This is the fourth installation of a casual series where I share what media has been impacting what I’m thinking about and writing about this week. You can probably see how these influences shape what I write down. More importantly, I might influence you into finding something you find interesting, too.
The whole thing about Taylor Swift’s 2011 tumblr art (music video)
This week I’ve been caught up in the discourse surrounding Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero video just like everyone else. I’ve also been reading it through some beautifully harmonious things that have influenced my thinking. This isn’t a think piece on her use of the word “FAT” on her scale. You can find a lot of smart people talking about it.
Musically, my whole review of the new Taylor Swift album that if she wanted to start wearing Pat McGrath eyeshadow, she could have just done that. I like Taylor Swift songs but I wouldn’t say I’m a Taylor Swift fan. I am a Taylor Swift fandom fan. I love stuff that is made for girlies that girlies love, so I try to keep up with it like (what I’m convinced is most) men keep up with sports so they have something to bond over. Honestly I’m kind of glad she didn’t come out as bi like half the world thought she might. First of all, people can be straight, even if you like them. Second, I just couldn’t stomach people considering Taylor Swift brave. Friends, she is a superstar in her thirties. It is 2022. She’d be every bit of 10 years late for bravery.
The level of secondhand embarrassment I get from Taylor Swift is probably unreasonable. We have a handful of identities in common, but so do hundreds of millions of white women. I identify with so many of her publicly visible flaws and since she is one of the most visible people in the world, I intuit others I believe we share. At my worst, I’m a control freak, obsessed with seeming “good” at the expense of being honest. I can be conniving and justify it through a good old-fashioned victim complex. When I see her acting out my worst impulses, it makes me want to change everything about myself. You can skip the next section between the section dividers if you’ve had your fill of hearing about this particular choice by this particular artist, or don’t find my perspective as a thin white woman helpful.
@fabfatfeminist explicitly noted that she’s not trying to cancel Taylor Swift and just pointed out a problem, as fans frequently do, for the sake of correction. So why did so many people so fervently attack them and other fat creators? The answer mirrors the reasons that Taylor Swift saw nothing wrong with this choice. The fact that she still uses fat/scale imagery in 2022 tells me either she is surrounded by fatphobic people, or she is still deep in it. Being surrounded by fatphobic people is pretty cut and dry. There are people who would have recovered who cannot because their environment is so staunchly fatphobic, even if no one thinks you’re fat and no one around you is being obviously horrible to fat people. The fear is in the air. The judgment is not subtle.
Then there’s the possibility that she might still be in it. Unlearning fatphobia is essential to eating disorder recovery, and it also tends to come later on the recovery journey. It’s not appropriate or helpful to criticize someone at the very beginning of recovery for their anti-fat bias. She opened up about a history of disordered eating in that weird 2020 documentary. Taylor Swift said that this album was about intrusive thoughts. Being fat is only an intrusive thought if you think that being fat is among the worst things you can imagine. How did this get past so many people? Is it possible that everyone in Taylor Swift’s creative circle has deeply engrained fatphobia from unhealed disordered eating? If I’ve learned anything from being an eating disorder specialist and a good listener who is socially open about her lived experience, yes. But even if that were true and Taylor Swift shot this in her first week of recovery, the size of her platform is sufficient to reinforce the cultural definition of eating disorders that keeps fat people from healing from eating disorders as well as being granted full membership in society.
When my friend Sahana and I were chatting about it, she said “If I never hear the term body dysmorphia again it will be too late”. We use the same clinical language for Body Dysmorphic Disorder and the phenomenon of a thin woman who is so terrified of fat that she sees it where it isn’t. But the imagined anorexic with body dysmorphia has little in common with most people diagnosed with BDD. The most common BDD presentations focus on the skin, hair, or facial features, using words like “deformed” to describe obsessive thoughts about a nose or picking at one’s face for hours a day to remove perceived flaws. They overlap, but they diverge in serious ways. If it were up to me, no one would ever use the term “body dysmorphia” to describe the video frame we’ve seen over and over again at the top of articles talking about this. This whole society is obsessed with body size. How could anyone escape fatphobia without consistent, lasting effort? How could anyone see their body in a neutral way given the constant self-objectification that must be present as a female popstar? I don’t know, but you need to figure it out before putting it into a video with 34 million views after 4 days. She very well might continue struggling, and her art may very well reflect that even if she tells these stories in past tense. After all, people struggling with eating disorders become highly skilled at lying to themselves and others.
If unhealed eating disorders reproduce fatphobia, does Taylor Swift have a responsibility of recovering? Yes. Hot take: we all do.
