My Problem With "Maggie Goes On A Diet"

I discovered Maggie Goes On A Diet during one of my morning rituals (I tend to start my days with a cup o' joe and a few interesting Yahoo! articles). As the above video explains, the book, aimed at girls as young as 6 or 7, is about an overweight 14-year-old who decides to go on a diet after being teased mercilessly by her classmates.

I probably don't have to tell you that Maggie has sparked a lot of controversy. The media has been raving about so-called "mommy bloggers" who are up in arms over how the book mishandles sensitive body image issues, but what I noticed after sifting through the comments on several news articles is a slightly different attitude:

"There is nothing offensive about this book, unless you're living in denial. Girls do tend to obsess about their weight and image far more than boys, so choosing a girl as the main character makes sense." 

"God forbid she take up an activity that causes her to lose weight. What an awful message." 

"This book is a good thing. The last thing this world needs
is more fat chicks."

I'm not usually a fan of chatspeak, but I think that last statement warrants a big-ass smh.

I have no objection whatsoever to children's books teaching healthy eating habits and the value of exercise, but as a former (and current) Fat Girl this book is offensive. Society has always done a bang-up job of making girls feel like crap about themselves, and this book is the icing on the cake — or should I say, the no-calorie sweetener on the high-fiber oatmeal?

What could have been an uplifting book about a girl eating wholesome foods, having fun playing outside, and ultimately feeling good about herself (without other's approval) turned into a social commentary about the unacceptability of being overweight in our society. Maggie is a loser when she's fat. Nobody likes her. The boys all point and laugh. But then she drops X number of pounds and people are putty in her hands. She becomes the star of the soccer team, people know her by name and want to be her friend, and boys even think she's cute — the ultimate triumph! *gags*

I'm not denying the fact that there's an obesity problem in this country and I'm certainly not knocking the importance of a balanced diet and exercise. But there's a way to deal with these issues without telling little girls that their physical appearance and value as a person are inextricably linked.

Female, Not A Marionette (By Jennifer J.)

Who's pulling your strings?

This piece was submitted by Jennifer J., a teen feminist and humanist. Jennifer would like to communicate with other teens who share her values, and end up making the world a better place for women to speak out!

If I am writing this now, it is because I feel the need to share this with other females out there who might go through the same situation. Today, I have just realized what I am to other people, especially males. 

I am not exactly the type of girl who "goes after" somebody right after some silly talk. I like to know them first and try to be connected. I have a very big heart, but I don’t show it that much. On the outside I am the tough and cold girl you would never approach, but on the inside I am the girl who loves and cares. The only reason I don’t demonstrate it is because I have learned that the more you show how warm-hearted you are, the more people will take advantage of you. 

And so, when people would draw near me, I would be indifferent, not showing any emotions. But there was one person who, despite my frostiness, approached me and faced everything I threw at him. To me that was incredible; usually people would be distant because of how cold I am. Only he had the bravery to talk to me. 

Of course we talked for a while. We got to know each other and started talking about more romantic subjects. Like many guys, he wanted to be more intimate, however I wasn't comfortable with that. I would rather talk about these kind of things and fuel the imagination than actually be intimate with somebody. I still consider myself a little girl; I don’t want to go that far.

After arguing about it several times, I decided to drop it and delete this guy from my contacts. Was that supposed to feel bad? Well, I did feel bad about doing that for some reason. I added him back and we continued talking to each other. As time passed, he was really getting serious and that critically put pressure on me. My body is a temple. I am not supposed to be pressured because of it, right? 

I decided then to talk to him about it. I told him that I shouldn’t be pressured and that we should slow things down. Today, I realize that he obliterated me. Now it makes me think about how and what I am to males. 

I am a female, and I am intelligent, beautiful, graceful, important and trustworthy. My body is sacred and not a universal pathway. I am talking now in the name of all females in the world. We are not something people can just use for their fantasies. We are love, care, comfort and attention. We are strength, courage and beauty. What makes guys think that we can be the tissue they blow in? 

Our bodies are the reason why there is a world and a worldwide population. We bear life in us. We are to be respected and loved. So I will state this one very last thing and if you can, read it out loud:

“I am a woman and not a marionette.”  

What does being a girl mean to you? (By Becka W.)

Becka W. wrote this piece in response to a question I posted under my Writers Wanted tab: "What does being a girl mean to you?" Becka blogs about feminist issues and her work has been featured on Fbomb multiple times – check her out at Becka Tells All!

Being a girl takes guts. 

I can walk with my feet 3 inches off the ground for the whole day. I walk down streets alone at night in a short skirt even though so many in my society tell me that it’s dangerous for a girl to be out alone, that a man may take advantage of her – and that it’s her fault if she doesn't cover herself up. 

