Puritan Pundits Should Chill Out — Here Are 5 Reasons I'm Happy I've Had Lots of Casual Sex

August 30, 2011 Greta Christina13 Comments

The phenomenon of women who have sex for its own sake seems to baffle many people. It’s widely believed that women have sex for love, commitment, poor self-control, to manipulate men, to please men, to make babies, to sooth their low self-esteem, and just about any reason at all other than their own pleasure. (While men, of course, are rutting horndogs who just want to stick it in the nearest wet hole available.) Sex, according to this trope, is by its nature a commodity that women possess and men are trying to obtain… and the phenomenon of women who are “giving it away,” who are defying these assumptions and treating sex as a pleasurable interaction between equals, is making the punditocracy piss all over itself.

Mark Regnerus, Slate: “If women were more fully in charge of how their relationships transpired, we’d be seeing, on average, more impressive wooing efforts, longer relationships, fewer premarital sexual partners, shorter cohabitations, and more marrying going on.”

Rachel Simmons, relationship advice columnist for Teen Vogue: “These letters worry me. They signify a growing trend in girls’ sexual lives where they are giving themselves to guys on guys’ terms. They hook up first and ask later.”

Bill O’Reilly: “Many women who get pregnant are blasted out of their minds when they have sex.”

Susan Walsh, Hooking Up Smart: “They cannot see that as she [self-proclaimed proud- and- happy slut Jaclyn Friedman] proclaims her detachment from sex, she gets emotionally wounded every single time. They take heart from her proclamation that sluthood is a healing thing. Ms. Friedman is a hot mess. Craiglist Casual Encounters was not a miracle, it was a disaster that broke her heart again. I hope she does find Love, the whole enchilada.”

Laura Sessions Stepp, author of Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both… oh, just look at the title.

Then there’s the piece that got me staying up until four in the morning writing about this in the first place: Christian author Don Miller, who recently asked his female readers (and his male ones, in a separate post) if they’ve ever had casual sex… and if so, why. Miller doesn’t ask this in a neutral way, a way that expresses a genuine desire for an honest answer. He’s asking in a way that makes it obvious what he thinks the answer will be — whatever the reason is, it must be bad, bad, bad. In fact, he’s asking in a way that totally slants the answers he’s likely to get. He’s asking “why some girls give up sex easily” (as if sex for women is always a surrender), and “do you use sex for some kind of social power or to make yourself feel good?”

It’s like a push-poll — a political poll designed to elicit a particular response, so you can shape people’s opinions and make your position seem more popular than it really is.

And this push-poll tendency is shared by many of those who ask, “Why on earth would women want casual hook-ups?”. They’re not asking the question, “Why do some women have casual sex?” They’re asking the question, “Why on earth would some women have casual sex, when it’s so clearly a bad idea that will do them and other women harm and is obviously not in their best interest?” And they’re doing this despite research showing that casual sex isn’t, in fact, psychologically harmful for young adults. They’re basing their questions on the common assumption that women’s natural state is to keep their legs closed unless they’ve got their hands on marriage or commitment… and that women who don’t are some sort of baffling phenomenon that needs to be explained.

So I thought I’d try to explain it.

I’ve had a lot of experience with casual sex. It’s been a while, and I’m not particularly interested in it anymore. But for many years, pretty much all the sex I had fell somewhere on the “casual” spectrum. Personal ad hookups; occasional sex with friends; sex clubs and sex parties; ongoing sexual friendships… that’s what my sex life looked like for a long time.

And needless to say — but I’m going to say it anyway — a lot of this casual sex was a good idea. A wonderful idea, in fact. A lot of it was done for excellent, healthy reasons. And the effect it’s had on my sex life and my love life has been overwhelmingly positive.

You want to know why I had it? Here’s why.

Thus begins my latest piece on AlterNet, Puritan Pundits Should Chill Out — Here Are 5 Reasons I’m Happy I’ve Had Lots of Casual Sex. To find out the reasons I had casual sex for so many years — and the reasons I feel overwhelmingly positive about it now — read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

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Why We Have to Talk About This: Atheism, Sexism, and Blowing Up The Internet

July 12, 2011 Greta Christina673 Comments

I know. We’re all sick of talking about it. I’m sick of talking about it; you’re sick of talking about it. And not just this latest blow-up, either, the one that’s been dubbed “Elevatorgate.” All of it. The whole freaking topic. I don’t know anybody who actually enjoys starting an Internet shitstorm about sexism (or racism, or ageism, or classism, or whatever-ism) in the atheist movement. I sure as hell don’t. Whenever I turn on my computer to write about one of these incidents, I don’t do it with an eager gleam in my fingers. I do it with a heavy sigh, and I brace myself for the ordeal that is likely to come. I am not happy about it.

But I’m a whole lot more unhappy being silent about it.

And I want to argue that we all should be a lot more unhappy being silent about it.

For the six of you who have spent the last three weeks under a rock in a cave on Mars with your eyes shut and your hands over your ears: Rebecca Watson of Skepchick recently made a video that mentioned an incident at an atheist conference in which she’d been propositioned by a man in an elevator at four in the morning; she said that this made her uncomfortable and briefly explained why… and an apparently unending shitstorm in the atheosphere has resulted. A shitstorm in which many men, including Richard Dawkins, have argued that this is a trivial issue, or even a non-issue: that it’s ridiculous for women to be cautious or fearful when they’re propositioned by a strange man in a strange country alone in an elevator at four in the morning; that men have the right to proposition women wherever and whenever they like and women should just suck it up; and that (as Dawkins seemed to be arguing) we have more serious problems to be worrying about than whether women feel comfortable and welcomed at atheist events. (This is a ridiculously inadequate summary of the explosion; Lindsay Beyerstein has a better one.)

And lot of the pushback against this feminist ruckus has come in the form of asking why the ruckus had to be raised at all… and why it had to keep getting driven into the ground.

So that’s what I want to talk about today. Or, more accurately: That’s not what I want to talk about — but it’s what I feel like I have to talk about.

Because, to misquote Oscar Wilde: There is only one thing worse than talking about sexism. And that is not talking about sexism. (Or racism, or ageism, or able-ism, or classism, or whatever-ism. This latest kerfuffle was about sexism, so that’s what I’ll be specifically talking about today… but this is also about all these touchy issues of discrimination and privilege, and the fights we keep having about them.)

Where to begin, where to begin?

Okay. I’m going to begin with a point that I haven’t seen raised very much.

To the men who have been resisting and pushing back against the feminists on this issue, there’s a very important thing I want to say to you:

We are trying to help you get laid.

We’re trying to do a lot more than that, of course. We’re trying to make the atheist community more welcoming to women: because that would be better for women, and because it’d be better for atheism. We’re trying to educate men about the reality of women’s experiences, including the reality of how sex commonly gets used to trivialize women, and the reality of sexual violence. We’re trying to make the world a less sexist place.

But we are also trying to help you get laid. (Many of us, anyway.) We are trying to show you the context into which your flirtations and advances and comments about our appearance are falling. We are trying to show you what it’s like to be a woman: what it’s like to try to be flirtatious and sex-positive and still be realistic about the no-joke threats we face every day to our safety and our lives. And we’re doing this, in part, to give you a better shot with us. In fact, one of the very first feminist responses to this latest ruckus, from Jen McCreight at BlagHag, came in the form of a helpful guide: a guide about context, a guide about when/ where your flirtations and advances and comments about our appearance might be well-received… and when/ where they might be perceived as insulting, demeaning, or dangerous.

The women who are raising this issue are not a bunch of man-hating ball-busters or sex-phobic prudes. If you read Watson’s blog, or McCreight’s, or Amanda Marcotte’s, or mine… you should know that this is patently absurd. We like sex. We like flirting. We like men. We’re not saying you’re all rapists. We know you’re not all rapists. We know that most of you aren’t rapists. We’re explaining that, until we get to know you pretty well, we have no way of knowing whether you’re a rapist or not, and that some situations (such as being alone with a strange man in an elevator) are well-documented as posing a greater risk of rape than others, and if you approach us in those situations, our guard is very likely going to be up.

We are trying to help you get laid.

And if you’re fervently resisting that help… then I have to assume that getting laid is not the point.

When women explain to you — in a calm, nuanced, proportionate way — that there are some contexts in which your advances are less likely to be well-received than others, and you respond by sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming about ball-busting, man-hating feminists who are hell-bent on eradicating all flirting and sex and eroding your First Amendment right to proposition any woman at any time and place? When you resist hearing that hitting on a woman who’s alone in an elevator in a strange city at four o’clock in the morning is not likely to be well-received, that it’s likely to be perceived as a potential threat, and that you are likely to be perceived as an insensitive clod at best if you do it? When we explain ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times, that elevators are well-documented as a common place for women to get raped and that it’s therefore not an appropriate place to make sexual advances — and you still reply, “But I don’t understand what the problem is with elevators”?

I have to assume that getting laid is not the point.

