The Grief and Artifacts of Russian Interference (Or: What Did I Ever Do to You, Barbara Kingsolver?)

A few nights ago, I got to officially sign up for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. (https://action.kamalaharris.org/signup/volunteer-website/?source=homepage) I’ve had her bumper sticker on my car for weeks (First primary sticker I’ve seen in my neighborhood!) and I feel so lucky and happy to have her as a choice, but before I can get truly excited about 2020 (Or even the awesome election work I have slated for 2019!) I need to process some stuff. My thanks if you’re kind enough to read it!

I hate to even type the name, but I really, really wish that Bernie Sanders were not in the primary race. Right after he joined, I could see that a few friends (Who I guess have less-curated feeds than I do) were already annoyed/beleaguered by Bernie Bro/Becky posts and comments. I felt the bullying fear and loss wash over me even as I declined to engage with those threads. After a few days of NOT TODAY, PUTIN-ing (https://www.vpr.org/post/how-russian-social-media-effort-boosted-bernie#stream/0) I broke down and cried. Suddenly, it felt like the Blue Wave was over, like the most diverse primary in U.S. history had been irrevocably colonized by Russian troll farms and a racist, dead-hearted, misogynist hate monger. And the worst thing about it is that that hatemonger is our own.

Even as I mourned the lost of that brief and wonderful Bernie-free race, I knew that friends and family members were getting excited about him (or that other, dreamier, but equally white guy), not even reading the women’s platforms. I knew that the quest not to engage about Bernie, not to explode about him at family gatherings, would be intense and long-lasting, and that the assumption of “reasonableness” would be placed only on the males in the conversation. I knew that the burden to “behave” and “be civil” would be on me, and that foreknowledge made me want to be preemptively shrill, unhinged, and hysterical. (I’m reclaiming all of those terms, thanks.) All of the 2016-to-present election PTSD made me feel crazy, trapped, and hopeless, even as I should still be enjoying the progress of the last three years and the promise of 2020.

The cult of Bernie Sanders has done unspeakable amounts of damage to America. This week, my feelings of fear and pain found a new level in, of all things, the new Barbara Kingsolver book. I HATE the practice of accusing powerful women of betraying women (while dudes get off scot free), but abandonment and betrayal are the emotions I feel. Until she hurt my heart in Unsheltered, I hadn’t realized she was one of my heroes, one of the brain-mentors out there in the world looking out for us, with her ecology and her love of nature. It stings that she turned on the kind of woman I am, so forcefully and blindly. Maybe she never would have thought of me as a worthy person, who knows?

(Before I get to my main point, I want to cover the fat-phobia in the book: Kingsolver indulges in the trope of using fatness as a symbol for hateful, brainwashed, selfish, Trumpish capitalism. She accuses fat passengers of “oozing” into a character’s airline seat and suggests that thin, small people are the next phase of human evolution because they fit more neatly into airline seats. All of that stung, but what she did historically and politically was way, WAY worse.)

Unsheltered is novel about climate change, late capitalism, frightened Americans’ eternal battle against science, and the erasure from history of a real-life female scientist. I like all of those themes, that’s why I finished the book even though it vilified my fat body and erased my own place in history.

The book is set in 2015-2016, and the rise of Trump (Whom she refers to as “The Bullhorn,” the use of which nickname seems like its own form of protest-shaming and civility-policing.) punctuates the story. We see hopeful, peaceloving Bernie supporters, whom Kingsolver calls simply “The Revolution.” (Relatedly, in the novel we see present day Cuba as a utopia, which I guess it might be, I’ve never been. Kingsolver apparently missed One Day at a Time episode that explained to white people why Cuban Americans don’t necessarily love seeing Che Guevara on a t-shirt. Here’s an old article that explains:  https://www.seattletimes.com/life/lifestyle/cubans-enraged-at-che-as-t-shirt-icon/)

What we DON’T see in the book is Hillary Clinton or her supporters. The closest Kingsolver comes to mentioning Hillary is when the protagonist sadly realizes that Trump “or someone like him” seemed bound to win the election.

