Wellbeing Thread - who's in?

[AnonWasAWoman]

This is a sort of ?gap in the market? thread really, forgive the rotten title. I was thinking about women and wellbeing and a possible feminist slant on what I feel the beauty industry has colonised.

If I try to find a threads, or a magazine articles, about women?s wellbeing and health I can guarantee half of them will be written in what comes across to me as doublethink: ?you need to feel good about your body, so first you must wage war upon it for a woman?s body is naturally hideously ugly!?. This just makes me sad. So do diluted versions ? the kind of discussions or groups where participants begin with a focus on health, but gradually shift to ?what can you do to look good?, which ? well, just makes me feel ugly if I don?t do those things (And, ah, angry that some people think women should have to!).

It really worries me how, as women, health and beauty are constantly conflated, and there?s an ever-increasing list of treatments that begin as luxurious pampering, then quickly come to be essential ?maintenance? or even basic ?hygiene?. It?s taken that a sign of healthy self-confidence and body confidence is to buy into these ideas about what to do with our time and money and bodies. I?m sure there?s a spectrum of views among feminists as to what we feel is right for us and what?s not, and I don?t want to get into that because I think it?s the least interesting bit of the debate. So I?m not trying to start yet another ?do you wax your fanjo fur? thread ? interesting as they are ?!

I am sure there is a way to resist gendered body care/products without in any way denigrating or ignoring the female body. I bet some of you are brilliant at this and the Resisting Femininity threads were great for showing me the way. But I also want to replace the things I?m resisting, not just get rid of all focus on my body. My mum can as close as can be to this ? everything ?gendered? for women?s bodies, from women?s anti-perspirant, to shaving equipment, to perfume and cosmetics, came under the same heading of ?disgusting things?. In retrospect I find this quite disturbing and not remotely feminist. I am sure I would have been a happier and better-adjusted teenager if I?d not had to sneak off to buy deodorant and nick my dad?s used disposables (I didn?t know any better). If as an adult woman I want to do without any of this stuff, that?s fine ? but I certainly don?t want to feel it?s the only option, or that being a feminist has to mean focusing on the mind and forgetting about the body.

So what I would like to do is to try to hammer out a sense of what you do (if anything) to replace or contrast with what we?re offered by society in terms of caring for your body. So I thought maybe it?d be nice to have a sort of wellbeing thread on here, where we can do all the healthy stuff you hope for on a ?diet? thread (and don?t IME get), and we can do all the ?taking time for myself? stuff that the beauty industry has colonised and distorted, but we can also maybe chat about how to feel better about our bodies, instead of how to make them look better.

So, here?s my list (some, obviously, drawn from a certain S&B thread!). They?re what I?ll hope to do, not what I promise to do!

• I?m going to try to go for a walk at least twice a week, even if it?s just half an hour. And I?m going to take my camera so I don?t end up thinking about work the whole time!
• I?m going to try to eat two different kinds of fruit/veg (I get stuck on apples galore)
• I?ll try to cut my coffee intake
• I?ll try to take 15 minutes before I go to bed to think about something that is not work, or chatting on MN (!), or planning food shopping or whatever
• I?m going to try to make proper breakfast every day
• Go to bed early one night per week
• Ration my (awful) snickers habit! I have eaten three snickers ice-cream bars this morning and it is Not good.
• (You can laugh here) I?m going to do some pelvic floor exercises every week ? I always forget and I imagine I?ll be glad of them later on!

Please add in suggestions if you have them or say if you think I ought to change my mind about any of these.

Oh, isn't that funny - I was half asleep this morning thinking I'd wanted to add my pumpkin bread recipe to this thread yesterday (briefly scanned and saw the post about banana bread which gave me the idea) and while lying there drifting thought, "the well-being thread reminds me of the princessing thread". It wasn't a bad idea at all, I thought. But I like the slant of this thread better - in that it's something we're doing for ourselves.

Morning all (7:40 am here).

So, a question about perfume. Is it a wellbeing thing or a vanity thing?

sometimes I make lists of all the things I am going to do to be a better person, and then it gets me down to see how far I have to go!

So then I rebel and say, Im going to eat more chocolate and sit on the sofa and watch comedy! The thought makes me feel free and happy, and then I actually sometimes dance around and eat fruit.

bloody fruit.

eyelash growth serum? What's that when it's at home? Is it scientifically proven to work?

Jackmania - women need perfume because they smell bad, apparently.

My list would be (and this is from a feminist well-being point of view, not anything else):

1. Read Gyn/Ecology
2. Read Beauty and Misogyny
3. Think about it
4. Carry on

I've completed it already, so I'll just have to be happy the way I am.

I did read a bit of the thread Elderberry and apparently one brand of eyelash serum stopped working so another was going to have to be tried.

I hope it doesn't look like I'm having a go at them, what pisses me off is the fact we live in a culture which believes that women aren't good enough and will never be good enough, so we have to keep constantly trying to improve.

Hmmm... so on a day when I've showered and smell fresh as a daisy, what's perfume then? An indulgence that makes me feel good or... what? I have a scent that I really love, it just makes me feel all warm and mmmmmmm :).

Re: eyelash serum - what a pile of crap. I've tried it, because I needed something to help me repair the damage done by eyelash extensions, which I was talked into by a friend during a drunken night. They look beautiful (although my own lashes are ok) but do a bunch of damage when they're falling out. Having been left with little short stubby lashes (eeek!!!) I tried serum. What a waste of money.