I have to assume that the point is something entirely different. I have to assume that you will do anything to resist hearing that women experience male advances in a very different context from the way men experience female advances. I have to assume that you have an active resistance to understanding that women’s experiences are different from men’s: that (among other things) women routinely get our professional/ intellectual/ artistic accomplishments dismissed in favor of a focus on our sexual attractiveness, and that women have to be seriously cautious about physical and sexual violence from men. When you are so vehemently unwilling to see some of the ways that privilege works in your favor, I have to assume that maintaining privilege is the point.

Even if it reduces your chances of getting laid.

I have to assume that your purported desire to get laid is a smokescreen — although quite probably an unconscious one — for your desire to not understand how sexism and male privilege work.

And that is EXACTLY the reason we have to keep talking about it.

Because continuing to talk about it is how people are eventually going to understand it.

And so now, I’m going to address, not just the men who have been insisting on their right to hit on any woman in any place at any time, or complaining about how trivial and self-absorbed it is to raise this issue at all… but everyone. Everyone who’s been participating in this blowup. Everyone who’s been following it. Everyone who sees one of these blowups on the horizon, and buries their head under the covers, and prays to the non-existent God that this one won’t eat the Internet for three solid weeks.

And in particular, I want to address the people who have been asking the question, “Why do we have to keep having these fights? Why is it that every time there’s an atheist conference, there’s some kerfuffle about sexist comments or actions, and everyone flies into a tizzy about it, and it’s the only thing anyone remembers about the event?”

Let me ask you this. When religious believers tell atheists, “Why do you have to keep talking about atheism? Why do you have to keep pointing out religious privilege, and anti-atheist bigotry, and the ways that religion is so deeply entrenched in our culture? It’s so divisive. Nobody can talk about religion and atheism without starting a huge, ugly fight. So why do you keep bringing it up?”

When religious believers say this to atheists… do you say to yourself, “You’re right. This is such a troubling, divisive issue. I’m so sorry I brought it up. We’ll stop talking about it now.”

Or do you say to yourself, “Wow. You really don’t want to hear what we have to say, do you? There’s a part of you that knows we’re right, or that fears we’re right, or that’s getting some assumptions challenged that you’re deeply attached to… and you’re uncomfortable with that. And you’re trying to shut us up. Knock it off. And try listening to what we have to say for a change.”

I’m going to assume that the answer is the latter.

So why on earth would you turn around and say to people who are talking about feminism, “This is such a divisive issue — why do you have to keep bringing it up?”

Do you see how this is the same?

I know. Everyone is tired of the huge Internet blowups about sexism. Everyone would like to avoid them. I’m right there with you. So here’s a tip. You want to know how to not have huge Internet blowups every time women in the atheist movement complain about sexism? LISTEN TO WHAT THE WOMEN ARE SAYING.

Here’s a perfect example of how this can play out well. At the American Atheist regional Rapture conference in Oakland, one of the speakers, David Eller, said that one of the ways to make atheism more appealing was to make greater use of pretty female videobloggers, with no mention of the actual content of what the videobloggers in question have been blogging about. Jen McCreight, and Rebecca Watson, and myself, and probably some other people, called him out on it, both at the conference and in blogs. And Eller apologized. His initial response at the conference was defensive and missed the point, but after a couple of days of thinking about it, he said (paraphrasing here), “Okay, you’re right, that was a dumb thing to say, my privilege was showing, I won’t do it again.” His apology was accepted.

And the crisis was over. In fact, I now have more respect for Eller, whose work I hadn’t really been familiar with before all this happened. Everyone screws up: I’ve said and done more dumb, thoughtless, privileged stuff in my life than I care to think about. It’s how you handle your screw-ups that makes the difference. The fact that Eller was able to see when he’d screwed up made me think very highly of him. And the ability to acknowledge when you’ve made an error is highly prized among atheists and skeptics.

So listen to what the women are saying, already. Women, oddly enough, know a fair amount about sexism. Just like atheists tend to know more about religion than believers — because we have to, because religion is the dominant voice in the culture and we have to be familiar with it — women tend to know more about sexism than men do. Not all women are always right about it — there are women who make critiques of sexism that I passionately disagree with — but we’re worth listening to on the subject.

And even if you don’t agree with the specific point that feminists are making?

DO NOT FUCKING WELL ATTACK WOMEN FOR BRINGING IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE.

You know how I just said that, if you want to avoid a huge Internet blowup about sexism, you should listen to what women are saying? Here’s a great way to create a huge Internet blowup about sexism: Try to shut women up. Try to tell women that we shouldn’t criticize sexist ideas and actions. This is a bad, bad idea. Trying to stop the latest Internet firestorm about sexism by asking women to please shut the fuck up does not work. It does worse than not work. It throws gasoline on the flames.

I am boggled by the number of people who are blaming Rebecca Watson for “creating” Elevatorgate. You want to know who “created” Elevatorgate? People trying to shut Watson up. People insisting, not only that she had no right to be upset over being propositioned by a strange man alone in an elevator at four in the morning… but that she shouldn’t have said anything about it in public. If the response to Watson’s videoblog had been, “Hm, that’s interesting, I hadn’t thought about that” — or even, “I don’t really get this… why, exactly, are elevators such a bad place to proposition women? Oh, okay, now that you’ve explained it, it makes sense” — this would not have eaten the Internet for three weeks. This would have been one of many moderately interesting topics of conversation for a day or two, and we would have all moved on.

What created this firestorm was not feminists pointing out sexism. What created this firestorm was sexist men perpetuating it.

If you don’t agree — with Watson, or me, or any other feminist making a critique about sexism — then by all means, say so. I don’t always agree with every other feminist about whether such-and-such does or does not constitute sexism. (In fact… this is something of a side note, but it has bugged me during this kerfuffle when women have called other women tools of the patriarchy and the like for disagreeing about what is and isn’t sexist. As a feminist who defends porn, sex work, sadomasochism, etc., I’ve been on the receiving end of that “you’re just sucking up to sexist men” trope way, way too often. Let’s not do it, okay?) So anyway… yes. If you don’t agree that a comment or an incident really was sexist, say so. But keep your disagreement focused on the content of what you don’t agree with and why. Don’t attack us for the mere fact that we brought it up. When we express our observations about sexism in a calm, nuanced, proportionate way, and the Internet reacts by shitting all over itself, do not attack us for bringing up an ugly, divisive issue that we knew people would react to by shitting all over themselves.

Finally:

I want to address the women and men who have been raising this issue, and who have been keeping it on people’s radar.

I want to say an enormous, heartfelt Thank You.

I want to encourage you to keep on doing it.

And I want to remind you — and everyone else reading this — that what we are doing is working.

I know there are women in the atheist movement who are reluctant to point out examples of sexism. I know there are women who have raised this issue in the past and got a faceful of backlash for it, and now… well, they don’t regret it exactly, but they’re wary as hell about doing it again. And I know that a lot of us — women and men — are exhausted by this issue, and passionately wish it would just go away.

In fact, when I’m in a cynical, pessimistic mood, I often think that this exhaustion is part of the point. The really grossly sexist men — not the genuinely well-meaning men who don’t yet get this stuff and are struggling with it, but the seriously hostile, hateful, deeply entrenched in their misogyny men — are trying to get us so sick of the backlash, and so daunted by the prospect of having to deal with it one more freaking time, that we don’t ever want to bring it up again. They are trying to wear us down.

But to the people who are getting discouraged by this fight — and this may be the most important point I have to make about all this — there is one more reason we have to keep talking about this:

Talking about it works.

I want to show you an email I got last week, which I’m reprinting here in full with permission of its author (and with my utmost thanks, both for the permission to reprint and the sentiments expressed in it).

Hello Greta,

After having followed your blog for awhile I eagerly looked forward to meeting you at the AHA conference in April of this year. My wife Lisa and I both attended. I remember seeing you standing in the hall between breakout sessions a couple of times and thinking to myself that you looked and dressed very sharp. In short, I was impressed seeing you in person for the first time.

We also both attended the panel discussion on outreach to women, the LGBT community and people of color. After the Q&A, I came up to the table to ask whether you might be available to speak to our group in New Jersey. And then I did it. Right after all the talk about how women at atheist conferences get sexualized by men, I told you that your hair looked great and you ought to use a picture from the conference as your avatar.

I wasn’t hitting on you, and I hope you knew that. My wife told me later that she thought my comment was inappropriate in that setting, and I agreed with her after a short discussion. I saw you speak at the AA conference later that month but never got a chance to talk to you and apologize in person.

To make a long story short, all the recent discussions of male privilege and sexism involving PZ, Richard Dawkins, Jen McCreight, Ophelia Benson, Rebecca Watson and you have further enlightened the feminist I’ve always thought I was and made me remember my faux pas.

So I want to apologize. I want to emphasize that your writing is what first gripped and inspired me. And your speaking voice only enhances your talent of putting forth ideas with a clarity that only a few can match. I am constantly thrilled to have a person of your talent advocating for both the LGBT and atheist movements and look forward to a day in the future when equality for people of both groups is accepted as a matter-of-fact proposition.