I know it’s a novel and not a history book, but still. I knew that the erasing of women (particularly women of color, which many of Hillary’s supporters were/are) from history happened, but its horrifying to see it happen almost in real time! It is maddening and creepy to see Hillary and her supporters written out of this 2015-2016 story that I know so many people will read and love.

The erasing of women’s work makes me apoplectic, whether it’s past, present, or future. Not only does Kingsolver (like everyone who equates Hillary to Trump) erase a former Secretary of State’s lifetime of service AND HER ACTUAL POLITICAL PLATFORM from the author’s version of history, she is erasing the majority of Americans as well. She is dismissing the women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, disabled people, and ALL of the other Americans who worked, sacrificed, fretted, and took near-constant online abuse from all sides in order to try and move America’s future leftward, heartward, equailityward.

Where is the payoff from erasing the majority of Americans from history? Is it worth this much disinformation to continue to convince herself she’s right, to continue hoping that all of us who don’t present as socialist enough will be headed for the firing squads, to keep propping up the white-supremacy-serving idea that “identity politics” (i.e. the concerns of every group that isn’t white, straight, cis, able-bodied men) should be silenced in public debate?

I’m supposed to be giving out more benefit-of-the-doubt this year, so maybe she made the book so lady-erasing on purpose. Maybe her characters were monstrous fat-phobes to show how bad that kind of prejudice is. But three years of election traumaand 30 years of regular PTSD means I know how to spot gaslighting when I see it. I’m almost certain that one of the authors I love can’t be trusted anymore. I hate when things get all Invasion of the Body Snatchers in my brain, but I think Bernie and the troll farms (NOT a good name for a band) only teased out a misogyny, a Stockholm Syndrome, a gentle white supremacy that was there in all of us. Still, it’s a loss. It hurts to unfriend and unfollow, but maybe this loss will free my eyeballs for more humane books.

Open Letter: Medical Fat-phobia

To the Management Team at Mount Airy Family Practice;

When I first started coming to Mount Airy Family Practice, I found Vincent Tyson to be a very helpful caregiver. He gave me great advice for navigating my way out of Acute Stress Disorder and helped me find a lifesaving treatment for my depression—I will never stop being grateful for his help.

However, some things were just not right. During exams where a second person was required to be in the room, he would joke that “They just don’t trust us to be alone together.” What’s the joke there? That harassment precautions are silly?

And then there were the reports: Although I have never been treated for anything weight/heart/blood sugar related, I always had to read the phrase “morbidly obese” on my reports. (I understand that that may be a requirement of the insurance companies, but it still reads as a reminder to feel “less than.”) Though I’ve never visited Mount Airy Family Practice for vein trouble, “varicose veins” were always listed on the reports as well. Those two factors combined gave me the feeling that I was being assessed aesthetically rather than (or, I guess, as well as) medically.

Then, a few months ago, I did have a question about weight. I had gained a bunch of weight without significantly changing my exercise or diet routine, and I just wanted to make sure that all of my other vitals were okay. Weight gain is a common side-effect of Prozac, and it seems like a small price to pay for mental health. I did not ask Vincent for any help with dieting or losing weight.

Nonetheless, my report said that I had “weight gain from excessive calorie consumption” even though I had just finished explaining to him that my diet and exercise had not changed.

This is a common problem, often discussed in the body positive community worldwide. Physicians often dismiss and ignore true symptoms, data, and information from patients, listening instead to their own biases about fat people being lazy, gluttonous, and stupid.

I wrote to him on the Patient Portal to inform him that this was not okay, suggested some reading sources on the consequences of medical fat-phobia, and reiterated that I was not interested in dieting, citing the fact that the workup he had just done pointed to health. I told him what I still believe, which is that ignoring my actual data in favor of preconceived biases is just bad science.

Vincent then ignored the boundary I had just set and wrote back to again suggest that I go on a diet.

I then called my insurance provider to switch to a different PCP within Mount Airy Family Practice, but was informed by the practice that I would no longer be allowed treatment there.

After that, I received a letter from Vincent (whom I had told in no uncertain terms not to contact me again) gaslighting me, calling me a liar, and saying that I had been “unfair.” It seems that he felt it was unfair that I expected him to hear and respond to information that I gave him (and that medical tests gave him) about my body.

