A woman who takes care of herself

Content note: some discussion of fatphobia and disordered eating – nothing too detailed/explicit because this is a triggery topic for me, but thought you’d like to know, so you can take care of yourself, too!

One of my pet peeves on dating apps is when guys say “I’m looking for a woman who takes care of herself.”

It would be fine if they meant it literally, but they don’t. What they mean, for the most part, is: “I want a woman who is thin and goes to the gym multiple times a week.”

Let me be very clear: It’s fine to have standards, and it’s fine if not everyone meets those standards. (That’s the point of having standards, in fact.) It’s fine to prefer partners who share your interests, hobbies, and values. It’s fine to prefer partners you’re attracted to (I think most of us do!). It’s also fine to be thin, and to go to the gym multiple times a week. None of that is my issue with this euphemism.

My issue with it is that it implicitly equates caring for oneself with thinness and athleticism, when, for some of us, the greatest acts of self-care involve deliberately rejecting these things and cultivating a different kind of life.

I was not taking care of myself when I hated my body and policed it fiercely with calorie-counting and over-exercise in my mid-twenties (which I won’t go into too much, because there are more than enough depictions of women’s self-denial and self-mistreatment in the world already!). It was literally the opposite of self-care; I was sabotaging myself. I was draining the literal life force out of myself. I was refusing to take proper care of myself, until my body looked the way it was “supposed to” and I therefore “deserved” that care.

Of course, at the time, I thought I was taking care of myself. I thought I was doing the right thing, the best thing for me. But it was really just the best thing for the fatphobic culture we live in, and for the shallow end of my dating pool. In no way was I benefiting myself by making myself constantly feel like my body was wrong just for existing, and needed to be changed radically in order to be worthy of love, even love from myself.

Anyway, my relationships to food, exercise, and self-love are quite different now, nearly a decade after my roughest patch of disordered eating and body-hatred. If I skip a meal these days, or don’t get enough calories in, it’s because my fibro nausea is flaring up, or my depression meds are fucking with my appetite, or I’m in a flare-up and haven’t been able to get out of bed to acquire food. But even in those cases, I do my best to feed myself when I can, and I offer myself compassion and love, instead of assigning any moral value to eating or not eating. That’s truly caring for oneself in this realm, if you ask me.

Taking good care of myself also looks like keeping up with my skincare routine, my dental hygiene, my vitamins and supplements. It looks like taking a nap in the middle of the day when I need one, and going for a long walk when I need that more. It looks like forgiving myself when I don’t or can’t live up to arbitrary standards that have been set for me, whether by the culture at large, or by me myself. And it looks like never, ever dating anyone whose idea of a woman taking care of herself is a woman running herself ragged at the expense of her soul.

(If you need help with disordered eating, the National Eating Disorders Association has some helpful resources listed.)

Elsewhere:

• On my blog, I just reviewed a new ultra-realistic dildo, the Solina. Click through to read my detailed thoughts about this beautiful dick.

• Our latest Dildorks episode was about service kink and how our relationship to it has changed over the years as we’ve become more aware of our people-pleasing patterns, trauma, etc. Always a pleasure nerding out with my best friend about our sexual psychology!

• Did you know that I have a TON of my original music available for purchase on my Bandcamp, and that you can read a lot of my songs’ lyrics there too, incase you ever wanted to know what I think (in musical form) about red lipstick, Tinder, bad sex, 69ing, marriage, or magicians (among other things)?!

• This gay cover of Stacy’s Mom (“Stacy’s dad has got me down bad…”) is well worth a watch.

• I went down a rabbit hole reading about John Steinbeck’s obsession with pencils this week for some reason. Always interesting to learn about famous writers’ tools-o’-the-trade. (One of his faves, the Blackwing, is actually tattooed on me – albeit a pink one, whereas Steinbeck preferred black.)

• Why am I re-watching, for the third time, SmallAnt’s run of Pokémon X where all the enemy trainers are level 100? Because I am a creature of habit – but also because his battle strategy skills are off-the-charts and so much fun to watch, especially in this particular challenge. I love excellence!! (And one of my favorite non-gaming moments in it is when someone in chat said his haircut made him look like a lesbian and this happened…)

• I impulsively signed up for a musical improv class yesterday (!!!), so of course, I’m re-watching a bunch of my favorite performances from Zach Reino & Jess McKenna, two of the best musical improvisors working today. “That dish is a risk!!”

• I’m reading, and enjoying, A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson, which is whip-smart and illuminating. I’m switching back and forth between that and a re-read of the teen romance I Kissed Shara Wheeler, though, because sometimes ya gotta balance out the heavy with the light. Although, admittedly, Shara is about queer kids at an evangelical high school, so it has some troubling aspects to it, too…

• I enjoyed this video from Keppie Coutts about how to organize your song ideas. A lot of the advice would be useful to writers/creators in general, since ideas are ephemeral and it sometimes feels like half the battle of art-making is just remembering what the hell you wanted to make art about.