I dream of careers in comedy or media or politics, despite the fact that all of those areas are notorious boys’ clubs.

  

Being a girl takes compassion and the will to act. I hear stories of other women’s rapes or fights with the healthcare system and I want to help them out. I hear about inequality and injustice in the fight for LGBT rights and I remember how rough it was – still is – for women to be accepted as powerful figures in our society, and I fight with them. I hear about a blood drive, or a cancer research walk, or a charity benefit and I feel compelled to participate. I don’t hate men, I just hate some men who don’t care about girls. I don’t hate conservatives, I hate that they’ve co-opted religion as their defense against women’s reproductive rights. I know how to see shades of gray. 

Being a girl takes confidence. We’re told to look a certain way, to behave a certain way, to like certain things. The fact that I am heavier, hate sitting with my legs crossed, and like Star Wars, Star Trek, comic books, and raunchy comedies more than I enjoy chick flicks doesn’t make me less of a woman. 

It makes me a more complex one. 

Girls are told to be one way, and to be any other way takes guts and confidence and independence and faith in oneself – and every girl is different from that image, that stereotype.

  

Being a girl means being awesome, intelligent, fantastic, strong, independent, fun, adventurous, kind, smart, and great.

____________________________

I'm curious to know what "being a girl" means to YOU. Send your response to teenagefeminist@gmail.com, and I might just post it!

Love the Body You've Got (Take it From a Fat Girl)

I've never seen anyone like Beth Ditto in
the limelight before; I think her beauty is
absolutely magnetic. Hooray for confidence!

I recall a time in elementary school when a friend tried to defend me from a few bullies by saying that I "wasn't fat, just big-boned." A few years later, I had a teacher who — probably in an attempt to keep my ego intact — wouldn't let kids say "fat" in class, only "fluffy."

To set the record straight, I do not have abnormally large bones. And I am not, nor have I ever been, a rabbit. But whether it's these sugar-coated terms or the painfully unoriginal "ugly fat girl," I've never quite been able to shake my overweight status for long.

Despite a few traumatizing events (i.e. falling off the jungle gym, losing my paper pilgrim's hat on Thanksgiving, etc.), I have relatively good memories of elementary school. I was about a foot taller than everybody else and began experiencing all the joys of early puberty (ah, training bras!), but I still don't remember those days in terms of my body. Rather, I remember going insane on Field Day (I still have the ribbons to prove it), competing with my classmates to see who could write the most numbers (we had to sprawl our lists out in the hallway to measure them), and playing "The Magic Scrap" when our teacher needed to trick us into cleaning up our messes.

Middle school was a different story. I don't know what they started putting in the Capri Suns the summer between my 5th and 6th grade years, but everybody got meaner while I became more and more self-conscious. I was significantly - shall we say, heftier - than my classmates, and there were always those intent on reminding me that I was fat and they were not.

I was an emotional wreck. Whether people recognized it or not, I was basically writhing in my own skin, caught between trying to wear clothes that were "hip" (and feeling awkward), and falling back on dingy jeans and band t-shirts (and still feeling awkward).

I love Adele. But whenever I go on
Youtube all I see are comments
saying how "fat" she is. Tell me
this woman isn't beautiful.

High school, I am proud to say, is much better. No overweight teen is going to escape the negative comments that inevitably bounce through high school hallways, but I've found a comfortable niche among friends and clubmates where I feel almost immune to that sort of thing. I've been living by the mantra "If it won't matter in five years, don't worry about it."

But last week, after a several-month streak of body positivity, somebody really hurt me. And I don't even think they meant to.

Long story short, this person (who is probably a size 4 or smaller) complained about how much weight they've gained and, in a not-so-subtle way, alluded to the fact that I was unhealthy. Really? You're going to complain to me about how much weight you've gained? And then you're going to criticize my health, despite the fact you know how hard I bust my butt for school, projects, and all the stuff I'm involved with? I was literally thinking: "Sorry, insert-name-here, I haven't had much motivation to exercise lately. Hard to imagine why."

Needless to say, I felt really crappy when I got home that day. But then I found these posters in the Love Your Body Day section of the NOW website and immediately felt better.

My favorite poster.

To top it all off, I also found this quote in a random comment on the Ms. Magazine website:

The less we judge each other by the contours of our bodies, the more clearly we will see the true content of each other's characters.

Isn't that awesome?