Though I have found a kinder and more humane doctor, it still makes me so angry and sad that your practice refused me medical care because I expected to be treated like a human being, because I didn’t want to be shamed for my size anymore, because I refused to accept Vincent’s skewed version over what I knew to be true. I was afraid, after that, that I wouldn’t find a doctor, that I couldn’t be treated medically without learning to apologize for taking up space in the world.

Your team put me in a dangerous, unfair place, but it seems I am one of the luckier of Vincent’s patients. When I reached out to neighbors about my experience, one woman wrote to me that he ignored her symptoms for months, and because she was losing weight, he “even joked that feeling crummy sure was a great diet.” This woman turned out to have ovarian cancer—due to Vincent’s dehumanizing refusal to hear her symptoms, this neighbor of mine could have died.

Not all forms of harassment are shocking and Weinstein-esque. Some forms of harassment are more mundane, the everyday reminders that we are expected to feel less-than, to apologize to our size, that we must reach a culturally acceptable weight in order to have our symptoms treated at all. They are dangerous and deadly habits that most medical practitioners accept and most insurance companies require.

Everyone can do something about this problem I want to urge you to find ways to remember to treat fat patients with the same dignity and respect that you give to normatively-sized people. The book The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor is a wonderful place to start.

Best,

Sharon Wiedmann

Woke Misogyny Is Hard to Write About

Trigger Warning: Sexual assault, online violence

***PLEASE NOTE: I’m writing as a white cisgendered women, and every oppression that happens to me happens so much more often to women of color, trans people, disabled people, etc. My point of view is extraordinarily privileged in so many ways. As I write about the ways in which misogyny and rape-victim-blaming can intersect with the callout culture approach to social justice work, it’s likely it will seem like I’m forgetting that privilege. I am not. I’m interested here in what the identity of rape survivor really feels like in a body, and how misogyny and victim-blaming still exists even in the most well-intentioned circles. A disclaimer can’t assure that I won’t get it wrong, but this is the space where I get to get it wrong so I can learn. ***

A few weeks ago, I read the wonderful, wonderful, WONDERFUL book The Body Is Not an Apology (https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/) by Sonya Renee Taylor. The book came into my life at a time when I was feeling stuck, and it felt like a lifeboat. The theme of the book, to wildly over-simplify, is that radical self-love is a starting point for making the world a less-terrorized place for bodies. Not just an I-love-my-curves kind of love, well that too but also a deeper love that celebrates even the difficult, ESPECIALLY the difficult, parts of the process each of us is going through. The book gave me space to truly love myself, even to forgive myself, and I felt ready to grow and serve the world better.

I LOVED The Body Is Not an Apology, I still do. I evangelized it all over town, I couldn’t help myself. My neighborhood even has a body-positive book club, and I joined even though I am super wary of groups. The problem is, Sonya Renee Taylor is a friend of some former friends of mine, and the IRL side of the life-saving book knocked me off of my radical-self-love square almost as soon as I got on there. The world, like depression-brain, will always find a way to remind me to live in self-criticism, to remind me that nothing I ever do will be good enough. The depression-brain part is on me, but I didn’t get this way in a vacuum.

While I was going on a kickass self-love adventure with TBINAA, the book club’s Facilitator was having a spoken word journey. This is where things went awry. A few days before the group was meeting for the second time, Facilitator posted a video of a poem to her facebook group. Not Sonya, that would have been lovely, but Mean “Body Positive” White Lady. M “BP” WL was a sort-of-friend of mine until she wrote a blustery post attacking Hillary voters (There may come a day when I’m over the 2016 primary, but this is not that day.) and, when I pushed back, called me a “vagina voter.” How can you call yourself body positive if my anatomy rules out my enfranchisement? Anyway, the usual things happened after that, some people pressed like, some people collected cultural capital by piling on and saying GOD KNOWS WHAT, I blocked the thread and moved on. Mean “Body Positive” White Lady, through very little fault of her own, became a figure of fear in the trauma-soup that is my once-beloved National Poetry Slam community.

