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.

I like the re-written poem!

I find it really sexist in its original and we had to do it at school - I agree it is much better for us.

I also love the sounds of your steak and stout casserole. Come the revolution we shall all have farmhouse tables and casserole and fresh baked bread. Even the vegetarians among us...

The flirtation sounds good too. [win]

I am just enjoying in the after-effects of RTN, which was great and exciting and full of people ... though my shoulders really ache from holding the sign in the wind and I am therefore being lazy on the sofa. It's good.

Btw, the other day DH made pizza dough and pizza, and I made challah bread, and we were sufficiently impressed with our own domesticity we took pictures and sent them to my mum to prove how capable we are (she's just given us a mixer to us). It is really satisfying in moderation, isn't it?

in moderation yes it is! you wouldn't want to disappear into it though

yay for rtn - who was there - who did you meet - was it fun? sorry probably the wrong questions but whilst the feminista thing was great the highlight was meeting lots of lovely feMNists face to face for me.

Yes, exactly, wouldn't want to disappear into it! Thank god for ready meals and husbands who like cooking more than me, and so on. I suspect it's easier for us, too, because not having children there is only us to think about feeding so if we don't feel like cooking until 10pm we don't have to.

I think it's like crafts though - people say how can you be a liberated, 21st century woman and want to be making quilts or whatever, and the answer is I do want to do it, it's been associated with women and domesticity for a long time but that doesn't mean it's not creative or not worth anything.

RTN was great as a crowd experience - it was so big! And it felt very good to be walking through so many iconic bits of London, looking up at all the famous buildings from the middle of the street, etc. There were some people yelling/taking pictures/being wankers but also a lot of people smiling and waving. Especially there were a set off buses in a queue and all the drivers gave me a big smile and a wave as we went past.

OTOH it was a bit bad because Riven had her wheelchair and the police kept telling her to get off the road when we were waiting to start. And there was no dropped kerb or ramp, so obviously she couldn't, and instead of standing by her they just kept wandering off and a new one would come along and ask her to move. Not great. I lost sight of her later but it was lovely to meet her.

It was really nice meeting people, especially people I've not met before, but it wasn't really a place for chatting because of the noise and so on. There were amazing speakers afterwards though - one woman works on women's rights in Afghanistan and was on her way to a human rights meeting in Germany about it all, and she was very eloquent and very inspiring. I can't find her name online, annoyingly, and didn't catch it well enough to write down. But she was great. Then afterwards we skeddadled before the dancing got going because we were knackered!

I agree with you how good it is to meet people - I do feel a sense of community here that surprises me sometimes, but is very good. The RTN crowd, a lot of it, was quite young and made me think 'oh, wow, I wish I could get my students into this, this would make them realize feminism could be cool'. But it would also have been nice to be somewhere quiet with more seats to talk a bit!

SAF i love that poem even though its so male focussed. during the hardest time in my life, i read it every morning, to remind me to keep on keeping on.

i had phases where i focussed on different bits & read it differently:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

LRD i was thinking you mentioned people who are never asked what they think. my first respose was to realised i spent my whole life telling people what i think (whether they want to hear it or... oh but of course they do)

second reponse was to think well asking more questions of other people. particularly those who dont get asked, because i think many people who are ignored probably have good answers.

i noticed you mentioned community: i want to do something more community related. not sure what yet. hopefully moving house soon so it is a bit difficult to put down new roots here but i am looking for the right opprtunity.

aside from the rights and wrongs of the govts changes, i think there is going to be a great need for community support, but definitly nothing asscociated with Cameron's Big Society self promotion.

Poetry and community - two important things relating to wellbeing.

Oh, I like that! I may try to steal that.

Until recently, I'd been either moving a lot or in student accommodation (which is different as a community), and one of the things I have enjoyed about being in the same place for a while (this will be our third Christmas in the same flat) is getting to know people to say morning to on the street, and so on. It is very cheering in a very mundane, simple way.

Besides which my neighbour has a baby kitten and she is so so cute and comes to 'visit' me and DH occasionally ... does that count as 'community' relations?