I still think you looked great. But I should have waited until we met again in a more casual environment, say, sitting around a hotel bar, to pay you that compliment.

Best regards,
Tim Ridge

And this isn’t an isolated incident. Every time we have a huge shitstorm about sexism in the atheist movement, things get better. Every time the feminists break atheism, it gets put back together a little stronger, a little more conscious, a little less sexist. A couple/few years ago, whenever one of these fights broke out, it was mostly “girls against the boys”: largely women making the case against sexism, mostly men making the case that sexism wasn’t a problem or wasn’t worth paying attention to. Now, whenever one of these fights break out, there are a hefty number of men right in there fighting alongside the women. Many of the most eloquent and passionate voices defending Watson have been men: PZ Myers at Pharyngula, Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheism, Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy, many more. And comment threads in the blogosphere, while toxic and ugly, have had loads and loads of men battling against the ugliness and toxicity.

This. Is. Getting. Better.

Yes, we all want this issue to go away. You know how it’s going to go away? By dealing with it. You know what’s making it better? Talking about it.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll almost certainly say it again: As exasperated as I am at the fact that we have to keep having these fights, I am also thrilled beyond my power to express that we’re dealing with it now… instead of ten years from now, or twenty, or forty. To quote myself: We have a chance in the atheist movement to learn from the mistakes of the LGBT movement, and the mistakes of every other progressive movement before ours. Our movement — at least, the current incarnation of our movement, the visible and vocal and activist incarnation of our movement — is still relatively new. We have a unique opportunity to handle this problem early: before these self-perpetuating cycles become entrenched, before decades of ugly history and bad feelings poison the well. Every other social change movement I know of has been bitten on the ass by this issue, and desperately wishes now that they had dealt with it early, before bad habits and self-fulfilling prophecies got set in a deep groove that are hard to break out of. As exasperating and exhausting as it is, the fact that the atheist movement is hashing this out now — relatively early in our current incarnation as a highly visible, vocal, mobilized, activist movement — gives me tremendous hope for the future of our movement.

We are making atheism stronger. We are making the world less sexist. What we’re doing is working.

So to those of you who are trying to shut us up: Knock it off. You’re making it worse. If you really are well-meaning and are genuinely trying to stop atheism from getting broken by huge fights… it’s not working. The more you try to shut us up, the more thousand-plus comment threads you’re going to get. So please don’t throw gasoline on the flames. Please help us move this thing forward.

And to those of you who are bringing this up:

Keep up the good work. Thanks.

***

UPDATE: This piece has been linked to, on Pharyngula and lots of other places, and as a result, traffic and commenting is increasing significantly, including from many non-regulars. This is excellent… but it means that people are participating who aren’t familiar with the usual standard of discourse here. Quick summary: I encourage lively debate, but I also expect it to be civil. Criticize ideas and behavior, but please keep the heated rhetoric to a minimum, and don’t personally insult other commenters. I have already banned someone for trotting out the “We don’t have to listen to you because you’re ugly” trope. (Full comment policy is here.)

And it also means that the trolls are seriously starting to come out. Please, please, I beg of everyone: DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS. This conversation is loaded enough. If you’re not sure what constitutes trolling, consult Katie Hartman’s Bingo card. (My regular bulldogs are hereby authorized to give the trolls a “Thank you for sharing” on my behalf.)

My very, very strong preference would be to keep this conversation ON TOPIC. I don’t think we need to re-hash the details of Elevatorgate again. The specific topics raised by this piece were: (a) the proposal that men who steadfastly and angrily refuse to listen to women giving guidance about when and where their advances are likely to be welcomed are more interested in maintaining their privilege than in actually getting laid; (b) the suggestion that, if you disagree with women who are criticizing what they think is sexist behavior or language, you focus on their ideas rather than chiding them for expressing them, and that telling women to shut up about sexism is equivalent to religious believers telling atheists to shut up about atheism; and (c) the proposal that, as unpleasant as they are, these kinds of controversies are necessary for the health of the atheist movement, and that we are far better off having them now instead of ten or twenty years from now. Please, please, if you can possibly bear it, keep your comments focused on these ideas.

I’m leaving for TAM tomorrow, where I’ll be on the diversity panel — I know, perfect timing, right? — which means that as much as I would like to (and I’m serious, I really would like to), I won’t have time to participate in this comment discussion. I will be checking in periodically to moderate (and if necessary, bring down the banhammer on trolls), but I will not have the time to jump in. Greta’s Bulldogs are already doing an excellent job of saying pretty much everything I would have said on my own behalf, though, and I’ll trust them to keep it up. Thanks.

Wealthy, Handsome, Strong, and with Endless Hard-Ons: Is Masculinity Impossible?

June 28, 2011 Greta Christina28 Comments

This piece was originally published on AlterNet.

The cultural ideal of masculinity isn’t just narrow and rigid — it’s literally unattainable. What can men do about it?

If you’re familiar with feminism — whether you’re for it or against it — you’ve almost certainly heard feminist rants about cultural ideals of femininity. You’ve heard how standards of femininity are so narrow and rigid that they’re literally unattainable. You’ve heard how, to avoid being seen as unfeminine, women are expected to navigate an increasingly narrow window between slut and prude, between capable and docile, between moral enforcer and empathetic helpmeet. You’ve heard how female fashion models have been getting increasingly thin over the years, to the point where disordered eating is becoming an industry norm… and how even the minuscule percentage of women who can become fashion models, with or without eating disorders, routinely get their pictures Photoshopped to make them fit the beauty myth. You may have even ranted some of those rants yourself.

Here’s what you may not know: It works that way for men as well.

I’ve been thinking more and more these days about how rigid and narrow the gender expectations are for men. I’ve even written about it before, in this very space. But a recent article about male fitness models has made me vividly conscious of how the expectations of masculinity aren’t just rigid or narrow. They are impossible. They are, quite literally, unattainable.

And while this unattainability can tie men into knots, I think that — in a weird paradox — it can also offer a glimmer of hope.

The article in question is about the hellish, dangerous, illness-inducing routines that male fitness models regularly go through to forge their bodies into an attractive photograph of the masculine ideal. According to journalist Peta Bee in the Express UK (the article was originally published in the Sunday Times [London], but they put it behind a paywall), in order to make their bodies more photogenic and more in keeping with the masculine “fitness” ideal, top male fitness models routinely put themselves through an extreme regimen in the days and weeks before a photo shoot. Not a regimen of intense exercise and rigorously healthy diet, mind you… but a regimen that involves starvation, dehydration, excessive consumption of alcohol and sugar right before a shoot, and more. This routine is entirely unrelated to any concept of “fitness.” In fact, it leaves the models in a state of serious hypoglycemia: dizzy, exhausted, disoriented, and (ironically) unable to exercise, and indeed barely able to walk. But the routine makes their muscles look big, and tightens their skin to make their muscles “pop” on camera. And even then, the magazines use lighting tricks, posture tricks, flat-out deceptions, even Photoshop, to exaggerate this illusion of masculinity even further.

On any sort of realistic irony meter, the concept of starved, dehydrated, dazed, weakened men being offered as models of fitness completely buries the needle. But this isn’t about reality. The image being sold is clearly not one of “fitness” — i.e. athletic ability and physical health. The image being sold is an exaggerated, idealized, impossible extreme of hyper- masculinity.

And the illusion being sold by the fitness magazines is that this hyper-masculinity is attainable. If you just work out longer and harder; if you’re just more careful about your diet; if you just take the right supplements and drink the right sports beverage… then you, too, can have a body like a fitness model. A cartoon image of fitness is being sold to men as if it were actual fitness. And men are being taught that there’s something wrong with them if they can’t get there.

But this ideal of masculinity isn’t just difficult to achieve. It isn’t just narrow; it isn’t just rigid; it isn’t just out of reach for some or even most men. It is, quite literally, unattainable. Even the fitness models themselves can’t attain it: not without nightmarish physical ordeals, camera tricks, and Photoshop. It is a carrot being dangled in front of a donkey — which the donkey will never, ever get to eat.

We’re not just talking about the world of fitness modeling, either. From weight loss products to underwear ads to cosmetic surgery to supposedly helpful books of advice on how to make yourself tolerably appealing to the opposite sex, men are being increasingly bombarded with messages about what Real Men are supposed to look like. It’s not surprising that, among men, reported rates of anorexia nervosa, anorexia athletica, and other forms of disordered eating and body dysmorphia are on the rise.

And we’re not just talking about physical ideals of masculinity. We’re talking about cultural ideals. Sexual ideals. Economic ideals. Emotional ideals.

Sexuality educator Dr. Charlie Glickman has written a great deal (and teaches workshops) about male gender expectations, and what he calls “the performance of masculinity.” And a two–part series he recently wrote crystallized this idea for me. He was talking about the “box” of masculinity — the ideas we have in American culture about what a “real man” is and does. You know: strong, competitive, dominant, wealthy, good at fixing machinery, lots of sexual partners, enjoys sports, big dick that gets hard on demand. You know the drill.

