainier and a higher weight when I hiked a glacier in Iceland.  My amazing body let me hike regardless of the years of torment the diet industry convinced me to put it through.  I refuse to measure my life by what number I was on a scale at a given moment.  I am here.  I am alive.  Every moment is mine to do with what I want... and I know for certain that what I want to do with those moments has NOTHING to do with weight loss.

Because I Have to Hate: Spring

You know that feeling when you are cuddled up under a blanket - all cozy and protected - and someone takes the blanket off of you? And suddenly you feel cold and irritated? Now, imagine the person who just took the blanket off of you is happy and excited and wants you to get up and be excited too? Wouldn't you end up hating that person in that moment? Not only are you now shivering, but you were feeling content and this idiot in front of you wants you to instantly feel the exact same way they are feeling? And when you protest that you were comfortable under the blanket, they look at you like you are crazy and ask, "What is wrong with you?"

That is precisely how I feel from mid-March until the end of May. Winter is my blanket and Spring (and all of the happy people enjoying it) are the blanket thieves. No matter how much I try to prepare for the onslaught of depression when springtime arrives, it never fails to kick my ass - every single year. I hate the light this time of year, especially once Daylight Savings begins. I hate the warm-but-not-yet-warm days in March and April that are harbingers of the doom to come. I hate the sound of the birds that wake me up in the morning... devastating sirens that signal my crash. I hate how everyone is cheerful and inevitably can't greet me without a redundant "Isn't it a gorgeous day out today?" (as though every other person, store clerk, and Facebook status update hadn't already alerted me to that fact.) And I hate the goddamn daffodils that will be popping their insipid yellow heads up out of the ground any day now.

I hate how everyone else feels liberated by Spring and I just feel like I am watching everyone else move on from what I thought was a shared rancor for life. I guess that is a huge part of it... a feeling of utter isolation while everyone else moves on from Winter and I am still here. Stuck in my own resentment for living. Maybe it is just that I can fool myself into thinking that I am not so alone in my hatred for life when, during the wintertime, everyone else turns into miserable, grumbling, depressed creatures as well.

I used to think that I was alone in my Spring-induced depression, but believe it or not, there are quite a number of people who experience the same feelings about it that I do. Even more astounding is the fact that the suicide rate in the Northern hemisphere spikes sharply in the months of April and May (and in November in the Southern hemisphere.) There is truly something about the nicer weather that just gets to some people in the same way many people feel in the darker months of the year.

But maybe it isn't such a difficult concept to grasp after all. Everyone seems to accept that suicide and depression will rise around the holidays for people who are alone or missing loved ones during a time of forced happiness. And, isn't this stark contrast between what someone is supposed to feel during the holidays and what they really feel exactly what people identify as the reason for the holiday blues? So, it really isn't any different with Spring. All of the messages coming not just from other people but from Mother Fucking Nature herself are full of directives of how I am "supposed" to feel. But I don't feel that way. I feel a deadening and a loss for the bleakness of winter that so perfectly mirrored my inner experience. Spring forces me to acknowledge this contrast between the inner and outer worlds. It forces me to recognize that I am different in my inner experience from all of the "normal" people. It rips the blanket of winter off slowly, painfully, inchingly - with each bird chirp, flower head, and every idiot girl who feels the need to wear sandals on the first sunny-and-45 degree day.

Because I Have to Hate: Lame Facebook Status Updates

Ok, basically I have to wonder what we are coming to as a human species if the extent of our conversations today, already forcibly limited to exhibitionist status updates on social networking sites, will continue on a downward spiral of the mundane, pathetic, unoriginal. So, at the risk (and probability) of alienating at least half of my Facebook "friends," I will list the five Facebook status updates that we could all live without. Really.

1. The Weather.
We get it. It's snowing and/or raining and/or hot and/or cold and/or sunny outside. Now, maybe if a single person was designated Facebook meteorologist, it would be one thing. But it's never just ONE post about the weather. No, no... it is a friggin' cacophony of the same damn weather report from everyone in your entire regional area. And, for friends that live outside of that area, they really don't have the need to know what the weather is like where you live. Seriously, unless a tidal wave is about to hit the Eastern seaboard, you don't need to post about the daily weather on Facebook.