As well, the point about community made me think of some other ideas I've been trying to think out. Bear with me because I may not get this right first time.

There's a point a very wise MNer made at RTN yesterday, which I think is very important in the context of wellbeing. I will try to paraphrase. We were running down Simon Baron-Cohen ('extreme male brain = genius' ... grr!), as you do, and she pointed out that patriarchial society has always tried to insist that people, and personal abilities, are fixed. So they say women 'have' to be a certain way, it's just the way biology makes them ... or it's just the way evolutionary psychology insists we are, or whatever. But actually people have a huge individual capacity for change and that gets in the way of the big, clever, generalizing theories.

As it happened the personality aspect/ability that we were discussing was social skills and empathy. And she was saying that it really suits the patriarchy to say that ability in these areas are fixed, but they're not at all - you can learn empathy as an adult.

I ended up thinking about a separate-but-related issue this morning. Society tells us that women should be empathetic, 'emotionally intelligent', because it's our 'nature'. Or if it's not our nature we're deficient and should feel guilty and correct ourselves immediately! Obviously there are lots of downsides to the idea that women should be the empathetic, emotionally intelligent ones. It's very tiring. I hate the idea that it's the woman in a family/relationship who gets lumbered with the responsibility for the 'emotional work' and for keeping links from the small family unit to the wider family or to the community. And I think a huge part of the negative pressure we feel when we're told these things are our responsibility, is because of that same idea that human nature is fixed, and these things should be coming to us 'naturally'.

On balance I think it is incredibly freeing and positive to realize that personality and ability is not fixed, that we can learn and change. I know it was really reassuring to have people on here saying that if you've grown up with a parenting model that is deficient, it doesn't (contrary to popular opinion) mean you'll automatically be a bad parent yourself. You can learn. And I found it great to learn that, as an adult you can learn the social/emotional skills you didn't pick up as a child, and you keep getting better at these things.

I feel as if this kind of learning is very different from the unreflecting, mandatory, 'corrective' learning that society expects women to undertake if they don't measure up to that ideal that 'women are better than men at social/emotional intelligence'. I can't quite work out why the two are different, but I think though one is a negative thing, the other one is very positive, and important for fostering links between women and within communities.

I am slightly worried now this makes no sense but I'm going to post it anyway and if you don't think I'm making sense or don't agree I'll just keep turning it over in my head until I work out what I'm trying to get straight!

just a quickie, as i too am working:

"For many years, scientists assumed the human brain was fully formed by the age of three but that notion has been challenged by the discovery of brain "plasticity" throughout life."

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b017cfkq

Thanks for the link! I have heard a little about this but need to know more.

SAF going back a bit but yeah, I'm glad I clarified that the eyebrow face should've been a smiley one... tone does not come across well in type. And here I'll chuck in another one Sometimes I read over old threads and see my unsmiley contributions and think Snotty caaah, or see the smilies in and think You PA caah, SS. It's a bit of a balance all right...

Love that poem, it's funny Tilly but they are the two lines that resonate with me also.

Am feeling very well being-y at the mo, babies asleep, DH out, just me, you lot and some Jammy Dodgers

LRD, I know what you mean and that was a very interesting post. I've been called 'unfeeling' for not crying at Marley and Me and my DP has been called 'soppy' FOR crying at it. If it had been the other way around, I don't think a single thing would have been said. Either way, I wasted a few hours of my life watching that film that I wish I could have back. There was a point there, but I'm not sure I made it. My brain is a bit fuzzy today and I can legitimately blame the chemotherapy, so I shall.

Well-being wise - I'm still struggling with weight/body issues. My next chemo session isn't for another week and a half, so physically I'm feeling pretty good right now apart from the fact I've put on a stone since I was diagnosed in August and I'm not happy with myself. I've had comments from family members like my nan telling me not put 'too much weight on' as she'd read that a lot of people reward themselves with food during chemo as they feel they deserve it. She's right and that's exactly what I have been doing, but it stirs up all kinds of feelings about why I care in the first place - I have cancer, I should be concentrating on getting better, but I'm still receiving all these messages from various sources that I should focus on my appearance and that it's important to be thin and look good even though I'm ill and going through this treatment.