Thunderbolts - you've summed up what pisses me off. I'd only like to add "we live in a culture where women aren't good enough and aren't valued for their brains so have to constantly try to improve their looks". Grrrr.

I like your list TAL.

You sound cool. You can be my role model if you like :)

It's not just our brains either is it Jacks, it's our talents, our hearts, our personalities, our achievements. There's so much that isn't taken into account.

Instead what's important is that our eyelashes aren't long enough and need to be extended.

You might feel fresh as a daisy, but the point about perfume is that women are supposed to wear it to disguise any unpleasant smell that might offend men, and also to be appealing to them. It's part of the female beauty duty.

LOL Chicken, I'll do my best.

Just in case my relentless negativity is spoiling this thread, what I really like about are the self nurturing aspects that people are talking about. I think that's definitely one area that women need to focus - being good to ourselves. Because whilst we're supposed to self improve, we're not supposed to be kind to ourselves and love ourselves the way we are right now.

I'm in. I find the being kind to myself part very difficult.

Didn't perfume start out as a cover-up-the-stink remedy for both sexes back in the day when nobody bathed regularly?

And thunderbolt, I don't think you're being relentlessly negative. You're focusing on what's underneath the unthinking beauty rituals a lot of women follow.

Comrade, don't worry about it, I wasn't taking anything personally! Just wanted to stress this came from me, not him. Dustbummies and clutter just make me aarghh
Interesting the concerns that have come up on this thread. I very much read it as wellbeing and that the people who wanted to lose weight etc were doing it to make themselves feel better, ie healthier and more able to do anything they want to do, even if that's as simple as running up stairs without getting out of breath.
Personally, I think being any weight / size is fine, so long as you have a basic level of fitness so that your weight / size doesn't limit you from doing whatever you want to do. Some "fat" people can be very fit at the same time and correspondingly some people can be so thin that they don't have high enough energy levels to be able to undertake any kind of significant physical activity.
Disclaimer - I am not talking about people who have illnesses etc which limit their energy levels.

Dust bunnies

dust bunnies sound cute

i want to lose weight because the area around my belly button is getting really sore where all my clothes dig in. it actually hurts, and when i'm at home i walk round with my trousers undone. i don't actually own a single pair of trousers that are comfortable excpet one pair of trackies. i'm also in the obese range for my bmi. and i'm out of breath walking up the stairs. i've also just moved to fitness and outdoors central.

it's feck all to do cultural expectations (except the pseudo-scientific one that says i'm about to have a cardiac arrest) or men. it's bloody uncomfortable and i'm too skint to keep buying new clothes just because i love food. i want to be able to eat, and zip my trousers. and they ain't skinny jeans, i can assure you. today i am sporting a sexy pair of black trackies, walking socks and a roll neck. i am the very antithesis of cultural expectation. that said, i do intend to drag out 'fat is a feminist issue' and re-read it.

tal, were you on the 'resisting compulsory femininity' thread? as a result of that one, i chopped off all my hair. it was waaaay down past my shoulders and a reet pita. it's now pretty much a crew cut. that and the hairy legs are all good. but the fat hurts and i want rid of it. i don't see it as any real part of the essential me - it's just weighing me down. i want to learn how to x-country ski this season, and at the mo it would just about kill me.

and i think i'd want shot of it if i was a man, too. no real reason for flab except depression and lack of motivation (i must dig out that carers thread again)

my town is currently dealing with being over-run by bunnies (and my house with dust bunnies, natch). it's very contentious - pictures of weeping children with 'save the bunnies' placards on the front page, and wildlife experts saying 'they are ruingin the eco-system and will attract predators' inside. there are folk dricing round with stuffed (toy) bunnies on their radiator grilles.

driving. apparently i need to learn to type to improve my wellbeing, too.

I would argue that it is partly cultural expectations though madwoman.

In some cultures, women are fattened up before their marriage and being massively fat is the sign of a "good" woman. To have your thighs chafing together, is considered drop dead beautiful. However uncomfortable it may be to walk like that, the women are proud of it and consider it a status symbol. Whereas our culture recoils with horror at the idea and finds the discomfort unbearable. Other discomforts though, we accept.

Save the dust bunnies!

The real ones make a tasty, organic meal if you can catch them.

When I cant be bothered to exercise I usually cant be bothered to cook substantial meals either. I am lucky.

I really don't think you can argue that wanting to lose weight is somehow feminist or a good thing to talk about uncritically on a feminist board, as if there was something feminist in women watching their weight or restricting their food intake.

It might be for health reasons or comfort but the fact is that there is a massive weight loss industry designed to make women feel bad for eating, and bad for taking up too much space plus all the media and social messages we receive day in day out. They need to be resisted.

BMI is pretty arbitrary too. Fitness and activity is far more important to health than weight except in very extreme circumstances.

Yes, be fit but don't feel you have to conform to anyone's stereotype. There are plenty of studies to help the fat - one found women about a stone over weight were the healthiest for example. It's all out there if you want it although I think most of us know at what weight we feel best.

I don't agree that women look worse than men and have to do more than men. I think aesthetically women look better than men do even totally untouched in their natural state.