Tweet of the week goes to Dennis Ricardo who said, 'Cristen Conger's transatlantic accent
is my favorite.' Oh Dennis do go on I can't believe it's true.
This week on the show I
kicked things off with '5 must know facts about teen depression.' On Wednesday I talked
about what the sexiest part of the male body is and it is not a penis. On Friday I put
on some wigs for '19 Vintage Slang Terms for Women' partially because I think we need to
bring back 'choice bit of calico'. Now onto this week's Ask Cristen first of all thanks
to everybody who watched and commented on last week's Ask Cristen video, 'How to love
your face?' although it could have more correctly been titled, 'How to love your butter face?'
Curtis006 had a great tip. 'Write down 100 things you love about your body like, "Hell
yeah, my heel bone supports me even when no one else does. I LOVE YOU HEEL BONE!"' And
I think that was by far the most up-voted comment and I really love that idea. Ourpensareourlips
had this to say, 'As a trans guy I fight with trying to accept my body all the time. It's
easy and inevitable to get caught up in the things I don't like about my body, especially
the ones that I can't change. But the thing is it's just a body. It's what contains me
but does not define me.' Amen Ourpensareourlips. Onto this week's Ask Cristen question coming
from Sydney Bleam who wants to know, 'What about us "butter bodies"? I am heavier set
and I constantly get comments like, "You've got such a pretty face", "if you just lost
some weight you would have all the guys". How do I respond to these people? How do I
learn to be confident when people are always tearing me down?' To those people who are
making all sorts of butter body comments to you, just respond with a question. Why does
my body matter so much to you? How much weight should I lose so that I'll be pretty enough
for you? If they then respond and say, 'But I just want you to be happy. I just want other
people to find you attractive', just keep asking them questions. Put them in a position
to where they have to explain their convoluted and stigmatizing logic so that at some point
they will hopefully hear themselves saying this out loud and maybe they will give themselves
pause. A HelloGiggles writer Ramou Sarr who was writing about this exact thing of the
whole, 'But you have such a pretty face for a fat girl.' Ramou writes, 'I've heard this
one a lot and this is not a humble brag at all because after you hear it a few times
you start to think that people are saying it not because they think it's true but because
they want to make you feel better about being fat. Telling us that we have a pretty face
can sometimes come off as if you think that's all we've got going for us and we would be
worthless without it.' That's not a compliment that's going to build someone up. I don't
want to sit here and try to fat-splain to everybody because I fully acknowledge that
me in the size and the shape that I am in right now, the experience of me walking out
into the street, into public, going to a mall, wherever, being in school, is much different
than a woman walking around who is twice or three times my size. This isn't to say that
I haven't had body issues of my own, that I haven't hated parts of my body, that my
weight hasn't fluctuated, just because I'm thin does not mean I'm not going to talk about
fat stigma. I don't think that a lot of people realize just how unrelenting and constant
fat stigma is. A recent study published in the Journal of Health and Psychology which
followed around fifty overweight and obese women throughout their day and just kept track
of every fat-shaming comment or outright insult that people around them made, either behind
their back or directly to their faces. And on average these women were the comments of
three fat-shaming comments per day, from jerky teenagers making mooing sounds behind their
backs when they walked past to the dentist complaining, 'Oh, I think that you might break
my chair.' An even more recent study that was reported on in the New York Times that
looked at fat-shaming in social media, two of the most common words to come after fat
in these fat-shaming tweets are 'girl' and 'lady'. A lot of times this fat-shaming was
specifically targeted to women. One of the lead authors told the New York Times quote,
'The study really clearly shows the connection between our anxiety around women, our anxiety
around women's rights and weight stigma. When women get to choose what their body size is
and the get to choose what they eat and they get to choose what kind of clothes they wear,
this is indicating a major paradigm shift. I think you've constantly seen backlash from
the culture anytime a woman tries to stake autonomy.' And that's not to say that fat
stigma is anything new. We have been stigmatizing and moralizing fat ever since the invention
of dieting as we know it by a guy named William Banting in I believe the nineteenth century.
This reminds me of this great video that I found through Upworthy of this girl talking
about how quote, 'It's not the word 'fat' that's hurtful. It's all the things that you
attach to the word 'fat'. I think that it's going to take us a lot of time to weed out
fat stigma but I think that people are becoming more and more aware of it. What then of Sydney's
question of, 'How do I learn to be confident when people are always tearing me down?' As
I like to say we got to look inside first. Who is the Sydney inside? Love that Sydney.
Get to know that Sydney. I would recommend finding community. There is a growing body
acceptance movement and active community online. I think in a lot of ways sometimes confidence
is something that we have to practice. Now though I want to hear from you. What kind
of advice do you have to give about this type of body acceptance and also fighting fat stigma
and fat-shaming? Let us all know in the comments below and as always ask me your questions
so I can give you some answers.