nothing to declare
Feb. 15th, 2006 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmSo, as previously noted, I have recently acquired a new dentist. He's a great dentist, his prices are a little better than many, and I'd give out the recommendation any day of the week. Before I continue, please note that my dental phobia is extraordinarily severe; if I've found someone I'm comfortable with treating me, I cannot just choose to go somewhere else. Which unfortunately means accepting or addressing a little problem, not unique to this particular practioner. So don't, for the love of all small gods, tell me to change dentists. That's not the answer to this story.
I am not bullimic. In fact, I have morbid, nearly phobic feelings about vomitting and have done so only three or four times in my life (not enumerating multiple nstances within two specific medical events counted within that three or four). However, the specific condition of my teeth as arrived at through a highly acidic diet, severe night-time grinding, 7.5 years of braces and bad genetics, does lead dentists to inquire if I am or have been bullimic. I don't take offense at this, as I'm very clear on how the question is arrived at, and it is a medical query of legitimate concern.
The problem ensues when I explain why they think that and why it's not the case. They don't believe me. They insist I protest too much. Sometimes, they will lecture me about relatives (who may or may not exist) who don't have eating disorders per se but were so worried about calories they just kept popping life savers to keep them going while they tried not to eat. Maybe that's what I'm doing, they ask.
I've never been anorexic either.
Not that I haven't been accused of these things before. (I want to pause here to talk about the word accused. I get than an eating disorder is a disease, not a weakness of character, but that understanding doesn't change the tone of these exchanges that have appeared throughout my life, so my using the word is not about my feelings about eating disorders but the way in which other people present their feelings about them to me. I think it's a digusting way to address an eating disorder to someone, whether or not they have one, and it's part of the problem I am coming to. Please, I don't want to be the villain of this tale; I've lost friends to it before).
I am, for the record, 5'6" with a weight that is generally somewhere betwen 110 and 120 lbs, depending on all sorts of factors -- hormones, exercise, what I'm eating, schedule, health. I have never counted calories except during times I was so poor I was afraid I wasn't consuming enough. When I first reached this height I weighed less than 100 lbs, and then sat at about 103 for years. I danced, had sort of only half gone through puberty. It wasn't a big deal. I ate like a horse and that's how it was. But you know what girls at camp said. Girls and school and old man doctors. Isn't that how it always works? For what my body has always been, I'm the right shape and size and weight for my height. It's not something I worry about, and believe me, I know that's a blessing on many fronts.
So I am not offended when the dentist asks me if I have an eating disorder.
But I am offended when he doesn't believe me when I reply. If I were a man, with these teeth, he would ask the question still. But I suspect he would believe me when I answered. Maybe it's not that I'm a woman (and this is so noted as he drops hints about how women think being too skinny is attractive, but it's not, trying to lure me into confession), maybe it's because he knows I'm an actor. Sadly, I'd like to think so. it offends me less.
But there is more to the dilemma, the aggravation, the sorrow, and let's be frank, the intense rage, I feel about this, the perils of being a woman in search of medical care. Considering a number of things about my nature, it would be somewhat unfair of me to offended by someone probing to see if I were a liar, because, after all, like everyone, I often am.
There is something else the repeated doubt says to me, and that is is that I don't, in the doctor's eyes, deserve this body. That I couldn't possibly have come by it honestly, whether through genetics, hard work or dumb luck. That a woman like me, with a mouth or a face like mine, just doesn't deserve such a socially valuable thing (and believe me, I'm aware of that, even if my own aesthetic preferneces do not particularly line up with that world view), and as such, could only possess it through pathology or deceit.
I have made and do make so much of my living and my art through my flesh, so to imply that it is not mine, that I am unworthy of it, that it is a lie or a falsehood, is a slap in my face. The first thing I was ever praised for was my ability to express myself through dance -- not my intelligence, not my writing, but my flesh, my certitude. I live in it so fully, when there have been so many good reasons to try to pull away from it -- health, accusation, and the pure beauty of my rather complicated fantasy lives. It's so utterly what I am, even my too thin and too long arms which when I look at them cause me to realize I often cannot fathom what use I could possibly have in this world not made for ethereal things.
People will always believe what they want to believe, and hear what they want to hear, and my flesh has always been suspect in some fashion or other (which I think is something all women could say before defining their meaning across so broad a spectrum it frightens me), but I'm a prideful creature in so many ways, including my willingness to enumerate my flaws. But there's no trade I can make, no sins I can declare to stop what is ultimately irelevant and condescending questioning. This is what it means to be in a non-dominant social grouping -- you are not just a transgessor, but _the_ transgressor, emblematic of everyone who looks or lives like you, both when you succeed (taking something you have no right to) and when you fail (being a burden on others).
I'll let you do the Miltonesque pondering on your own time, but so often it is the pettiest things that make being a woman feel like you've lost a war you can't even remember fighting.
I am not bullimic. In fact, I have morbid, nearly phobic feelings about vomitting and have done so only three or four times in my life (not enumerating multiple nstances within two specific medical events counted within that three or four). However, the specific condition of my teeth as arrived at through a highly acidic diet, severe night-time grinding, 7.5 years of braces and bad genetics, does lead dentists to inquire if I am or have been bullimic. I don't take offense at this, as I'm very clear on how the question is arrived at, and it is a medical query of legitimate concern.
The problem ensues when I explain why they think that and why it's not the case. They don't believe me. They insist I protest too much. Sometimes, they will lecture me about relatives (who may or may not exist) who don't have eating disorders per se but were so worried about calories they just kept popping life savers to keep them going while they tried not to eat. Maybe that's what I'm doing, they ask.
