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Best Little Girl in the World

May 23, 2019 in Feminist Matters, Past Matters, Snapshot

I’ve been doing a lot of visual research for my book and today found two pics from my 20s that really freak me out. I wrote last week about my struggles with anorexia nervosa, but the photographic evidence was still tough to see. Back then I thought I looked so fly but in the one at left I am covered with a pelt of fur and at right I am literally concave. Please note: There’s nothing inherently wrong with body hair but it’s disturbing that the thick dark hair covering my limbs and abdomen fell out when I started eating regularly.

I may be flattering myself but I think in my zaftig 40s I actually look younger. Certainly it’s unclear if I’d be heading round the bend to 50 had I not found a way through my anorexia. At 25, I had auto-immune issues, joint problems, a jaundiced complexion, digestive disease, and frequently fractured bones. Yet no doctor connected these problems to the fact that I was severely underweight. It is a betrayal of the social contract to ever comment on another’s weight, yet I received so much approbation for walking around obviously ill that I was drafted as a model. (Not a humblebrag, modeling is fecked.) To be fair, it may have been hard to tell I was eating-disordered since I have my mother’s strong and sizable bones. Still. My head loomed like–well, my head loomed like fucking Barbie.

Teach Me Tonight (NSFW, O My)

May 20, 2019 in Age Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Feminist Matters, Music Matters, Queer Matters, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters

I’ve been trying to figure out who to sleep with next–really, who to be attracted to. As if we have control in that department.

I always tell my Ruby Intuition clients the best you can hope for is a version 2.0 of what’s erotically imprinted on you. I’ve seen those relationships borne out of someone stubbornly trying Not to Date Mom or Dad and, boy o boy, the no-sex vibe is stronger than Prince’s pheromones are even now.

Strong.

As usual, my shrink has useful advice. She says, “The minute you get that Child feeling, get out.” She means that when I get that desperate, pay-attention-to-me-daddy! feeling around a paramour, I should cut it off. Because once again I have fallen for a charismatic narcissist who would rather drown me in their black hole than make our dynamics about anything other than their ego. Continue Reading →

Skinny and Number-Sixed: 2019 Orthorexia

May 18, 2019 in Age Matters, Book Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Feminist Matters, Style Matters

Recently I was in a room of women who did not eat carbohydrates.

I am exaggerating, of course. I am sure they occasionally ate things like sprouted quinoa in bowls filled with other expensive elements meant to extend their lives by weeks or even months.

That is, if they didn’t choke on their own bile first.

Because these women were unhappy. They were rich women and they were white women and they were women my age. I kept having to remind myself they were my age, because they looked both older and younger than me. Their skin radiated a glow that mine only achieves about an hour after I work out–but really it was a sort of florescent, dangerous glow that spoke of misplaced determination. Their hair also spoke of that determination. It was very actively Not Grey, but not with the generic beige which less clever or moneyed women slap on grey hair. No, their hair was like a trip to the Grand Canyon or South Dakota’s Badlands–compelling flowing layers ranging from gold to burnt sienna–waves of sediment, not sea. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy