Redefining Body Image

WHAT WE'RE ABOUT

RBI focuses on using expressive writing, design-oriented work, photography, media, research, and community input to fuel fat positive, body acceptance, discussion, and outreach. Our goal is to redefine the way we view and think about body image, size, fat, discrimination, health, fitness, wellness, mental/chronic illness, stigma, and other related topics.

We are constantly redefining our own perspectives, and therefore tend to write a lot about our personal experiences. Many followers and contributors are living with anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphic disorder, depression, and a variety of other body image disorders or mental illnesses, so please be respectful and remember that health applies differently to everyone. Any and all potentially triggering content will be prefaced with a trigger warning.

RBI supports all races, genders, classes, and sizes. We try our best to make this a safe space for everyone. If we are not doing our job or checking our privilege, we invite you to please inform us.

Some of the artwork you see here has been created by our founder or moderators, some sourced when applicable. Please be kind enough to source this blog whenever you share it's content.

We are not health professionals. Any and all advice provided on this blog is supported only by our own research, studies, and personal experiences; nothing more.

This blog is part of the Safe Space Network.

PSA:

versatilequeen:

Also, if you are going to date someone with a mental illness (or any illness) make sure you have accepted that they might not get better for a very long time, if ever.

Do not enter the relationship thinking that you can fix them or that they will be fine in a few months. Never do that.

Movies really give us a false sense of what happens in these cases.

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Our culture teaches us about shame—it dictates what is acceptable and what is not. We weren’t born craving perfect bodies. We weren’t born afraid to tell our stories. We weren’t born with a fear of getting too old to feel valuable. We weren’t born with a Pottery Barn catalog in one hand and heartbreaking debt in the other. Shame comes from outside of us—from the messages and expectations of our culture. What comes from the inside of us is a very human need to belong, to relate.
”

- I Thought It Was Just Me: Women Reclaiming Power and Courage in a Culture of Shame by Brene Brown (via runalovegood)

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All girls continue to be taught when they are young, if not by their parents then by the culture around them, that they must earn the right to be loved — that “femaleness” is not good enough. This is a female’s first lesson in the school of patriarchal thinking and values. She must earn love. She is not entitled. She must be good enough to be loved. And good is always defined by someone else, someone on the outside.”
- bell hooks
”

- (via 5ft1)

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[TW: Sexual Assault]

His lips crushed mine, stopping my protest. He kissed me angrily, roughly, his other hand gripping tight around the back of my neck, making escape impossible. I shoved against his chest with all my strength, but he didn’t even seem to notice. His mouth was soft, despite the anger, his lips molding to mine in a warm, unfamiliar way.

I grabbed at his face, trying to push it away, failing again. He seemed to notice this time, though, and it aggravated him. His lips forced mine open, and I could feel his hot breath in my mouth.

Acting on instinct, I let my hands drop to my side, and shut down. I opened my eyes and didn’t fight, didn’t feel… just waited for him to stop.

”

-
Twilight: Eclipse p. 331 (Bella and Jacob’s first kiss)

This is rape culture.

Young women are taught to think of this passage - which describes sexual assault - as erotic. Young men are taught to force their will on young women, regardless of any (non)verbal cues, because sex is conquest and women are objects - not something to be done between two consenting individuals because it’s pleasurable for both people.
The most frightening thing about this excerpt is that many survivors of sexual assault who have disclosed to me describe stories that sound exactly like this one.

(via profeministbro)

Vomiting everywhere

(via arilyn-anson Well shit, i didn’t know it was this bad. Wow. (via fuckthacistem)

The lines before that:

    He still had my chin—his fingers holding too tight, till it hurt—and I saw the resolve form abruptly in his eyes.
    “N—-” I started to object, but it was too late.

And after he assaulted her she punched him in the face but due to his “super human strength” she broke her hand, said “Don’t touch me!” and then:

    “Just let me drive you home,” Jacob insisted. Unbelievably, he had the nerve to wrap his arm around my waist.

    I jerked away from him.

And then:

    When he got in the driver’s side, he was whistling.

AND THEN while he was driving:

    “…There is so much I can give you that he can’t. I’ll bet he couldn’t even kiss you like that—-because he would hurt you. I would never, never hurt you, Bella.”