And he pointed out that many of these ideas aren’t just rigid or limiting. They actually conflict with each other. As Glickman put it, “Some of the items in the box are contradictory. You can’t be a mechanic and a CEO. I’ve talked with men who are convinced they’re not Real Men because they aren’t rich and I’ve talked with men who are convinced they aren’t Real Men because they don’t work with their hands.”

In other words: The Act Like a Man Box isn’t just a painful, difficult, miserably limiting place to live. It is, quite literally, an impossible place to live. It doesn’t exist. It isn’t like having your goal be to live in a big mansion in Beverly Hills with dozens of supermodels hanging around the pool. It’s like having your goal be to live on the surface of the sun. It literally can’t be done.

But here’s the good news.

“Impossible” is, in many ways, a better cultural ideal to have than “really, really difficult.”

Because it’s a whole lot easier to ignore.

Now here is where, I freely admit, I am stepping away from more solid facts, and into the realm of harebrained speculation based on my own personal experience. That being said, I still think I’m onto something.

The day I realized that the cultural ideal of femininity was, quite literally, unattainable? The day I realized that women are supposed to be sexy and chaste, undemanding and seeking commitment, meek delicate flowers and strong backbones of the family? The day I realized that if you’re tall you’re supposed to look shorter, and if you’re short you’re supposed to look taller, and if you’re fat you’re supposed to look thinner, and if you’re thin you’re supposed to look more voluptuous, and that whatever body type you had you were supposed to make it look different? The day I realized that every woman is insecure about her looks… including the ones we’re supposed to idolize? The day I realized that, no matter what I did, no matter how hard I worked, I would always, always, always be a failure as a woman?

That was the day I quit worrying about it.

If the world is telling you that if you work just a little bit harder, you can be strong enough, pretty enough, rich enough, whatever enough… you’ll be a lot more tempted to keep running that treadmill, keep chasing the carrot that’s dangling in front of you. But if the world is telling you that if you work just a little bit harder, you can turn yourself into a unicorn and start shitting diamonds? The whole thing just becomes laughable. And it becomes a whole lot easier to step off the treadmill. Obviously the cultural expectations still affect you — I’m not claiming to be free of them, I don’t think anyone is — but it’s a lot easier to see them for what they are, and shrug them off, and get on with your life.

So guys? Listen up.

The world is telling you to turn yourself into a unicorn and start shitting diamonds.

The world is giving you an impossible task. It’s not just a stupid task; it’s not just a pointless task; it’s not just a needlessly confining task; it’s not just a task that will make you miserable. It is, quite literally, unattainable. You will never, ever be man enough.

So stop giving a damn. And be whoever you are.

Be a whisky-drinking electronic music nerd who mixes a perfect Manhattan. Be a dialog editor who bakes banana bread and does stand-up comedy. Be a tattooed poet and kettlebell competitor. Be a retired soldier who does English folk dancing. Be a software engineer with waist-length hair and a thing for Michelin-star restaurants. Be a French-speaking rare book collector who calls into sports radio talk shows. Be a porn writer and atheist activist with eighteen cats. Be a muscle-bound gym rat who sings opera and cries in public.

Be who you are. That’s actually an attainable goal. And it’s a hell of a lot more fun.

Wealthy, Handsome, Strong, and with Endless Hard-Ons: The Impossible Ideals Men Are Expected to Meet

June 21, 2011 Greta Christina34 Comments

American ideas about “real men” are contradictory and impossible to live up to. So stop trying!

You’ve almost certainly heard feminist rants about impossible cultural ideals of femininity: how standards of femininity are so narrow and rigid they’re literally unattainable; how, to avoid being seen as unfeminine, women are expected to navigate an increasingly narrow window between slut and prude, between capable and docile, between moral enforcer and empathetic helpmeet.

Here’s what you may not know: It works that way for men as well.

A recent article about male fitness models has made me vividly conscious of how the expectations of masculinity aren’t just rigid or narrow. They are impossible. They are, quite literally, unattainable.

And while this unattainability can tie men into knots, I think that — in a weird paradox — it can also offer a glimmer of hope.

Thus begins my latest piece for AlterNet, Wealthy, Handsome, Strong, and with Endless Hard-Ons: The Impossible Ideals Men Are Expected to Meet. To find out more about how male fitness models endure dangerous, illness-inducing routines to make their bodies look that way on camera; how the ideal of masculinity — not just the physical ideal, but the emotional and cultural and sexual ideal — has become not only narrow and rigid but literally unattainable; and how, paradoxically, the unattainability of this ideal can be actually liberating… read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

"I was kind of an aimless teenager": Greta's Interview with Teen Skepchick

June 16, 2011 Greta Christina7 Comments

There’s a cool interview with me on Teen Skepchick! We talk about boys, clothes, makeup, Justin Bieber… no, no, no. Totally kidding. I’ve just always wanted to be interviewed by Teen Something magazine, and I’m letting my imagination run away with me. We talk about shifting identities, connections between skepticism and sexuality, career paths or the lack thereof, making atheism a safer place for teens to come out into, and more. Here’s an excerpt:

When you were a teen, where did you see yourself going in your adult life? Are you the person you thought you would be?

Honestly? I was kind of an aimless teenager. My goal as a teenager was to get into a good college where I knew I’d be happy — and I was very focused on that goal. I actually graduated high school in three years (which took a lot of work) so I could get the hell out of there and get on with my life. But beyond college, my future was kind of a blur. And it was still very much a blur once I left college. I took a long, long time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and while I’ve been writing professionally off and on since my late twenties, I didn’t get serious about it until I turned 40. For many years, I drifted from job to job, mostly based on what was catching my interest at the time. (And on what jobs were available at times when I needed to find new work!)

Which actually worked out really well for me. I know adults aren’t supposed to say that to teenagers — but it’s true. I do wish I’d gotten more serious about the writing earlier — I missed a lot of opportunities that I still regret. But drifting from job to job got me into some very interesting jobs. I’ve worked at an abortion clinic, a public library, a lesbian sex magazine, a gay newspaper, a sex toy company, a small press book publisher and distributor. Even my boring job at the ticket company exposed me to music and theater and dance and other culture that I never would have explored on my own.

And a lot of those “drifting” jobs opened professional doors. The job at the lesbian sex magazine was just a clerical job, but they were the first place to publish my writing. Ditto the gay newspaper — it was initially just a clerical job, but they eventually hired me to write as well. And most of my jobs exposed me to new political and cultural ideas, about feminism and sexuality and LGBT rights and censorship and so on — ideas I’m still exploring in my writing. I would much rather have a boring job at an interesting place than an interesting job at a boring place. I don’t know if I’d give that as general career advice… but it’s certainly been true for me.

To read more, read the rest of the interview. And if you feel inspired to comment here, please consider cross-posting your comments to the Teen Skepchick site — they like comments there, too. Enjoy!

"No Strings Attached": Sexual Convention in Transgression's Clothes

January 28, 2011 Greta Christina9 Comments

This piece was originally published on AlterNet.

Is Hollywood exploring the frontiers of modern sexuality… or simply reinforcing the same old standards?

Well, it could have been worse.

I suppose.

You may have seen the saucy, sexy previews and ads for the super-hyped new movie, “No Strings Attached.” Paramount is clearly pushing this film, not as just another romantic comedy about women hunting for marriage and men succumbing to its sweet inevitability, but as a daring, edgy, ultra-modern exploration of the “new” relationship models: casual, non-romantic, commitment-free sexual friendships, in which both women and men go in with no expectation of a capital-R Relationship, and no desire for it.

It’s always interesting to see how mainstream media treats gender and sexuality. And as a sex writer with a focus on unconventional sexuality, I’m especially curious when it purports to be shattering myths and breaking new ground. My hopes weren’t high for this one — I’ve seen way too many Hollywood movies titillate themselves and their audiences with transgressive sexual possibilities and then firmly drag everyone back into safe conventionality. But I’ve been wrong before. I’ve gone into more than a few movies prepared to be bored and irritated, and come out surprised and delighted and raving to everyone I know.

Not this time.

Before I get into everything that’s stupid and annoying and just plain wrong with the sexual politics of “No Strings Attached” — and believe me, there’s a lot that’s wrong with these sexual politics — let’s get this out of the way: This is not a good movie. A romantic comedy (and I use both words with grave reservations) about long-term acquaintances who try to turn their friendship into one with benefits, “No Strings Attached” is fake, implausible, and entirely disconnected from human reality. It’s not even interested in being authentic, plausible, or connected to human reality. It’s interested in aggregating some cute moments and raunchy moments and heart-tugging moments and a bunch of juvenile sex jokes that would make a twelve-year-old cringe… and half-assedly stringing them onto a tediously predictable storyline that plays like it was written by a computer programmed by a committee who all read the same stupid screenwriters’ bible. The moment when Emma casually invites Adam to “this thing she’s doing,” and it turns out to be a family funeral… that was the moment I knew that this movie was aiming solely for cheap laughs, and was not remotely interested in any of the things human beings actually do. It’s a moment that takes place approximately ten minutes in.