2. Weight Loss. (Or Gain. Or Working Out.)
It always disheartens me that we all have nothing better to talk about to each other than the state of hatred and loathing we have for our bodies. And actually, if it WAS discussion about how you felt about your body in context with the way in which society expects everyone to be physically perfect, I would be okay with that. But it's not. No one needs to know about the 5 lbs. you lost or your next weigh-in or how long your run was that day. Again, if you accomplished something (a marathon, for example) I expect that to be posted. But Facebook is not your personal Weight Watchers meeting. Seriously. There are, like, a billion more interesting things to know about you than how much you weigh.

3. Children's Bathroom Habits.
Really? You REALLY think that everyone on Facebook wants to hear about how your little miracle pooped on the potty today? Really? And, maybe - JUST MAYBE - we should consider children in general to be OFF LIMITS in Facebook status updates and discussions. They are their own individual humans. Personally, I would be pretty upset if I found out later on in life that my parents were sharing my every milestone, tantrum, and bathroom break with a bunch of random strangers and distant friends on Facebook. Not to mention the amount of abject, seething hatred I see in so many posts about your children. If you don't like your kids, you need to work on that and not post about how much work they are, how annoying they are, etc. on Facebook.

4. Food.
To loosely quote a recent article I read on hatred for Facebook, if you didn't call up all of your friends to tell them what you were eating in the past, maybe you should think twice about posting it for all to see on Facebook. It's boring. No one cares what you are eating. Seriously.

5. High School.
Ugh... need I say more? If you are planning to get together with people that you haven't seen in 20 years and haven't felt the urge to stay in contact with for 20 years, why has Facebook suddenly made it acceptable to now have mini-reunions with people that, in all honesty, you probably barely talked to when you saw them every single day 20 years ago?!? And, more importantly, why do all of your real friends from your real life need to know about this? I will write what I said blatantly to my ex-boyfriend a few months back when he discovered Facebook and started to make plans with all of his former marching band friends: "How do you even LIVE with yourself?"

Because I Have to Hate: True Love

I think that Miracle Max in The Princess Bride said it best when, in doubting the words "true love" that came from Westley's mostly dead mouth, he replied: "But that's not what he said. He distinctly said 'to blave.' And, as we all know, 'to blave' means to bluff."

And isn't that all that the promise of love turns out to be? A big, fat, giant bluff... like being Punk'd by society at large, by the myriad of movies that promise the fairy tale, and most often by the significant other who convinced us to believe the lie of love only to dismantle it in the end. It just seems so insane that otherwise capable, intelligent, interesting people make the mistake over and over to believe in the notion that love conquers all in the face of mounting evidence that it, in fact, does not.

You can call me jaded, bitter, and lonely. But I like to believe that bitterness is the result of reality. People are not born bitter, just as troubled teens don't just fall out of the sky. Life experiences that teach you that it is definitely a bad idea to trust anyone close to you largely contribute to the life outlook of jaded thirty-something women AND adolescent rage. It is hard to not begin to settle on the conclusion that love is a lie. Indeed, most of us spend our entire lives so focused on chasing the lie that we have been sold (by movies, by Hallmark, by the online dating industry) that we begin to ignore our own interests, stop developing ourselves, and become one-note harpies about either our desire for a "true love" relationship or how we can't believe that the relationship that is ending didn't end up being "the one."

Indeed, the true love/soul mate market needs a strong dose of my jaded/bitter/lonely thirty-something reality. There is no true love. There is no "the one." There might be many "ones" that all fulfill your love needs for a few years. There might be one "one" that you grow bored with, or worse, grow to resent. But unless your definition of love is flexible and unless you know that the grass is not greener in another relationship and unless you stop defining yourself or your happiness by your relationship status and unless you have the strength to shirk the messages that we have been receiving since we were three about what fairy-tale "true love" is supposed to look like, it is inevitable that you will be unhappy in whatever stage of love you happen to be in.

The brilliant part about The Princess Bride is that the book, unlike the movie, ends with author William Goldman hinting at how the happy ending - Fezzik, Buttercup, Westley, and Inigo all riding four white horses into the sunset - is only temporary. He briefly mentions a few of the things that begin to go wrong after the departure from Humperdink's castle. And I guess that is what I am beginning to look for in affairs of the heart... the things that go wrong, the lies, and the realization that, in the words of Westley, "life is pain." And I'll take that over the false promise of true love any day.