For almost a decade, the thing that has made it hardest for me to hear and be heard in online interactions with the NPS community is the pile-on. In fairness, in about 2010 when I secondhand-witnessed my first NPS pile-on, social networking was fairly new. Troll farms, 4chan, revenge porn, etc, weren’t part of the public lexicon, and there wasn’t as deep an understanding of the violence that the online world can perpetrate on women, particularly queer women and women of color. Because of my magic/annoying PTSD brain, the mob-mentality aspect of the pile-on jumped right out at me.

The First Big Pile-On (meaning, the FBPO that entered my consciousness, not the first they had) didn’t happen to me, but also it sort of feels like it did. The details are fuzzy to me, but I’ll do my best. A White Lady Slam Leader was sort of live-facebooking the finals of a national slam competition in…2010? She was making the point that the options for how to be a woman and get slam points are very limited, and in making that point, she said something racist—NOT OKAY. I’m glad people spoke up about her misstep, but the response was wildly disproportionate, with everyone weighing in, comment after comment. To her credit, WLSL saw the whole thing as a learning opportunity, and I learned a lot too, but alongside our progress toward awakening came a clear message: You don’t get to comment on poetry culture, and if you do, you are eligible to be ripped to shreds. At the same time that the mass-pushback was helping us make progress and learn, at the same time that it was helping marginalized voices be heard, it was also sending women a clear message to stay in our place, to keep ourselves small and stop trying to comment on the culture as a whole.

Not too long after that, my own work with the Philadelphia Poetry Slam started to feel like I was being used and like my work (We’d call it emotional labor now—YAY TERMS!) was being taken for granted, for only-sort-of-related reasons. For good and ill, the NPS community stayed with me through my friend feeds. That’s how, in that benighted spring of 2016, I got tangled in the tail-end of a much more upsetting pile-on.

A queer white woman had written a performance poem about her rape. Some of the language in the poem implied that her rapist was Mexican, when he was, in fact, white. THAT’S BAD! It’s upsetting and definitely a problem but also IT’S A POEM SHE WROTE ABOUT HER OWN RAPE. Even though she was a very privileged rape survivor, she was still a rape survivor, and I felt like a PUBLIC PILE-ON was maybe not the best way to address it. I’m a super-lucky rape survivor too, but I don’t think I could’ve made it through the NATIONAL TRIAL BY FACEBOOK that this woman survived. I’m sorry, but no one deserves that.

Like the WLSL, this poet was willing to learn from her mistake. The Woman Who’d Written Her Rape Poem Wrong wrote a public apology on facebook, including an apology for taking private time to heal. By now you’re yelling JANE! DON’T COMMENT ON THAT THREAD! Because I never learn, I commented. I told her she’s still a person, still entitled to self-care, and that taking time for herself was not going to make there be more racism. Then I blocked the thread, vaguebooked about how the NPS community can be shitty and misogynist and went to bed.

What I didn’t know was that the Queen Bully of Poetry Land, who used to be a friend of mine, was at the center of this pile-on. My phone buzzed around 3 AM, QBPL letting me know she thinks I’m as racist as Susan B. Anthony (There’s a certain line of thinking that suggests feminism can never be a thing because of Susan B. Anthony’s poor choices. If this same standard were applied to men, there would NEVER BE ANYTHING EVER.) She told me that I had failed at teaching not because I’d lacked self-care, but because of my own weakness and entitlement. Accurate, but not helpful. After I blocked her and went back to sleep, she texted my ex-wife/BFF to yell at her for having #blacklivesmatter on her facebook page, since clearly we both must be unredeemably racist for thinking a white rape victim is still a person.

No matter how much I distance myself from that NPS scene in my heart and mind and feeds, it still hangs like a tattooed ghost over my creative life. I was surprised when my jangledness about those years-ago pile-ons knocked me out of The Body Is Not an Apology Book Club, but I’m glad to give the Facilitator the chance to go on her spoken word journey without worrying about my weird residual triggers. Today, for me, radical self-love means admitting that this stuff still matters, that there’s still so much fear and un-worked-out pain, so much letting go of the ten-to-twenty-years-ago NPS community that still sometimes knocks me off balance. Mostly, that off-balance is good. Mostly, I’m getting somewhere.