And that, in fact, is a huge amount of what’s wrong with the movie’s sexual politics.

They’re fake.

I suppose I should summarize the plot here. But there really isn’t much to summarize. Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kutcher) are long-time friends — acquaintances, really — who’ve always been a little interested in each other. They have an impulsive sexual tryst one day, and decide, for not- very- well- explained reasons, that instead of being lovers, they should be friends with benefits, with no romance and no commitment and no strings attached. Wacky hijinks ensue. Or, more accurately: Hijinks ensue that are intended to be wacky, but are, in fact, predictable to the point of tedium. Hijinks ensue, not because it would be natural for the characters to hijink in that manner, but because said hijinking is what the screenwriters think will be funny.

Which brings me back to the fakery. The sexual politics of “No Strings Attached” have nothing to do with the sexual things people actually do. They have nothing to do with how sexual relationships are changing: the ways that people are questioning assumptions about what sexual relationships have to look like, breaking down the standard categories and inventing new ones… and how these re-inventions from the fringe are filtering into the mainstream.

Quite the contrary.

“No Strings Attached” wants desperately to be all modern and cutting-edge and sexually transgressive, with gags about menstruation and tag lines like “Welcome to the new world of relationships.” But it consistently runs back to the safe ground of predictable formula and conventional sexual morality. It daringly asks the question, “Can two friends hook up without love getting in the way?” But then — spoiler alert, but if you didn’t figure this out you haven’t seen many Hollywood movies — it answers that question with a resounding, “No!” It flirts with the titillating edges of sexual exploration, but ultimately chides the explorers for being afraid of commitment, and settles everyone into cozy, coupled, “happily ever after” conventionality. If your first reaction to seeing this movie’s ad campaign was a roll of your eyes and a jaded sigh of, “I know exactly how this movie unfolds and where it ends up”… you’re right. That’s how it unfolds, and that’s where it ends up.

Where to begin, where to begin? Well, the first problem is with Emma’s motivation for resisting romantic love.

There isn’t any.

Emma’s reasons for not wanting to get into a capital-R Relationship are pathetic. They’re like a first draft that never get hammered out in the rewrites. The reason she gives Adam is that she’s working 80 hours a week on her medical residency and doesn’t have time. The real explanation, though, the one she tells her friend, is that she’s afraid of getting her heart broken. Note, please, that she’s not gun-shy for any particular reason, a bad breakup or anything. She’s just scared. Because the screenplay demands it. Because if she isn’t, then she and Ashton Kutcher will happily fall in love in the first fifteen minutes, and the rest of the movie will consist of stock footage and light music.

But this lack of plausible motivation doesn’t just make the movie baffling and pointless. It trivializes the entire premise. It frames the very idea of sexual friendship — of pursuing sexual relationships that aren’t romantic and aren’t going to be — as ridiculous on the face of it. Doomed to fail at best; emotionally cowardly at worst.

As a longtime sex writer and educator, I find this irritating because it trivializes a fringe sexuality. It makes people who are engaging in it feel alienated and shamed; it makes people who are considering it give up before they even begin. As an off-and-on participant in these sexual friendships over the years, and as part of a community that often enjoys these kinds of friendships, I find it irritating because… well, for the same reason, basically. Because me and my friends are the ones being trivialized and shamed and marginalized. And as a moviegoer, I find it irritating because it makes me feel like a dupe. If even the writers couldn’t be bothered to take the premise seriously, why on earth should I waste my time and money it?

It’s not like a plausible motivation wasn’t possible. In fact, when my friend Rebecca and I saw this movie and then enthusiastically dissected everything that was wrong with it, we came up with an alternate plot that might have actually worked — and in particular, a motivation for Emma’s romantic reluctance that might actually make sense. In our version, Emma and Adam meet, hook up, feel sparks… but while he’s interested in pursuing something more, she has genuine good reasons for not wanting it to get serious. The fake reason she gives to Adam, that she’s working 80 hours a week on her medical residency and doesn’t have time for a romance? That would do nicely. That’s a genuine conflict, not a stupid fake movie one — wanting love, but also wanting a medical career, and not knowing how to juggle the competing demands on time and energy and commitment. In fact, in Rebecca’s version, Emma’s actually had several friendships with benefits before this one, which mostly worked out neatly and well — and so the romantic sparks she starts to feel with Adam take her by surprise, and she has to not only figure out what’s going on with her emotions, but make real choices about where to go with them.

That’s a movie we would have happily seen. It would have treated sexual friendship as a valid option, a workable alternative that reasonable people might get real value from. And it wouldn’t have had to be some heavy relationship drama. It could easily have fit into a light, goofy, romantic comedy format.

But that movie would have taken, you know, work. Attention to coherence and plausibility. Maybe even some research into what people with fuckbuddies actually do with them. (Other than the obvious, of course.) And it would have taken a willingness to question the dominant relationship paradigm… instead of pretending to question it, but having the stock answer in it pocket all along.

So there’s that.

But there’s more.

There is, in fact, the foundational premise of the movie: the assumption that sex inevitably leads to love.

This premise gets treated like a law of Newtonian mechanics. You have ongoing sex with someone you like — it turns into romantic love, with the inevitability of planetary orbits collapsing. There’s no point in fending it off. It’s ridiculous to even try. Entertaining to watch (well, in theory, anyway) — but ridiculous.

Okay. Here’s the bit where I get all TMI on you, and inappropriately disclose details about my sexual history. I promise, it really is relevant.

I’ve had sex with a fair number of people in my day. I can’t be exact about that fair number, since I stopped keeping track a long, long time ago. But it’s somewhere in the high two figures. Possibly the low three, depending on how you define “having sex.”

And of those roughly 80-120 people that I’ve had sex with, I’ve fallen in love with exactly three. David. Richard. And — most importantly, by several orders of magnitude — the great love of my life, my partner of thirteen years and my wife of seven, Ingrid.

Now, to be fair, many of those roughly 80-120 encounterees were very short-term indeed, with no time for love to blossom. Brief flings, one-night stands, people I met at sex parties whose names I never knew. But some of them were ongoing relationships — that’s small “r” relationships — of some duration. Some were friendships that became sexual; some have been sexual trysts that became friendships. Some of those friendships were fairly easy-going; some have been among the most central friendships of my life. Some have had sex as a central defining component; some were sexual only tangentially, or intermittently. Some of these people I’m still friends with; some aren’t — not because sexual friendships can never work, but for the same reasons that any friendship can sometimes drift apart.

And of all of these people, I fell in love with three.

Three, out of 80-120.

That’s some really crappy Newtonian mechanics you got there.

And I’m not the only one. I move in a community where sexual friendships are fairly common, and I know a whole lot of people who have them, or who’ve had them in the past. Some of these friendships have worked out; some haven’t. Sometimes they’ve lasted in more or less the same form for a while; sometimes they’ve changed over time. Occasionally they’ve led to romantic love; usually they haven’t. A lot like, you know, non-sexual friendships, or work partnerships, or school chums, or every other kind of human relationship on the face of the planet.

That’s the reality.

But it’s a reality that the writers of “No Strings Attached” seem entirely uninterested in.

Yes, I know. It’s silly escapist entertainment. And that’s fine. Not every movie about love and sex has to be a blazing insight into the deepest realities of the human heart. But even silly escapist entertainment is better — funnier, more engaging, more actually entertaining — when it has a whiff of plausibility. Escapist entertainment works better when you’re not scratching your head trying to figure out why on earth the characters are doing what they’re doing… or playing a silent game of “Predict the Movie Cliche” to pass the time until the sweet, sweet credits finally roll.

There are a handful of likeable things about “No Strings Attached.” I actually sort of loved the bit about the menstrual-themed mix CD. The running gag about silly covers of raunchy pop songs — the mariachi band playing “Don’t Cha,” the country-Western version of “99 Problems” — is pretty freaking funny. (The latter, in fact, was weirdly awesome, and I may even wind up downloading it.) Chris “Ludacris” Bridges is dry and smart and hilariously understated, and I definitely want to see him do more acting. And the idyllic sexual montage of Emma and Adam’s early hookups is both genuinely hot and genuinely sweet. It was one of the few stretches of the film where I felt that the characters were, you know, real people, with real chemistry, taking genuine pleasure in one another’s bodies and one another’s company, experiencing emotions that were honest and joyful and subject to change without notice. It was one of the few stretches of the film when I felt like there was a real movie in there, itching to come out. (Maybe the one Rebecca and I came up with.)

