Fat Girls in Swim Suits

There have been some CRAZY things going on around the internet. Like real cray. I thought I need to weigh in as well. It seemed to start from a blog post from one of my favorites GABIFRESH. She posted pictures of herself in a bathing suit, oh excuse me, a fatkini. From the words of Gabi:

As always, I truly encourage you guys to get to the beach (or a pool) this summer--don't let body shame keep you from having a good time! I don't expect everyone to feel comfortable in a two piece, but hopefully I can inspire some of you to take the plunge. I can't tell you how freeing it is to just have fun without worrying about what other people think.

Of course the world went crazy over a fat girl in a swim suit. This lead to an oxjane article about fat women and swim suits from the again amazing Gabi. The article also featured a photo slide show of women of all sizes wearing bathing suits. I loved it.

Then That Cortnie Girl posted a picture on of her in a swim suit on her Facebook, resulting in over 90 comments! Most positive, but of course, there was some body shaming as well. You can see her video response here.  

I thought, what a better way to celebrate my birthday (PS, yay I am 25, my brain is developed and ready to make some mad crazy sound decisions)  than to reaffirm my commitment to fat acceptance and the healthy at every size lifestyle then posting some pictures of myself in a bathing suit! It all really worked out perfectly, because I needed to pick a suit for my trip to Georgia this weekend anyways! 

Low a behold, a living, breathing obese person in SEVERAL bathing suits! Gasp! 

Here is me and all of my body, standing in solidarity with all other people that have been told their body does not deserve to wear a swim suit in public. 

Bodies and Victim Blaming

I follow healthy living blogs. I also follow healthy-at-ever-size, or fat acceptance blogs. In reading these blogs I saw an interesting reaction to emotional triggers related to bodies.

One HAES blogger wrote a post the other day about an emotional trigger for her, bad pictures. I think this is very relatable.

Her response was to realize most bodies she sees do not look like hers. In addition, she does not spend much time on a regular basis looking at her own body. She notes that unless people spend time looking at their bodies in full length mirrors regularly, they might forget what they look like, and start to think their bodies look like ones they are visually exposed to. The bodies we are mainly exposed to come through mainstream media – ads, TV, magazines and so on. These bodies are not real, and they are usually unattainable and non-representative of the majority of people.

Some bloggers in the healthy living community also had recent experiences with triggers. One of the bloggers is pregnancy and talked about the difficulty of accepting that her clothes no longer fit. She expressed feeling upset loosing a body that she worked so hard to achieve and maintain. When she reached her pre-baby weight she vowed never to gain weight again. Obviously this isn’t possible during pregnancy. Another blogger wrote about feeling upset and shocked after stepping on a scale.

In these examples, women felt the blame or cause was not unrealistic images in the media, but instead themselves. The thought was that either they needed to just feel better about their bodies, or actively do something to change their bodies till they were happy with them.

Here is what I understood:

HAES blogger

• cause of anxiety – a culture that only finds certain bodies acceptable, causes individuals to become disconnected from ]their own body.
• solutions – normalize all bodies. This can mean taking time to actually look at your own body, or see other images of real bodies.

Healthy Living Bloggers

• cause of anxiety – I am unhappy with my body.
• Solution – learn to love my body, or change my body.

I feel blaming a person for feeling anxiety about their bodies is victim blaming. An individual is given a warped sense of what bodies should look like from being over exposed to certain bodies, and under exposed to others (ones that actually look more like theirs). Wrongfully, some argue being affected by these environmental factors makes an individual weak. They need to rise above these influences.

I can already hear voices saying – only a weak person would let images in the media impact their sense of self. Then the individual is told, be strong, foster body image and so on, but the root cause of the anxiety, societal pressures, unrealistic images, are never addressed.

Kind of sounds like this other example of victim blaming – you knew dressing that way made people think you wanted to have sex, you were “asking” to be sexually assaulted. That is victim blaming, and telling someone they are weak because they have body anxiety caused by a culture that promotes unrealistic bodies is also victim blaming.

The real solution to these problems is societal-level change in how we view and express bodies. Our society does not accept bodies unless they look a certain way. To create cultural change I need to normalize my body. There needs to be MORE pictures of my body, and people, including myself, need to look at them. One example of normalizing different bodies was Fa(t)shion February.

Ok, I am getting on a ramble – night folks.

