eff that noise, #1

See below; anyone who wants to take on the questionable mission of caring about this, or any subsequent bits of eff-worthy noise, have at it. I'm done.

1. "Batwings", "muffin top", "problem areas", "FUPA", and any other "clever" little weapons of body shame masquerading as efforts to relate to "the female experience". Lookit, I almost killed myself with an eating disorder -- a different, less sanitized version of "screwed up over my body" than the one I was conscripted for originally -- and I would choose that over the powerless feeling of living in a body that's a punchline.The majority of my high school, college, and young adult years were absorbed in an effort to ensure everyone understood that I will simply destroy this body rather than live in it while someone else holds it up for critique and ridicule. This area is a problem? Yeah, I got that -- that's why I've fed it nothing but gum and vodka today. 

I did not loosen my death grip on that (unfortunate, unproductive) manifestation of control in order to be talked down to, just because some conveniently invisible arbiter of "truth" regarding my physical being feels that I'd do more for "him" if my upper arms were a little more toned, or that I've earned ridicule by having a butt that does not give "him" an erection when I am walking down the street/passing him in the bar/otherwise engaged in living my life. (Note to publishers and advertisers: there are no actual "hes" in my life weighing in on either my arms or my butt, because I don't associate with with people who presume to have an opinion on parts of my body. These "he's" you speak of are evidently either imaginary or are, wisely, keeping a low profile, afraid of either my flapping, geriatric flesh, my man-hating feminism, or both.)

Moreover, heterosexual men may use these words (which, eff that noise, hard and in the ear), but mostly they are not the ones producing or consuming the cultural and economic products whose existence depends on these words and the associated shame. And, in fact, other than FUPA -- which is fun to say, if one doesn't get sidelined by the way it thrusts the speaker in a position of deciding whether another human being's body is or is not disgusting and contemptible -- I don't hear men say these words that much at all. I don't hear women say them much, either. We all just have to hear them, and read them, because someone keeps putting them in cartoons and in SELF and on talk shows and ads that pop up online, the linguistic equivalent of Lief Garrett in Tiger Beat.

An easy dragon to slay, this one. I'm unilaterally rejecting the word "batwings", the concept of batwings, and the larger paradigm within which we excuse ourselves for appropriating the bodies of others as ours to evaluate by using silly, cutesy, or anthropomorphic words to do so.

My arms are arms, not a hobby or a joke. They look the way they goddamn look, and no amount of wink-wink-nudgery is going to convince me that shaming me into "fixing" them is anything other than an ineffectual attempt of bullying. Ineffectual, because being female is not an Achille's heel, and the belief that it gives anyone power over me -- to make me feel bad or waste my time or change my body -- is just so much incoherent noise. Eff it.