Don't Let The Bastards Take You Down

Last week I got banned from Facebook for posting my #metoo story, sharing just a small portion of the sexual harassment and violence I've experienced in my life. I did not share any photos with any nudity. I wrote a pretty simple post that read:

“A year ago I wrote this and some of it happened twenty years ago and some of it happened yesterday and some of it happened to my 13yo daughter and to you and will keep happening again and again. Here’s to telling our stories and standing up and being heard and changing the narrative. TW: for this blog post I wrote about a year ago #metoo”

I linked to a blog I wrote a last year called Boys Will Be Boys with some cropped and edited images of nude men I’ve been assaulted with over the past two years. Ironically, these men use this very platform to sexually violate me yet I’m the one punished for calling them out. Additionally, this #metoo post was up on my public profile page for four days  (and has been successfully shared on Facebook several times over the past year) before an attempt to silence my voice by reporting this post wrongly as sexually explicit material worked - Facebook erroneously ruled in the favor of some angry (presumably based on another interaction) male "fan."

Revolt, a self-portrait from a 2017 body of work called Mother Figure

But they won't break my spirit, I won't let ’em win
I’ll just keep on living, keep on living, oh
The way I wanna live

I've written and spoken on gender-based violence and sexual violence and patriarchy and misogyny and standing up and speaking out so many times. Here and here on this blog and in my TEDx talk and on Instagram and in classrooms and auditoriums and on radio shows and in magazine interviews.

And the more amplified my message is and the more platforms I'm on, the more serious the attempts to silence my voice are. This is not the first time I've been unfortunately banned from Facebook by someone trying to stop my radical words of love and it certainly won't be the last. (The first time was a few months ago by a woman in a private selfies for self-love Facebook group I'm in who didn't approve of my nude bathtub photo.) And if these people knew me at all, they'd know that all the times they shout "no" and "shut up" pour gas on my flames igniting more "YES" and "TELL IT." And this minor break this week from this particular social media platform gave me some much needed time to plan and implement some pretty important new work. And truth be told, I'm currently dealing with a lot more dangerous threats to silence my voice than just removing my ability to speak on Facebook for a few days. It's been heavy and stressful.

Adult alphabet cards by Boise artist Bingo Barnes, purchased at Wintry Market 2016 (which is coming up again, BTW, and you should totally come! Nov 18-19, 2017 at JUMP Boise

I got too many people I got left to prove wrong
All those motherfuckers been too mean for too long

As a perpetually positive person, when I'm feeling this way I try to find good things happening and to look forward to. So, to all the bastards and, more importantly perhaps, the rest of you who believe we can make real change, here's a little list of things I'm currently thankful for:

• New directions and possibilities and educational ways I'm moving this revolutionary feminist work in body liberation forward.
• Other brave folks who have shared their difficult #metoo stories this past week.
• Some spectacular women who are also not afraid to speak up and use their voices to change and make a difference, including friends on Facebook who shared my story in solidarity and in hopes of helping my appeal this weekend and sharing the notion that we should stop victim blaming because that just deepens the burden of unnecessary shame.
• The crew of junior high school girls who were in my car on Friday after their Activism Club meeting at school and told me about how they hand-painted 20 signs to hang in their hallways educating themselves and their young friends on sexual assault sharing phrases about unfortunate stats and how no means no.
• And having this inspirational new music by another woman who's found her voice and is letting it rip forth with power on repeat on my CD player helps immensely. Thanks, Kesha, for the soundtrack to some brutal and beautiful days.

Don’t let the assholes wear you out
Don't let the mean girls take the crown
Don't let the scumbags screw you 'round
Don’t let the bastards get you down

Image: Pinterest, source unknown

I Call It Critical Thinking or Saving The Environment

This month marks the 5th anniversary of us building our pink Little Free Library, the first one in our low income neighborhood on the Boise Bench. It was a pink doghouse I purchased off Craigslist for $20 and turned into a little library or free bookshelf, as the idea is you take a book and leave a book, old ones that you have no need for, and grab a new-to-you read. There is a whole shelf dedicated to children's books and another for adult reads. We live two blocks from our elementary school and on a busy corner that sees lots of foot and bike traffic. From the get-go we've been a popular stop and quickly became a neighborhood icon and so overwhelmed with books that we have entire shelves in our garage housing extra books to replenish it. We've scored some amazing reads from it and know others have, too. We carefully curate this space to make sure that appropriate reading material is inside (nothing too raunchy, political, or religious for example - like the Books of Mormon the missionaries repeatedly drop inside) and that the books are in readable condition (often they're ripped up). The most popular items are fiction, so most of the nonfiction gets taken out by our family and sent to the thrift store, and I also dispose of other books I think are harmful propaganda, like:

I mean FOR FUCK'S SAKE, LADIES. Your breasts aren't actually yours.

Diet books, in particular, have been removed and recycled (you're welcome, Earth and people of the Earth) or reused in my art projects. As a writer, academic and body image activist I think a lot about words and they often play a big part in my art. Their history, meanings, double entendres, spellings. How we fling them, mean them, change them, reclaim them. They often show up as important parts of my artwork and I reuse these books and the pages in them in often radical and subversive ways.

The best chapter in Dr. Edelstein's book may have been the one where she was attempting to dissect the history of bodies a bit and while this section on The Militant Fats was way off base in many ways but if I ever create a subversive underground group a la Jennifer in Dietland or a band I'm totally stealing this name.

Last year on the eve of the one year anniversary of my stand for self-love in the market I visited the sacred spot on 8th Street downtown Boise that I refer to as hallowed ground and sprinkled hearts I cut from this diet book on the spot where I was standing and all around Freak Alley Gallery. It was cathartic and personal and political and powerful. I came home and posted about it on Facebook only to be called a censorer by a fellow female Boise artist who, surprisingly, also uses upcycled materials in her own work on a regular basis, but also (not suprisingly) buys into diet culture. She claimed that removing this material from a library was unethical (she later claimed to not understand that a Little Free Library wasn't like a public library) and that by doing so I was not only promoting censorship but also body shaming those who chose to restrict their eating in desire for a smaller body. I responded that I called it critical thinking, not censorship, and that I also removed other nonfiction content that I didn't agree with promoting.

Shit going not to the thrift shop but right in the recycling bin where it belongs.

The thing is, people are inundated with body shaming propaganda in every written form and in the media and at their schools and from their parents and on the TV all day every day. If I can make one little space in my world more radical and positive then you bet I'll censor the hell out of it. Kind of like I do with my own media feed and information intake - one of my very first (and favorite) steps to cultivating better body image is to get rid of groups and people and businesses that propagate body shame in my news feeds and social media pages and replace them with radical feminists celebrating living their best lives in their bodies at any size and academic sources and thoughtful think pieces challenging hate.

My 2016 image transfer print for the annual Wingtip Press printmaker's exchange called Leftovers featured fireworks exploding from a teacup (based on a dream my friend Sandi had about me) stitched to vintage recipe book pages I upcycled from my Little Free Library.

My black out poetry reading:

No, The Fat cannot b(e) a small intensely suffering segment

I be

Fat

brilliant

truly

We used one of the diet books from my Little Free Library to make black out poetry and cut word poetry at my RADCAMP: A Body Positive Boot Camp For Feminists this summer in McCall, Idaho. I refuse to use my money to purchase diet books at the thrift store but often snap photos of them and use write-over apps on my iPhone to reimagine their titles to be more body positive and post them on Instagram. And I continue to proudly censor my books and my Little Free Library and my media in the name of feminism and body liberation and cultural progress. And I'll keep trashing these books and turning something ugly and harmful into something beautiful.

Normal & Extraordinary

On the last morning of RADCAMP: A Body Positive Boot Camp for Feminists one of my campers and Rad Fatties, as I lovingly call them, left me a thank you gift and a note on my bed, including this Danielle LaPorte #truthbomb card she pulled specifically for me. I'd actually pulled two similar ones for myself as reminders of using my presence on this earth for challenging, pushing, creating, educating.

I keep this one propped up on a wall near my bed full of tiny pieces of meaningful art - things that are both normal and extraordinary - including a Mexican painted Christmas angel, a gaudy red framed photo of my two daughter when they were toddlers, a rustic wooden heart cut by hand with a saw from old fencing by a high school in my neighborhood raising money for something like football camp, a trio of photos of Romanian circus performers in Burley, Idaho, taken by my friends at Two Bird Studio and a historic panorama photograph from 1914 of the little mountain town of Cascade, Idaho. Together all of these things remind of of things that are important to me, ideals I live by, where I come from, my past, my future.

This week has been filled with normal days with extraordinary mom moments.

nor·mal

adjective

    1. conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected

Alice, my middle child, submitted three original artworks she'd made this summer from hot glue, fabric, buttons, sticks, beads and her own amazing imagination to the Western Idaho Fair, a family tradition we've had for years (garlic braid ribbon holder right here!). She and I went together to the hot dry fairgrounds and stood in line for about an hour filling out paperwork and looking at the scarecrows and sunflowers and beets and peppers being submitted and talked about winning ribbons and she wished she could volunteer there to set up after watching the big trucks and tractors haul architecture in and around the site.

My baby boy, Arlo, refuses to be called a baby as he's now a "BIG BOY" because last week he decided to suddenly poop on the potty and we all cheered and he's wearing PJ Masks undies and we now carry around a tiny toilet seat in the back of the truck and it's all very VERY exciting and includes a gazillion thumbs-ups and lots of loud clapping and squealing from the bathroom.

My oldest daughter, Lucy, went in for her very first orthodontist appointment in preparation for braces at the age of 13. Dr. Brown and I nervously awaited the total bill for such a procedure and she anxiously awaited to hear how much that spacer will hurt. She also registered for 8th grade and wandered the halls and opened her locker alone and she and I celebrated with boba tea downtown.

She also received her first unsolicited inappropriate photo on Snapchat from a teen boy she knows and sexual harassment from another. This is real and heartbreaking and sad and while we're dealing with it in all the appropriate and necessary ways, Dr. Brown and I are livid.

This week has been filled with (ab)normal days with extraordinary moments.

ex·traor·di·nar·y

adjective

1. very unusual or remarkable

There are literally thousands of people flooding into Idaho this week to enjoy the total eclipse of the sun on Monday August 21st at around 11am. For just a few minutes our entire little world will be black and upside down, astronomically speaking. The last time this has happened was 1918, astronomically speaking.

I've been asked to give lots of these tourists private tours of historic Boise, both on foot and on giant coach buses navigating our way through tight tiny streets of our town. All week I was in bed more than I was out of it due to a terrible stomach virus but downed some pills and donned a dress and big sunglasses and with sweat rolling down the backs of my knees stood propped up on a seat on a bus in the middle of an aisle with a broken microphone and told a whole crew of stargazers from California a quick and dirty history of Boise and a bit about Idaho.

