thefrisky:

Dear Thinspiration Blogs,

At first I didn’t really understand you. I mean, I’d heard of the “pro-ana” blogs that lurked in dark corners of the internet, encouraging starvation and promoting anorexia. But thinspiration blogs are more mainstream. You show up on the Pinterest homepage in the form of “diet plans” that allow nothing but lemon water for a week. You show up on my Tumblr dashboard in the form of photos of concave stomachs and protruding rib cages, or food diaries with 500-calorie totals. The phrase “thigh gap” is actually a popular blog tag now, shorthand for pictures of skinny legs that don’t touch. The gist of it? You are getting harder and harder to avoid.

I could write about how scary it is that these blogs have found such a huge audience. I could write about the flaws of our weight-obsessed culture, or the fact that the vast majority of these blogs are written by young women for young women. But mostly I want to write about how you make me incredibly sad.

I think about the girls who write blogs like this and how much they hate their bodies, how they believe their worth is tied only to their physical appearance, how their definition of beauty is so tragically narrow.

I think about the girls who repost pictures and text from these blogs and how they will never be satisfied, how they will never look down at their thighs and see strong muscles and soft skin, only dimpled fat.

I think about the girls who are actually feeling OK about themselves until a thinspiration photo or quote shows up in their orbit and tells them to reconsider.

I think about myself when I was 13, chubby and depressed, bullied at school. I used to lie in bed at night and think about cutting the fat off my stomach with scissors. Today I came across an “inspiring” photo of a girl trying to do just that. How would I have handled these messages? Would I have followed a thinspiration blog? Or worse: would I have written one?

Sometimes I click on thinspiration links to see who is posting them. Almost every time it’s a teenage girl. So here is it what I want to say to you: as long as you are focused on thinspiration you will never truly know inspiration. You will never learn to delve deeper than skindeep. You will never be able to dream about anything bigger than a certain number on a scale or an exposed collarbone. Someday you will look back on your teenage self and want to protect her. Why not start now?

“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” is a huge lie. Self-love is delicious, and so is cheese and chocolate cake.

Love,
Winona

lungbuster:

notasenator:

angels-and-angles:

As defined by urban dictionary, the friendzone is…

“When you are expected to support a girl you really like while she searches for a smarter, richer, and more handsome boyfriend. There is little you can do without feeling like a dick. All in all, one of the meanest things a girl can do, whether they mean it or not.”

and ”The perennial location of nice guys everywhere.”

Although this hypothetical situation could work both ways, friendzone is almost always applied to a man who is rejected by a woman. Therefore, there is something inherently unequal, something inherently sexist about the term “friendzone”. But what and why?

From my experience, this is what friend zone is. A “nice guy” pursues a woman, but isn’t forward with his intentions from the get-go like, say, a “jerk”. The woman is pleased to see a man who is interested in her not as a sexual object but as a human being and wishes for things to stay that way. The man is not satisfied with seeing the woman as a human being because being “expected to support a girl” is a bad deal if she’s not putting out.

Before I delve into the sociological aspects of this, I just want to point out that ”friendzone” is no more pleasant for a woman than it is a man. First, that is to say unrequited love works both ways, but the person who doesn’t return affections is considered mean only when she’s a woman. And second, what option does the woman have in a traditional “friendzone” situation? Just stop talking to a close friend to avoid “leading him on”? In high school, I found out my best friend of 2 years liked me. Having to tell him I didn’t feel the same way and being immediately ex-communicated via Facebook status (“Thanks for wasting my time”) was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. Were our two years of friendship invalid because I didn’t want anything more? Was all our time together really wasted because there was no hypothetical pay off?

Guys who do this and claim to be “nice guys” are the worst misogynists because of their sense of entitlement toward a woman. They make investments in property and expect their dividends. They are fake friends. They are selfish. And they will jump at the chance to vilify you and victimize themselves when their attempts at manipulation don’t work. Clearly, “friendzone” is the remnant of a phenomenon that has plagued women since the beginning of time: women are not independent creatures. Our love lives exist only in the context of a man’s desire. When we make independent decisions, we are subject to a host of derogatory terms. “Slut” is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say “yes”. “Friendzone” is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say “no”.

I’ve seen that last line popping around, and it is wonderfully written.

Here is The Way It Works: A Primer by Brian Gefrich

• You are nice to people because people should be nice to each other.
• You are good to people because then everyone’s lives are a bit better.
• If you meet a person you are interested in romantically or sexually, you will already be treating them nicely as per the above.
• If they are in a position where they would be open to a relationship, you make your intentions clear. This is not done through the simple acts of kindness or friendship you would perform for anyone else, make use of the culturally-accepted forms (flowers, ask out on a date, just tell them straight-up, etc)
• If they say ‘no’ in any form, then that’s that, but you do not punish them by treating them as less than a person. Remember above, you are being nice to everyone.
• If they say ‘yes’ in any form, if it’s a relationship or sex once on a whim or anything in-between, you don’t then get to stop being nice to them. They are still a person.

If you use your kindness as a form of pre-payment for sex, you are treating the object of your desire as less than a person, you are demeaning them by thinking that their sexuality can be purchased, and you are prostituting your own humanity.

This may make you a misogynist, yes, but more than that it makes you really terrible at being a person.

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