Thread by @mcjulie

Since pleasure-shaming is apparently my theme for the morning, it's one of the elements really in play when it comes to fat-shaming.

https://twitter.com/KivanBay/status/1390972798026223616

I mean... as a middle-aged person whose general level of fitness took a major hit when Covid lockdowns disrupted all my routines, I get the whole "desire to fat-shame self" but the truth is, I'm just a regular-sized dame thinking "I've looked/felt better"

And it's really ironic because most of our "oh no you're out of shape/fat" narratives are structured around pleasure-shaming too, like, you must be out of shape because lazy, fat because you ate too many treats.

But there is no fucking way you can construe the last year as PLEASURE, right?

Nobody did that because they WANTED to

Nobody did that because they ENJOYED IT MORE

And so I'm thinking, if we can engineer any kind of positive social change from the post-lockdown emergence, at least one aspect has to be, stop being JERKS about everyone's body

And, yes, that's partly a message to me, because I'm pretty good at thinking "other people's bodies are not my business" (although I do try to convey them accurately when writing) but I can be BRUTAL about my own damn self.

Which leads me to a tangent, because I woke up too early after not quite enough sleep & am feeling a bit loopy, in my own writing, I sometimes struggle to find the balance between accurately representing people's body issues vs. not perpetuating the ones that exist.

Body issues, as with a lot of my legion of mental/emotional problems, gives me this "I want to tell people they're not alone, at the same time I want to present a world where that bullshit does not happen" & never know if I'm landing in the right place.

One of the things I try to do with my writing is give a "general sense of diversity" so that you don't picture a world 100% white, straight, cis, etc., and that includes body diversity.

But not only is the Tales of the Rougarou Abby series limited by being first person, it's also hard to do, I think -- like, the werewolves are kind of inherently athletic, but "athletic" has a huge RANGE of body types.

Abby herself has a lot of issues from her upbringing, which are based around growing up with periods of starvation, and also being raised vegetarian, with a lot of vegetarian propaganda that stuck, and then ending up as a werewolf with exaggerated protein needs.

Anyway, we should stop pleasure-shaming people for whatever reason, there's actually no GOOD reason ever to do that, no, that includes whatever reason you think you have right now

AND we should stop being jerks about bodies, including our own

The end.