As a historian and academic whose love of history was born and bred in small town conservative American public schools I'm careful to pick apart what I learned, to seek out alternate viewpoints, to find the stories we haven't been told or that we'd prefer were hidden. Like the fact that pretty much from the beginning in 1863 white Boiseans hated the Chinese immigrants and had xenophobic laws that forbid them from owning land and effectively demolished a thriving Chinatown twice to rid our city of them. And that while we are so lucky to have a wealth of beautiful public parks and green space in Boise, many of them are named for the wives of rich white men who donated the land and helped build our city in so many ways - for better or for worse. And about the controversial murals depicting Native Americans kneeling with nooses around their necks and the history of enacting law in Idaho that remain inside the 1939 Ada County Courthouse. My favorite part of talking about the Idaho State Capitol building is telling folks that the way the stone is carved on the first level was mean to represent logs, paying homage to our pioneer founders and the most modest houses they first built in the grandest house the people built.

When we ended the tour at the Basque Block and I stood outside the bus saying goodbye to my group as they headed towards their outdoor paella dinner one older white woman grabbed me by the arm and whispered in my ear, "Thank you for being so honest about the role rich white men play/played in your community. It was refreshing to hear from a [female] historian and on this tour." American history is hard and messy and difficult and the storyteller is a key player.

Chinese New Year Parade, Chinatown, 7th Street (now Capitol Boulevard), Boise, c. 1905, courtesy Idaho State Archives & Library

Motherhood is political. History is political. Our bodies are political. White supremacy and racism and patriarchy and misogyny has everything to do with all of it. As I've said before - our skin is the largest visible organ on our bodies and it plays into so much of how we experience life. Body liberation is for all bodies - especially those most marginalized (black bodies, brown bodies, trans bodies, differently-abled bodies, aging bodies, etc). It all starts with personal acceptance freeing us up to own our stories, make change and do important work liberating others.

*I can't recommend enough checking out the links in this blog post. They changed my perspective and helped me process so much of this week and provide some much needed context.

Reviving Hilda

Duane Bryers grew up in rural Minnesota and worked in the circus, painted murals, and sculpted giant ice figures before becoming most well-known for creating Hilda, a voluptuous pinup girl in the mid-1950s. Before becoming known as the "Norman Rockwell of pinup art," Bryers won 2nd place and $150 in the Proctor & Gamble National Soap Sculpture competition for carving a woman out of a single bar of Ivory soap in the late 1930s and started his girlie art career painting sexy ladies on the sides of military aircraft and went on to create poster art and comic strips for the air base.

After working as a commercial artist in Chicago and moving to New York to pursue his fine art career, "I got the idea for a plumpy gal pinup and thought I'd like to make it into a calendar series," Bryers said in an interview with the Arizona Daily Star in 2012. "But how was I going to sell a plump girl?" He took his series to Brown & Bigelow, then the country's top calendar maker, and "they reluctantly put it in the line and figured it would last a short time," he said. "It went on for 36 years."

My own body positive take on this Hilda image, swapping out her diet book for the much more radical and feminist Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight by Dr. Linda Bacon.

Hilda calendars were the most popular in the 1960s, surprisingly, but waned in the early 80s and were almost forgotten until someone recently dug them up from the archives and collective memories of Americans. According to Bryers, Hilda was a mash-up of several larger models he'd worked with over the years and his own imagination, hence her imagery and features varying quite a bit from image to image and her face and body varying from calendar to calendar.

While Hilda was laughing at the comics, I'm getting a chuckle from a 2006 article from the Idaho Statesman calling me a mix between Cyndi Lauper and "I Love Lucy" as a quirky and powerful new curator at the Boise Art Museum.

There are at least a hundred images of Hilda resurfacing from over the years and they are all silly and cute and feature her in a bikini doing a variety of sweet, sexy and often clumsy things. Her imagery has been shared repeatedly in fat activist/body positive circles and pages and posted on my wall and private messaged to me over the past few years, as news of her existence was shocking and celebratory. Here was a body that looked more like mine than many others I'd ever seen revered as something sexy enough to be on a flirty calendar. Her imagery has been a positive breath of fresh air in the body shame and sex shame filled media we've been used to consuming for so long.

I've written before about my love of using self-portraits and social media as a radical tool in the feminist revolution over the past few years and I thought Hilda's imagery could use a little more feminism and body positivity. So using things I had around the house, my tripod, my iPhone timer and a few supplies I purchased at the Dollar Tree down the street (plus a few $2.99 watermelons from Trader Joe's!), I embarked on a little fun summer project recreating some of her most iconic images.

Much like the art of Norman Rockwell, Bryers' Hilda reminds us of playful, sweet, and carefree days gone by. But she recalls more than that, too. Hilda shows us that at some time someone else found big girls' curves sensual, silliness sexy, softness endearing, confidence bold and bare skin beautiful. And that maybe, just maybe, we can find that in ourselves, too.

Thanks to Dr. Brown for his help snapping this pic on the top of Bogus Basin on the eve of our 17th wedding anniversary with beers, a lotta wind, and too many cars for the stripping down roadside I did. Also thanks to my friend Angie for bringing the plus-sized jeggings to our annual Boise Rad Fat Collective clothing swap that I cut up for this outfit.

(Scroll down for more fun with Hilda. You didn't think I'd stop with just FIVE recreations did you?! She's too good and it's too much fun. All photos mine, all images of Hilda courtesy a Google images search for Hilda pinup, copyright with Brown & Bigelow)

While I totally believe plumbing can be fun, I'm really into reading feminist texts these days and the just-released Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement by Charlotte Cooper is next up on my summer reading list.

While the rest of my family are stellar skiers, I hate being cold. Much like Hilda, I'm pretty clumsy, but I'd most likely screw up my foot/ankle hiking in the Foothills than gliding down the mountain. Reading The Hiker's Guide to Greater Boise by Scott Marchant.

When you live on an urban farmette and your friendly yard animals consist of three wily chickens, a kitten, bees, a hummingbird and squirrels, these critters were the most willing to sit still and listen to cautionary tales of the king of the neighborhood - the raccoon.

>>>> This project has turned into a long time love affair with Hilda and re-creating her images. They have become a fun and beloved part of my activism and you can see all the new Hildas as they are posted both here on my website and here on my Facebook page. Also Café Mom wrote a piece about this series when it first began which you can read here. And my Reviving Hilda project recently got a BUNCH on international press during the global coronavirus pandemic in 2020 - you can find links to it in all sorts of languages here. I also started a plus-sized pinup calendar with these images in 2018 and the proceeds fund my body image camps and classes for girls and teens in Idaho!

Raising Radical & Rebellious Feminist Teens

The moment I took off my dress in the Capital City Public Market and blindfolded myself in a black bikini people walked straight up to me and said "ME TOO." The same message came flooding into my inbox and on the street corner and from major news outlets and on celebrity Twitter accounts and 200+ million video views and still. Still they come. From all genders and countries and ages and abilities and colors.

And they come from young girls and their moms. Their voices are loud and scared and angry and strong and rebellious. They're ready. And I'm ready to help.

Since announcing Radcamp : A Body Positive Boot Camp For Feminist Teens in February I've gotten so many "thank you"s and "we've been waiting for this"s. And so many generous women who want to help change the narrative for our future generation of leaders. Financial donations from a handful of amazing women around the country allowed me to offer so many full scholarships for girls in need, buy amazing art supplies and snacks, and give the girls two feminist books to add to their bookshelves at home.

Researchers and doctors and parents all have found that it's during our early teenage years and puberty that ideas about our bodies can be really solidified. It's a crucial time of change and growth and discovery about who we are. It's also a time when beliefs are formed and ideas are fluid and anything is possible. I've had the honor to speak to lots of young people about being an activist in your own life in big and small ways and how to stand up for what's important - including yourself. It's something I teach all three of my children at home and a message I'm honored and thrilled to share with others. What a treat it was to have lead a crew of young girls aged 13-15 in Boise who spent an entire weekend together in a park and left a little closer to finding their voices and taking ownership of their bodies in a whole new way.

RADCAMP: A Body Positive Boot Camp For Feminist Teens Day 1 was extraordinary. We ate, laughed, learned about cultivating healthy relationships with food, dug deep, thought hard, watched some amazing women poets and read some amazing women writers, planted seeds, made art (including craftivista Kim Werker's Mighty Ugly dolls while examining notions of beauty, being pretty, and perfectionism) and generally became a little more radical and in tune to our unique bodies, voices and spirits.

(And wrapped it all up with our annual backyard beginning of summer movie night watching Penelope - one of the greatest feminist teen body positive movies of all time.)

I was so excited to be able to give all 11 girls at RADCAMP : A Body Positive Boot Camp For Feminist Teens this brand new book, Here We Are edited by Kelly Jensen, to keep this weekend. They actually get to add TWO badass books to their library as a result of some amazing donations from some stellar women (the other is a body image workbook for teens) and I hope they pick them back up over and over in their lifetime.

Here We Are just came out and features 44 writers, dancers, actors and artists contributing essays, lists, poems, comics and illustrations about everything from body positivity to romance to gender identity to intersectionality to the greatest girl friendships in fiction. It's beginning feminism 101 and it's perfect for the young adult. (The editor was so thrilled about her book being used this way she generously donated 10 copies for all the women attending my RADCAMP for women in McCall in July!)

RADCAMP: A Body Positive Boot Camp For Feminist Teens Day 2 was just as epic as the first and filled with radical goodness, including a lunchtime chat with some pretty amazing young women on how to raise your voice high and be proudly feminist in the face of adversity with Nora & Colette of People for Unity, making tee shirts inspired by punk rock & the Riot Grrrls, dissecting popular media, photoshop and consumer culture in a magazine project, and taking on Betsy Greer's You Are So Very Beautiful (#yasvb) craftivism project by stitching tiny positive affirmations and hiding them around the city in the name of guerrilla acts of kindness. Each girl went home with so many amazing powerful tools, including some body positive stickers from My Body Does, sun-kissed shoulders from our end of camp pool party and a lot of new information rattling around in their hearts and brains.

Organizing both my RADCAMPs this year (the adult sleepaway camp coming up in July and the teen one) has connected me with some amazing women working in radical body positivity and feminism all over the country. Including My Body Does in Brooklyn, who created a handful of affirming stickers to slap on your school binder, bathroom mirror, street lamppost or any body shaming billboard that might need some uplifting 😉.

Turns out they're big fans of what I do, too, and generously offered to mail me a big fat envelope of stickers to give the teens this past weekend and some for me and the women at RADCAMP, too.

It was also a treat to have two teenage powerhouses, Nora Harren and Colette Raptosh, come speak to RADCAMPers about how to raise your voice high and be proudly feminist in high school hallways that aren't always so welcoming. Together they run People for Unity and organized the Women's March on Idaho in January. Thanks to generous donations by a few of you to my program, I was able to put some money towards their organization in the form of a small speaking stipend. I think it was super powerful for the girls at camp to hear from some other young role models in Boise using their spirits and passion for change and good. Here's to women supporting women supporting girls supporting girls. And here's to a bearing witness to a new generation of resilient and strong girls. May we all be the role models they need.

