The following is a post Reverence Lily wrote for her blog and decided not to use. She offered it to me and I thought it was too good not to see the light of day. So without further ado…

As you can see, the name of my blog has changed from The Element of Fun to Cherish Her: A Blog. I felt that the previous name didn’t jive with the direction it was going in - which is, while interesting, not all that lighthearted. I’d originally planned for Cherish Her to be my self-owned clothing company… but I don’t really have time for that right now, unfortunately. I had great designs, though.

I was pondering over the idea of “resisting temptation” and wondering why we do it - and furthermore, why giving in to temptation is considered bad. It could actually be bad, if you go by, “something that you want to do that you should not” as the definition of temptation. I have mixed feelings on that definition, myself, because while I could definitely see it being something bad, I can also see it being wildly glorified even while considered bad (and even actually harmful) because of its “rebellious” consequences - even if it’s actually widely accepted, e.g. the pro-pornography mainstream.

But I was also pondering that phrase’s relation to eating disorders. If you’ve been anywhere near a pro-anorexia (or even sometimes pro-dieting) site, you know the catchphrase, “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.” Thus my strong reaction to it in the first post I made: No praise feels as good as healthy tastes!

There are two ways you can take “resisting temptation” as relating to eating disorders: first, if you are actively eating disordered at the moment, you will most likely relate it to your own experience as “needing” to resist food. (I find that even those with BED/COED have this little quirk. It’s pretty much ingrained in us all, see last post.) If you are doing well in recovery, or actively resisting an eating disorder, you will take it as meaning that you need to avoid slipping into disordered eating.

Peculiar, that. On the other hand, it’s not so peculiar at all - after all, eating disorders really do change your entire worldview and personality. That, in an eating disordered mind, “resisting temptation” would mean resisting food - and all needs, a moral matter rather than a matter of essential mental health - is not surprising in the least to me.

That is because women’s needs are a moral matter in at least Western society. While men run into fatphobia occasionally, it’s women who see the idea, glaringly reflected on the smooth, flawless stone surface of Patriarchy, that their needs - for food, sex, security (both emotional and physical) and every other kind of need they may have - are not only suspect, they are automatically condemned until proven to serve the needs/desires of anyone but themselves - usually men’s needs/desires (as long as they, too, are Patriarchy-approved).

Women see food as a moral matter because how women feed themselves is seen as a moral matter in society. Though expertly documented in The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams around, well, the sexual and sexualized politics of animal flesh, I’ll be broader: there are foods that are seen as feminine and there are foods that are seen as masculine and, while the former are largely nourishing and do not cause disease (fruits, vegetables), they are considered “inferior” because of the lack of what I believe to be one of the primary defining characteristics of Western society’s neurosis surrounding food: it doesn’t cause pain - and as such it doesn’t grant the illusion of power to the consumer.

Now, we have all been brought up to believe that, first, having power over someone means possessing the ability to cause them varying degrees of pain (that correlate with varying degrees of the power granted) - rather than, say, possessing the ability to make someone happy or make them laugh.* Women are, also largely, considered to be unfit to wield power - either because they are unfit (see the recent lies and distortions about Hillary’s choke-up on TV) or because they would be even worse than men if they had it (see female-dominated S&M pornography).

This, I think, is where feminists decide to part ways with what I see as being a necessary component of an anti-oppression worldview: support and practice of abolitionist animal rights, i.e. veganism. (This also happens because of their unwillingness to make themselves even moreso targets than simply being radical feminists, which I understand but in no way condone.) Because animal flesh is one of the world’s largest sources of calories (though not in any way nutrients) and women have historically been barred from it in times of famine so that the men could take it. Nonvegan feminists therefore think - incorrectly - that the way to solve the sexism in this matter is to make animal flesh freely available for women and children. What they do not realize, of course, is that accepting animal flesh, eggs and dairy as a necessary component of a diet means accepting violence as a necessary component of a human’s life and accepting the idea that the only way one can live a “good” life is through ruling over another - etc. (You see the further slippery slope, of course - as I personally believe sexism racism et al. began.)

As such - because pain is power and calorie-dense food is (often) pain is power and women cannot wield power i.e. pain i.e. food and women’s survival is food is pain is power - women’s desires become a moral matter. (Sorry if that didn’t make any sense.)

When women wish to refuse to take part in this absurd dictate, they become anorectics. When women wish at once to prove the system wrong and also to drown it out, they become binge eaters (/purgers, perhaps). And the only reason this is at all possible is because we place a moral judgment upon the size of someone’s body.

Delving more into the animal rights aspect of Feminism, I think that, because animals are supposed to be as big as possible to be as valuable as possible - and because women, instead of refusing to allow both themselves and animals to be defined in a Patriarchal hierarchy in which they are always the losers, have historically tried to distance themselves from nonhuman animals - women went the other direction in order to attempt achieving equality and made themselves as small as possible. This just so happened to produce a “societal opiate” effect that was rather pleasing to those in power, so it was continued. (Have you ever noticed how the obesity scare tactics revved up right when Bush got into power and we needed to be distracted?)

In order to abolish Patriarchy - what I see as the essential cause of all oppressions - we need to stop pushing each other down in order to raise ourselves up and begin “floating all boats”, so to speak.

We need to stop saying, “comparing women to animals is insulting” and start saying “you’re a bigot for thinking ill of women and animals.” We need to stop trying to free ourselves from our bodies. And, perhaps above all, we need to change “power = pain” into “power = love”.

*Side-note: as such, in a Patriarchal world, no matter how much a woman may “make” a man want to have sex with her, he will still have the advantage/privilege of power over her because he not only has the inherent and socially-taught ability to make her feel overwhelming mental and physical pain, but that ability of his, if use, will usually be socially accepted as long as he doesn’t leave many visible marks.

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