The whole 'cancer experience' has made me think a lot, actually. When I had my lumpectomy, I was questioned every single time when I stated I didn't care about the positioning of the scar or what it would look like. One nurse even went so far as to try and reassure me that I could have filler injections or other cosmetic treatments if I felt I needed them later on. Just before I went into theatre, I was asked if I wanted the surgeon to try and go in at the side of my breast, which would be harder to do as it was further away from the tumour. I said no, I wanted the surgeon to go in wherever was easiest for him to remove what he had to. The nurse who asked me was genuinely surprised that I didn't care about the scar.

At the time, I just took all the information in, but looking back, I find it interesting that as a woman in her twenties with breast cancer, it's automatically assumed by every health professional that my overriding concern is with my appearance (except my oncologist, and the registrar I tore strips out of last week - they both know better now ). This is mirrored by the support that's on offer too - lots of things like manicures, hairdressers and massage are easily accessible, but it's been much harder to get support of any real value. I'm not saying that massages and the like don't have their place, of course they do - it's nice to feel nice and reconnect with a body that is more used to feeling nauseous and ill and things like massages help with that.

I have rambled, I shall stop.

'Am feeling very well being-y at the mo, babies asleep, DH out, just me, you lot and some Jammy Dodgers' - I love it! I am soooo sentimental here, but my granny used to say there is just nothing like the feeling in a house when the baby is finally asleep .... used to drive my mum nuts as she always said it when my little brother was screaming his head off! But taken in isolation I imagine she was remembering her own babies and not actually trying to piss my mum off ...

BB - It's so good to hear how you're doing. You weren't rambling btw. It is crap, isn't it, the expectation you should really mostly care about fitting society's ideal of femininity. TBH I would have thought rewarding yourself with food was quite a good thing! It's something we usually associate with health, having a 'healthy appetite' ... I wonder if blokes get judgy comments too or if with them it's more 'oh yes, do have that'.

I love a good massage ... it's annoying they get pushed together with other things like beauty treatments that, to me anyway, have such a different focus. I think that's one of the reasons why it is just so hard to work out how to reject the beauty industry, because it cleverly presents itself as containing all this nice, body-positive stuff. But, in the feminist spa we shall no doubt have massages.

Right: this is a wellbeing-y question please ... what do you all do for chapped skin/lips? I don't want to beautify or cover it up with makeup, I just want something to soothe the skin and I've looked at the lip balm I had, and it has artificial wax in, which apparently makes your skin drier afterwards so you keep needing more. I'm a bit conscious of all this as I've been reading that if you were lipstick, you consume about 4 kilos of it in your lifetime! Which seems a bit disgusting TBH.

don't stop bubble! god, you'd think having cancer would get you off the hook wouldn't you? people still watching your weight and stuff is unbelievable isn't it? what the hell do you have to do or have in order to be allowed to not watch your weight for a while?? [confusion]

interesting stuff to read. do you want the surgeon to make a really important surgery more complicated and likely to go wrong by going in at the side of your breast in case your breast isn't pretty anymore? err no! i'd like him to do it the best medical way possible and get the fucking tumour out please! crazy. Crazy. world we live in.

lrd - yes. if you naturalise things or you treat people as if they are fixed and the 'system' as if there is no agency, it's just a given then you basically block change and growth which essentially is quite convenient for those trying to keep the game rigged in their favour no matter the cost for women/the environment/the long term economy/the train service/whatever, whatever, whatever.

in terms of the empathy/emotional intelligence thing it totally lets men off the hook doesn't it (as well as putting women firmly on the hook) and it ties our hands in terms of properly dealing with things like male violence, rape, etc because men can't be called upon to be better, we pretend it's a given, the way they are etc and therefore having no agency over it they have no responsibility over it - again convenient. not sure that made any sense sorry - foggy headed

lip balm is an utter con and perpetuates sore lips for sure imo.

moisturise your lips with the same stuff you moisturise your face for one thing. don't lick your lips or pick at them. i have resorted to vaseline before but it's not ideal. i just keep moisturising them and give them a chance to recover. and weirdly a dryish lipstick seems to make them recover rather than a glossy type if i wear it. not something i wear often though - more a lick of mascara and dab of concealer round the eyes person if i do wear make up

Saf that did make sense ... you are totally right, it's part of the 'poor men, they just can't help it' thing. And as BB says, men get judged as 'soppy' for reactions that are perfectly normal.