{Find out more about my annual RADCAMPS for teens and women and news about the 2018 dates here. You can follow me on Instagram or Facebook to hear about it first.}

Body Positivity Is Not A Feeling - It's a Movement

I've told this story many, many times in the recent past about how - when feeling love for my 250 lb. body instead of shame and ready to finally opt out of diet culture eight years ago - I Googled the words, "why am I fat and happy?" And how sad and disappointed I was to find myself scrolling through pages and pages of ads for the diet industry complex I was so desperate to leave behind (further proving my point of how fatphobic our culture is/was, Google picked up the words happy and fat and changed them to UNhappy and fat). As the story goes, I did finally come upon two blogs that forever changed my life and catapulted me into ideas of Health At Every Size, fat acceptance, and its little sister, body positivity.

Selfie for International No Diet Day 2017 in conjunction with an online activism event with Fat Positive Louisville

For YEARS I've been shouting from the rooftops (along with a few others) about how our misogynistic beauty standards - including diet, weight loss and fitness culture - have been oppressing women. Along the way I also kept educating myself (and still do!) about the radical history of the fat acceptance movement, which famously started in 1969 with a Fat-In in Central Park with a group of people who were fed up with the bigotry they'd faced because of their body size. The group went on to become the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance and remains an important civil rights organization.

In 1996 The Body Positive was formed, based along the same ideas but with a bit more of a bent toward eating disorder recovery. It is perhaps here that the term "body positivity" and this iteration of the movement came to be. Fast forward twenty or so years and EVERYONE is suddenly "body positive," including every gym, fitness class, "healthy lifestyle" eating program, clothing store, beauty product and person.

And suddenly with the mainstreaming of the radical movement by our consumer culture so many people want to STILL buy into diet culture and still call themselves body positive. To which I call bullshit. Of course you have the right to do whatever you want with your body - that is called body autonomy (which, while an important component of body positivity, is not the same).

This notion that health is somehow in opposition to body positivity is mind-boggling to me. But so is the idea that health MUST be a standard accepted by all. I've also spoken about this about one-hundred times over the past year and a half, in interviews and on radio shows and at public events and in writing. Health is not a moral imperative and is NOT a prerequisite to body positivity. You cannot tell someone's health just by looking at them. And you don't have that much control over your health anyhow. Plus, even if you are unhealthy does that make you any less deserving of love and respect, both from yourself and others? Does that make you less valuable as a human being? Health means something different to all of us and it's important to remember that whole health incorporates many things including mental and emotional health. Shame has never been a motivating factor in better health. But you know what does motivate? Promoting radical body acceptance. Because people often take better care of something they love rather than something they hate. And if you really cared about my health (or that of another person fatter than me) you'd be an active part of this movement. So let's just call this health argument what it really is : fatphobia.

Body positivity is not a feeling, it's a movement. Self-love? That's a feeling. And a really damn good one, I know. And they can go hand in hand but they don't always have to. I've been pretty clear about my stance about body positivity as an integral part of feminism and a radical social justice movement.

It's hard being told that perhaps what you've been taught to believe about bodies all your life might be wrong. That there might be a different way, a better way. That you can opt out of the game because there are no rules and there is no winner. Change makes people angry and is always hard won. And it takes a lot of practice, patience, education, reading and an open mind.

* And as I was writing the first draft of this blog post several days ago a fellow body image warrior Kaila Prins was penning a similar, spot on and poignant piece called Here's Why the Definition of Body Positivity Isn't Up for Debate, which is much like this one only more detailed, eloquent and NAILS IT.

“Wanting something to be body positive doesn’t make it body positive.

Choosing to call it body positive when it isn’t doesn’t make it body positive. You don’t get to decide what is or isn’t body positive just because you want to be a part of the movement without giving up your beliefs about fat loss. ”

— Kaila Prins

These conversations about the recent co-opting of body positivity have been going on in the feminist activist realm for many months now and I'm stoked to see others speaking up about this hard truth as well. If you're interested in learning more there are many resources linked in this article, under the Resources and Press & Interviews tabs on this website, and always in the Boise Rad Fat Collective on Facebook.

Mother Figure

I am building a body of work.

My skin tells stories of resilience and revolution.

I am sensual and scary.

I am damaged and dangerous.

My body is complicated and messy.

I wear marks. I make marks.

I rise. I fall.

I crawl. I climb.

I feed. I grow.

I push the limits.

Body in motion.

Art in action.

On Memoirs and Manifestos

Just last night as I was quizzing Alice in bed on this week's spelling list I told her about how we used to have spelling bees when I was in the third grade and how I won many of them, proudly bringing home blue ribbons. I've always loved words and as long as I can remember I've studied them, changed them, challenged them, and written them. It was also in the third grade that I won my first writing contest - a young author's statewide event where I submitted a fantastical poem about a camel caravan, my little mind in the southeastern Idaho desert dreaming about what it might have been like in a Middle Eastern desert centuries ago.

I've been a writer ever since, both in academia and in the art world and for magazines, journals, and newspapers. A thesis, museum exhibition catalogs, press releases, blog posts, presentations, a TEDx talk. I've written a lot of things. In fact, this month marks 8 years I've been writing this blog and many of you have been reading my words here (and when it was known as Doin' It All, Idaho Style) since my beginning blogspot.com days. EIGHT YEARS! I've always written what I know and these days I write what I'm passionate about - things about motherhood and feminism, perimenopause and death, bodies and self-love, doubt and courage, making change and standing up. While I was born a storyteller, it's also a craft I've honed and something I'm pretty proud of.

The past few weeks, much like this past year, have been rough but also brilliant and beautiful. I was recently honored as one of the 50 Idaho Women of the Year and spoke to so many people hungry for change and feminism and body positivity - from a room full of teenage girls at a local junior high to a room full of community members and college students at Idaho State University for their first annual Positive Body Image Week.

My first annual RADCAMP for feminist girls is fully funded by donations from women I don't even know around the country and is almost sold out. I was the guest on an amazing podcast that a fellow body image warrior Summer Innanen has called Fearless Rebelle Radio talking about age positivity, sex, raising body positive kids and more. The diversity and number of people my work reaches in a positive way daily is extraordinary and empowering.

But it's not always positive and heartwarming - my work comes with a lot of sadness and hard things. I was supposed to speak at a school wide assembly on self-love, body acceptance, and kindness at a large local high school this week that was suddenly cancelled because the school district administrators feel my message - and my body - are "too provocative" and scandalous. And I just had a local grants organization deny my application to fund a writing residency because they found my previous work "too conversational," noting that I probably just "want time away from my kids" and dismissing the power of motherhood, social media, body positivity, and Facebook groups to ignite radical social change. And for some reason the anger and hatred towards me and my ideas on social media has amped up from both men and women in both aggressive and passive-aggressive ways these past two weeks. But all these things right here? The amazing and the awful? They all add fuel to my fire and fodder to my feminism.

Years before I became a famously fat activist I was often asked when I was going to write a book. But ever since, the stories have really solidified in my heart, my mind, and my activism and I've gotten some pretty positive feedback from some pretty knowledgeable people that I'm on the right track.

To be honest, I've been writing this story all of my life and putting it to paper over the past 1.5 years. Some of it on little scraps of paper, to be exact, filling up an old Chinese moon cakes tin with a Team Hillary sticker on front. I carry it around and it vacillates between my bedside table and my bathroom depending on where memories and inspiration strikes. Which, lately, has often been in the middle of the night. There are chapter titles and outlines and page counts and quotes and sadness and anger and frustration and joy and triumph and power in the pen scribbles in this box.

So, here goes. I'm writing a manuscript. For a book. And I'm slightly terrified. Following my own good advice, though, I'm reminded that if I'm not doing at least one thing that scares the shit out of me I'm doing something wrong.

It's gearing up to be part personal essays part feminist manifesto. And I think - I hope - you're gonna want to read it.

Wish me luck.

And stay tuned.

Writing Women

It's International Women's Day which this year is marked by an added event, a protest called A Day Without A Woman where women are asked to do a whole slew of things like wear red in support, not go in to work, not purchase anything, and more. There's a lot of controversy about this event, some saying it's not very well thought out, not very conducive to making real change, not very inclusive of those of us who can't afford to take off work or those of us who do an inordinate amount of labor for free (like stay-at-home moms).

In my world, and my work, every day is international women's day. I'm lucky to celebrate women in so many ways on so many days. As a writer, I often get to explore things like body image, education, money, leaders, fashion, reclamation, resistance, revolution, feminism, work and how they all tell important parts on the history and contemporary life of women.

I'm also lucky to write for FabUplus magazine, the only plus-size exclusive magazine in the world.

I get to use my voice and my words to tell stories, not only my own, but those of some other pretty amazing women I know, too. Just yesterday I received the spring issue of Mamalode magazine in the mail and opened it to find a gorgeous SIX PAGE SPREAD for my story, "All Bodies Are Beautiful (especially when we wear what we want)." I was thrilled when the editor, Elke, asked me if I'd write the fashion piece for this edition with the theme of BEAUTIFUL, and highlight the plus-sized babes in my Boise Rad Fat Collective. I squealed and then said YES and put out the call for participants in our Facebook group. Ten lovely women from all over the US answered and submitted brave and beautiful photos of them wearing something that makes them feel amazing, strong, or beautiful. They let me interview them and a few of their more personal stories are included alongside mine.

My fashion sense has always been quirky and fun, inexpensive and different. I mostly shop at thrift stores or for free at my annual clothing swap (my favorite).  I can't think of a better way to celebrate International Women's Day today than by being featured in a spectacular female-run magazine with a story I wrote featuring a whole bunch of other pretty special women. So, here's to us, today and every day, in the words of some amazing women I know:

We are all lovable and deserving and enough.

I want my daughter to know that women can be many things, but most importantly, they can do anything!

I'm grateful, humble and doing my best to knock it out of the park. I've got this.

I have never felt more beautiful and it's because I have never felt stronger.

I'd accomplished sexy. I liked what I saw. That's not something I had ever felt about my body. I didn't scrutinize every dimple or wish I'd sucked in my stomach more. I saw beauty and rawness. It was empowering.

Now, I've learned to love myself more and know that although I'm not perfect, I am perfectly me.

Silver-Haired Shit Starter

I was doing an interview on Radio Boise about the stand for self-love a little over a year ago when a beautiful woman with long, gorgeous silver hair knocked on the window of the recording studio, smiled, and rushed to introduce herself and hug me. Donna and I became fast friends that day and she told me that she admired my bravery, my courage, my rebellion and my hair. She inducted me as an honorary member of the "Canas con Ganas Club," which she told me meant "gray with gusto" but for months I couldn't remember the exact meaning and would always translate in my mind to "silver-haired shit starters."

Donna and I at Radio Boise, September 2015, photo courtesy Donna Vasquez

I was also captain of the junior varsity cheer squad the year I decided to chop my hair off. You can see me in my feminist rebellion germinating phase here second from the right.