Time for grad school recovery

The last few months have been all consumed by grad school. During that whole process I felt  like this:

And I had to see things like this, which I hoped to never see again.

Oh silly pre-grad school Ashley would probably see that stack of books and think, oh wow cool! I want to learn those things! Post-grad school Ashley mainly thinks, OMG vomit, get those out of my face.

Anyways as of yesterday all my paper work has been turned in and signed. I am done. D-O-N-E baby, yeah! Now I feel like this:

If you are wondering, yes that is my computer mouse in my hand. I am sure there is some fancy way to time photos with my webcam but I haven’t figured it out yet.

Please, stare at those for a long time. They get better the more you look at them.

Now that I am done with grad school I am left with the sad sack of human that was chewed up and spit out by the fine institution I attended. Needless to say during the process of …

• Getting a new job
• Fighting the federal government trying to take away healthcare from women
• getting another new job
• conducting and analyzing research data
• writing my culminating
• writing my culminating again after getting it chewed up and spit back in my face by again that fine institution I attended
• Doing other weird things – lobbying, testifying and so on

… there was little self care. I went from a 85% vegan to a 100% pizza, fast food and whatever else was cheap and would fit into my mouth kind of eater. I also went from 8 weeks into a marathon training plan to absolutely no exercise.

Correct, NONE. That is pretty impressive really.

Now it is time to pick up the pieces and make my next moves when it comes to self care. During this whole process I learned a lot. I have changed my views about healthy living, well really living in general, and thus also what the purpose of this blog will be.

I am off for a run to try to get myself back into some regular fitness schedule. Look forward to more posts about my adventures in trying to figure out how to live like a human being again.

And now your moment of Zen, a sparkly GIF in honor of my shiny new degree. PS – nothing says higher education like sparkly GIFs!

(source )

Poem Alert: Keep Going

complex, tired, pushing, searching

I am complex, and have many dimensions to my wholeness

I am tired from the heartbreak of a world unfair

I push each day to make the world better

constantly searching for truth

to be whole is to be complex

to be whole is to be tired

to be whole you have to wake up each day fighting – pushing, searching

I might not care about whether there is a god, or is not a god

but I am for damn sure – I have faith, in the beauty and possibilities of the world we live in.

I am Still Alive

This has been a WEIRD year. 2011, what are you? Blogging is something that I WILL return to, once I am done with graduate school and have ensure Planned Parenthood is safe.

Until then, talk later gater, and follow my more reproductive justice/activist blog here.

What it means to me to be a 3rd waver

I don’t know a lot about feminism. I remember the first time I was asked, why was I a feminist, I had no response. I had never identified that way. I started my journey promoting health, because to me health equaled happiness. When I learned people could not live healthy lives because of social structures and factors outside of their control, I have became an activist for social justice.

My love for health, and comfort talking about sexuality and sex led me to reproductive justice, which opened my mind to feminist. I really claimed that work when I got engaged last summer. That was the first time I felt so much social pressure to perform, as a woman, and fit neatly into a construction of femininity that I did not identify with at all.

To me, being a 3rd wave feminist is being thankful for all the women before me that gave me the right to speak, to vote, and pursue ventures outside of the home. These women gave me the ability to go to school and pursue the career I wanted to. I never questioned going to college, because of these women. I was raised to believe I was intellectually, emotionally, and any other way as capable as my male counter parts to pursue my dreams in life.

These women gave me the pathway to an education, now my job as a 3rd waver is to figure out how I can make the world more justice with the privileged education I was able to receive. My job is to understand the intersects of race, gender, sexuality, abled-bodiness and any other identities or classes. My job is to work with environmentalist, organized labor, LBGTQA groups, and others that fight for justice and fairness of all people and the planet. My job is to make the world more fair for men and women, and fight more subtle battles of internalized and systemic oppression.

My job is also to prevent women and others from going back in time, when it comes to their rights. Everyday a war is fought over the rights of women’s bodies, their ability to receive equal pay as men, and many many other fights. There have been large gains within the women's movement, and it is my job as a 3rd waver to protect those advances and not let them go. The moment I think they will be there forever, is the same moment I leave myself and other sisters vulnerable.

My job is to work between generations, and foster hope and enthusiasm among youth within my movement. With out young people, the movement will not move forward.

