Shooting Up the Skinny

So, tonight I watched "The Substance" while I made dinner (a cool movie and a poor choice of venue). It's a fabulous cultural take-down of beauty standards and youth obsession and skinny culture set in the MOST awesome, grotesque body horror situation. Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and writer/director Coralie Fargeat deserve all the flowers they got for this. It's intense, specific, and cutting to the marrow. And SO MANY BUTTS! Also freaky blood-soaked creatures. Just delightful. AND as I watched it on my cheap Max subscription- as with all media where you haven't paid to avoid it- every other commercial is an add for the new weight loss serums that are winkwink for diabetes and winkwink to avoid heart disease.

ALSO, as I've been binging other shows, I've been getting furiouser and furiouser as the BEARDED WOMAN'S EMPOWERMENT BALLAD from The Greatest Showman is being used behind another skinny shot advertisement. That whole message was that I'm fine the way I am no matter what you assholes think!

I fucking hate it. Fuck you, skinny culture. I hate you.

All of my reliably normal/chubby celebrities have shot up and are now waff-el thin. They're deleting all the content off their Instagram that showed them shamefully normal-people sized because it was SO EMBARRASSING. I don't blame them but.

I. Hate. It. Here.

I get it. We're really, really certain that skinny=good=valuable=deserves to be alive in this culture. Like we're obsessively convinced of this. And if my face was put on movie screens I can't imagine what I'd do to make sure it was an socially acceptable face.

I feel it, too. I keep thinking I'd have everything my heart desired if only I were thirty pounds lighter. And, like, if I really believed this, wouldn't I stop cheating on Weight Watchers or shoot up the fucking meds?!

But I don't want to feel nauseous and I don't want to gain it all back as soon as I stop and I don't want to take meds necessary for diabetics and I don't want to play the fucking games where women don't count if they're not little bitty baby sized. Not that we'll count anyway-mind you. It's definitely a trap.

No one is free of this. We're all prisoners.

Women need to be small to be (managed) beautiful and even though I'm onto it, I still feel like apologizing to the earth for the extra weight I carry now that I didn't used to carry and that makes it not easy for me to wear all the clothes the people on TV do.

I fucking hate it. And I have no solutions. Artists I admire have tackled this very topic and for a while I'm activated and motivated, but then I fall back into the pit of despair we all live in.

I'm so exhausted and angry at myself for being weak and more angry at the system for being so effective and fucking shitty. I feel like a failed woman for not being what I'm told to be and also like a righteous woman for not trying. And I know that even if I was the perfect specimen of perfection, I'd have no power or glory, so eat the damned muffin.

Trump's healthcare initiatives are centered around making sure these shots are affordable to all of us miserable fatties, fyi. He's basically a hero. Ignore everything else, it's fine.

Anyway. Here with you if you're agonizing about this all the time. Watch The Substance. Read Sonya Renee Taylor's The Body is Not an Apology and join me in sort of kind of fighting this battle that sucks.