I've written before about secretly saving up my money at the age of 16 to seek out a bold new stylist in our tiny conservative Idaho farm town in high school with a creased picture torn from the pages of Vogue magazine. In a radical act of feminist rebellion, I cut my long curly brown hair off into a super short pixie cut in 1991 much to the chagrin of my parents and most of the boys in town. It was a move away from beauty standards I felt imposed upon me, a way to begin to take some control of my body. In a recent piece on her short hair for Ravishly, Emily Hill writes about her departure from long hair to short in a way that feels familiar to me:

Short hair takes away a crutch. I’d been leaning on the long-hair trope to feel more secure. Something about flowing curls, I admit, is comforting. Long hair is the ultimate accessory. It’s your wingman. It wraps you up, makes you feel taller, thinner, bolder. It gives you something to twist flirtatiously around your index finger. And in moments of self-consciousness, it allows you retreat, to hide, to take your place.

But this isn’t just about my cheeky haircut.

It’s about how a woman's worth is derived from beauty, not ability. It’s about how hair is sexualized and fetishized. It’s about how we’re taught to make ourselves desirable above all else. Sorry not sorry for the lofty departure folks, but this is not about pixie cuts, it’s about the mutha fuckin’ patriarchy.

My, left, right after I liberated myself from my long hair, 1991.

Black box dye phase, c. 1997

Still coloring it dark in 2000.

My first silver streak came when I was just 18, a small wisp in a curl right above my forehead. It was quirky and a conversation starter for a few years, but I was soon embarrassed by the freakishly early continued spread of gray around my face and went through that angsty phase in my early 20s when I used cheap boxes of dye to color my hair black. It was so harsh it fried my cute a-line bob and dried out my scalp til it peeled off in chunks, so I cut it off into a short pixie to let it heal around age 25. It wasn't until I discovered the fat acceptance movement eight years ago that I felt comfortable embracing my true colors (in more ways than one). I also found an amazing stylist who took to my idea of highlighting my large silver streaks with my natural dark brown and adding in some funky bright red. While most women go to great lengths to hide their gray, I choose to celebrate it. For me, body positivity means accepting the natural ways of my body, including aging, as beautifully imperfect as they may be.

A White Woman Reads Martin Luther King Jr. in Idaho

About a month ago I came upon this brilliant article by fellow Idahoan Laura Bracken called Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates in Idaho. It’s long and lovely and left me shaken to the core with recognition and in tears. We have a similar story: like Laura, I was raised among a plethora of white faces. I encountered very little diversity in my life other than books, which have always been my salvation. I longed for multicultural events and friends growing up but turned instead to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and movies like Malcolm X as a teenager.

“A few years ago, I picked my daughter’s copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings off a bookshelf. Then The Color Purple. She recommended Zora Neale Hurston and Amazon suggested Melissa Harris-Perry. Then Ta-Nehisi Coates, Isabel Wilkerson, Bryan Stevenson. I backtracked to The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Notes of a Native Son and some poetry by Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. I watched 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained, Straight Outta Compton. King Leopold’s Ghost was the plunder of human bodies and Song of the Shank was the owning of one such body. In these stories and histories and art came a visceral recognition of white privilege.”

— Laura Bracken, Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates in Idaho

As a high school student in rural Burley, Idaho, I wanted so desperately to understand; I still want so desperately to understand. I also just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible, something quite common in teenagers exploding with potential and wanderlust. This desire is what led me to become a student of American history and women’s studies and, eventually, to move across the country several times.

January 25, 1888, Idaho Statesman

“The racists at Hayden Lake were predominantly from California — not native Idahoans. But racism has a long reach back into Idaho history, from the slaughter and resettlement of Native peoples to discrimination against Chinese and Japanese immigrants. Idaho’s government in the immediate post Civil War period was controlled by whites who had left the Confederacy. Housing segregation created Chinatowns, including one in Lewiston that burned to the ground as white firefighters refused to intervene. In the Rialto Theatre in Pocatello, non-whites were “delegated to the last six rows…on your left-hand side.” In 1916, when the racist epic Birth of a Nation played across Idaho, the advice sheet for House Managers included the words “Please bear in mind that NEGROES MUST NOT BE ADMITTED TO BIRTH OF A NATION UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.” In 1958, the Franklin Park neighborhood in Boise had a sign with “boxcar high letters,” CAUCASIANS ONLY.

But I didn’t know any of this when I moved to Lewiston, which is only 7 miles from the Nez Perce Reservation boundary. My kids and I applauded the Nez Perce riding on horseback in the rodeo parade; I was stunned when a new friend, born and raised in Lewiston, characterized the Nez Perce as a “bunch of drunks.” She said that I should go to the bars and see.”

— Laura Bracken

February 28, 1949, Idaho Statesman

I wanted so badly to study abroad as an undergraduate at the University of Idaho. I thought it might be the only affordable way I’d ever be able to leave the country, but even that was too expensive. I settled upon a national student exchange program as long as I could be in as different of a place than Idaho as possible. I wanted to be in the South and on the ocean but my parents weren’t keen on New Orleans, my first choice, because at the time it had one of the highest murder rates in the country. I decided upon Charleston, South Carolina, and had never seen more old money, sprawling plantations, humidity or black people in my life. It was mind-blowing and awful and extraordinary, my time there, for so many reasons.

When I lived in Charleston in the early 90s the population was somewhere around 50% black and 50% white. I experienced racial tension on numerous occasions during my time there and it always made my heart pound and my hands sweat. One time at a downtown Arby’s I noticed, for the first time in my life, that I was the only white person in a very full restaurant. I stood in line for a long time until everyone else was helped and the cashier looked at me, visibly sighed, and walked into the back room to be replaced by a white cashier who finally took my order. My naïve nineteen-year-old mind was reeling with thoughts about "reverse racism," though I’d yet to hear that term. I was so upset and confused that I got my food to go rather than eat inside the restaurant as planned.

I spent my honeymoon in Memphis - mainly for Elvis and the BBQ - but also for a pilgrimage to the Lorraine Hotel. It had recently been converted into part of the National Civil Rights Museum and Dr. Brown and I made the long sweaty walk through the streets of Memphis from Beale Street through historically African-American neighborhoods. We sat in the bus with Rosa Parks and at the lunch counter and made our way to the hotel room where Dr. King was assassinated, shot on the balcony. It’s preserved in eerie detail and it took my breath away. I burst into tears, like the kind where you can barely breathe because you’re sobbing so hard. The only other people in the room were two black families who stared at me and I was mortified. I ran outside and leaned against the wall on the sidewalk and sat there for an hour to gather myself. I couldn’t bring myself to go back inside.

A decade ago we packed up our cat who pukes in the car and our two-year-old daughter and we moved our growing family from the bustling, multicultural Midwestern city of Minneapolis back to Idaho, something I never thought we’d do. It was so white and so conservative and a place I wanted to run far away from, not a place I wanted to return to. How can I raise diverse kids in such a homogeneous environment? It’s a decision I’ve been thankful for yet questioned every day since. So we read. And we march. And we make new friends who are different than we are. And we listen. We learn. We recognize our privilege. We act as allies. We can’t afford to travel far, but we have a car and gather experiences where we can. We have an education and a library card. We have kind hearts and inquisitive minds.  

“As parents do, I often wondered over the years whether I did the right thing, moving my children to Idaho. I fretted whether they would be ready to live in a multicultural world, ready to act as allies for those who face racism, to choose to be one of the thousands of parts. But they are finding their way. It is my task to do the same.”

— Laura Bracken

I was given a BLACK LIVES MATTER pin many months ago, when feminist writer Roxane Gay came to Boise State University and I went to see her speak. I’m pretty sure it came from the table in the back of the room operated by the Idaho Coalition Against Sexual & Domestic Violence. I immediately put it on my summer purse and switched it to my winter coat when the seasons changed. I’ve gotten a lot of looks here in Idaho because of that pin – some of surprise or solidarity, some of distrust or disgust.

Last night I went on an impromptu date with my daughter and friends to see the movie Hidden Figures, about some amazing African-American women who were scientists, engineers, business women and mathematicians who worked for NASA in the 1950s and 60s. I'm appalled I never knew their story before last night. I'm appalled that I'm wearing a BLACK LIVES MATTER pin on my coat still 55 years later. Yet we continue to stand up. We keep trying. We move forward.

Walk the Walk, Talk the Talk

The stunning actress Ashley Judd has been an outspoken feminist activist for years but her October TED talk just became available online and it took my breath away. From the moment she started speaking and telling about the vile harassment and bullying she's received on the internet for years as celebrity woman with a loud voice I felt my soul breaking in solidarity. She talks of rape and death threats, revenge porn, slut-shaming, misogyny and more. She tells horrific stories of Twitter and Facebook and the media and the tech industries all being complicit in this culture of violence against women. She calls us to make real and radical change in an angry and powerful way.

As I watched this over coffee on this snowy morning I cried big fat tears of recognition. She talks of research proving that online violence affects us physically, emotionally, and mentally much like real-life violence and has her own experiences to prove it. Ashley tells about how she has hired someone to scrub her social media accounts of the hate and mean comments on threads and stories about her before she gets online to help alleviate the trauma of bearing that burden in her heart and mind.

I can relate to this talk and this phenomenon in extraordinary and sad ways. Only I don't have anyone to delete the pain from my social media; I've mostly learned to deal by not ever reading the comments and taking screenshots of direct hate mail and violence and saving them to my computer in a "safety file" of sorts should I need them for the police in the future. I've written before about the plethora of sexual words and propositions and photos of penises I receive from men all over the world. Men who violate my world on the reg with their words and their bodies and who send me friend requests on Facebook, a few of whom I saw on the national news shortly after for robbing a gun shop as part of an underground ring to shoot police and another who was arrested and accused of raping and murdering a young woman. Men, probably, much like the ones Ashley Judd deals with daily. The fear is palpable and the internalized damage it has done on my spirit, my heart and body is also real. It's caused me to lose a significant amount of weight, a lot of hair, the ability to sleep well, panic attacks and after a really intense year of it, a recently diagnosed stomach ulcer.

Doctor's office selfie. I was waiting for an ultrasound and preparing for an endometrial biopsy to rule out uterine cancer. (Both those showed clear and healthy results.) My stomach and esophagus not so much.

I found this hat at a local thrift store the other day and it was the best and most cathartic 25 cents I ever spent.