    I held up my injured hand.

    He sighed. “That wasn’t my fault. You should have known better.”

And then:

    He grinned over at me. “You kissed me back.”

    I gasped, unthinkingly balling my hands up into fists again, hissing when my broken hand reacted.

    “Are you okay?” he asked.

     “I did not.”

    “I think I can tell the difference.”

    “Obviously you can’t——that was not kissing back, that was trying to get you the hell off me, you idiot.”

    He laughed a low, throaty laugh. “Touchy. Almost overly defensive, I would say.

    I took a deep breath. There was no point in arguing with him; he would twist anything I said.

Then when she gets home, to where her father, Charlie, the police officer, is:

    “Why did she hit you?”

    “Because I kissed her,” Jacob said, unashamed.

    “Good for you, kid,” Charlie congratulated him.

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Additionally, trans people tend to face a disproportionate amount of animosity for perpetuating the gender binary than do binary-identified heterosexual feminine cis-gendered women (despite that such women have faced accusations of colluding with the oppressor, among other things). “When trans women have every aspect of their presentation examined and labeled either hyperfeminine and therefore fake or not
feminine enough and therefore male, while the same traits would be seen as normal in cis women, that’s transmisogyny…
”

- When Feminism is Revolting: Initial Thoughts on Abolition of Gender (via ninjabikeslut)

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The most common reaction, the one those of us who experience this type of abuse get most frequently, is: suck it up. Grow a thick skin. “Don’t feed the trolls” - as if feeding them were the problem. The Telegraph’s Cristina Odone was amongst many commentators to imply that Mary Beard should have done just that rather than speaking out this week. “Come on, Mary,” wrote Odone. “Women in public arenas get a lot of flak – they always have. A woman who sticks her head above the parapet… . is asking for brickbats.”

Asking for it. By daring to be a woman to be in public life, Mary Beard was asking to be abused and harassed and frightened, and so is any person who dares to express herself whilst in possession of a pair of tits.

”

-
Take Back The Net: it’s time to end the culture of online misogyny

Excellent point.

(via eddieatthegov)

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I think healthcare providers should treat the patient in front of them for the healthcare issue that they have using evidence based medicine and informed consent . I would hope that healthcare providers who don’t have what they need to properly treat fat people would be on the forefront of activism to get the tools that they need to help their patients, not trying to hide their fat bigotry in talk about whose fault fat people’s healthcare issues are or how they could treat them if their bodies were smaller.

When you go to the doctor I suggest that you interrupt conversations about whose fault something is and instead ask that your doctor focus on providing you with evidence-based healthcare for the issue that you are presenting with. Some phrases that I find helpful at the doctor are:

• Do thin people get this health issue? Can I get the treatment protocol that they get?

• Can you help me understand how suggesting that I should be blamed for [my health issue] is part of your plant to help me get better? or I disagree that suggesting that I should be blamed for my health issue will help us to treat it so let’s please move on.

• Can we please skip over who is to blame and focus on how we’re going to treat this issue?

• Can you give me the name of a study of a weight loss intervention where the majority of people have lost the amount of weight that you are recommending that I lose and kept it off for the long term, as well as a study that shows that doing so would have long term positive effects on my health?

• Studies from Yale have shown that over 50% of doctors have some prejudice against people of size – do you consider yourself part of that group of doctors?

Regardless, if you go for healthcare you deserve to get care for your health, not suggestions of fault and lectures.

”

- Healthcare, Fault, and Fat People - Dances with Fat

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Let’s examine this:

Miss is a word for a woman that has not been married.

Mrs. is an abbreviation of the word Mistress, used as a title for a woman that is married or widowed.

Ms. is a title used for a woman whose marital status is unknown or irrelevant (as in business).

The letters Ms. are not an abbreviation of a word, they are an amalgamation drawn from the letters of Miss and Mrs.

On the other hand, a man is just a mister (Mr.)

You see men don’t have to determine their sexual availability like women.