It’s less urgent if you aren’t one of the most famous people in the world, or if you’re more negatively affected by anti-fat bias due to your identities1, but individual impact matters. You may love your fat friends and family members and never explicitly tell anyone that your worst nightmare is looking like them. It’s felt. Getting a diagnosis does not help the people in your life that your bias hurts. If you ask anyone with an eating disorder about the why they started a behavioral pattern that spun out of control, they will give you anecdotes about the way people treated them. Things people said to them. Those things alone are not the full recipe for an eating disorder, but do you really want to provide that ingredient? Providing family therapy, I’ve seen the despair on parents’ faces when they realize they have hurt their child through their own words and actions. I’ve heard so many confessions from family members who had never before talked about their own eating disorder history. But we don’t have workplace therapy or friend group therapy (not that I think we should) and while our family system is the primary system we are a part of, it’s not the only one with power. We owe it to each other to try our best to heal our relationship with food and our bodies.
Helen is deprogramming from beauty culture. She stopped using all cosmetics and stopped all beauty maintaining tasks. She’s a new follow, and I don’t cosign everything she says. But she is shaking up my life. Read those captions. The actual tasks of her deprogramming project seem mild to me, but I imagine it’s a lot harder as a straight woman, especially dealing with straight men. These are some of the excerpts from her caption that are making me question my responsibility to other women as I move through the world, a struggle that is likely evident in my Taylor Swift conclusion.
“He would look at my make-up or heels and think to himself that I care so much about others viewing me that I'm willing to live a lower quality of life than him. No matter my private justifications, the male gaze would end at the same place as every other woman wearing make-up: that I am bidding for others to see me as attractive.”
“The male gaze is always scanning for women who are already self-objectifying. They consciously or subconsciously think "if she's willing to freeze in the cold/be uncomfortable in heels/spend a ton of time on her make-up, then she probably doesn't value her comfort, safety, or experience in her body very much... Which means I don't have to value her comfort, safety, or experience in her body very much."
“Women might not want to think about how the ugliness of objectification and rape culture permeates everything, but it's the fog we all navigate. Private thoughts about pseudo-feminism really don't matter to the public bottom line. Denying it won't make it go away.”
I realized today that I’ve never been “intimidated” by a woman who was wearing foundation.
I imagine it has to do with the above, but it also has to do with internalized sexism somehow. That self-objectification is a sign of lower intellect or blanket frivolity. I wonder how to tell the difference. This is complicated by the subject skincare. I am not prepared to figure that out.
“You Don’t Look Anorexic” by Kate Siber for The New York Times
Atypical anorexia is a diagnosis that means “we would diagnose you with anorexia, but you aren’t skinny enough”. For real. You have to be significantly underweight to be diagnosed with anorexia nervosa.
I imagine that the majority of people reading this already get the gist, but for real, read this. And for sure, send it to someone. I don’t believe too many people are still surprised to hear that eating disorders affect people who aren’t underweight. What I believe most people (including medical providers!) are missing is that the spectrum of body size is not in a causal relationship with the dangerousness of an eating disorder. Fat people die from eating disorders. And they can die fat. People straight up imagine that fat people with eating disorders will inevitably become smaller and small the more severe it gets, and if they don’t become very thin, they’re fine. Anyway, I made this because I’m mad:
I didn’t know that there was a question of differing psychopathology due to different psychological presentations in anorexia and atypical anorexia, likely a product of biological differences. A differing illness progression is something I’ve seen anecdotally, but with all of the (good) arguments for collapsing the two diagnoses into one, I wasn’t aware that this was acknowledged officially.
I do have one critique. Siber expresses that patients with atypical anorexia experience frequent insurance discrimination, leading them to be discharged after a few weeks. I’m sure it’s much worse for those with atypical anorexia, but the truth is that insurance cuts off every eating disorder treatment course prematurely. Eating disorders in general are under-researched and people are underserved. The vast majority of treatment centers named in this article only accept private insurance (if they accept insurance at all). Not a single therapist quoted accepts Medicaid plans. (Shoutout to Carolyn Constin though, for committing to providing some free services and pushing for equity through the reduction of economic barriers). If you have Medicaid or no insurance at all, you’re SOL. Good luck finding someone who can name more than 2 eating disorder diagnoses at the community mental health clinic. Maybe you can get into an IOP at your local hospital? Even if you’re admitted, they sure as hell will not have programs equipped to serve people with atypical anorexia. Eating disorder treatment in general is not a priority in our healthcare systems and scientific communities despite being the most deadly of all mental health conditions.
Anyway,
have a good rest of your week.
See “Fearing the Black Body” by Dorothy Roberts