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Not a journaling assignment, obviously. Enter your cut contents here.
So, first off, at least 80% of the way I’m feeling is due to not having taken my citalopram for a few days; I’ve taken it just now and I’m trying to calm down. I’ve spent the past hour or so 1. obsessing over the way I put my foot in my mouth two days ago in a comments thread on another blog, and 2. consequently missing my bus stop or getting on the wrong train multiple times and feeling even stupider.
The original stupidity consisted of me complaining that “between the euphemism-to-insult cycle and the constantly changing standards over what constitutes the “ideal” body type, I have no idea what any given person means by a word like “curvy,” because I’ve seen it applied to every body type from Kate Winslet to Beth Ditto.” I also added that there was apparently also a masculine version of this, in that I’d lately seen Tumblr posts complaining that straight people have discovered the term “bear,” but are diluting it to meaninglessness by applying it to guys like, say, Tom Hardy.
I should have listened to the misgiving in the back of my mind that said “if you post that, you’re going to sound like someone in the 1980s ranting about how they can no longer use the word “gay” to mean “happy,” but I foolishly ignored it and hit Post.
Someone proceeded to ask me why I felt the need to comment on women’s bodies at all. I probably dodged a bullet by not arguing that sometimes there are legitimate reasons to describe someone’s appearance (introducing a character in a novel, asking after someone whose name you don’t know, looking for a friend in a crowded public place) and instead just replying that I never do comment on anyone else’s body, but if someone else does, I like to have some idea of their intended meaning.
Someone else then said that language changes over time and I should learn to deal with it. I started to reply that I’m not complaining about meaning-shifts over five or ten years, or the same word having different connotations for different subcultures, I’m complaining that if two fashion bloggers writing in the same year for, AFAICT, an audience of white middle-class women both use the term “curvy women,” I honestly don’t know if they mean plus-size women or medium-size women or both or women who are medium but think they’re fat because they’re not rail-thin or if the word is being used as some kind of passive-aggressive fatphobic insult or what. Then I decided that would just be digging a deeper hole for myself so I said sorry, never mind and stepped back.
Guess I’m still obsessing over the incident, though, and I don’t know why. I suppose a lot of it is that I’m really interested in how language evolves, and at the same time also so afraid of accidentally insulting someone that I cringe at having to use any physical descriptors at all beyond the most basic age/gender ones. So I kind of feel like I’m being called out for the opposite of what I was trying to do. But then if I was unable to make my point understood, then it is my fault. And maybe it is none of my business to even bring the topic up.
I’ve realized this was sort of like another situation a few weeks back with a woman on the subway. I do feel like she was more definitely in the wrong than the internet commenters were, in that I didn’t notice her dropping any of the usual hints (throat-clearing, position-shifting) that she wanted me to move to a seat that was not next to hers until she said to someone on her phone: “this bitch is still sitting next to me even though there’s plenty of space.” I said sorry, moved, and tried to avoid eye contact for the rest of the trip, and part of me felt unfairly treated, and part of me blamed myself for having missed whatever signals she had been sending. But again what made it so bad was that I really try to be aware of other passengers and read their body language, and apparently I just wasn’t good enough at it this time, so I felt like I’d gone all Dunning-Kruger and deceived myself as to my abilities. If I were a bitch, maybe I could not care, or feel confident that it’s not me, it’s them; but this simultaneous defensiveness and guilt really makes it hard to move past things.
So, first off, at least 80% of the way I’m feeling is due to not having taken my citalopram for a few days; I’ve taken it just now and I’m trying to calm down. I’ve spent the past hour or so 1. obsessing over the way I put my foot in my mouth two days ago in a comments thread on another blog, and 2. consequently missing my bus stop or getting on the wrong train multiple times and feeling even stupider.
The original stupidity consisted of me complaining that “between the euphemism-to-insult cycle and the constantly changing standards over what constitutes the “ideal” body type, I have no idea what any given person means by a word like “curvy,” because I’ve seen it applied to every body type from Kate Winslet to Beth Ditto.” I also added that there was apparently also a masculine version of this, in that I’d lately seen Tumblr posts complaining that straight people have discovered the term “bear,” but are diluting it to meaninglessness by applying it to guys like, say, Tom Hardy.
I should have listened to the misgiving in the back of my mind that said “if you post that, you’re going to sound like someone in the 1980s ranting about how they can no longer use the word “gay” to mean “happy,” but I foolishly ignored it and hit Post.
Someone proceeded to ask me why I felt the need to comment on women’s bodies at all. I probably dodged a bullet by not arguing that sometimes there are legitimate reasons to describe someone’s appearance (introducing a character in a novel, asking after someone whose name you don’t know, looking for a friend in a crowded public place) and instead just replying that I never do comment on anyone else’s body, but if someone else does, I like to have some idea of their intended meaning.
Someone else then said that language changes over time and I should learn to deal with it. I started to reply that I’m not complaining about meaning-shifts over five or ten years, or the same word having different connotations for different subcultures, I’m complaining that if two fashion bloggers writing in the same year for, AFAICT, an audience of white middle-class women both use the term “curvy women,” I honestly don’t know if they mean plus-size women or medium-size women or both or women who are medium but think they’re fat because they’re not rail-thin or if the word is being used as some kind of passive-aggressive fatphobic insult or what. Then I decided that would just be digging a deeper hole for myself so I said sorry, never mind and stepped back.
Guess I’m still obsessing over the incident, though, and I don’t know why. I suppose a lot of it is that I’m really interested in how language evolves, and at the same time also so afraid of accidentally insulting someone that I cringe at having to use any physical descriptors at all beyond the most basic age/gender ones. So I kind of feel like I’m being called out for the opposite of what I was trying to do. But then if I was unable to make my point understood, then it is my fault. And maybe it is none of my business to even bring the topic up.
I’ve realized this was sort of like another situation a few weeks back with a woman on the subway. I do feel like she was more definitely in the wrong than the internet commenters were, in that I didn’t notice her dropping any of the usual hints (throat-clearing, position-shifting) that she wanted me to move to a seat that was not next to hers until she said to someone on her phone: “this bitch is still sitting next to me even though there’s plenty of space.” I said sorry, moved, and tried to avoid eye contact for the rest of the trip, and part of me felt unfairly treated, and part of me blamed myself for having missed whatever signals she had been sending. But again what made it so bad was that I really try to be aware of other passengers and read their body language, and apparently I just wasn’t good enough at it this time, so I felt like I’d gone all Dunning-Kruger and deceived myself as to my abilities. If I were a bitch, maybe I could not care, or feel confident that it’s not me, it’s them; but this simultaneous defensiveness and guilt really makes it hard to move past things.