”

- Laila Alsabahi (via goodpeopledosomething)

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It’s true: Whole Foods employees “voted” on our benefits package this year. What Mackey doesn’t tell you is this: On the health care portion of our benefits vote, we were presented with three choices that we had no voice in drafting, and all of them resulted in significant cuts in benefits and increases in out-of-pocket employee costs. This not only has implications for the overall health of employees, but also resulted in, essentially, a pay cut.

Employees had no avenue to negotiate over whether these options were fair. We had no opportunity to discuss them with our co-workers. Instead, we were pulled in small groups to a conference room filled with computers where we listened to corporate “benefits specialists” explain each of the options, ask for clarifying questions, and then give us a few minutes to make our choice.

In my voting session, the benefits specialist glossed over the ways in which two packages threw workers with families under the bus in order to lessen cuts to the benefit packages of single workers who have no dependents.

Then, on the way out, they handed us “I voted!” stickers and thanked us for participating in “workplace democracy.”

Of course, it wasn’t workplace democracy in that conference room—it was management forcing us to accept a benefits cut in order to increase the already massive profits that we create for the company. This mask of democracy is central to the way Whole Foods does business, but it’s a mask that workers can increasingly see through.

And that’s why, in ever-increasing numbers, we want a union.

”

- Telling the whole truth about Whole Foods (via stfuconservatives)

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Female fat [as] a moral issue is articulated with words like good and bad. If our culture’s fixation on female fatness or thinness was about sex, it would be private issue between a woman and her lover; if it were about health, between a woman and herself… A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but one about obedience.
”

- Naomi Wolf The Beauty Myth (via bigbadjuju)

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Gaslighting is the systematic attempt by one person to erode another’s reality. This is done by telling them that what they are experiencing isn’t so – and, the gradual giving up on the part of the other person.
”

- Robin Stern (via elizabitchtaylor)

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Just a reminder, ladies, that you may graduate from Wellesley, then Yale Law School, become one of the most powerful and influential lawyers in the country, then the First Lady of the United States, then a U.S. Senator from New York, come this close to being the Democratic nominee for president yourself, and ultimately serve as the Secretary of State, but you’ll always be a woman — an emotional, unhinged, woman.
”

-
From the article Here’s the New York Post with the Most Sexist Headline of the Year on the New York Post’s cover of Hillary Clinton (with a scared-looking Bill in the corner) testifying during the congressional hearing over the embassy attack in Benghazi. (via lcucinotta)

Thank you.

(via cactustreemotel)

And once again, HILLARY, who calmly answered the same irrelevant question somewhere around 12,000 times is portrayed as “exploding with rage” while the male Republican congressman who literally screamed at her isn’t mentioned.

Anyone want to come talk to me about how sexism doesn’t exist anymore?

(via stfusexists)

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ACCORDING to the United States government, nearly 7 out of 10 American adults weigh too much. (In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention categorized 74 percent of men and 65 percent of women as either overweight or obese.)

The meta-analysis, published this week in The Journal of the American Medical Association, reviewed data from nearly a hundred large epidemiological studies to determine the correlation between body mass and mortality risk. The results ought to stun anyone who assumes the definition of “normal” or “healthy” weight used by our public health authorities is actually supported by the medical literature.

The study, by Katherine M. Flegal and her associates at the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health, found that all adults categorized as overweight and most of those categorized as obese have a lower mortality risk than so-called normal-weight individuals.

If the government were to redefine normal weight as one that doesn’t increase the risk of death, then about 130 million of the 165 million American adults currently categorized as overweight and obese would be re-categorized as normal weight instead.

”

- Read the rest at: Our Absurd Fear of Fat - nytimes.com

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1 k 196

bridgettelizabeth:

- Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls

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“
I don’t mean to take major issue with you about this. I’m not super thin, but I’m thin for, like, Detroit.
”

-
Lena Dunham, in response to Howard Stern’s comment calling her “a little fat girl who kinda looks like Johah Hill”

Okay, I have never seen Girls. I have no intention of seeing Girls—mainly because I don’t get HBO. And have no idea what the show is like or if Lena Dunham is a good actress or writer. But I will tell you something, I will avoid her and her projects at all costs because this is unacceptable.

(via zoearcher)

Grrl, no. Just…All kinds of no.

Signed,
A fat girl from Detroit.

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