Let’s stop talking about how much women weigh
If it doesn’t matter for men, it shouldn’t matter for us.
I’m tired of being told what to do when it comes to my body. And I’m also tired of being told how to make that clear.
At the beginning of June, Amy Schumer won the Trailblazer award at the 2015 Glamour U.K. Women of the Year ceremony. It’s well-deserved: Schumer’s been able to talk about women’s issues on her Comedy Central TV show, Inside Amy Schumer, in a way that makes people (read: not just other women) actually pay attention. She’s made sketches like “12 Angry Men,’’ a parody of the famous film where a bunch of guys debate whether she is hot enough to be on TV.
Schumer has made a career questioning society’s sexist assumptions and skewering those who perpetrate them. So when she got up to accept the Glamour award and said, “I’m 160 pounds and I can catch a dick whenever I want,’’ the Internet exploded. How freeing! A woman voluntarily stating her weight, which isn’t in the double digits or low hundreds, and then bragging about how much sex she can have even if she isn’t what Hollywood typically deems desirable. And for Hollywood, desirable means very, very thin.
In a piece by Margaret Boykin about Schumer’s acceptance speech on Man Repeller, Boykin wrote about the don’t-tell nature of how much women weigh. “I’m not sure what the logical origin of this is or why we allow numbers to hold so much power, but I do know the effect this weight-taboo has on women: it makes us feel alone,’’ she said.
Inspired by Schumer, she states her own height and weight, and asks commenters to weigh in (as it were) with their own numbers.
And they did. There are over 69 comments on the piece where women wrote down—on the Internet—their height and weight.
The point of her post, Boykin wrote, was to rob numbers of their power over women and bring us together. To take away the “should’’ of how we think of our bodies and replace it with acceptance of what we are.
The media constantly tells women what we should do: Lose 10 pounds by summer, drink this green juice, eat cold, mashed up bananas and avocado instead of ice cream, don’t eat five hot dogs at once (come at me, Weight Watchers). There’s always a new super berry or strain of grass that, when blended up and ingested, will improve our lives and make us thinner and more beautiful.
Boykin had good intentions. She wanted to foster a healthy dialogue. But ultimately, the article is one more piece of a compulsory puzzle when it comes to talking about body image. Revealing an intimate truth about my body felt like one more thing I had to do to be good woman. Or to be on the side of women.
Boykin’s post also made it very clear that we’re still very far away from treating men and women equally when it comes to how we think and talk about our bodies.
Men would never be asked to write down how much they weigh and how tall they are in order to foster freedom from judgement. They don’t need to, because the media readily accepts them when they don’t look like they belong on the cover of Men’s Health.
Take, for example, the celebration of the dad bod. The majority of outlets were delighted by the idea that guys who have a healthy layer of fat over otherwise in-shape bodies are actually more attractive to women, popularized in a post by Clemson University student Mackenzie Pearson. Pearson said that the dad bod was alluring because it made women feel good to be in better shape than the men they dated.
When Slate’s Amanda Hess interviewed Pearson about the phenomenon, she went pretty easy on her. But Hess did ask say one thing that got at the heart of what’s not great about the dad bod: “Some of my colleagues were saddened by the dad bod article, because it seemed to say that a lot of the appeal of the dad bod lies in a woman’s own insecurities.’’
In other words, the celebration of the dad bod (not the dad bod itself) is a problem because the mom bod will never be afforded the same level of sexy.
Not when women are both favored and punished for being attractive in hiring processes. Not when we are told, by our therapists, that maybe we can’t find love because we are “dowdy.’’ Not when a female author gets more letters about what her hair looks like in her author bio than she does about her work. Not when we have weird Instagram trends floating around encouraging us to try to wrap our arms around our backs and touch our belly buttons to prove we are thin enough.
The only way we can actually fight these trends is if we treat women’s bodies the way we treat men’s bodies. And if that means not asking other women what they weigh because we wouldn’t ask men, then let’s not. Men don’t have to defend their waistlines. They don’t even have to talk about their waistlines in order to make their waistlines okay.
Neither should we.
Boston-area comedians:
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