Today was a long day. I saw a fetus testify, and was last to be heard in the hearing. I was one of few women in that room that spoke for themselves, and were not a prop for a radical anti-choice stunt.
This post rambles, I did not proof read it, but these words are true, honest and from my heart.
Trust me, a more substanial post will follow soon with all the details from the now infamous fetus hearing.
Thank you to all the amazing women in my life who inspire me!

Junk in the trunk

Today was a roller coaster of emotions. Around noon we picked up the truck and began packing. Here you can see me doing my best Vanna White to show off the many things we donated to Goodwill.

Kevin, our trusted driver, here taking one of our many trips to Goodwill.

Goodwill is an amazing organization and does a lot more than just manage the retail stores. I HIGHLY recommend volunteering with this organization! They go great work to ensure all people are able to live independently. Check them out here.

Soon our mood took a sudden turn for the worst. While packing, we had to make some hard decisions. Our truck was getting full and we just couldn’t take everything.

That is when we both looked at the tandem. Its so big, and hard to move and we have no place to keep it now. We both knew what we had to do, but neither of were happy.

 

We took it over to play it again sports and sold it. My face really explains the mood of the moment.

sad sad day … GOOD BYE TANDEM! You will never be forgotten

After all the packing we finally decided we could not get everything done tonight AND unload in Cleveland as well today. We decided to call it a night and go see the Black Swan.

(source)

It was CRAZY! Check it out sometime this holiday, but be ready to have your mind messed with to the extreme!

Since the bed is already in the truck, Kevin and I created out own hibernation nest. You might ask, what is a hibernation nest. Well, as I mentioned before, we were worried about hedgehogs strange new burrowing in his bedding.

Turns out, when hedgies get cold, they start to hibernate. When they go into hibernation mood, they create nests! We decided to use Sand’s message and create our own nest!

And now, your moment of zen:

The crazy pony comes ALIVE

Lots to do tomorrow, night!

Long time, no blog

It feels like forever since my last blog! Well here is a little recap of my life.

These past few months of life has been school, election, and driving back and forth to Cleveland. I found myself phone banking, organizing my first phone bank in Bowling Green, and helping with the One Bowling Green campaign. We lost, we won, but I found myself in some funny places along the way.

I had a second home with some friends at BGSU. They like puzzles. There is a very important dance that happens when a piece is found. I also found myself wandering near Kevin’s old apartment. Ah yes, fond memories!

This fall had a lot of car disasters as well. First, someone decided to randomly back up into my car then drive off, not cool. Second, I was harmlessly driving back to Columbus from Cleveland and the rubber on my tire just fell off. I was driving along, heard a weird sound, looked back, and saw the remains of my tire roll down a hill. What is my life? I missed class, and had to turn in my paper late. I got an A still, so take that karma!

  

Speaking of school, I spent a lot of time doing this.

This is me studying environmental health at the law library. I think when people saw me making millions billions of note cards about asbestos they were confused. I am not officially done with ALL my classes and practicum for graduate school! Now all I have left is my culminating project. For that I am working with a research at Kent State to write a funding proposal for a survey project. I am really excited about the project and will write more about it later.

Also, I got a new job as a School Health Educator with Planned Parenthood Northeast Ohio! I am so excited to be educating and working with young people. I love young people, check it out here.

With school done and a new job starting in a few weeks, I am working on getting my hours finished at my current job. Therefore, I am on the road again checking posters. Sometimes I run into posters that are NOT public health, such as the one on the left.

  

I haven’t had much time for cooking these days but I have learned a few things. Below is my ode to squash. I love squash and can’t wait to learn how to do more with it. On the left we got acorn squash, and on the right spaghetti squash with a little tomato sauce mixed it. It is WONDERFUL.

 

Here is some other nom noms I have been digging. Grilled pepper and hummus on toast and rice, tomato and chickpea bowl. YUM!

    

I have been doing some more research on vegan lifestyles and marathon running.

 

Marathon training has been going great so far. This is the first week I really feel like a runner again! I ran 2 miles yesterday with a 9.52 min/mi pace, with is basically LIGHTINING SPEED for me. I was way impressed.
That is my update so far! The next month will be CRAZY and can’t wait to fill you in on all the fun. Here are just a few of the up coming events …

• New job
• Moving
• Xmas
• Wedding!
• FRIENDS from across the states and world reunited!

Yeah, I am really excited for December! Before the fun starts I got to get through this move and finish my Columbus. This is my mantra … YOU CAN DO IT!