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kathryne's avatar

Ooh, I loved this!

"Y'all, the grandparents are not okay" hit me so hard.

**mention of dieting below**

A friend in my Quaker meeting was telling me last week about her & her wife's fasting routine and I just... had no idea how to respond. It's a specific kind of heartbreaking to hear a 70 year old feminist lesbian artist and activist talk so matter-of-factly about needing to maintain their weight.

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Sarah's avatar

My mother is around the age of the "great aunts" in the article, which is kind of a trip... I mean, I'm forty and my mother is in her seventies, but all of my great aunts (now dead) were Really Old, but possibly they were just my mom's current age? I wonder how old my mother seems to my cousins' kids?

I think a lot about how my maternal grandmother had an early life made precarious by knock on effects of the 1918 Flu Pandemic and then the Great Depression. For her, marrying my grandfather wasn't just about love, but also a step towards the security that eluded her mother. And I think that definitely affected how she understood her body, and the bodies of her daughters. (Complicated by a husband who looked like JFK and who brought his secretary/mistress home for Sunday dinners.)

My mother understands herself in terms of her ability to keep my father happy (to the best of my knowledge my father is more or less unaware of women who aren't my mother as sexually relevant), and suffers great angst because I'm forty, look forty, and am not married.

And I (out on the very tall end of the bell curve of women's height*) woke up one morning, looked at Vogue and realized that everyone in it was either under 25 or had serious money or both. I decided that since I suffered from neither affliction, trying to look like I was still 22 was not an achievable goal. This is not to say I am a perfect font of body positivity or suggest that one of my solutions to my own problems is also a solution to someone else's--when the real problem is 'our society is infested by the white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy-- just that every so often I look in the mirror and think "the fact that I'm feeling bad about my [whatever the neurosis of the moment is] is a clear sign that I survived my twenties long enough to look like this." And that feels really powerful.

*Which is a Whole Thing, once you're taller than 5'8" or so.

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