Is it anti-feminist to want to lose weight?

sometimes I covet a body without curve (!)

This essay took a very long time to write and surprised me at every turn. I learned about myself (falling completely down my Charlotte Gainsbourg crush spiral - to this day my desktop is littered with jpegs of her I snagged before choosing the one that illustrates this essay) and I hope it also helps illuminates what we might be feeling when we covet the body that another woman has so easefully. Especially when that sensation makes us say we wish we could ‘lose weight’.

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Is it anti-feminist, fat-phobic, deeply internalized misogynistic behavior to want to lose weight? And if it is, and if instead we were good feminists, would we always be satisfied with our bodies and never want to lose weight, change a hair, nor a wrinkle or dimple again?

What if instead we asked, and this could be our response also, when our friends, family, and our own face in the mirror whispers this wish to be slimmed, what do you mean when you say ‘I want to lose weight’ ?

Like literally - what do you mean?

I think few of us really mean a number on a scale. If you do, I am tempted to just call you gauche at this point. Passé really. How 1990s of you. A number?? You can be a very heavy person with zero body fat. You can be a heavy person with a lot of fat. (same goes for a light person and a light person by the way.) Here are two Heavyweight boxers beautifully illustrating this point. FYI Heavyweight, in boxing, means 200 pounds (which is not an opinion on anyone’s weight but theirs). Both these men weighed 200 lbs at weigh-in which happens the same day as the fight.

For credit, the men pictured are Andy Ruiz Jr, the chubby one and winner in a previous fight, and Mr. no-body-fat Anthony Joshua, who came back for a re-match and won, seemingly pictured here. Also of note, their relative fatness did not affect their skill, training did. Chubby Andy took out Anthony easily in their first fight. Anthony studied up on Andy’s style and came back for re-match prepared. (Just pointing out you can be an exceptional athlete who also happens to be fat.)

But that exciting tale is not the point. The point is, if you are striving for some ridiculous ‘under xyz’ or whatever number is fixed in your head, that is just SILLY. You can look all kinds of ways at all kinds of weights and more importantly, a number says nothing about your health or wellbeing. So please, give it up and throw your scale away!

What I think we mean (what I HOPE we mean) when we say we want to ‘lose weight’ is that we want to FEEL a certain way.

We look at people who are slimmer than us, or a photo of ourselves at a slimmer time, and we remember a feeling, or we ascribe a feeling, to that slim person. Or as my mother used to bemoan, that woman who can cross both her knee AND her ankle, her legs so slim as to resemble snakes entwined, THAT PERSON or that past me (or that possible, maybe, future me - if I just try HARD ENOUGH) must be feeling, having, thinking, all the things we've never had, felt or thought.

None of this is about a number, a pants size, or how reptilian your legs can appear. It is a sense of self that is as vague as it is coveted (what does BETTER THAN THIS feel like?). It is an amorphous quality that yearns to be hardened into something we can hold. We want to turn this intangibility into gray numbers we can read in digitized scale-font. We want to clasp an article of clothing in our hands like gathered bread crumbs, desperate that it lead us back, or towards, a mythical land where we feel the way we want to feel.

Sometimes I want to feel like Charlotte Gainsbourg.

She is my ‘if I could blip into anyone else’s body it would be…’ body. Pictured above, she is a successful French/British actress, musician and fashion icon in her own right. I saw her interviewed once and was taken by the way she loosely arranged her lanky limbs while in conversation. There is an ease in her ligaments I know from my own, but without all the padding of muscle and fat. It looked fun, in a different way than my body is fun, to be her, all puppet-without-strings-like, a-jumble in her seat.

It is not though, that I wish I was LESS. It is not a longing to be deprived of my breasts and butt, to look down and see stems where once there were trunks. It is a longing for an experience that is innate to her. An experience expressed through her own unique body, as my life experience, which she does not have, is expressed through mine.

When I look at Charlotte Gainsbourg I see the spacious freedom of potentially going unnoticed. A body that slips from front to silhouette with all the fanfare of a twirling leaf, affords her a space I can never have. She gets to decide when she is seen, how she is seen, if she is seen. Ironically it seems to me, a body that by all accounts does not look very powerful, has all the potential power of being invisible. Isn’t that the deeper wish? To enter a room just as you are, without assessment, objectification, evaluation? To get to just be and exist unlabelled, even unsexed?

Upon seeing me sideways, my partner loves to shout “It just comes out of NOWHERE!” …meaning my butt….larger bodies are just that, bigger, more visible (and just to clarify, he is shouting this in a celebratory manner though sometimes I do remind him I also enjoy being in profile without it being announced at high volume.)

I think part of our wish for less flesh is really a wish to be less burdened by the vulnerability of being VISIBLE, or to be relieved of the burden of being missed. If you have the kind of body that precedes you upon every entry of every room, you have a body that eclipses other aspects of your personality. We know innately, that in many moments we are seen simply as ‘the woman with big boobs’ or ‘the fat lady’. When I look at Charlotte Gainsbourg I don’t want to lose weight, I want to feel free. I want to know what it feels like to live in a body that isn’t noticed until I make it noticeable (which, in this fantasy, is with my effortlessly cool French fashion sense).