And while she mentions this briefly, Ashley doesn't go into great detail about the role that women play in this misogyny, in perpetuating this patriarchy. The way that women, too, write hate mail and harmful messages, violence enacted not usually in rape threats but in a different, more "acceptable" and more "palatable" way - with their words. Shaming Ashley and women like her with hateful speech for how she looks, what she does, what she thinks. This, too, is painful and traumatic and in it's own way, violent. It is also something I know far too well, something that breaks my heart and my spirit as much as dick pics. Women who write hateful body shaming comments to me and about me on the internet. Women who gang up and gossip and threaten and spread false rumors with jealousy, shame, anger and vindictiveness because they disagree with my voice and my platform. Women who play real, important and powerful roles in the misogyny and patriarchy that keep this country from making real radical change. The most harmful part about this, to me, is that this hatred and awful behavior often comes at me almost daily from women I actually know, both on the internet and in my local physical life in Idaho and beyond. That's not to say there aren't PLENTY of female strangers on the internet that shame and threaten and "mean girl" me all day long, but the most painful actions come from those I know. The online hatred directed at me by women has been FAR more prevalent than the threatening from men.

The truth is, as women, we probably all see this daily and experience it just as often. We participate in it and are complicit to it and laugh at it and don't call it out when we see it. We gang up together and leave people out on purpose because our feelings are hurt or we're angry or embarrassed that we were called out on our lack of forethought or understanding. There are a lot of reasons for this, I think, including that we learn from birth to shrink, be quiet, not to speak up, take up less space, don't cause trouble, pretend, to fake it. Misogyny has taught us that other women are our enemies and not to be trusted. Sometimes women harm other women unintentionally and sometimes it's borne of jealousy, fear, frustration, and wanting to be the most, the best, the smartest, the biggest. It's constantly happening on micro and macro levels in this country and it's not something we are talking about nearly enough.

The Women's March on Washington has been plagued by this from the beginning. Within hours of Election Day results, a small group of white women wanted to get together in protest and retaliation against Donald Trump's inauguration on Saturday January 21, 2017 and called it the Million Woman March, co-opting a historical African-American women's march. Rightly so, women of color called them out on that, and the fact that there WERE no women of color on the organizing committee, both things since rectified (at least a little, it seems). Recently, a march manifesto of sorts called the Unity Principals came out listing women the official march thanks and honors and Secretary Hillary Clinton was intentionally left off (the reason is unclear, although I've read that perhaps the organizers are angry at Clintons attendance at the Trump inauguration).

Artwork created by fat activist Stacy Bias in retaliation against Ann Coulter's attempt at body shaming female protestors after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential race.

This Saturday as we're all preparing to march with our daughters in various cities around the United States in solidarity with each other think about why and what you are saying vs. what you are actually DOING. Ask yourself hard questions. Do you call yourself a feminist but shame other women, either in your head or out loud, for wearing a short tight skirt to work? Do you claim to be body positive but really think fat people are lazy and probably unhealthy and eat a lot of McDonalds? Do you wear a safety pin and change your Facebook profile photo in solidarity but haven't read the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or were afraid to speak up the other day when your friend made a racist joke? Do you share memes of equal rights and lifting other women up but don't feel comfortable sharing and uplifting the successes of women you know because you think it undercuts your own? Don't just talk the talk. Move forward. Feminism isn't all fun. Body positivity isn't easy. Listen. Read books. Open your mind. Watch more. Participate. Don't be afraid. Make mistakes. Get educated. I know from experience that the revolution lives where women honestly support one another, lift each other up for our unique strengths, respect our diverse voices, and cheer for our individual wins. And I know for a fact we are stronger together. Really, REALLY, walk the walk. Not just this Saturday, but every day.

Our Bodies, Our Selfies

I learned at a very young age that my body was a political vessel and one that I could use for my activism and for art. By the time I was a teenager I realized that others felt they had more ownership over my body than I did and had a lot to say about how I presented it, what I put on it, in it and did with it.

Self-portrait detail of live body painting performance collaboration with Natalie Fletcher and the Boise Film Festival, September 2015

I feel like I've always been a bit of an enigma to people - a complicated woman that challenges the status quo and what it means to be a mother, an artist, a wife, a daughter, a feminist. Someone that they can't quite figure out and doesn't quite fit inside the box or the label they want to wrap me up in. In high school I was the captain of the high school cheerleading squad but also fat; in the theater club in leading roles onstage while dating the captain of the football team; a cute girl excelling in AP English but who loved Sylvia Plath and wrote letters to the editor of the local newspaper opposing the proposed elimination of sex education being taught in junior high; super popular but wore a pantsuit to the homecoming dance. Needless to say, I was voted Most Unique Personality in my senior class awards ceremony. I grew up to be even more confusing to people: a pretty twentysomething woman who picked up dead bodies at night in a small Oregon town; a feminist scholar who loves Katy Perry; an Idaho mom to three who sometimes models lingerie; an activist with a loud voice who stood on stage and stood up to fatphobes and stood stripped to a bikini downtown Boise in the name of self-acceptance.

Photo courtesy Melanie Folwell

Much of my work as an artist, activist and writer has been greatly influenced by those who came before me. As an academic at heart and a continual student in life, I find books and exhibitions and art as valid and important tools in my trade. You'll hear me speak in lectures about Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, the Guerrilla Girls, Roxane Gay, Marilyn Wann, Naomi Wolf, Betty Friedan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Beyonce, and Charlotte Cooper to name just a few. I've found power in using social media as a tool for the resistance, as a radical means to reach the masses in fast and furious ways. It became even more apparent to me when my blog post about my stand for self-love in the market in 2015 (including photos and a video) went viral. The message spread so fast and the video has picked up by various sources (like Buzzfeed and HLN) and has now been seen somewhere around 200 million times.

I've long been interested in photography as an art history student, museum curator, and now, as an artist, as a instrument in the feminist revolution. It's a way for me to document using my own body as the canvas or the subject, a way I can take control of my image and my physical self. The selfie, the shorthand 21st century term for the self-portrait, has gotten a bad rap as something self-obsessed young girls do for "likes" in recent years, but myself and others are reexamining that idea. In 2013 Jezebel wrote a scathing article that the selfie was a "cry for help" and beautiful backlash ensued as the #feministselfie movement took hold, one that I've actively participated in (this article from TIME defines it and its history so well that I borrowed the title of this blog post from it). Seeing yourself and your body type represented on social media has been a powerful thing for me in my own body positive journey - seeing other women who looked like me rocking their amazing fat bodies online has been inspiring and revolutionary. And selfies aren't just about what you look like, they are about what you're doing in life, what moves you, what makes you proud, what makes you cry, what makes you YOU. “Selfies are one way for a female to make space for herself in the world: to say ‘I’m here, this is what I actually look like, my story counts, too,'” says Pamela Grossman, the director of visual trends at Getty Images, and co-curator of a feminist photo-curation project. “They allow girls to shine on their own terms.” They allow us to see ourselves, flaws and all.

My favorites are the least curated, messy, and unprofessional portraits, but I so appreciate that fine artists are also utilizing it as well in a fresh way. Women like Laura Aguilar, a Latina photographer in Los Angeles, with a major solo exhibition opening this year. “When you’re driving down the street of East L.A., you see so many women that look like Laura,” says Sybil Venegas, the Los Angeles curator of the show of Aguilar's self portraits.  “And no one’s going to pay attention to them. Because they’re poor, because they’re just walking with a bunch of kids … people don’t pay attention to those people. And so to have her and the work that she did, in particular her self-portraits — they’re really beautiful. So it really challenges what is beauty. What is beautiful? What is a woman or a man, for that matter, what do we have to look like in order to be considered beautiful?”  

Laura Aguilar, Three Eagles Flying, courtesy L.A. Weekly + the artist

And Audrey Wollen, a young woman whose performance art plays out in large part on Instagram with her Sad Girl Theory and poignant thoughts on feminism. Like me, a major part of her selfies hinges on the notion that "the personal is political," a term coined by Shulamith Firestone in her 1970 book A Dialectic of Sex. “If your feminism isn’t painful, you’re not doing it right,” said Wollen in this great piece about her work in the Huffington Post. “Because it’s a painful thing to witness how things are and your own participation.”

this is not a girl

A photo posted by tragic queen (@audreywollen) on Mar 26, 2015 at 1:45pm PDT

I love using selfies to subvert the long-standing tyranny of the male gaze and find in them self-empowerment through rebellion. Taking control of my image stops male (and female) objectification of a woman by using the very tools of oppression to dismantle it. Objectification on our own terms has radical potential. That's why I was thrilled when my friend, photographer and part of our team at Wintry Market, Anna Wiley, asked me to help her host 52 Selfies: A Year of Self-Love.  It's a Facebook group about a DIFFERENT kind of New Years resolution (or revolution): Loving ourselves AS WE ARE, RIGHT NOW. Today. This very moment. Each week, we will all share a themed selfie and write a bit about something we love about ourselves. Our goal is for all of us to look at ourselves with love and gratitude, not shame. Our goal is to get more women out from behind the camera and in front of it. Every selfie doesn't have to be a serious feminist artwork, it can be fun or flirty or silly or sad. You can still be part of the revolution armed with a little bit of courage, your unique story, and an iPhone.

This year, let’s try a new kind of resolution.

No gym, no diets, no changing ourselves. Instead of focusing on what we think society wants us to be, let’s love every inch of ourselves as we are. Radical, right?! Let’s try radical self love – feeling comfortable and beautiful in our skin. Read more about our project here on Anna's blog and join us here if you're interested in a safe sweet way to celebrate yourself in the new year.

Bring it on, 2017!

Can't Co-Opt This : Thoughts From A Token Fat (Positive) Girl

It started happening to me right away when my stand for self-love video went viral last year. Within 24 hours I was getting calls from every major television and news network in America, many of them super surprising ones. Several of them were "health" shows and sources who have traditional been anti-fat and body shaming for years. I said no to a handful of them for this very reason - the history and theme of the program/news organization/show was not conducive to my message and I felt I was being set up for a potentially negative "devil's advocate" type situation. But as I grew stronger and louder I said yes to more.

Even though I knew they may be using me as the token fat girl - an easy way to say to their viewers, "Look at us! We ARE body positive!" only to turn around and have the next guest/ad be for slimming wraps or fat-burning milkshakes or some damn gluten free "clean eating" program. Truth be told, this was happening to the body positivity/fat acceptance movement and activists well before my work became famous. It's certainly happening now more than ever, and not only on a national scale as our revolutionary grassroots movement becomes more mainstream and watered down, as I've seen local "body positive" fitness folks co-opt important radical messaging of the size acceptance movement while promoting weight loss. I've had a slew of people selling anti-aging creams and "healthy lifestyle changes" regimens approach me to buy/like/advertise/represent their products. (To which I politely decline with a you may have missed the point/message of my work and they usually reply some version of you are a bitch.)

Recently Amara Miller wrote a great piece called "‘Oops, We Did It Again!’ Yoga Journal Is What Co-optation Looks Like" dissecting the history of co-optation in the Yoga Journal and how, for many years now, the magazine has faced heavy criticism from body positive activists about the mixed messages and unattainable ideals promoted through their advertising and articles and rightly so. And the Yoga Journal is not the only culprit - it's a big problem in the traditional women's health and fitness industries and the fashion industries. These words of Miller's really struck me: 

"In other words, the industry profits from maintaining the same systems that generate inequity in yoga, but because they tokenize a small number of specific diverse contributors, the company gains ethical legitimacy even while nothing substantive really changes. All talk, no walk."