It reminded me that in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter what we look like, just what we do. We're not going to be remembered for being a size 4 (or 24), so we might as well make the most of life without letting insecurities "weigh" us down.
______________________________________________________________

You may not know Beth Ditto (pictured above), but she's the lead singer of a band called Gossip (which originated only 30 miles from my hometown). Ditto is apparently well known for her outspoken support of both LGBT and feminist causes (according to the all-knowing Wikipedia), and is also an advocate of body positivity. Even if this isn't exactly my type of music, it's cool to see a bigger girl rock it out for once!

Random Thoughts for a Friday Afternoon: Abortion, Diets, and Krispy Kreme Donuts

There have only been about two days in the past few weeks where I actually got some free time, so while I regret not writing for a while, I don't blame myself. After all, it's hard to write anything interesting (let alone coherent) when your eyes are about to fall out of your head from exhaustion. But anyway, you know when you get into one of those crazy "thinking" moods? I've been like that a lot lately, just thinking, thinking, thinking. Here are my random thoughts for a Friday afternoon:

Abortion. I realized the other day in an epiphany-kind-of-way what being pro-choice is really about. People make pro-choicers out to be inhuman baby-killers (and I'll admit, I would never want that stereotype on my head), but it's a lie. When a woman has an abortion it's not as if she just bops out of the clinic whistling "Singing In the Rain." Having an abortion would tear anybody up inside.

Pro-choicers don't celebrate the act of ending a baby's life, but they do respect women enough to allow them to make their own decisions about their own bodies. That's what we're celebrating: the fact that we are intelligent creatures capable of intelligent, rational thoughts. Why should I let some governor in [insert state here] dictate what I can and cannot do with my body?

I'm not sure if the statistic "77% of anti-abortion leaders are men. 100% of them will never be pregnant" is true, but if it is, dang. How can they make decisions about something they will never, ever experience for themselves?

Maybe if we did more to make abortions unnecessary in this country - like amp up sex education in schools; make contraception more accessible to at-risk couples; and make it easier for single, pregnant women to receive report (financial and emotional) - women wouldn't have to suffer so much.

Overall? Being pro-choice doesn't mean that you're anti-life.

Diets. I haven't really blogged about my weight loss struggles before, but I'm horrified to admit that I've gained back nearly three-fourths of the weight I spent nearly a year losing. I let stress and school get the better of me, and used that as a (lame) excuse to drown my sorrows in Oreos and cheesy enchiladas. Well, I hopped back on the weight loss bandwagon two days ago, and I'm feeling a load better. I'm approaching things differently this time, and believe it or not it's all because of what I read in a random Yahoo! article.

The article said that when women try to lose weight, we're way too hard on ourselves. Instead of "Oh wow, I lost a pound!" we tend to say "Aww man, I only lost a pound?"

Well, no more.

I'm going to start celebrating little successes. If I get it in my head that this is a short-term "diet," I'm going to crash and burn. It's way less pressure to think of this as a lifestyle change, something I can stick to from now on. I'm going to make good choices and drink lots of water, of course, but if we're having pizza one night - dammit, I'm having pizza.

If you want to get healthy and start tracking your food, check out Livestrong.com. Sign up to use one of its features called The Daily Plate - it's great!

For an A&F clothing ad,
something invariably seems
to be missing.

Operation: Anti-Discrimination. Okay, this doesn't have a ton to do with Krispy Kreme donuts (though my group and I will be enjoying them on the day of our "operation"). What is this "operation," you say? On December 18th the girls from Real Beauty Revolution and I will be going under-cover at a nearby mall as different stereotypes to see how people treat us. I'm completely stoked because I'll finally be facing my demon: Hollister.

Whenever my brother and I walk past Hollister we plug our noses and make "snooty" comments. I absolutely abhor the store.

As an overweight woman I'm really interested to see how they react to me, if at all. I'm going to wear sweatpants, a sweatshirt of some sort (I've got a lovely one with my brother's face on it!), a cheap-looking bag, and no makeup. I might pretend that I've never been in the store before, and innocently ask if they have my size...

A part of me hopes we won't experience discrimination in any of the stores we target, but a larger part - a biased, immature part - wants to bust some suckers.

Am I biased against stores that routinely judge and treat customers like crap (i.e. Hollister, A&F, Nordstrom)? Yes.

But that'll make the results that much more interesting when I post them on the 18th!

The (Big-Breasted) Curse of Women in Video Games

Video games. Sweet, succulent video games. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day . . .?

Um, sorry about that.

Though my gaming experience hardly compares to my brother’s (who I swear was playing Zelda: A Link to the Past in the womb), I still consider myself a full-fledged gamer, and a darn good one at that.

But what does it mean to be a gamer and a girl? "Teenage boy" and "video game fanatic" are often synonymous, but the same can't be said for someone like myself. In fact, in her article What Women Want, Aleah Tierney suggests that to be a girl and a gamer is to be "a stranger in a strange land . . . a male-created virtual space."

