750 words essay 5 hrs
My Body Is Wildly Undisciplined And I Deny Myself Nearly
Everything I Desire
Q xojane.conVissues/my-body-is-wildly-undisciplined-and-i-deny-myself-nearly-everything-i-desire
roxane-gay April 9, 2014
I watched the first few seasons of The Biggest Loser avidly. The show offered the ultimate fat
girl fantasy—go to a “ranch” for a few months, and under the pressure of intense personal
trainers, low caloric intake, the manipulations of reality show producers and the constant
surveillance of television cameras, lose the weight you’ve never been able to lose on your
own.
During those first few seasons, I often toyed with auditioning to appear on the show though,
realistically, that could never happen. I’m too shy. I would go through Internet withdrawals. I
can’t work out without music. If trainer Jillian Michaels screamed at me I would shut down. As
a vegetarian, I don’t eat Jenny-0 turkey. Appearing on the show is simply not workable for me.
The longer The Biggest Loser has been on the air, however, the more the show has disturbed
me. There is the constant shaming of fat people and the medical professionals taking every
opportunity to crow about how near death these obese contestants are. There are the trainers,
with their perfect bodies, demanding perfection from people who have, for whatever reason,
not had a previously healthy relationship with their bodies. There is the spectacle of the
contestants pushing themselves in inhuman ways—crying and sweating and vomiting—visibly
purging their bodies of weakness.
1/4
This is not a show about people becoming empowered through fitness, though on the surface,
the show’s slick marketing would have you believe that. The Biggest Loser is a show about fat
as an enemy that must be destroyed, a contagion that must be eradicated. This is a show
about unruly bodies that must be disciplined by any means necessary, and through that
discipline, the obese might become more acceptable members of society. They might find
happiness.
When we watch shows like The Biggest Loser and its many imitators, we are practically
begging some power beyond ourselves: “Take these all too human bodies, and make what you
will of them.”
If you watch enough daytime television, particularly on “women’s networks,” you are treated to
an endless parade of commercials about weight loss products and diet foods—means of
disciplining the body that will also fatten the coffers of one corporation or another. In these
commercials, women often swoon at the possibility of satisfying their hunger with somewhat
repulsive foods while also maintaining an appropriately slim figure. The joy women express
over fat free yogurt and 100-calorie snack packs is not to be believed.
In her latest commercial for Weight Watchers, Jessica Simpson says, “I started losing weight
right away. I started smiling right away.” This commercial is one of many weight loss
advertisements that equate happiness with thinness and, by default, obesity with misery. In her
commercials for Weight Watchers, Jennifer Hudson shrieks about her newfound happiness
and how, through weight loss, not, say, winning an Oscar, she has achieved success.
Gossip magazines keep us constantly abreast of what’s happening to the bodies of famous
women. Their weight fluctuations are tracked like stocks because their bodies are, in their line
of work, their personal stock, the physical embodiment of market value. When celebrity women
have babies, their bodies are intensely monitored during and after—from baby bumps to post
baby bodies.
Women, for that is whom these ecstatic diet food commercials and celebrity weight loss
endorsements are for, can have it all when they eat the right foods and follow the right diets
and pay the right price.
They are the unachievable standard toward which we must, nonetheless strive. They are
thinspiration as the parlance goes—thin inspiration, a constant reminder of the distance
between our bodies and what they could be with the proper discipline.
Part of disciplining the body is denial. We want but we dare not have. To lose weight or
maintain our ideal bodies, we deny ourselves certain foods. We deny ourselves rest by
working out. We deny ourselves peace of mind by remaining ever vigilant over our bodies. We
withhold from ourselves until we achieve a goal and then we withhold from ourselves to
maintain that goal.
2/4
My body is wildly undisciplined and I deny myself nearly everything I desire. I deny myself the
right to space when I am public, trying to fold in on myself, to make my body invisible even
though it is, in fact, grandly visible. I deny myself the right to a shared armrest because how
dare I impose? I deny myself entry into certain spaces I have deemed inappropriate for a body
like mine—most spaces inhabited by other people.
I deny myself bright colors in my clothing choices, sticking to a uniform of denim and dark
shirts even though I have a far more diverse wardrobe. I deny myself certain trappings of
femininity as if I do not have the right to such expression when my body does not follow
society’s dictates for what a woman’s body should look like. I deny myself gentler kinds of
affection—to touch or be kindly touched—as if that is a pleasure a body like mine does not
deserve.
Punishment is, in fact, one of the few things I allow myself. I deny myself my attractions. I have
them, oh I do, but dare not express them, because how dare I want. How dare I confess my
want? How dare I try to act on that want? I deny myself so much and still there is so much
desire throbbing beneath my surfaces.