When I look at Charlotte Gainsbourg I am wishing different circumstances existed in my life including; not being under the eye of patriarchy, equal access to opportunities regardless of sex and appearance, and gender based safety. But it’s easier to say - I wish I looked like her! I wish I had a body like hers! Because it is much harder, and takes much more work, to say: I wish I had confidence like her (isn’t that really what my eye read in the interview I saw? Someone at ease in their body and voice?) I wish sometimes, I had a body that was less easily sexualized so that I felt more safe, ie that the patriarchy didn’t exist and with it, all it’s oppressive, violent structures.

If weight loss was just about numbers we would all do it, could all do it, ye olde ‘eat less, move more’ would be true! but it’s not, so we can’t, we don’t and we shouldn’t. What do you mean when you say ‘you want to lose weight’? What ‘weight’ (read burden) are you really wanting to lose? What (do you imagine) are you are gaining?

You might mean power, success, support, acceptance, safety, sexuality, self expression. You might mean your identity. You might mean being seen as you. You might mean being missed entirely (isn’t a major point of weight loss to be infinitely less and less and smaller and smaller? Like at the core, mustn’t we be careful that’s not our only aim?).

What does your ‘I want to lose weight’ mean to you?

It might mean memories of a time in life when you had more freedom and less responsibilities. It might mean pursuing activities that brought you joy, less late nights at work, less snack-based dinners that leave you feeling ill. It might mean that you were slimmer when you were younger, more active, and less stressed, which often (but not always) results in being more slim than when stressed, less active and older. Instead of ‘wanting to lose weight’, the focus could be on finding time in your current life for things that bring you joy, activities you stopped doing, dinners you can look forward to eating. That seems much more fruitful than giving up sugar or ‘white flour’ for the month of January.

If you yearn to experience a slimness you’ve never had, maybe it’s a gnawing feeling that you could be taking care of yourself in a way you suspect is better. It could be a misconstrued way of saying ‘I wish I was supporting my body more’. It could be an assumption that the slim person is doing things habitually that you wish you were doing at all: eating more veggies, having a satisfying movement practice (note I didn’t say workout routine), getting more sleep.

It’s tricky and ultimately pointless to wish we ‘looked like’ someone else since so many slim people do not do any of those things but instead are just naturally slim. Instead, we can focus on what we’d like to feel/experience/do as us. Take steps towards those things in a way that makes the most sense for our lives, not someone else’s. I, for one, am not incorporating the diet I assume Charlotte lives on; smoking and pastries, (because of course that’s what sustains her, she’s a French actress and musician!). But I do go to France a lot, which does help me find the pleasant ease in my body that I crave looking at hers (thank you French culture which does not assign morality to bodies and sex! Freedom!).

I don't think it's misogynistic to want to lose weight. I don't think it's anti-feminist to want to feel however you want to feel in your body. But I DO think it takes a lot a lot of work to figure out exactly WHY you want to feel a certain way and if the way you want to feel has to do with your OWN needs, your OWN preferences, or if it is a reaction to the experiences and assumptions that other people make of you, and at you, when you are in the body you are in. I do think very often it is internalized fat-phobia and what that really is, is a wish for white-cis-hetero-male-power-over approval (like please say I make the cut!) deeply rooted in our brains.

I will never look like Charlotte Gainsbourg and that’s OK with me. But I can envy in her an ease in the world that I may never have. That is not self-hate, nor is it anti-female. It is a recognition that we are living in bodies we didn’t choose, within power structures we can’t remove (yet). It is recognition that we can’t change these things, except with extreme measures; restriction, body building, surgery, hormonal intervention, general population insurrection. And even then, we will always be us and not someone else, and that is very often a challenging and painful thing to be. The world is not an easy place for anyone, even a slim and successful French ingenue.

I hope this season, instead of repeating our wish to ‘lose weight’, over and over, like holiday jingles played endlessly on retail store speakers, we can instead ask - what is it you’d like to feel? How is it you’d like to be? What is it you wish was different? Maybe there, in that answer, we can start to form a vision of ourselves and our lives, that allows all the ways we currently are, to overlap, like a film filter, with all the ways we’d like to be. Maybe there we can see a dotted line that isn’t meant for cutting out but for connecting, and for drawing us more deeply in.

I can see the appeal of a frame that goes from armpit to ankle with nary a variation for one completely incontrovertible reason. More than once I have pretty much peed my pants simply because at the critical moment of FINALLY reaching a public bathroom I struggled to get my jeans off my extremely not-bony-behind. That is a problem the fashion world might solve once inclusive clothing really hits the mainstream. Until then, I assume Charlotte has other problems. Her pants probably fall down at inopportune moments, a fear I have never had and will never need to worry about. 

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