So yes, it definitely could have been worse. There could have been fart jokes. There could have been vomit jokes. There could have been overturned fruit carts, wacky cases of mistaken identity, people falling into wedding cakes. The sexual libertines could have died tragically at the end, of disease or violence, the last words on their bloody and tormented lips, “I know that our life of sin has led us to this sorry fate.” It could have starred Adam Sandler.

It could have been worse.

But not by much.

No Strings Attached. Starring Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher, Cary Elwes, and Kevin Kline. Produced and directed by Ivan Reitman. Written by Elizabeth Meriwether. Paramount. Rated R. Opens Jan. 21.

ADDENDUM: There is so much more that I could have said about this movie if I’d had space. I could have talked about the flagrant fakiness of the “TV production assistant/ aspiring writer gets his script into production in six weeks” storyline. I could have talked about the approximately 43,547 supporting characters in the form of the main characters’ supposedly colorful friends and family, all of whom were essentially interchangeable and who I kept getting mixed up. I could have ranted about how, in giving Emma no sane motivation for resisting a capital-R Relationship, the movie not only trivializes sexual friendships, but slut-shames women who want sexual adventure. (Fortunately, David Edelstein covered that angle.) I could have written an entire other piece lambasting the idea that friendship — sexual or otherwise — isn’t an important connection that requires work and commitment, and doesn’t count as a “string.” And, on the plus side, I could have mentioned the lovely moment in the blissful erotic montage, when it’s strongly implied that Emma fucks Adam up the ass. Ah, well, You can’t say everything.

Natalie Portman's 'No Strings Attached' Sex: Is Hollywood Finally Ditching Its Repressive Attitude?

January 21, 2011 Greta Christina11 Comments

No_strings_attached_poster_natalie_portman_ashton_kutcher

Not this time.

Thus begins my latest piece for AlterNet, Natalie Portman’s ‘No Strings Attached’ Sex: Is Hollywood Finally Ditching Its Repressive Attitude? To find out more about the new movie “No Strings Attached” and its take on friendships with benefits, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

Caught Between Fat and Thin: When a Fat Acceptance Advocate Takes Off the Pounds

December 15, 2010 Greta Christina11 Comments

This piece was originally published on AlterNet.

I’m always going to be a fat woman.

Don’t get me wrong. At five foot three and 135 pounds, I am not, by any useful definition of the word, fat.

But I have been fat. I was fat for many, many years. And for years, I was an ardent advocate of the fat acceptance movement. I actively resisted the idea that there was any point whatsoever to losing weight. I believed that medical statistics on the health effects of fatness were exaggerated at best, part of the cultural conspiracy to make women hate their bodies at worst. I was convinced that I could be just as healthy at 200 pounds (and with the eating and exercise habits that kept me at 200 pounds) as I would be with less weight. And I was convinced that losing weight never, ever worked… or at least, that it worked so rarely it wasn’t worth trying. If there was even any reason for trying. Which I was convinced there wasn’t. (It wasn’t until my bad knee started getting worse that I saw the writing on the wall, and decided that, given a choice between losing mobility and losing weight, the weight would have to go. Here’s how I did it, if you’re interested.)

You’d probably think that losing weight would make a person stop thinking of themselves as fat. And you’d almost certainly think that making a concerted effort to not be fat would make someone abandon the whole idea of fat acceptance.

If so, you’d be wrong. I thought all that myself once… and I was wrong.

I still see the world as a fat person. My perceptions of myself, and of society, and of how society views fatness and bodies and health, have been profoundly shaped by my years of being fat… in ways that are never going to change. And while I have huge disagreements with the fat acceptance movement — especially with its more extreme denialist edges — I still think many of its ideas are important, and perceptive, and entirely fair. I have serious disagreements with FA, but I am still very much shaped by it, and I would like to think of myself as an ally of the movement, and even as a member of it.

It’s just that they don’t feel the same way about me.

Or about other fat people who choose to lose weight.

The Thinnest Fat Woman in the World

My years as a fat woman — and as a fat acceptance advocate — have made me hyper-conscious of anti-fat hostility, contempt, and discrimination. When I hear mocking or insulting comments about fat people, I stand up for them. When I see rigid, internally contradictory, impossible- to- attain standards of physical beauty promoted in pop culture, I rant about it ad nauseum. When I hear about fat people being discriminated against in employment and medicine and so on, I get seriously ticked off. When folks call fat people “lazy slobs” and say that “as a society we should not look up to successful people who are fat. We should tell them we admire their acting or philanthropy, but look down on them for being lazy” (direct quotes from comments on my Facebook page, btw), I smack them down with every weapon in my rhetorical arsenal.

And I still take it really, really personally. I don’t hear anti-fat bigotry the way I hear, say, racial bigotry, as something to be passionately opposed but that isn’t aimed at me personally. I hear it as being about me. When someone in a comment thread on AlterNet linked to an older photo of me and mocked me for being fat, I felt the shame and the sting and the anger… before I remembered, “Wait a minute. I’m not fat.” And was left with only the anger. On behalf of myself… and every other woman who’s ever had her ideas irrelevantly dismissed because of her personal appearance.

I sometimes feel like the thinnest fat woman in the world. (Well, probably not the thinnest… but you know what I mean.) Some people say that, inside every fat person, there’s a thin person trying to get out. I feel the exact opposite. Inside this relatively lean body, there’s a fat person nobody can see. People think they can say stupid, bigoted, hurtful things about fat people to me, because they don’t see me as one of them. They couldn’t be more wrong. I am fat. Not in a body-dysmorphic way — I don’t look in the mirror and think I’m still fat — but because this fat identity shaped me for years, and it will always be with me.

It’s true that my feelings about fatness — my own, and other people’s — have been changing since I’ve lost weight. The biggest change is that I now acknowledge the health problems associated with fatness: problems I was in deep denial about during my fat years. So I have some concerns about the health and well-being of the fat people in my life, in a way that I didn’t before.

But I also see it as none of my freaking business.

I do think weight loss is both possible and worthwhile. But I also think that the cost-benefit analysis isn’t the same for everyone. Weight loss was really freaking hard: it wasn’t as hard as I’d initially thought it would be, and it got easier with time, but it still took some extremely hard work. And I had everything going for me: easy access to healthy food, money for things like healthy food and a gym membership, a health-conscious city to live in, a supportive partner who was going through the process with me. Not everyone has all that. And even people who do have all that still may not make the same cost-benefit analysis that I did.

So if some other fat person looks at the time and work and emotional effort that weight loss takes, and decides, “Nah, that isn’t where I want to put my energy”… I think that’s a reasonable decision. As long as they’re making it with their eyes open — as long as they understand the costs and risks of fatness, and decide that they’re willing to accept them — then I support them. To me, that’s the essence of fat acceptance. Their body, their right to decide.

And in a totally freaky paradox, fat acceptance has helped me lose weight and keep it off. My years as an FA advocate have actually given me essential tools for weight management.

Here’s what I mean. One of the hardest things about maintaining weight loss has been accepting the fact that my body is never, ever going to be perfect. It’s never going to be the culture’s ideal; it’s not even going to be my own. Even though my weight and body fat percentage and so on are now well within a healthy medical range, there are still plenty of things I’d change about my body if I could wave a magic wand and make it happen.

That’s been hard to accept. For years, I projected all my body anxiety onto my weight. If I was unhappy with how I looked or felt, I assumed it was because I was fat. Period. And when I was in process of losing weight, even though I was healthier and happier with my body than I’d been in years, I was still very focused on trying to change, to reach my goal weight, to make my body different. Now that my weight is where I want it… I have to accept this body. With my thin hair, my veiny hands, my droopy breasts, my funky loose skin from the weight loss, my chronic middle- aged- lady health problems. I have to accept this body, and live with it, and love it.

And my years in the fat acceptance movement have been helping me do that.

The idea that I can love my body the way it is? The idea that I can focus more on how my body feels and functions than how it looks? The understanding that the cultural ideal of physical beauty is not just insanely rigid and narrow, but internally contradictory and literally unattainable? The understanding that everybody, even fashion models and movie stars, is insecure about their bodies and their attractiveness… and that becoming more secure happens, not by hating our bodies and trying to change them, but by loving our bodies and learning to accept them? The idea that there are lots of different ways to be beautiful and desirable? The idea that confidence and joy make people way more attractive than any physical traits? The idea that I can make the body I have be as healthy and happy as possible, instead of trying to cram it into someone else’s ideal? The idea that I should eat well and exercise, even if it doesn’t make my body look exactly the way I want it to, because it will help my body feel the way I want it to? The wacky notion that a “good body” is one that gives me pleasure and does most of what I want it to do?

All of this comes from my years as a fat acceptance advocate. And I can apply it to how I feel about my body now, in ways that have nothing to do with my weight: my age, my skin, my hands, my short square frame. Heck, I can even apply it to my weight… which is totally healthy by medical standards, but is still seen as grossly fat by the standards of, say, TV actresses. Even though my weight is well within a healthy medical range, it’s still not always easy being okay with it. And the ideas I learned from FA have been of invaluable help.