Because I Have to Hate: Stripper Chic Culture

This post is not about strippers. I know women that work in the sex industry. They have my complete respect. I have listened to and understand how their circumstances and life experiences have contributed to their choice - albeit a forced choice - to work as strippers or in adult film. I use the term 'forced choice' to indicate that a choice can only TRULY be a choice if opportunities for a different path choice are present. Think of it this way: a bank manager who was laid off from work and now "chooses" to take a job working part-time at Home Depot just to bring in some money. This is not a TRUE choice, but a forced choice. This person would not choose this path if his financial needs did not dictate that he had to do so. The same applies to many people (not all, but many) who work in the sex industry. If women could make the same amount of money and garner the same accolades for their work in traditional jobs as they do at a strip club, I guarantee you that this would not be their true choice for work.

Well, I think I could have guaranteed that prior to the "stripper chic" culture that has taken hold in recent years. So, this is what we are all aspiring to be now, huh? I guess just randomly hooking up with guys with no strings attached has stopped being satisfactory enough. I guess lifting up our shirts for the camera or for random men is boring now. I guess being faux lesbians on the dance floor just isn't intriguing anymore. Nope. Now we need to ascend yet another rung on the ladder of self-exploitation in deafening clammor for male attention. Or rather, ascend the stripper pole.

Here is (loosely) what happens in our culture for many women who start seeing other women getting male attention for a previously unacceptable behavior: we go crazy. We become desperate out of this weird mix of jealousy and fear. This is what drives women to contemplate bringing another woman into bed with her husband to fulfull his fantasy. This is why women are flocking to stripping workout classes. This is why women make out with other girls at clubs. This is why women are buying stripper poles for their bedrooms. I could go on and on about the less obvious ramifications of the stripper chic culture (plastic surgery, obsessing over weight loss, etc.) but for the purpose of this rant, I am limiting it to direct male attention seeking behavior that only serves to benefit male fantasy or garner immediate attention for the woman.

Unfortunately, many of these behaviors are placed under this weird umbrella of "liberation" for women. Really? Liberating? Liberation could only be argued if we removed the aspect of male attention from the equation. Liberation is finding the freedom of sexual expression for your own pleasure and ONLY your pleasure. There will always be, on some level, a sense of being shackled to your own need for male attention if any of these behaviors are done in hopes of gaining acceptance or feeling desired by a member of the opposite sex. If you engage in a behavior that you would not otherwise engage in and brings you no direct pleasure, this is not liberation. It is participation in your own exploitation... you're just trying to convince yourself otherwise.

Oh! And don't forget that we need to make sure that our daughters and sons know just how these new "liberated" women are supposed to act and be seen! By all means, buy a stripper pole and bring it into your house! Make sure that you encourage your daughters to think of boys as something to be competed over - even amongst each other! Be sure to laugh about the fact that your son is a "player." And be sure to encourage them to emulate what they see and hear on TV and in music.

This is a great example to help you inspire your daughters:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3c1fm_keeping-up-with-the-kardashians-gir_shortfilms

Or this!

http://www.lilmynx.com/

And, of course, Miley Cyrus' latest "stripper chic" moment dancing on the ice cream cart complete with stripper pole... her slide down the pole appropriately coinciding with the song's lyrics Get to the club in my taxi cab/Everybody's lookin' at me now. (As one blogger put it, "I'd rather young girls be fans of Death Metal, than listen to the teen queen." I agree.) It seems that in our current culture, everything is all about getting as much attention as you can possibly get - especially sexual attention and especially at the cost of your sense of self.

Why, I can think of nothing more appropriate than to have our children get an early start on learning how to make sure that male attention is to be attained at all costs and that boys can expect to give nothing in return for this kind of attention-seeking behavior. Oh, except for those $1 bills. They'll need a lot of those.

Because I Have to Hate... Gen X Sellouts

This post could also be titled: "What I Thought Would Happen (or Why Facebook Shatters My Entire Worldview on a Daily Basis)"

I often describe myself as being perpetually 14 years old. Hence, I am stuck in a state of arrested development and therefore cannot really handle the daily shattering of this 14-year-old worldview that is brought on by the forced reconnections with Facebook people from my past.