Denial merely puts what we want just beyond reach but we still know it’s there.
Recently, my best friend and I were drinking wine in a hotel room. She grabbed my hand to
paint my fingernail. She had been threatening to do this for hours and I was resisting for
reasons I could not articulate. Finally, I surrendered and my hand was soft in hers as she
carefully painted my fingernail a lovely shade of pink. She blew on it, let it dry, added a second
coat. The evening continued.
I stared at my finger the next day, on an airplane hurtling across the country. I could not
remember the last time I had allowed myself the simple pleasure of a painted fingernail. I liked
seeing my finger like that, particularly because my nail was long, nicely shaped, and I hadn’t
gnawed at it as I am wont to do. Then I became self-conscious and tucked my thumb against
the palm of my hand, as if I should hide my thumb, as if I had no right to feel pretty, to feel
good about myself, to acknowledge myself as a woman when I am clearly not following the
rules for being a woman.
Before I got on the plane, my best friend offered me a bag of potato chips to eat on the plane,
but I denied myself that. I said, “People like me don’t get to eat food like that in public,” and it
was one of the truest things I’ve ever said. Only the depth of our relationship allowed me to
make this revelation, and then I was ashamed for buying into these terrible narratives we fit
ourselves into and I was ashamed at how I am so terrible about disciplining my body and I was
ashamed by how I deny myself so much and it is still not enough.
With the dramatic reveal of Rachel Frederickson, the latest winner of The Biggest Loser, we
finally have a reason to be outraged about the show and its practices, even though the show
has been on the air and offering a damaging narrative about weight loss since 2004.
3/4
When her season began, Frederickson weighed 260 pounds. At the final weigh in, on live
television, she weighed 105, a 60 percent loss in mere months. She had disciplined her body
the way she was asked but, apparently, she disciplined her body a bit too much. There are so
many rules for the body—often unspoken and ever shifting.
During this reveal, even trainers Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels gaped at Frederickson’s
gaunt body. In an interview, Harper would later say, “I was stunned. That would be the word. I
mean, we’ve never had a contestant come in at 105 lbs.” The biggest loser, we now know,
should lose, but only so much.
There was a wide range of responses in the wake of seeing Rachel Frederickson’s new body.
Her body, like most women’s bodies, instantly became a public text, a site of discourse, only
now, because she had taken her weight loss too far. She had disciplined her body too much.
In the two months since that reveal, Frederickson has gained twenty pounds and is at,
apparently, a more acceptable but still appropriately disciplined size. She has explained that
she lost so much weight because she was trying to win the $250,000 prize, but those of us
who deny ourselves and try so hard to discipline our bodies know better. Rachel Frederickson
was doing exactly what we asked of her and what too many of us would, if we could, ask of
ourselves.
4/4
8/22/2018 Jon Ronson: How the online hate mob set its sights on me I Media I The Guardian
ThøGuardian
Jon Ronson: how the online hate mob set its sights on
me
When Ronson wrote about the injustice of Justine Sacco’s trial by Twitter, he found that he too
became a target of an internet witch hunt. How did we become unpaid shaming interns for
companies that don’t care about us?
Jon Ronson
Sun 20 Dec 2015 10.10 EST
I
n December 2013 a PR woman called Justine Sacco tweeted to her 170 Twitter followers:
“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!” The joke was intended to
mock her own bubble of privilege, but while she slept on the plane Twitter took control of
her life and dismantled it. She became the worldwide number one trending topic that night:
“We are about to watch this Justine Sacco bitch get fired, in real time, before she even
knows she’s being fired”, and “Everyone go report this cunt @justinesacco”, and so on, for a total
of 100,000 tweets. Justine was fired, her reputation mangled. I recounted her story in my book, So
You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. The chapter was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine. I’ve
been keeping a diary of what happened next.
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Condemnation began hesitantly at first, a little uncertain, like a consensus waiting to form: “The
article did nothing but bring her back into the spotlight when we’d all moved on,” somebody
tweeted. “Her dad is a billionaire,” someone replied. “I’m not too worried about her.” (Her father
isn’t a billionaire. He sells carpets.) “That tweet didn’t ruin her life,” someone added. “Justine
Sacco has a new job. Give me a break already.”
“After a year,” I thought when I read that one. “She got a new job after a year.” Nice people like us
had effectively sentenced Justine Sacco to a year’s punishment for the crime of some poor
phraseology in a tweet – as if some clunky wording had been a clue to her secret inner evil. The
fact that she had managed to doggedly pull things back together after a year was now being used
as evidence that the shaming had been no big deal from the start.
