Part of the body positive movement should also be about realising that there are women and girls who do not love themselves and are not at the end of the journey where they feel confident in themselves. Although as Gay points out, the idea that loving yourself will come easily to everyone and that loving yourself will solve everything is just not going to make everything wrong with the world suddenly stop. Gay touches on the body positive movement, which I agree with her as being an important movement for women and in particular fat women. So we watch each other and police each others bodies out of fear and suspicion. Our bodies are gaol cells that look out at other gaol cells and in the distance we see the news and media tower in the middle with tinted glass so we never know if we are really being watched. It reminds me of the self-policing Panopticon from Bentham. The constant monitoring of female bodies, internally and externally, creates a collective fear in women. Either too tall, fat, short, brown, white, whatever… Self-loathing is destructive and yet all too easy for women and girls. I feel like this would uncomplicate my life exponentially. Sometimes I still wish I could shrink a few centimetres. I wanted to be smaller and shorter for almost all my life. To take up space, voluntarily or otherwise, is not supposed to be a female act. As a fellow tall woman, I can relate to Gay’s discussions on her height, and how this made her a problem in society. Women taking up space challenges traditional notions of masculinity and therefore patriarchal norms. As much as I want to shout out a big “FUCK YOU” to these standards, and I am sure Gay would also like to do the same, to assume that we can escape, forget, or easily subvert these standards is also naive.

As society’s standards go, she is not doing too well in the ‘feminine’ beauty department.

She is tall, fat, Haitian, tattooed, and queer. Roxane Gay, like many women around the world, does not have the kind of body that follows the rules of society’s standards of feminine beauty. So if your body does not meet the particular standards of female beauty at any given time, you will be blamed for it. Someone, somewhere gets to decide what ‘perfection’ for the female form is, and in my general experience, women are usually the last ones to be asked about this. I distinctly remember being about seven or eight years old at my friend Amanda’s house playing dress-ups, when I thought to myself as I looked in the mirror, “Well at least I have skinny arms.” Women and girls, overtly and covertly teach each other how to judge and ridicule the bodies of others and their own bodies. Every woman and girl knows what it is like to have their body judged by not just the people around them, but also by themselves.

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