"There are a number of euphemisms for female thinness that do not require a man to make the impolite admission of his exclusive attraction to women with very little body fat. Though “active” and “full of energy” make respectable showings, they are a distance second and third from “a woman who takes care of herself.”
It seems a benign enough request, but one quickly learns that this man is not especially concerned that she has regularly scheduled self-care sessions like time with friends or spa days with a good book. He isn’t asking that her household finances be in order and that she be self-actualized. He is asking her to be thin. When he says “herself,” he means “her body.”...
An Instagram trend of thin women posing with calorie-dense foods that functions partly to appeal to this desire has even made headlines recently as the “You Did Not Eat That” account has gained popularity. But the impulse to pretend is understandable. For a thin woman to betray the reality of her diet and regimen for staying that way would spoil the fantasy of a woman who is preternaturally inclined to her size rather than personally preoccupied by it...
thin women said that the more they disappeared, the more visible they became"
Just pausing at the very early moment in the essay that I quoted, it gets at something that I'm really trying to articulate for myself - the way that certain people are expected to be constantly available to be gazed upon without every spending time preparing for that gaze, or even being aware of it. For example, it's the person described in every song about a girl who doesn't know she's beautiful. It's this coquettish lack of self awareness that lets the gazer define the person, fill in all the blanks that are normally filled in by a person's actually identity beyond that moment that is visible by the gazer. It's like, this person isn't really supposed to have a mirror of their own, they are sort of supposed to only understand themselves through the understanding of the gazer. They are reliant on the gazer to provide this information.
And that's using some gendered stuff, like men looking at (and through looking, owning and defining) women. But there is also stuff that I experience with race, with people looking at me and defining my race and how it does or doesn't exist and how I am supposed to identify to fit in with their lives. Like, am I the kind of black person who listens to rap? Who can do X or Y dance move? Can I help the gazer be cool? Can I be a source of comic relief for them, their very own BBF? Am I cool with that kinda joke the gazer made all the time in high school but has since started to worry might be racist and therefore sort of wants to get a black person to laugh at? Can I be saved by the gazer, provided the love and acceptance and that I might not find in this cold world, with all the small slights I probably experience from the non-colorblind people but shouldn't ever really bring up because that would make the gazer uncomfortable, so that the gazer can know that they themselves are not racist?
And I dunno, as anyone who has been gazed at knows, you are expected to be available for all of this while not noticing the ways that people think about you. There has to be some scholarship on this somewhere, that puts it better that I am. It's sort of like the double consciousness thing, but it's the expectation that there is no double consciousness - that there can't be.
This essay also has really important things to say about mental health, and I think about how the gazed-at aren't understood to have the human complexity of mental health, and therefore people don't think to ask about it.
FB: A deeply thoughtful reflection on body size by a woman who became very thin and decided to stay that way, and encountered all the social expectations for thin women
"Covert concern about my body is easy to maintain in the dating phase of relationships. Men will touch a particularly small or toned part of me and remark, “Wow, you must work out.” Upon confirmation that I do, the most frequent reply is, “So what do you do, yoga?” It is generally safe to assume that such men have never practiced yoga. Yoga, in the minds of many straight men, is a placeholder for light but effective exercise done primarily by women. It is a sanitary practice, a form of exercise uncontaminated by sweat or gender-neutral footwear. Something that pretty girls do three times a week in flattering pants. But while the benefits of yoga are tremendous, it cannot turn overweight or average bodies into tiny ones. Real yoga—as opposed to cardio routines that borrow heavily from it—cannot create the calorie deficits required to be thin thin. Real thinness requires something much more brutal."
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