Here's the thing... I guess I thought that everyone in Generation X was supposed to stay angry and disillusioned with life. Forever. I thought that WE were going to be different. We wouldn't sell out by getting married or having babies or working in a soul-sucking job so that we could afford a mortgage and an SUV. I thought we were going to learn from the pathetically miserable lives that our sell-out Baby Boomer parents ended up adopting once they decided to give up on changing the world.

So, in my mind, we are all supposed to still be the same people we were twenty years ago. No kids, no spouses. We are still supposed to loathe our parents and have tentative relationships with our siblings. None of this "family" forgiveness/integration crap where you suddenly have aunties and grandmas where you once had a "bitch" for a sister or mother.

I just don't GET it. How does that happen? Is it just that life sort of takes over and you succumb to what everyone is doing? Is it really the whole biological clock thing? Is it just what happens as people age? If so, I am implicating Facebook in this assault on my entire worldview.

Because I Have to Hate... TV Online Dating Ads

Do you want to dig your eyes out with searingly hot spoons whenever a match.com commercial comes on? Because I do. Everytime one of those creepy-ass ads comes on, I start to feel skeezed out while watching the nervously giggling girls followed by the tagline: "It's okay to look." They are oddly reminiscent of the horrible Calvin Klein ads made to look like teen pornography from the 70's. And what's up with the one dude that looks like a pimp crossed with Peter Pan? I'm confused and feel like I need to take a shower after these voyeuristic pieces of advertising crap pass by my retinas.

Then we have the relentless barage of chemistry.com ads that feature annoying people making vows to one another while on dates in sushi bars and city parks. Vows generally consist of stupid things like "taking the recycling out even though you are way better at it." Now, maybe I'm just a bitch (ok, omit the maybe from that sentence) but if someone started promising weird-ass crap like that to me on a date, I'd be out of there faster than you could say "cucumber maki." My personal favorite (ie the one that makes me want to stab my eardrums with sharpened chopsticks) is where the girl promises to never wear a flannel nightgown and the guy says something like "Can you just promise to never wear a nightgown?" Then they both laugh annoyingly. Now, besides the fact that I want to vomit at the idea of a bunch of ad writers in Dockers laughing at their own "joke" in a self-congratulatory way as they identify with this total tool, I just have to state the obvious here... these ads don't make me want to meet, have sex with, or vow anything to any of these people! Now, to be fair, chemistry.com does feature a same-sex couple in one of their ads and before the horrid "vow" campaign, they had a fantastic "rejected" campaign where they challenged...
the Holy Grail of horrendous online dating ads. Yes, I am talking about eHarmony.com. Ugh. Could there be a more repugnant display of sanitized blather about love and destiny anywhere on tv? (Not to mention, the founder is a crazy Christian and eHarmony still won't allow same-sex matching on their site and tried to force media not to run chemistry.com ads exposing this.)

However, what really makes me crazy are the couples who are routinely featured as the success stories for eHarmony. They usually go on and on about how they found the perfect soulmate and I just want to start stabbing them in the head. Especially that douchebag Lee and his little puppet Anne Marie. I really want to stab them in the head. Could they find a more smarmy guy than Lee to feature? The whole time I just sit there fuming and wondering what their story will look like in two years when Lee is feeling trapped by Anne Marie wanting a baby so he starts going out to the strip club with his buddies a few nights a week and she starts getting angry because he's gone all the time and starts pouring her energy into decorating the condo.

Call me old-fashioned but I'd prefer some truth in advertising for these online dating sites. How about a girl talking about how match.com provided her a bunch of hook-ups with losers to falsely soothe her low self-esteem until she found a loser slightly better than the others (or, at least, one of the only ones that would call her back after a fuck or two) that she finally settled for? Or the guy who uses dating primarly to fill a void in his social life because he is a computer programmer with few friends and even fewer real live girls in his life? Or the single mom who needs to field the guys who are willing to date someone with three kids and an ex-husband? Or the lesbian who is seeking out another lesbian that doesn't smoke, doesn't have pets, and doesn't want children? Yeah... those ads would not only be truthful but they'd sure as hell be 100% more interesting. (And they'd probably be less likely to make me all head-stabby. Probably.)