I've found ordinary moisturiser is worse, but that may be beause I haven't found a good one yet (lots seem to be perfumed/coloured and I think I might be reacting to those). E45 cream used to work a treat but they changed the formula.

I'm glad you say lip balm is a con because I was coming to that conclusion and wanting some support it really was!

Are you doing the oil cleansing thing? I didn't get round to it but I know some people on this thread mentioned it and I suppose logically that should be good for ouchy skin.

Sorry, very trivial conversation, especially after BB's posts, I hope it's ok.

Trivial conversations make the world go around. Posting and running - the BEST thing I've ever used on my lips is lansinoh, or however you spell it. I still have a tube left over from breastfeeding, I keep meaning to dig it out and squirt it into an empty little pot. It's just pure lanolin.

That is very gracious of you to say. And I will google the lansinoh thing, thanks very much! I take it it's the stuff you put on cracked nipples, and if so, then my mate did mention it's the business for dry skin, I just hadn't thought!

Incidentally, I am sitting working with some very beautiful old carols sung by female voices on that a mate compiled for me, and it is lovely.

no i quite like that we can go from chemo to the patriarchy to lip balm all in one post

i guess natural oil is a good thing - not chemical stuff - like plant oils as they are supposedly close to the skins own oils. do you have sweet almond oil in the house? that's very good for sensitive, upset skin i think. could try putting some of that on.

and yes a nipple/nappy rash natural cream might be good - i have cammilosan here that i may try on my lips actually! good stuff.

just a quickie i as am supposed to be working: this product is really good:

www.greenpeople.co.uk/product/131/c013/no-scent-soft-lips-spf8-10ml.html

it contains plant waxes. i am obsessed with organic/fairtrade stuff generally.

will pick up Sasha Baron Cohen & the other important stuff later.

I don't have almond oil but I like the sound of it (I've baked with it before and it smells good!).

i use it as the carrier oil for the oil cleansing as i have quite sensitive and dry skin. even oil cleansing is proving too harsh and drying my face out but i'm still persevering in the hopes that as someone said it takes a few weeks to settle then works great.

if you don't mind spending money i like REN products as they're all about plant oils and nothing chemical and keeping it as 'digestible' for the skin as possible. i have a friend who works for them so was always kept well stocked on fantastic products that should have cost a fortune but i was getting free think they're very pricey.

Thanks Tilly, too.

I need to dig out what I was reading in Beauty and Misogyny about how some liberal feminists would say it's ok to use beauty products if you don't buy into capitalism, ie., if you make them at home (or I imagine fairtrade them, perhaps). And Jeffries makes a good argument in B&M about why that is, to her, only a rather unsatisfactory halfway house. I do agree I think, in theory, but I also feel stuff like this shouldn't be a 'beauty' issue anyway, it should be a comfort one.

SAF - I have no theoretical problem with spending money but atm we have 200 pounds left on the overdraft to get us to January (and I've not done Christmas presents yet), so I think I will pick up your suggestion in the new year!

Just a quick post as I'm in a hotel in shanghai with sleep refusing dd and jet lagged and snoring DH.

Lrd the only, only lip balm that IMO really works and doesn't do the drying out thing is suvana. You can get it here it's the yellow tube At the bottom of the page. It's so organic that it's edible- at least that's the claim in Aus. I use it any odd dry patches too. I suppose it's like organic vasaleen.

Or just use a non runny honey and put a thin layer on your lips before bed.