Having been a "token" myself at times in these publications over the past 1.5 years, it's frustrating. It's also super irritating to see phrasing and words and work of mine (and others) co-opted without credit or mention of the grassroots radical efforts behind it. Unfortunately, this also happens within our own body positive circles and I feel it's due to uneducation, laziness and the desire to be seen as the originator of revolutionary thought and content rather than giving credit to those who we learn from.

About a year ago I was approached for an interview at Prevention.com, a magazine and website with a rich history of fat hatred and unfeminist thought about bodies. The female writer seemed slightly secretive about the story, but I felt strong in my messaging and knew that my words, story and work can make a difference - even if it is portrayed as "wrong" or "weird." I'm almost always willing to take the chance that there might just be one person out there who needed to see a loud revolutionary fatty standing strong in her truth. 

She didn't give me much information (and after the story came out I realized why), just that she was working on a story for Prevention.com and would love to include my input. "The gist of the story is 'things people who are overweight want you to know.' Many people have misconceptions about those who are very heavy (50+ pounds), and we'd like to try to set the record straight," she wrote.

She told me I could remain anonymous but I demanded she print my whole name and identify me as a body image activist in Boise, Idaho. Here are her emailed interview questions followed by my answers:

-What do you think is the biggest misconception about people who are overweight? That they're lazy? Binge on junk food all day? That sort of thing... And why, given your experience, is that notion off-base?

I don't use or believe in the false notion of 'being overweight.' There is no right or wrong weight. There is also no magical number, either on a scale, in your BMI, or your pants size. You cannot tell someone's health by just looking at them; healthy people come in all shapes and sizes.

-Is there anything you wish your "skinny" friends/relatives would do differently when it comes to your weight/body/lifestyle? For example, does your mom constantly tell you to lose weight and you wish she would stop? Does your annoying aunt email you low-fat recipes and you find it insulting? Does your friend always suggest meeting for dessert and it's harming your efforts to eat healthfully? Etc.

I wish people would not make negative assumptions or comments on my body at all - not what I put in it, what I put on it, or what it looks like. All bodies are good bodies, and there is no wrong way to have a body.

-Have you ever been in a social situation that you found uncomfortable specifically because you were overweight? (Pool party, bridesmaid dress shopping, etc.) If so, what was going through your mind at the time that you wished the thinner people around you would have understood?

Body shaming language and diet talk are so ingrained in our culture that all people, fat or thin, are constantly put in uncomfortable social situations and made to feel bad about how they look and what they eat. I wish all people would be more aware of the words they use and their own biases.

Turns out the story was eventually unfortunately titled "10 Things Everyone Carrying Extra Weight Wants You To Know" and was filled with other fat folks who wanted desperately to be smaller, less than, different. I was the only radically happy voice, and she only included an edited version of one of my answers at the very end with a final quote wrapping up the piece. It was the most hopeful part of the article, a lone voice shouting that there might, in fact, be a new way, a different way to live our lives in these bodies. One that doesn't involve hate, shame or fear.

I don't think that real revolutionary change will ever come from consumer culture or within mainstream media, especially in body positivity, where the fundamentals are a rejection of those very things. I do love, though, that they are learning from us and am hopeful for deeper change. Positivity trumps negativity. Love moves the world more than hate. Speaking truth is better than staying silent. Baby steps are better than no steps. And for that, I'll gladly be your token fat positive girl any day.

Hot & Heavy

I've been having sex for 25 years now, which I think makes me a bit of an expert - on my own sexuality, at least. My weight has fluctuated by over 100 pounds over the decades; I was about 150 lbs when I started having sex and have had it when I was 263 lbs and nine months pregnant. I've had sex with men who relished my fat body, men who secretly enjoyed it but were publicly embarrassed by it, and with those who could care less about my exterior appearance. All of them, though, would probably tell you that my confidence and comfort in my own skin was the sexiest thing about me.

Women, in general, are not supposed to be openly sexual. We are not supposed to talk about it, admit to having it, or say we enjoy it. It's a subject that becomes more taboo the older, grayer, more married, more motherly and fatter we get. We've grown up internalizing this message for so long - that our fat and aging bodies are not worthy of respect, adoration, positive attention or love. Especially as women, many of us have hated our desexualized bodies for so long that it's incredibly difficult to believe anyone else when they tell us otherwise. I've long been a very sexual person and the more body positive I've become the more confident I've felt in expressing that sexuality. So many things have helped along the way, including supportive and kind partners and following other fierce fat feminist sexy folks on social media and reading their stories. There have also been so many helpful fantastic feminist books written about it, including this one, this one, and this one.

It's no secret that I'm not a huge fatshionista - I'm thrifty and like a vintage find and have a quirky style. Truth be told, I like to wear as little clothing as possible, especially in the hot Idaho summer months and, ahem, when I'm gettin' busy. I've bought some cute lacy and flirty bras and panties in the past (and I've been known to rig up some DIY pasties out of HRC stickers on important election days), but it's always been more for myself - feeling like I've got a fun dirty little secret under my clothing. So when Curvy Girl Lingerie in San Jose, California - the only exclusively plus-sized lingerie boutique in the country - said they'd send me a box of several fancy things I immediately (but nervously) said YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU.

I'm honored to be fighting the good fight in size acceptance and self-love alongside the owner (and fellow member of my Boise Rad Fat Collective) Chrystal Bougon. She's been a business owner for the past ten years and also runs an online romance shop selling other tools and toys. Chrystal's Curvy Girl mantra is this: sexy is for every body. Sexy is NOT a size. All of us want to and deserve to feel sexy and relevant. So she's created a very safe place for women over size 12 to come and try on lingerie, sexy shoes, buy stocking and pick up some pretty panties or something fun for your lover - or yourself. She also sells much of her stock online and via her Facebook page, including this:

Muva Curve Lace Gartered Teddy, size 1X/2X, $48 with the Kix'ie Argyle Thigh Highs, size C, $25

I'll start with my favorite, the Muva (or Natasha) Teddy or, as I like to call it, Take Me For A Roll In The Hay, er, Leaf Compost. It comes with removable garters to attach thigh-high stockings and is crotchless (one of those things is handier to me than the other). It fit like a dream, even though I do not have anywhere near the large and voluptuous breasts to fill out the top like the model on the box. I was excited to try the Kix'ie stockings with self-sticking elastic around the top. Admittedly, I haven't worn them all day yet, but they were comfy and stayed up for the entire photoshoot and the pattern feels a little naughty secretary to me. This was both my favorite and Dr. Brown's as well.

Amnesia Seamless Hot Dress, OS/Plus-size, fits size 12-26, $38

This one is called the Amnesia or, as I like to call it, Walking In A Winter Wonderland/Won't You Be My Neighbor? I was anxiously awaiting the snow to fall and was all set to grab my shovel and get to work on the sidewalk. All kidding aside, this hot pink number came out of the box like the size of one of Arlo's 2T tank tops I SHIT YOU NOT. I laughed as I pulled it over my head but it is way stretchy and comfy. Chrystal says it fits people from a size 12 to a 26 (I'm a 16)! I also cannot show you a full frontal view because, um, it's mostly mesh and not internet-friendly. It's fun and flirty and something I'd totally wear over my bikini to the pool or for this year's Cupid's Undie Run.

Josephine Chemise with G-String, 1X/2X but runs large, $52

I scream you scream we all scream for her/Don't even try 'cause you can't ignore her/She's my cherry pie/Cool drink of water such a sweet surprise

Swingin' in the living room/Swingin' in the kitchen/Most folks don't 'cause they're too busy bitchin'

Tastes so good make a grown man cry/Sweet cherry pie oh yea/Put a smile on your face ten miles wide/Looks so good bring a tear to your eye/Sweet cherry pie

This one is called the Josephine Chemise, otherwise known at my house as She's My Cherry Pie.
(FELLOW CHILDREN OF THE 80s YOU'RE WELCOME.) I've never worn a cage bra/chemise before and it, along with the satin fabric and the black G-string underneath, made me feel super sexy. Too bad it was way too large for me (my breasts only filled like 3/4 of those cups and the back was pretty baggy, so it runs large (I wear a size 16 and this fits more like a 18/20, maybe even up to a 22). This one was probably the most true to my style and lingerie preference, as I'm a sucker for silky fabrics and animal print.

I've never treated myself to lingerie before, so what a fun honor to be asked by Curvy Girl Lingerie to try some out and share my experience. It's something I'll definitely do again. Chrystal and her crew are so down to earth, kind, and sex positive, I can't think of a better and more comfortable place to shop if you're plus-sized and interested in spicing things up. I think it's a super fun part of self-care and self-love to remember that you are, and can be, sexy at any size and in any way that feels good to you.

I received all lingerie from Curvy Girl Lingerie to facilitate this review. All opinions are my own.

Is This the Hillary Clinton Line?

It's no secret that I'm a radical feminist and an ardent fan of the notorious HRC. I have been, in fact, for many, many years. I came out publicly as a hard and fast supporter of hers, way back when she was a FLOTUS and still when most of my friends and colleagues were supporting Bernie Sanders for the nomination.

And again, more recently as the shitshow of this current presidential election cycle continued into the public debate phase between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump:

About a month ago, when the Boise Weekly asked me if I'd be interested in writing for them again - this time in the form of Op-Eds - of course I said yes. I was so excited to hear my first one would run this week in their election issue, just a handful of days before a historic, extraordinary, and earth-shattering (or glass ceiling-shattering) one at that. And I knew exactly what I wanted to write about - a little story of a brave girl from rural Idaho who grew up to be a courageous feminist mom with the power to stand up for a vote, and a country, she believes in. While so many people agree with my voice, speaking up and out (especially in conservative Idaho) is hard and stressful as there are many who feel free to tell me I'm too loud, a bad mom, an overly educated bitch, too much.

Nasty Women Vote, 2016, lace curtain with yarn, 3' x 3', guerrilla artwork hung downtown Boise until is was removed two days later by the powers that be in Julia Davis Park

Honestly, lately I've been feeling scared sick and just sad about the current state of affairs of this election and this country I love so dearly. I'm worried, friends, for myself, for my children, and for all of us. Then yesterday I received an email that made me burst into tears:

I just read your article in this weeks issue of the Boise Weekly. I LOVED IT. I just turned 18 so I will have the right to vote tomorrow. I am doing a government project for my government class at school and had to read and highlight 10 different newspaper articles. Yours was by far the best one I have read. Your story was so moving and makes me feel even more awesome for being a woman. People often forget about Alice Paul and all of the work she did for the rights of women. I will proudly hold the "I voted" sticker tomorrow after I place my vote. I am in tears writing this because I am so happy. Thank you for your wise words and wisdom. You're a badass and keep killing it!

I responded to her and told her to proudly check those boxes today - in honor of the women who came before her, in honor of herself, and those who will come after her. To be brave, be rebellious, and, perhaps most importantly, to continue to be educated.