I've never been anorexic either.
Not that I haven't been accused of these things before. (I want to pause here to talk about the word accused. I get than an eating disorder is a disease, not a weakness of character, but that understanding doesn't change the tone of these exchanges that have appeared throughout my life, so my using the word is not about my feelings about eating disorders but the way in which other people present their feelings about them to me. I think it's a digusting way to address an eating disorder to someone, whether or not they have one, and it's part of the problem I am coming to. Please, I don't want to be the villain of this tale; I've lost friends to it before).
I am, for the record, 5'6" with a weight that is generally somewhere betwen 110 and 120 lbs, depending on all sorts of factors -- hormones, exercise, what I'm eating, schedule, health. I have never counted calories except during times I was so poor I was afraid I wasn't consuming enough. When I first reached this height I weighed less than 100 lbs, and then sat at about 103 for years. I danced, had sort of only half gone through puberty. It wasn't a big deal. I ate like a horse and that's how it was. But you know what girls at camp said. Girls and school and old man doctors. Isn't that how it always works? For what my body has always been, I'm the right shape and size and weight for my height. It's not something I worry about, and believe me, I know that's a blessing on many fronts.
So I am not offended when the dentist asks me if I have an eating disorder.
But I am offended when he doesn't believe me when I reply. If I were a man, with these teeth, he would ask the question still. But I suspect he would believe me when I answered. Maybe it's not that I'm a woman (and this is so noted as he drops hints about how women think being too skinny is attractive, but it's not, trying to lure me into confession), maybe it's because he knows I'm an actor. Sadly, I'd like to think so. it offends me less.
But there is more to the dilemma, the aggravation, the sorrow, and let's be frank, the intense rage, I feel about this, the perils of being a woman in search of medical care. Considering a number of things about my nature, it would be somewhat unfair of me to offended by someone probing to see if I were a liar, because, after all, like everyone, I often am.
There is something else the repeated doubt says to me, and that is is that I don't, in the doctor's eyes, deserve this body. That I couldn't possibly have come by it honestly, whether through genetics, hard work or dumb luck. That a woman like me, with a mouth or a face like mine, just doesn't deserve such a socially valuable thing (and believe me, I'm aware of that, even if my own aesthetic preferneces do not particularly line up with that world view), and as such, could only possess it through pathology or deceit.
I have made and do make so much of my living and my art through my flesh, so to imply that it is not mine, that I am unworthy of it, that it is a lie or a falsehood, is a slap in my face. The first thing I was ever praised for was my ability to express myself through dance -- not my intelligence, not my writing, but my flesh, my certitude. I live in it so fully, when there have been so many good reasons to try to pull away from it -- health, accusation, and the pure beauty of my rather complicated fantasy lives. It's so utterly what I am, even my too thin and too long arms which when I look at them cause me to realize I often cannot fathom what use I could possibly have in this world not made for ethereal things.
People will always believe what they want to believe, and hear what they want to hear, and my flesh has always been suspect in some fashion or other (which I think is something all women could say before defining their meaning across so broad a spectrum it frightens me), but I'm a prideful creature in so many ways, including my willingness to enumerate my flaws. But there's no trade I can make, no sins I can declare to stop what is ultimately irelevant and condescending questioning. This is what it means to be in a non-dominant social grouping -- you are not just a transgessor, but _the_ transgressor, emblematic of everyone who looks or lives like you, both when you succeed (taking something you have no right to) and when you fail (being a burden on others).
I'll let you do the Miltonesque pondering on your own time, but so often it is the pettiest things that make being a woman feel like you've lost a war you can't even remember fighting.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-16 04:36 am (UTC)I remember one day I had the stomach flu, and went in only because I had a big exam in second period that would've been impossible to make up. My mom knew this, and was expecting me to call her and ask to be picked up around lunchtime.
I made the mistake of going to the nurse instead of just using a pay phone.
"Hi, I'm really sick and nauseous and need to go home, can you call my mom?"
"Oh, dear. Have you been throwing up a lot?"
"Kind of, yeah. I'd rather not talk about it."
Have you had lunch?"
Urk. "No."
"What about breakfast?"
"Can we stop talking about food please? No, I didn't have breakfast. I can't keep food down."
"Oh, dear me. Have you been doing this a lot? Are you worried about your weight?"
"Yo! Lady! Stomach flu! You know, the one that's been all over school this month?"
"If you haven't been eating, and you've been throwing up, I'm concerned. When was your last meal?"
"Lady, you're gonna get to *see* my last meal on your desk in a minute if you keep talking like this. Call my mom, will you? She had the same thing this weekend."
"I'm still concerned about your eating habits."
"Do I have to go find a pay phone? Or throw up on your desk? Call my mom, damnit!"
A few years ago, when Kate Moss was all over billboards? And people were slapping "FEED ME" and "HEROIN KILLS" stickers over them? I had her exact measurements. It made me feel horrible. There I was, finally beginning to accept my figure as something that might not be horrible and bony and skeletal, daring to wear things that actually exposed my figure, and then - heroin chic.
I'm 130 lbs now, and I'm not happy about it, because I know I lost at least 5 lbs of muscle tone to being ill. People say it looks better than I used to, and I don't understand how 130 lbs. of sedentary, sickly flab and cellulite can look better than a healthy 115 with muscle tone. I could cope with the weight gain if it were healthy, but it isn't.
Skinny people shouldn't suffer for existing.