And I’m tremendously grateful for that. I am still very much shaped by the ideas of fat acceptance, and even though I’m not fat anymore, I would like to think of myself as an ally of the movement, and even as a member of it.

I just wish the movement felt the same way about me.

And about other fat people who choose to lose weight.

My Body, My Right To Decide

I am grateful for the FA movement. But I also have serious differences with it, and some serious anger. Among other things, I spent years buying into the hardcore FA line denying any connection between fatness and health problems. And this denialism gave me a years-long excuse to not try weight loss. I spent years ignoring the serious health problems my weight was creating for me… because I’d been persuaded by the FA movement that weight loss wouldn’t make any difference to my health, and that I’d never succeed at it even if I tried. I wasted a lot of years being a lot less healthy than I could have been. I’m pretty ticked off about that.

But that’s nothing compared to the anger I’m experiencing now that I’ve lost weight.

When I first started blogging about my weight loss, I was met with a faceful of extremist denialism, concern trolling, and outright hostility from many FA advocates, in both blog comments and private emails. The health benefits of successful weight loss were denied. The extremist attitudes of many FA activists were denied. Connections between weight and health were denied, and medical researchers publicizing these connections were called “crusaders.” I was told that all diets fail everyone. I was told that there was no way my weight loss would work in the long run; that I might succeed in losing the weight initially, but would almost certainly fail to keep it off over time. I was told that weight loss is never the right decision for anyone, and that there is no health problem that could appropriately be dealt with by weight loss. I was told that there are no serious health risks caused or exacerbated by being fat, and that health problems that appear to be caused by fatness are always really caused by something else. I was told that weight is entirely controlled by genetics, that eating/ exercise habits have absolutely nothing to do with it, and that weight management is therefore a complete waste of time. I was told that it was okay to incidentally lose weight as part of a “healthy at every size” eating and exercise plan, but that deliberate weight loss was horribly unhealthy… even if the “conscious weight loss” plan was identical to the “healthy at every size” plan in every way. I was told that even when weight loss is successful, the harm done by it — physical, psychological, or both — is terrible: so terrible that, in all cases, it completely outweighs the benefits.

And the specific health concern that inspired me to lose weight — namely, a bad knee that was getting much worse, to the point where my mobility was becoming seriously impaired — was met with a callous, trivializing dismissal that I still find shocking. Many FA advocates were passionately concerned about the quality of life I might lose if I counted calories or stopped eating chocolate bars every day. But when it came to the quality of life I might lose if I could no longer dance, climb hills, climb stairs, take long walks, walk at all? Eh. Whatever. I should try exercise or physical therapy or something. Oh, I’d tried those things already? Well, whatever. As long as I didn’t try to lose weight. That was the important thing. For the sweet love of Loki and all the gods in Valhalla, whatever else I did, I should not try to lose weight.

Essentially, when I started writing about weight loss, I was treated like a traitor. I was treated like a threat. Even though I made it clear that I wasn’t advocating weight loss for everybody, the mere fact that I was choosing to lose weight myself was seen as undermining the principles of the movement. And I was told, in no uncertain terms, to knock it off.

This didn’t just piss me off. It baffled me. I’d always thought of the fat acceptance movement as essentially about empowerment and self-ownership. Our bodies, our right to decide. Apparently, not so much. Apparently, the decision to manage my health by losing weight was not really mine. Apparently, my body didn’t belong to me. It belonged to the fat acceptance movement. Many of whom felt entirely comfortable telling me what I should and should not do with it.

And I’m not the only one. When I started blogging about my weight loss, I wasn’t just met with toxic denialism from FA advocates. I was also met with a hugely positive response from readers who were dealing with the same stuff. Like me, a lot of my readers identified as fat-positive, but because of serious health concerns, they were now working on losing weight… and were trying to reconcile their fat-positivity with their weight loss. And a number of these readers had dealt with the same hostile, concern-trolling, denialist reaction from the FA movement. They felt the movement had made an important and valuable difference in their lives, they felt a connection with it that they wanted to maintain… and yet they felt like they’d been abandoned by it, even pushed out of it. Margo put it best in her email to me: “The body / fat positive communities don’t seem to have any place for me, even though these are communities I’ve sought out, identified with and gained a lot from over the years. Firstly, I’ve done the unthinkable and dropped my body fat percentage intentionally, and secondly, the scientist in me just can’t deal with the faith-like basis for some of the debates on health, weight and weight loss anymore. I just wish there was a place to talk about the intersection of these issues with feminism without feeling that I’m a FA and feminism drop-out.”

What. The. Hell.

What kind of feminism is this?

What kind of movement claims to be about empowerment… but disavows people for making their own choices about their bodies?

What kind of movement claims to be about self-ownership… but abandons people who deviate from the movement’s norm?

What kind of movement claims to be about self-esteem… but treats people like traitors for loving their bodies and wanting to take care of them the best way they know how?

I still think there is a hugely important place in our society for a fat acceptance movement. I think we need a movement that advocates for treating people with dignity, equality, and respect, regardless of their size; a movement that resists the impossible cultural ideals of beauty; a movement that encourages fat people to love themselves and take care of themselves, regardless of whether they lose weight; a movement that speaks out for fat people’s right to make their own choices about their bodies and their health.

But it needs to accept that not everyone is going to make the same choices. If the fat acceptance movement is going to advocate for fat people who don’t choose to lose weight, it needs to be every bit as supportive of fat people who do.

Our bodies.

Our right to decide.

Period.

Caught Between Fat and Thin: The Pounds Come Off, But the Label Stays

December 8, 2010 Greta Christina7 Comments

I’m always going to be a fat woman. Don’t get me wrong. At five foot three and 135 pounds, I am not, by any useful definition of the word, fat.

But I have been fat. I was fat for many, many years. And for years, I was an ardent advocate of the fat acceptance movement. I actively resisted the idea that there was any point whatsoever to losing weight. I believed that medical statistics on the health effects of obesity were exaggerated at best, part of the cultural conspiracy to make women hate their bodies at worst. I was convinced that I could be just as healthy at 200 pounds (and with the eating and exercise habits that kept me at 200 pounds) as I would be with less weight. And I was convinced that losing weight never, ever worked… or at least, that it worked so rarely it wasn’t worth trying–if there was even any reason for trying.

It wasn’t until my bad knee started getting worse that I saw the writing on the wall, and decided that, given a choice between losing mobility and losing weight, the weight would have to go.

You’d probably think that losing weight would make a person stop thinking of him or herself as fat. And you’d almost certainly think that making a concerted effort to not be fat would make someone abandon the whole idea of fat acceptance. I thought all that myself once… and I was wrong.

Thus begins my latest piece for AlterNet, Caught Between Fat and Thin: The Pounds Come Off, But the Label Stays. To find out more about how fat acceptance has been both an ally and an enemy in my struggle to love my body — and how I still see the world through the eyes of a fat person, even though I’m not fat anymore — read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

Happily Single, Happily Married

November 29, 2010 Greta Christina7 Comments

An edited version of this piece was originally published on AlterNet. This is the complete, unedited version.

How long should you wait after a relationship ends to get involved with someone new?

And is that even the right question to be asking?

I write a lot about the hazards of making decisions about sex and relationships by default. I’ve written about the problem of default decisions in relationships generally, and I’ve written about the specific default decisions people often make in their relationships — when and whether to have kids, to get married, to be monogamous, and so on.

But there’s a major decision people typically make about their long-term romantic relationships — a decision that these particular questions don’t touch on.

And that’s the decision about whether to even get into a relationship at all.

In American culture, it’s generally assumed that everybody wants to be married, or to be in a long-term relationship. It’s assumed that everybody should be hitched up, and that everybody would be better off that way. Oh, sure, if you’ve just broken up with someone, it’s considered prudent to take a break between relationships. But it’s generally assumed that this break is just that — a break. A temporary pause in the normal, correct state of affairs: the state of being in love. It’s assumed that, once a decent interval has passed, of course you’ll want to get back in the love game.

And this assumption drives me up a tree. More so than almost any other default assumption about relationships.

This may sound odd coming from me. If you’ve read my writing at all — and especially if you’ve read my writing about sex and love — there’s a word you’ll inevitably see come up, again and again and again. That word: Ingrid.

Ingrid and I are very happily married. We’ve been married for six and a half years (or five years, or two and a half years, depending on which of our three weddings in the shifting “same- sex marriage” winds you’re talking about), and we’ve been together for close to thirteen years. I talk about Ingrid, and about our marriage, in earnest, passionate, lavishly purple prose that sometimes verges on nauseating. And largely because of Ingrid, I am a huge fan of love, and of marriage, and of putting in the hard work of making love and marriage last.

And yet.

I was single for twelve years before Ingrid and I fell in love.

Very happily single.

And I am also a huge fan of being single. I am a huge fan of taking time after a relationship ends: time to consider, not just when to be coupled again and with whom, but whether to be coupled again. I am a huge fan of learning to be okay about being single: learning, not just to be okay with it, but to be actively happy about it. I am a huge fan of seeing our choices about romantic relationships include the choice, “None of the above.”