Election Day is one of my favorite traditions. I've never voted early or by mail because I love the ritual of re-reading up about the issues and candidates the night before with Dr. Brown, staying up late and Googling and researching and making our notes about who we are voting for. I love standing outside in the cold November air with a hot mug of coffee in my hands with my neighbors and buying cookies from the school bake sale. This morning I donned my makeshift denim pantsuit with my Nasty Woman tee hidden underneath and brought my 8yo daughter, Alice, with me. As we waited in line I noticed I was the only one who had a child (with the exception of one baby in arms) and I was noticeably the only one in a pantsuit, so I had no one to make "solidarity sister" eye contact with. The vibe felt serious and reverent, anxious and not at all celebratory. As Alice and I moved into the short line for those with the last names M - Z she looked around worriedly and asked loudly, "is this the Hillary Clinton line, Mama?" I hushed her and told her that we were just being arranged in alphabetical order to get our ballots. That I have no idea who these people are voting for, but it's exciting that they are all here, exercising their right to vote. As she scurried off to choir practice, I ducked into my little cardboard booth and saved the Hillary Rodham Clinton for President box to fill in last with my black pen ceremoniously while holding back my tears.

This morning, as per tradition, I drew hearts on the arms of my daughters before they left for school, this time telling them how important and historic it was that I was voting for our first female POTUS today. I wished for them a life in which they may never know a world without a powerful woman leader. I told them that it wasn't that long ago, really, that women even got the right to vote, nevermind be in charge of one of the most powerful nations on earth. But I also told them that, honestly, while the work that women like me and Hillary and others have done is important there is still so much to do. That we are fighting an important fight for freedom and truth and acceptance and radical change. And that they can - and will - too.

I walked home from the little school community that I love feeling emotional and passed a neighbor walking her dog on the other side of the street. She called out, "Have a great day. And GO HILLARY!" Dr. Brown and I traded Arlo duty so he could vote next and I told him about the sort of melancholy atmosphere I felt at the polling place and he told me that everyone was just stressed out and nervous. I started busily reading the positive posts on Pantsuit Nation on Facebook to cheer myself up and pull my typically positive self out of this momentary funk when my naked toddler waddled up behind me pulling a tiny red toy wagon into the kitchen FULL OF HIS OWN POOP. I snatched him up quickly to find feces spread all over his body and tiny shit-filled footsteps across the hardwood floor and into the carpeted family room. I rushed him to the tub and surveyed the damage. In the midst of crusts of toast and a million train tracks and toys and books all helter-skelter I saw shit smeared on the vacuum cleaner and covering a notebook and I panicked. WHAT KIND OF FUCKERY IS THIS?! How am I ever going to find all the shit and clean it up? Should I just throw the toys away or bleach them? I started to cry again out of frustration and exhaustion and misplaced anxiety. Dr. Brown came home just in time to help and calm my nerves and grab a roll of paper towels and carpet cleaner to go with my bottle of bleach and baby wipes. "We've been through this before," he calmly told me. "It's called life. We can clean it up together and move forward through our day."

Some days you just gotta get up, throw on a pantsuit even if it's not really your style, pull up your big girl panties and bust out some party pasties in the name of positivity, optimism, courage and change. And remember that love trumps hate any day of the week but especially on Election Day. That we are stronger together cleaning up any of the shit life throws our way.

Feminism Is So Fun! Body Positivity Is So Easy!

The Fat Acceptance (or Fat Power or Fat Liberation) movement officially became organized in the US in the 1960s, about the same time that the Women's Liberation and Feminist movement did. As important facets of the larger Civil Rights uprising, they were started by radical women (and a few men) who were fed up with the discrimination and bigotry, inequality and lack of respect they had faced all their lives simply for existing in their bodies. Over the past 50 years many of the brave leaders of these movements have protested and spoke out, been ridiculed and humiliated, rallied and risen up.

Over the years feminism has made amazing gains and changes in the world, even though it recently went through an "unpopular" period, where many young women were afraid of or put off by claiming the term feminist, as to them it denoted someone who was radical and hated men and WASN'T SOMETHING WE NEEDED ANYMORE. Fat Acceptance didn't catch on quite as quick or establish major forward movement as women's rights did, or LGBTQIA rights or rights for people of color. It has, though, in the past three years or so really finally began to get some justice for people of size that we have deserved all along. But it did so under the much easier-to-stomach more palatable name of "body positivity."

The body positivity movement has been making extraordinary gains and has, in many ways, made radical body acceptance accessible to people of all sizes and places in life. It's also made it more acceptable to the media, and done (less important) things like feature the first curvy model on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine and (more important) things like getting the American Pediatrics Association to officially change their recommendations about talking to children about the importance of weight. For me and my work, it's jumped the membership of my private Facebook group, the Boise Rad Fat Collective, from 30 to 1,380 and filled not one but TWO theaters for the premiere of an important Australian body image documentary in Boise in September.

Hand stitched riot not diet needlepoint guerrilla art project by yours truly, 2015, hidden in various locations around town, this one at the Boise Public Library main branch in the diet book section.

But, like feminism today, body positivity has become watered-down and their radical roots all but forgotten. People new to the movements have no idea of the subversive and serious work their foremothers did to get them to this place. They often claim both these feel-good labels like they do a new fun fall fashion trend - just slip it on to say look at me! I'm feminist! And body positive! So easy! So fun! They don't want to do the hard work of educating themselves and digging deep - the falling down and getting back up that happens when you are learning. It's a journey that is supposed to make you confused, angry, hurt and be difficult.

I identified as a feminist in college as an undergrad, and attribute that to my own evolution as a woman, one really great professor, and books like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth. Seven years ago when I started my own life-altering journey by Googling the phrase "why and I fat and happy," I immediately identified with fat activism for several reasons. One, because I was fat. Two, because "body positivity" as a movement didn't yet exist. Three, because I immediately launched myself into the education, reading everything I could find on the history of fat power.

Body love advocate Whitney Way Thore and reality star of My Big Fat Fabulous Life established the No Body Shame campaign, also known as No BS, several years ago.

A few months ago I was interviewed for an article in Bustle magazine along with ten other leaders in the fat acceptance movement on this new found fame for body positivity and how we felt about it. Had it become watered down? Was it being co-opted by thin people? Had it forgotten its roots and lost its bite? I absolutely believe that all bodies are good bodies and are valuable, including differently gendered, abled, aged and sized bodies. But, there's a little bit of unfortunate truth to all those questions. Everyone and everything is claiming to be body positive these days - from the "What's Your Excuse Fit Mom" who so adamantly damned and berated the very concept just a few years ago to Weight Watchers - a diet conglomerate that profits off selling us shame, an industry that is the very antithesis to body positivity but is now profiting off the term.

So many of my colleagues said so many great things in the Bustle article, like Isha Reid:

"It feels like anything used by those most marginalized gets ambushed and taken over by those who are not marginalized. Black lives matter? No, no, ALL lives matter, and it's the same with fat acceptance. We've been told that ALL bodies should be accepted and ALL bodies should be seen positively; but we know that's not the case. We know that the more body fat you have, the more you are hated, stigmatized, made fun of, and seen as less worthy."

And Meg Elison:

"When I think of body positivity folks, I see an average-looking woman holding an umbrella in the rain. Body positivity is a big umbrella, giving cover to a lot of people who have had to stand in the rain. So, under her umbrella are huddled her friends who are like her; imperfect and on a journey toward self-love. However, they're not really fat. They're up against an impossible standard, but most of them are fatphobic at this point in their journey. They see themselves as self-accepting and maybe willing to look at someone lumpy like Lena Dunham without being cruel."

And me:

"I prefer to look at body positivity as part of a spectrum of size acceptance, with it on one end and more radical fat positivity at the other. Many will start on the body positivity end of the spectrum and their eyes and hearts will be opened via education, reading, watching others, following activists, and generally participating in the larger revolution as part of their personal journey.

Ideally, they'll move along the continuum towards radical and revolutionary body acceptance and see that all bodies are valuable and worthy, be they super fat, differently-abled, ugly, unhealthy, and/or unapologetic. As an activist, I feel it's important to meet people where they're at on that spectrum and not alienate them, giving them the tools to move forward."

I'm a proud owner of this set of artist Stacy Bias' Rad Fatty Merit Badges, a sweet way to celebrate the creativity and strength fat folks show in overcoming the daily obstacles stigma presents.

I genuinely love having you on this spectrum with me, but let's keep moving forward along it. I don't believe you can just claim body positivity or feminism without doing any of the hard work of learning from those before you and asking hard questions (of yourself and others) and getting educated. We have a reading list in the Boise Rad Fat Collective, and I often say that when you join the group and are just beginning your journey you may be in body positivity 101 but if you finish all those books you'll have a PhD in badass. Education is an important step, but implementing those ideas and examining that perhaps the way you've been taught to think about bodies (and being a woman) your entire life may be wrong is really really hard work. It can be painful and exhausting and sad and lonely. It's awkward and uncomfortable and you have to learn to critically examine words because they have power and sometimes it feels like learning a whole new language. People will often react to your ideas and your brave new voice with anger. You will be rejected and challenged and fall down a lot and have to find a way to pull yourself back up. Quite frankly, it will seriously suck more than it will be enjoyable, like most important things in life do, including things like parenting, marriage, relationships, and college. But, trust me, it will be so worth it. Like my little family motto says, WE CAN DO HARD THINGS. (Pro tip: finding a new community and revamping your media feed can help in tremendous ways.)

Don't just pull on the new label of body positivity and claim you're a feminist and stop there. YOU CANNOT HAVE ONE (FEMINISM) WITHOUT THE OTHER (BODY POSITIVITY). Push your own boundaries. Open up your mind and your heart. Be rebellious. Speak up and out.  Know your privilege and check it. Intersectionalize your feminism. Challenge the status quo.

Ghosts

We'd have to get a bigger car if all your babies were still alive, Mama, Alice said to me the other day out of the blue. A minivan like you've always wanted. With a movie screen.

I don't know at what age we'll tell Arlo about his lost twin. I think about it a lot, actually. The girls think about it a lot, too. We told Alice and Lucy not long after my first miscarriage began (a process that took a horrific and long week) because they were so worried about why mama was curled up on the floor crying and sitting on the toilet moaning and bleeding and were scared. We were all scared, but I knew that hiding from them a natural and sad process in life would be detrimental to them later as they became women. We told them that we had a surprise new baby coming into the family and were very sad because it had died in mama's belly, which we hoped they could understand at ages 5 and 9. They were terrified by it being flushed down the toilet. We explained that it hadn't yet become a tiny recognizable baby but was still cells and tissue and blood at just around 8 weeks or so along in its growth cycle. This was something that was difficult for them to reconcile - for Eric and I too - because it had always been a real baby from the moment I saw those two pink lines.