I remembered a time I was on a beach in Scotland and a flock of terns singled me out. They circled
above me for a while, and then began to dive bomb, pecking at my head. This early, tentative
disapproval felt like the terns circling. And then the dive-bombing began: “After reading that
excerpt from his book. I think it’s safe to say @jonronson is a fucking racist.”
A group of Chelsea fans were filmed on the Paris Metro pushing a black man off the train and
chanting: “We’re racist, we’re racist, and that’s the way we like it.” It was a shocking, awful video.
“Maybe Jon Ronson will cape up for ’em,” somebody wrote.
An opinion was beginning to form, and feed off itself, that I had written an attack on social justice,
a defence of white privilege. In coming out against online shaming I was silencing marginalised
voices – because online shaming is the only recourse of the marginalised, whereas the world
automatically allows people like Justine to succeed. But I just couldn’t see how Justine’s shaming
made anything better, given that her joke was intended to mock racism. What happened to
Justine struck me as just another terrible thing happening in the world.
I decided to try to encourage those people to read the book, and so I tweeted: “By the way, the
Justine Sacco story in the New York Times isn’t a stand-alone article. It’s an extract from a book.”
“Oh, now Ronson’s saying it’s an extract from a book,” someone wrote.
What did that mean? It was always an extract from a book. Did he think I ran home and quickly
wrote a book? But anything I said in that moment, I realised, would just be more evidence for the
prosecution, and so I went back to being silent.
“Why isn’t Jon Ronson replying to any of us?” someone tweeted.
“Because Jon Ronson only replies to men,” someone replied.
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Twitter suddenly felt uncaring, intimidating, even dangerous …
Ronson. Photograph: Christopher Lane for the Guardian
I liked it when people went for me in ridiculous ways, because when I recounted those comments
to other people they made me look good.
Still, I didn’t regret writing Justine’s story. I was basically being told, “It’s fine to write about those
wronged people, but don’t write about that wronged person because it makes us look bad.” But a
wronged person is a wronged person, even when they are an unfashionable wronged person.
I wrote about Justine not because I identified with her, although I did, but because I identified
with the people who tore her apart. I consider myself a social justice person. It was my people,
abusing our power.
I emailed Justine: “I’m getting an idea of what it was like to be you.”
“I’m really sorry if you’re getting death threats,” she emailed back. “No one should receive threats
or words of violence at all.”
“Well nobody’s threatening to actually kill me,” I replied. (As is often the case with shamings, the
range of insults levelled against Justine, a woman, had been far broader than those levelled
against me, a man.)
A train crashed in Philadelphia. Passenger cars were ripped apart. Eight people died and 200 more
were hospitalised. A survivor emerged from the wreckage and tweeted: “Thanks a lot for derailing
my train. Can I please get my violin back from the 2nd car of the train?”
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In the early days, Twitter was a place of curiosity and empathy. Back then, people might have
responded to this woman: “Are you OK?” or “What was it like?” But that’s not how Twitter and
Facebook responded in 2015. Instead, it was: “Some spoiled asshole is whining about her violin
being on that Amtrak that derailed. People died on that train” and I “I hope the violin is crushed”
and “I hope someone picks it up and smacks it against the train” and “Fuck that little bitch and
her god-damned violin. I would slap the fuckin’ taste out of her mouth if she was in reach” and
then – after she deleted her Twitter account – “Too bad she’s a coward and deleted her account,
how will her violin ever be returned?” and “I hope you get your violin back from under the
bleeding people. Good luck!” and “I hope it is destroyed” and “Your violin can be replaced. The
DEAD are gone forever” and “Self-absorbed cunt” and “I won’t be cutting her any slack. What a
sickening skank. I hope her life is exactly what a nasty bitch deserves” and “8 passengers dead,
but she lives. No justice in the world”.
Like Justine, she was being shamed because she was perceived to have misused her privilege. And
of course the misuse of privilege is a much better thing to get people for than the things we used
to get people for, like having children out of wedlock. But a great number of people who hadn’t
just been in a train crash were now accusing a woman who had just been in a train crash of being
privileged. The phrase “misuse of privilege” was becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much
anybody we chose to. It was becoming a devalued term, and was making us lose our capacity for
empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions.
I visited a TV studio in New York to film a video about the book. There was a doctor on before me,
filming her own video.
“What’s your book about?” she asked me.
“Online shaming,” I replied.
“Oh, did you read that piece in the New York Times?” she asked.
“I wrote it,” I replied.
“Oh you must be so happy!” she said.
“Actually I’m not,” I replied.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because there’s a backlash, with people calling me a racist,” I said.
“So what do you want?” she said.
I paused.
“Xanax?” I said.