Unfortunately, I don’t think Tierney is that far off. According to We need more women in games, an article by blogger Jacob Aron, women represent nearly 38% of all gamers, but only 11% of game developers. But when you think about it, is it really shocking that more women aren’t lining up to work at places like Nintendo, Capcom, and Konami (just to name a few)? Childhood I-want-to-be-a-ballerina fantasies aside (hey, don’t look at me!), women are taught to be practical. *Puts on sarcastic tone* Why risk doing something so math- and science-oriented like developing video games when we should be flexing our natural abilities as helpers and nurturers?

Video game developing just doesn’t appeal to most women (sadly enough), and that’s probably why a majority of the game universe has been molded around puke-inducing male fantasies of macho, gun-totting heroes and exotic, large-breasted women.

Though they make up only 49% of the US population, research shows that 85% of all video game characters are male - and that figure rises to 90% for characters that players can actually control. Excluding race as a factor (which is another issue entirely), male characters in video games are as diverse as ever. They can be bulky-as-heck, gaunt, or average-looking. They can be triumphant heroes, shady villains, or your Average Joe off the street. They can be hunky, intelligent, sleazy, or badass - it doesn’t really matter. There’s no end to the possibilities of what male characters can be.

Expectations for female video game characters, however, are much more constricted. They're often forced to play the “helpless princess” role, giving a male lead the chance to flex his muscles and "save the day." Female characters are also constantly portrayed as meek, shy, submissive, innocent, naïve - the list goes on and on. I’ve even noticed that 4 times out of 5, fantasy-game-women are given roles as healers or sorceresses rather than sword-wielding warriors. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with having supernatural abilities (heck, I wouldn't mind having a few myself), but it makes me think back to the whole "women are supposed to be helpers" theory.

Helpers. Sidekicks. Servants?

Now, for those of you who don’t play video games, I hope you don’t think they’re all sexist piles of crap! On the contrary, there are plenty of awesome, strong women who hold their own against male counterparts (Samus Aran from Metroid and Jill Valentine from Resident Evil both come to mind). But I do have one gripe . . .

Women in video games are always, always, always inhumanly “beautiful.”

Whereas male characters can place anywhere on the scale of attractiveness from “purposefully repulsive” to “god-like," video game women always have to fall under the latter category. With physiques that make Barbie look average, these characters have impossibly long and slender legs; skinny waists (but wide hips); and breasts that mimic medium-sized watermelons. Just type in “women in video games” to Google Images and you’ll see what I mean!

What the heck? Do you think the people who created these - um - overly-endowed characters just sat down one day and said “so, how big do you think we can get these puppies"?

Because it seems pretty frivolous to me.

I’d say the body proportions of 90% of female video game characters are a huge insult to women in real-life. What is it, video-game-developer-who-lives-with-his-parents, we're not good enough for you?

Aleah Tierney wrote about her own frustrations when playing Tomb Raider for the first time. The game’s lead (Lara Croft) is often seen as a beacon of female empowerment, but Tierney didn’t exactly see things that way:

I couldn't wait to load and play Tomb Raider when it first came out, but when I saw Lara, I just couldn't take the game seriously. The giant twin pyramids mounted onto her chest look like something she could use to impale her enemies. In many ways her kick-butt presence is a triumph, but the designers' decision to sexualize her to the point of deformity angered me. I couldn't get past her proportions, so I put the game away. I'm waiting to see if Lara (or her designers) will evolve in future versions of the game.

I don’t think Lara’s changing anytime soon, pal. In fact, video games are becoming more and more sexualized as time goes on - and as kids (people in general, actually) are becoming de-sensitized to staggering levels of violence and sexualization in all areas of the media, I don’t see conditions improving for video game gals anytime soon.

It’s kind of funny, actually. I can play the bloodiest, goriest games ever - the kind with chainsaws, zombies, and flesh-eating dogs - and they don’t bother me a bit. Why? Because killing zombies is hardly something I’m going to pick up as an actual hobby (and I don’t foresee a People for Zombie Rights group anywhere in the near future, so I'm not offending anybody by takin' them out). But the gender stereotypes and hypersexualization in games? That affects us. And it sucks. It really, really sucks. Because no matter how kickass a female character is - like I said before - as soon as you type her name into Google Images you’re going to be bombarded with twenty pages of fan art of the woman flashing her (mutant) breasts. It's degrading.

So I’ll be sticking to my survival horror games, thank you very much, because zombies don’t care if you’re male or female - or whether or not you have gargantuan jugs - they’ll try to eat your brains either way :)

Are you a female gamer too, just looking for a little support? Check out this site!