When the same thing happened six months later, though, a visible teeny tiny baby came out of me in a gush into the toilet at 11 weeks along that I hysterically scooped out with a slotted spoon from the kitchen. After a grief-filled emergency ultrasound the next day we found that in a surprise turn of luck and extraordinary beauty, there was another visible teeny tiny baby with a heartbeat still thriving inside my belly. Apparently vanishing twin syndrome is quite common in pregnancies - often the mother has no idea that she's expecting twins and one will perish in utero, to be absorbed back into her system long before the first ultrasound with no one the wiser. Sometimes people do see their twins on an ultrasound, only to have a second ultrasound months later and find that baby vanished, as if into thin air. And in very, very rare situations, like mine, a mother will physically miscarry the aborted fetus while the other pregnancy remains viable inside. The remaining fetus (in this case my now thriving toddler Arlo) is classified as a high risk pregnancy at that point, as it is not clear if he/she will make it, either. Everyone hopes for the best, but in many cases that baby is lost, too. The remaining months of my pregnancy were so hard, not only on my emotions, but on my body, as it took a while to register that it was not, in fact, growing two babies any longer, so it didn't need such a ballooned space or so many hormones in my system, things which resulted in routinely measuring too large at appointments, advanced nausea with all day long vomiting, significant weight loss, placenta previa, excruciating sciatica, terror, exhaustion, anxiety and a breech baby. My body couldn't let go of the little ghost baby, and neither could my mind or my heart.

If your first dead baby had lived, Mama, we probably wouldn't have Arlo then, right? asks my astute 8yo daughter. You're right, I tell her. As much as I wanted that baby to live, it's as if she paved the way and left us so we could have our sweet little brother.

Courtesy Bella Baby Photography at St. Alphonsus Medical Center

I was nearly four years into my body positive journey when my first miscarriage knocked the wind out of me. I had bravely started public performances and speaking engagements about fat acceptance and had been verbally attacked for it, by both anonymous strangers on Twitter and people I once considered friends. It was awful and heartbreaking and while I had previously felt powerful, I now felt confused and sad - about both the body I had worked so hard to love and the activism I had felt so strongly about. I found out, though, that while I was devastated I wasn't broken, although I was knocked flat on my back. It actually made me stronger in my beliefs about my body and I felt like I had just unlocked the key to true body acceptance and self-love - not letting these journeys and experiences in life destroy you, but treating yourself with kindness and compassion as you work through them with grace.

As most mothers know, pregnancy and parenthood is terrifying. You are always counting kicks and watching itty bitty chests raise and lower with each careful breath in bassinets cuddled up close to your own bed. As mothers who have previously lost babies know, these things intensify to an obsession that can make focusing on anything else in life nearly impossible. Pregnancies and children following loss are magical treasures and the gratitude you have for their very existence is staggering. And the thing is, you realize that any children you may have conceived pre-loss truly are miracles, too. These two lost babies of ours will haunt our little family for the rest of our lives, but that doesn't feel like a sad or scary thing. In fact, it feels like a beautiful and poignant reminder of how lucky we are to have each other each and every tenuous day on this earth.

I've written more details about my miscarriages before (here, here and here) and will continue writing about them every year. I’m honored to be joining forces with my friend and fellow body love advocate Jen McLellan of Plus Size Mommy Memoirs this week to celebrate and honor of National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Day on October 15th. All week long we’ll be sharing our stories on all our social media platforms with #mymiscarriagestory, about loss and death, fertility and grief, body acceptance and fear, love and joy, sadness and kindness. You can watch our short video about our miscarriage stories here.

Do you have a special necklace or a tree you planted or a pregnancy test in your top drawer or a marker at a cemetery to honor your baby and your loss? I do, and I’ll be sharing some of these hard and personal things with you this week on Facebook and Instagram, because I’ve found that opening my heart and being vulnerable and standing up and speaking out can help others, too. Courage is contagious and heartbreak is hard and community is important. It can be powerful to speak your truth and hear others say ME, TOO. We’d love for you to join us if you wish. And if you don’t? That’s fine, too. We hope you’ll read along and know you aren’t alone.

We Wear What We Want

My fashion sense has always been a bit quirky and fun, thrifty and different. I've loved shopping at second-hand shops since I was a teenager and I'm always spontaneous about what I might find and how I might pair it with something else. For the past six years I've been hosting an annual plus-sized clothing swap where friends (often members of the Boise Rad Fat Collective) come to my house bearing cocktails and appetizers and mountains of clothing to give away. We make piles all over my yard and garage and make a fun evening out of trying things on and modeling for one another. It is such a great way to clean out your own wardrobe and find new fun items to add back in for free in a supportive and environmentally-friendly way.

For years I've been touting the mantra "wear what you want," because life is too short to abide by nonsense fashion rules about how fat girls shouldn't don vertical stripes or crop tops or short shorts or leggings. Fuck flattering (is another thing I love to say) and wear what makes you feel good, even if it's the same baggy tee and beloved holey jeans every day. This summer a twenty-something model and blogger from Los Angeles named Simone Mariposa started the hashtag #wewearwhatwewant on Twitter because she, too, was tired of big girls being ridiculed for their choices of clothing, on social media and in real life. She told BuzzFeed in an article that she'd experienced this firsthand:  “My body image suffered greatly from it. I stopped wearing my legs and arms out, I stayed away from clothes that accentuated my belly fat, and I was extremely self conscious [in] public,” she said. “However, after a while, I stopped letting society dictate my wardrobe, and starting wearing things that I always dreamed of wearing that made me feel beautiful.”

LuLaRoe Amelia dress, $65, size 2XL. Do you spy Arlo's little blond curls?

When I splurge on something new it's usually for a special event or shoes (I will forever spend several hundred dollars on Danskos and Fit Flops for my wide difficult feet and save up for hand-crafted jewelry from makers at Wintry Market). Over the past few years, though, I've discovered LuLaRoe, an online sale boutique that features the softest fabrics and most darling casualwear ever, at a really inexpensive price (items run $25 - $65). You can attend a home shopping party or buy from a representative via their Facebook group, which is typically how I've done it in the past (the parties are a GREAT way to try on various sizes and styles, though). My favorite part is that LuLaRoe offers sizes XS - 3x (the largest which has been known to fit people up to about size 26). So when one of the members of my Boise Rad Fat Collective, Tami Olsen, began selling LuLaRoe and offered me my pick of three outfits of my choice, I couldn't say HELL YES fast enough, as a die-hard LuLaRoe fan and fatshionista. I hightailed it to her home boutique to shop one Saturday afternoon just in time for a really big week in the spotlight. AND OF COURSE I WORE MY LULAROE.

On September 19th I hosted a sold out screening of the body positive documentary film Embrace out of Australia to celebrate the one year anniversary of my stand for self-love and kick off my 41st birthday week. Not only did so many eager Boiseans purchase all 285 seats in the Edwards 9 theater downtown, they showed up early to hear me speak and stayed later for a really compelling Q&A I hosted and asked hard questions like "can you be body positive and still want to diet?" and "can I still love my fat belly even if I'm not a mom and I didn't 'earn' it via pregnancy?" Another screening of the movie across town held 100 more body positive folks who tuned in via Facebook Live.  KTVB invited me in studio right beforehand to talk about how this past year has been and the importance of films like Embrace coming to Boise. It was the perfect night to debut my new LuLaRoe Amelia dress, which I fell in love with immediately. The purple and lime green print appealed to my love of midcentury design and BOX PLEATS FTW (and for fat girls!). Also, a dress with pockets is like a dream come true for someone who needed a lot of tissues in her pocket that night (because, like I said, I haven't stopped crying for months now) and always a spot for my Dr. Pepper LipSmackers lipgloss. It's stretchy and the full skirt also gives it a fun flirty feel. I grabbed a 2X because the XL felt a little too tight in the arms (my upper arms are pretty big and I normally wear a XL or 1X in tops for reference). I can't even tell you how many compliments I've gotten on this dress from that night, and I've only worn it once so far.

LuLaRoe Perfect Tee, size medium, $36; Tall & Curvy (TC) leggings, $25

A few days later I gave two historic walking tours of Cloverdale Cemetery for my work as an architectural historian and tour guide for Preservation Idaho. We are a nonprofit that has been around since 1972 and we advocate for and educate about our historic built environment. While that most traditionally means buildings, it often incorporates unique elements of our landscape like cemeteries. (Fun fact: in case you didn't know, I'm also a death historian, and used to work as a mortician's assistant and pick up dead bodies at night for an Oregon funeral home.) It was the first day of fall and blustery and cool and a perfect day to wear my new Tall & Curvy (or TC) leggings and Perfect Tee in dark green. Seriously, I have several pairs of these buttery leggings and could live in them and get a million "where did you get those darling leggings?!" every time I do.  Here's the thing about the TC leggings: they're $25 and seriously fit sizes 16 - 26 in a variety of body shapes. I didn't believe it either, but after trying them on and owning several pairs for over a year I'm a believer. They feel like you're wearing the most stylish pajamas ever and allow me to crawl on the floor after my toddler, attend meetings, and look professional talking about death AND come in a plethora of fun prints or solid colors. The Perfect Tee is tight in the arms and has a swingy bottom more like a tunic and is made from the same soft fabric. It seems to fit large so I ended up with a size medium. Paired with garage sale boots, a vintage casket crank (used to seal caskets by funeral homes), and 1930s historic site maps of the cemetery, this girl was ready to lead an hour jaunt through sacred grounds telling sordid tales.

Va-va-va-voom Julia dress by LuLaRoe, size XL, $45

It may be this Julia dress, though, that really stole my heart. It's skin tight but so comfortable. It clings to every curve and showcases that VBO (visible belly outline) and booty like no other. It makes me feel brave and bold and beautiful and is seriously sexy (Dr. Brown thinks so too). The black and white pattern goes with anything and doesn't show stains, which is necessary for this messy mama. I can't imagine it doesn't look good on everyone. Mine is a size XL, which Tami says is about a size 16/18 (accurate for me). I wore it out on a date night for my 41st birthday with my hot hubby to the Boise Film Festival a few hours after I stood nearly nude downtown Boise in Freak Alley for a really cool collaboration with the famous and kind body painter Natalie Fletcher of Skin Wars.

If you were lucky enough to be at the Embrace premiere, you saw that I featured several size positive businesses at the check in table, including Tami Olsen's LuLaRoe business cards complete with a hand-drawn red heart for a discount off your first purchase from her. (She was also there handing out leggings to lucky recipients who asked about my darling dress.) But! She's offering another chance to my readers and fans to win free clothing and/or get a discount. Check out her Facebook group for more details.

I'm being asked more and more to do giveaways or to try out a product and, let me tell you, I'm super picky when it comes to endorsing someone or something and will only agree to share or post about something that I already loved or think is pretty great (like hand-crafted meat from Minneapolis or this darling LuLaRoe gear). I love supporting other plus-sized gals who are starting their own small businesses based around helping others look and feel their best, however that looks to them. Tami knows, like I do, that life is so much better when we wear what we want no matter our size, archaic misogynistic fashion rules be damned.