Fat and Happy and a Little Befuddled

Inspired by this Radiolab episode about an artist who is creating and island of fat in appreciation for the substance itself.

            I tend to forget (at least consciously) for long spates of time that there’s supposed to be anything wrong with the size of my body. In the past twenty-five years, since reaching adulthood, I’ve wavered between size 18 and size 24, with a brief Southern California stopover at size 14. I’ve always loved clothes and love them even more now that there’s more cuteness available in my size(s). In general, I forget to not feel beautiful, assuming anyone who thinks otherwise is just a creep. My Aunt Connie always told me that “fat is jerk repellant,” and although I wish it were truer than it is, it’s comforting advice.

            I never really thought about Fat Liberation or saw myself as having a marginalized body until the last few years’ deep dive into trauma work and feminism. Two of my favorite sources for body-positive fat advocacy are the She’sAll Fat Podcast and Lindy West’s book Shrill. These and lots of other sources have helped me to clarify my view of how body positivity fits into the overall project of justice.

            Although I’ve never been all the way convinced (at least as an adult) that my body isn’t beautiful, there’s one insidious societal message that did get in there: “Fat women need to take what they can get when it comes to men.” When I first (polyamorously) returned to dating men back in 2011, one of my first guy-loves was someone who terrified me. I went almost immediately into an abusive not-relationship with a (not always consensually) sadistic jerk partly because I was so shocked and delighted to find a man attracted to me. Luckily at the time I was still with Amy who has always thought that I’m perfect (even when I’m really, REALLY not) and had a lovely FWB who treated me like a Mystery-Science-Theater-watching goddess. Still, the “you’re lucky to have anything” mentality was my accomplice in many, may nightmare scenarios with men who were more than willing to take advantage of that vulnerability—that was their fault, not mine, but I’m happy to be in a kinder-to-myself place.

            Of course, my reluctance to have standards and boundaries was tied to the trapped-and-helpless residue of trauma, but a lack of general worthiness, especially when it comes to men, has made the trauma harder to come to terms with.

            After a powerful year of trauma work, I feel fully entitled to decide my own body size, but I’m not sure my actual body agrees. There have been so many years when I’ve resolved to lose 40 pounds, and it has always been the most elusive (and honestly, least-cared-about) goal. They say if you keep not doing a goal, you don’t really want it, so I dropped it. Kept exercising and eating lots of produce and mostly forgot about it.

            Then at a doctor’s appointment last fall, I found out that I weighed almost 300 pounds, and a few weeks later at the follow-up appointment, I was at 303. That’s the highest weight I’ve ever had measured. I gained 25 pounds last fall (I’ve been half-jokingly calling it my #metoo weight…) and I am freaked. I’m also freaked that I am freaked, because it feels like I’m letting my body positive sisters and brothers and non-binary siblings down.

            Nonetheless, there’s that stupid goal on the list again—lose 40 pounds. I chose 40 because it feels like a reasonable amount to lose in a year, but it also feels impossible and stupid and embarrassing. I eat pretty well, just more than I am supposed to, but putting ANY restrictions on food makes me feel deeply anxious, like I’m holding myself up for judgement and taking my own privacy away. Mostly food is just delicious, and I don’t know why it feels like privacy, but also maybe I do.

            Friday night on the way home from yoga I was listening to this interview with Roxane Gay  that reminded me she also sometimes thinks of her body as “unruly” and that rang a bell. The 25 #metoo pounds made me feel out of control and made me worry that I had lost touch with myself.

            So that’s where I’m at right now, just asking my body what it needs from me and doing my best to listen. I love my body so much for always being with me through this not-always-easy life—though trauma and bad classrooms and a housefire and those GODDAMNED election results, but also for niece-and-nephew hugs and gorgeous adventures and ramen at Morimoto and a long marriage and a wonderful time taking back the term “spinsterhood.” I’m proud of myself for keeping alive, for keeping safe, and I hope that my body knows I’m grateful.