She got out her pad and wrote me a prescription for 60 Xanax. After that I was no longer anxious.
But I felt groggy. I had to weigh up whether to feel groggy or anxious. Later, I mentioned this to
the comedian Joe Rogan. “Welcome to America,” he replied. “That’s our dilemma. Groggy or
anxious.”
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Rachel Doležal who was relentlessly hounded online after being
‘outed’ as a white woman. Photograph: Annie Kuster for the Guardian
I was getting misdefined by some people as a racist, and as a consequence I was starting to
misdefine myself as someone who felt the need to leap into pretty much any ambiguous shaming
and take a counterintuitive position. It was becoming unseemly. On 12 June I read in the Guardian
about Rachel Doležal, the Washington State civil rights activist who had faked being black.
“What an extraordinary story,” I thought. “So mysterious and complicated. What led her to fake
being black? Maybe she has a mental illness. Or maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she feels about colour
the way some transgender people feel about gender. Or maybe she doesn’t feel that way.” I had a
thousand questions. A journalist’s favourite question is “Why?” Why? opens doors into new
worlds.
“I wonder what Twitter is making of it?” I thought. And so I went on Twitter.
“#RachelDolezal you can APPRECIATE a culture, without APPROPRIATING it. The fact you can’t
grasp that is one reason you’re a racist idiot” and “#RachelDolezal has been living in ‘Black-Face’
her whole life, seems cut & dry racist to me” and “We should apply a super-strength relaxer onto
#RachelDolezal head & not wash it out. Allow it to burn through her skull & racist brain” and
“Make no mistake: #RachelDolezal is a self absorbed, psychotic & sociopathic racist.”
On social media we’d had the chance to do everything better, but instead of curiosity we were
constantly lurching towards instant cold judgment. Maybe Doležal was everything Twitter
assumed she was, but what was wrong with a bit of waiting for evidence? Maybe she was reading
all the tweets and thinking about killing herself. (That was possible. Three weeks earlier an Israeli
government clerk called Ariel Runis had killed himself in similar circumstances.)
I was tired of us forever making damaged people our playthings. And so I tweeted: “Feeling
incredibly sorry for #RachelDolezal and hope she’s okay. The world knows very little about her,
her motives.”
I went to dinner. I chatted away with people at the table. Everyone was nice. I went on Twitter.
Someone was calling me a white supremacist. I went back to the dinner conversation. It was nice.
I went back on Twitter. Somebody, pretending to be me, had written: “Dylann Roof is good.”
Dylann Roof was the racist who murdered nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina.
Someone told me I had no right to weigh into Dolezal’s story because, being white, it wasn’t my
story. He added that, unlike her, he had no choice in being black or white. As a black man he was
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racially profiled every time he walked down the street. He was genuinely angry with me for
chipping in the way I had. I explained my reasons – that after 30 years of writing about
complicated, spiralling people I had opinions on how to consider them. But he was right. In all the
hardening of positions I’d become a caricature.
I complained to Twitter about the man who, pretending to be me, commended the Charleston
racist murderer. Twitter responded: “We have determined that it’s not in violation of Twitter’s
impersonation policy.” I felt a flash of rage. Every time an online shaming occurred Twitter and
Google made money. Whereas those of us doing the actual shaming? We got nothing. Twitter
suddenly felt uncaring, intimidating, even dangerous. We were unpaid shaming interns for a
company that didn’t care about us. I quit Twitter.
The world outside Twitter was great. I read books. I reconnected with people I knew from real life
and met them for drinks in person. Then I drifted back on to Twitter.
Someone told me I would have avoided much of the criticism had I ended my book with a set of
rules outlining when shamings were and weren’t OK. It hadn’t crossed my mind to do that
because it sounded like the kind of thing lifestyle coaches do. And, anyway, it seemed obvious.
During 2014 and 2015 videos were surfacing of police brutality against people of colour. People
were dying: Eric Garner and Michael Brown and Sandra Bland. In McKinney, Texas a police officer
was filmed pulling his gun on a group of unarmed black teenagers at a pool party. He violently
wrestled a girl to the ground, using his bodyweight to pin her down. She was wearing a bikini. “I
want to call my mom,” she screamed, terrified.
It didn’t need saying – but maybe it did – that using social media to distribute those videos was a
world away from the Justine Sacco witchhunt. One was powerful and important, a new civil rights
battlefield. The other was a nasty imitation. Given that we are the ones with the power, it is up to
us to recognise the difference. The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to
voiceless people. We are now turning it into a surveillance society where the smartest way to
survive is to go back to being voiceless.
• The new paperback edition of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson is published by
Picador at £8.99 on 31 December 2015. To order a copy for £7.19 go to
bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only.
Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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