Challenging the Bone Goddess

Amie Tullius

An artist friend of mine was talking about how much more interesting it was for her to draw fat bodies than skinny ones. I've noticed that it can be the same to look at fat bodies. I like fat. My women friends
range from bony to orbital in their degree of plumpness, and honestly, the skinny ones don't look better to me anymore--and they certainly don't feel better. I've gotten jealous before of friends'
luscious, buttery fat that makes them seem especially graceful and sensual. It takes effort to see fat as beautiful--particularly when it comes to one's own body. It feels vulnerable to not even try for the
cultural ideal. It is hard to remember that the cultural ideal is only cultural. We've made the model body out to be our moral, aesthetic, and medical ideal body type, not just the one flavor of beautiful that she is.

The "ideal" woman is powerful. She and her skeletal fleet keep watch over us 24 hours a day from busses, billboards, magazines, television, movies, cereal boxes, and our own minds. Who is this bony template who overlays herself onto my body when I look in the
mirror, and shows me what pokes out, and what needs to be carved away? She is kind of like a goddess, perhaps the closest thing our junk media offers up to worship. The sad thing is, we do worship her. I have made offerings of hundreds of pounds of flesh to her over
the course of my life. I have given her sweat; I have cried to her, and begged her to relieve the suffering that she herself caused.

She is a paradox, this goddess of thinness. She defines sensuality, and sexiness, but hoards it all for herself, and leaves us mortals to reject our physical selves and sensual impulses. It is paradoxical that we spend all of our time denying ourselves, dieting, disliking our bodies as they are, in the process of trying to achieve a sexy, sensual body. It seems a lot like the traditional Christian idea of toiling away in this world to reap the rewards of the next. It makes so much more sense to me to quit struggling, and trying to change ourselves, and instead plunge into our sensual selves right now, unaltered and perfect.

Is it that easy? Can we just decide to stop wanting the culturally ideal body? As I see from looking at the bodies around me, I've noticed the supermodel body type is a somewhat freakish, and rare phenomenon, that does not occur frequently in nature. The problem
is that it occurs over and over in advertising: the average American is exposed to fifteen hundred ads each day, a large percentage of which feature women's bodies. We sometimes underestimate the power of the media, but to a large degree the media has replaced
religion in shaping the goals and motivations of the masses in this country. Advertising has become a modern set of commandments, telling us what to think, eat, wear, and how we should look. In our consumeristic society, the media alludes to us that buying and acquiring things are promises of happiness; in the past only religious pursuits could offer such promises of contentedness.

For women, having the ideal body is still what we are told is central to the pursuit of happiness. The media provides us with exact instructions as to what the ideal body looks like, and how we can attain it. It's come to an extreme where supermodel bodies have become almost more real than real women's bodies, because of the
sheer frequency that we see them, and the exalted way in which they are portrayed. Seeing very similar model bodies over and over legitimates them as the correct female body types--happier, healthier, sexier because of their body type. They seem better in some very deep and moral way, and hold promises of a better life.

Reclaiming fat, then, becomes not just a matter of growing a new aesthetic sensibility, but an act of heresy and resistance. For fat-loving to really take off, it would require a shift in the culture and a new influx of larger models into our daily media diet. In the meantime, it requires developing a countercultural self that challenges the authority of the bone goddess. Like so many other women, I've struggled with a lifelong obsession with food and weight. After spending my adolescence starving myself so that I could become the ideal, I swore off dieting and leapt into a new sensual life governed by a love for the raw truth of my body. It's required that I become comfortable looking at other real women's bodies and enjoying them. Generally when I see myself naked I feel pleased and sometimes even delighted. Yet as much progress as I've made there's a part of me that feels like if I just buckled down and was really disciplined, the smooth, fatless magazine body would
burst out of me like Aphrodite from Zeus' forehead. To love one's own lumps, and extra flesh takes incredible comfort with oneself as an individual, and for me has become a practice in the pursuit of a conscious and empowered life.
. . .

It's a naked weekend. I'm at a hot spring in a sulfurous pool of naked bodies that look natural and normal in the same way that their faces look natural and normal. And yet they are unfamiliar, not one body, not even the thin ones, look like any body you would see in any women's magazine. They look good. They look like naked humans. I feel a warm friendliness toward the real bodies of my wrinkled, lumpy, sagging species. And then back in the dressing room, with the mirrors, I look at my own body and it looks wrong to me. Again. Still.