I’m not alone in this. According to Dr. Marty Klein, Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist (and author of five books on sexuality as well as the Sexual Intelligence blog), the consensus in the therapeutic community is that taking time to be alone after a breakup is, if not essential, certainly very beneficial to making future relationships work. Klein thinks this time gives people the space, not only to grieve over the loss of a relationship, but to grow. Being single, he says, gives people room to rethink old habits — habits that may have caused problems for their relationships in the past. It lets them learn more about who they are, and what they really want in a relationship… and whether a relationship is even what they want at all.

But how does that work?

How can I be an advocate, both for happy marriage, and for happy bachelor/ bachelorette-hood?

There are two basic things going on here. They’re going to seem paradoxical, but they’re really not. Paradox resolution is forthcoming, I promise.

Thing One: Being single for so long was, in and of itself, awesome.

Thing Two: Being single for so long has made my marriage stronger.

Let’s get to Thing One first. Being single for twelve years was one of the best experiences of my life. It taught me self-reliance. It taught me self-confidence. It taught me an immense amount about who I was and what I wanted and how I felt about myself and the world. It taught me how to keep myself company. It taught me how to keep myself sane.

And for most of those years, it was just plain fun. I did what I wanted to, when I wanted to do it. I went to the movies when I wanted. I hung out with my friends when I wanted. I went out to nightclubs or sex clubs or nerdy folk dances when I wanted. I sat on the sofa eating ice cream and watching “Star Trek” when I wanted. I let the dishes rot in the sink when I felt like it. (And I felt like it a lot.) I fucked dozens of different women: casual personal-ad hookups, ongoing fuckbuddies who became genuine friends, women at sex clubs whose names I never knew.

I never would have known how valuable and fun being single was if I hadn’t thought to try it. As Dr. Charlie Glickman, AASECT Certified Sexuality Educator and Ph.D. in Adult Sexuality Education, said when I asked him about this, “I’ve always said that the only way to know for sure if something works for you is to try it on. Whether that’s a shirt or a relationship, we can often make educated guesses but until we take it off the hanger and put it on, we don’t really know for sure. I’ve spoken with a lot of people who thought that a particular sexual activity or relationship structure wouldn’t work for them until they tried it.”

And obviously, we can’t try out a relationship option — including the “None” option — unless we know it’s both available and valid. You can’t try on a shirt if you don’t know it’s on the rack… and you’re a lot less likely to try on a shirt if your friends are all telling you it’s ugly.

An important point to make here: For most of those twelve solo years, I wasn’t just happily single. I was consciously and deliberately single. I wasn’t single for twelve years out of bad luck or bad vibes or bad dating skills. I was single because I chose to be single. By the time I fell in love with Ingrid, I was beginning to question my singlehood and to be open to the possibility of a serious relationship… but for most of those twelve years, I actively resisted them. I made it clear to anyone I was dating, right at the outset, that dating me was not going to end with us walking down the aisle. My personal ads always said things like, “Seeking casual flings or ongoing sexual friendships; not seeking LTR.” Or, if I was in a blunter mood, “I’m happy being single and don’t want a wife.”

So why the hell did I get married?

That brings us to Thing Two, and the apparent paradox. Yes, being single for so long was a completely valuable and fun experience for its own sake.

And at the same time: My marriage with Ingrid is much stronger because of the years I spent on my own. Being single for twelve years laid the emotional foundation for my side of this marriage. A significant part of it, anyway.

Some of that is because, when I was single, I did a whole lot of soul-searching. About love, and about a bucketload of other stuff. Having room to just be myself for a few years gave me the chance to figure out some bad emotional habits… and to unlearn them. I learned how to sort out what I wanted and felt from what other people told me I should want and feel. I learned how to balance assertiveness and clarity with generosity and kindness — or, as I put it to a friend recently, how to find the window between being a demanding, high-maintenance asshole and being a doormat. I learned how to ask for what I wanted and needed and deserved, without alienating people or wrecking relationships. I learned why I kept being attracted to fucked-up, emotionally broken drug addicts… and I learned how not to be. I learned how to find the sexiness and the intensity and the compelling sense of fascination and intrigue — in sane, balanced, stable people.

And without all that, I doubt that my relationship with Ingrid would have lasted six months — much less thirteen years.

But there’s something else here: something more crucial, something that’s right at the heart of this apparent paradox I keep talking about.

Knowing that I can be happily single makes it easier to be happily married.

My marriage is stronger because I see it as a real choice. I don’t feel trapped into it. It’s not a default slot I fell into, and I’m not afraid that I could never be happy on my own. It’s a real choice — a choice between genuinely competing options, with real plusses and minuses to each of them.

I’m not with Ingrid because I’m afraid of being alone. I’m with Ingrid because I want to be with Ingrid.

So when I’m feeling cranky about something that’s less than perfect in our marriage — a compromise we made about money that I’m not totally happy with, a party I promised to go to that I just don’t feel like coping with, an evening when we’re both tired and cranky and irritable and are snapping at each other, the fact that I have to do the dinner dishes even though I’m really not in the mood and really just want to sit on the sofa watching “Star Trek” — the upsets aren’t compounded by feeling trapped into them. The large conflicts and small irritations that come with any long-term relationship are much easier to deal with when I remember that this is my choice. Remembering that this is my choice reminds why I made it — and why I continue to make it. It reminds me that I make this choice because I am passionately in love with Ingrid, because I feel more like myself with her than I have with any other person I’ve ever known, because my life with her is richer and stronger and way more fun than life without her, because she is an extraordinary person and I am intensely lucky to have her in my life at all… and lucky beyond my wildest dreams to get to share every day of my life with her.

(I warned you. Purple prose, verging on nauseating.)

And the flip side of that is true as well. When I’m feeling happy about our marriage — which is most of the time, by a significant margin — that happiness is enhanced by the freedom with which we chose it. Our happiness isn’t something we fell into by accident; it’s not a slot we got slotted into and that we were lucky enough to fit. We chose it. And we’ve worked our asses off for it. So it feels like ours. It feels like it belongs to us.

But as passionate as I feel about this question of choice — of making our own conscious decisions about our own damn relationships, and not letting ourselves get slotted into them by default — I have to admit that things aren’t always that simple. More choices don’t always make us happier. Some research suggests that having too many choices can make us as unhappy as not having any. It can overwhelm us, paralyze us, make us anxious about whether our choices are right, make us blame ourselves when things don’t work out, create a perpetual loop of second-guessing, raise our expectations to an impossible level. (Think about shopping for olive oil. If there’s only one kind on the grocery store shelf, we don’t much like that, especially if it’s a kind we don’t like… but if there are a hundred varieties, that can be just as frustrating.)

This is a point Dr. Klein was emphatic about. When I interviewed him about this question — about default decisions in general, and about the specific default decision of being coupled over being single — he pointed out that not everybody is as enamored of choice as I am. Personally, he also has a strong philosophical attachment to making his own free choices about his own life… but from a practical, clinical perspective, he recognizes that many people are happier, and better able to get on with their lives, when they let some of their decisions, big or small, be made by social consensus.

And while Dr. Glickman is another fan of tailoring our relationships to fit instead of just buying them off the rack, he also acknowledges the challenges to this approach. “The more you move away from the default option,” he says, “the harder it is to find role models, which can feel really unstable as well as making it more difficult because you might not think of a possible solution to the challenges you face.”

So I guess that’s what I’m trying to do here. I’m not trying to make a new rule that everyone has to follow. I’m trying to be a role model for an option some people might not have considered. As much as the demanding, high-maintenance asshole in me would love to tell everyone to live their lives exactly like I do, I can’t in good conscience do that. I’m not going to argue that absolutely everybody should be single, and should try to be happy being single, for X amount of time before they get coupled again. I know that isn’t right for everyone. (After all, while I’d been single for twelve years before Ingrid and I fell in love, Ingrid herself had only been single for five months. And while she’d had times before that when she was single for longer, she acknowledges that she wasn’t really happy about it. She made the best of it, but it wasn’t what she would have chosen.)

I’m not saying that the way I did it is the only way, or even the best way. I don’t want to replace the old set of Thou Shalts with a new one.

I’m just trying to say: Being single is an option. It’s a valid option: temporarily, or indefinitely. It’s one that some people are genuinely happy with. I was, for close to twelve years. If you tend to feel trapped in relationships — or if you get panicky and freaked-out when you’re not in one — it’s an option you might consider. It’s an option that might make you happy, just because it’s fun and cool and valuable for its own sake. And it’s an option that might do a world of good for any future relationships.

I’m not trying to say, “Thou Shalt.”

I’m just trying to say, “Thou Might.”

Greta Christina's Blog

Atheism, sex, politics, dreams, and whatever.

Feminism

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Caught Between Fat and Thin: The Pounds Come Off, But the Label Stays

Happily Single, Happily Married

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