On Friday morning, Sarah and I met each other (for the first time ever! Squee!) and headed over to Navy Pier to attend BlogHer 2007. We were both very excited to go to the Our Bodies, Our Blogs panel, featuring Laurie Toby Edison, Wendy McClure and Yvonne Marie, moderated by Jenny Lauck.

Laurie Toby Edison is a crazily-talented photographer and activist. I had noticed her walking around during lunch, looking for a place to sit down and almost asked her to join us, since Sarah, Wendy and I had an empty table all to ourselves, and I am kicking myself that I didn't, because I could pretty much listen to her talk all day long. She came of age in the Sixties, so she is filled with some of the political fervor that is so rare in pessimistic Generation X, which grew up under the shadow of an impending mushroom cloud. She reminds me of the hippies who used to sit around our kitchen table when I was growing up, planning rallies and discussing Greenpeace fundraising efforts and planning what would eventually become the local food bank that today feeds a thousand people every day. I loved Laurie's contention that Fat vs. Thin has become the new class system, because that's all there is left and her discourse on the circle of blame. Laurie says that she concentrates on making the invisible visible, mentioned that men have eating disorders too but the interesting aspect is that men aren't really talking about it, are they? They are just freaking out in silence, or starving themselves to get that V down by their groin that only occurs around 2 percentage body fat.

Wendy McClure talked about how she hates assumptions and how it was weird and random that Dove needed to sell the idea of loving our bodies to us. She also noted that she personally only tends to talk about the successes in her weight loss efforts, the time she goes to the gym, the healthy recipes she makes, and when she's not going to the gym, she just doesn't mention it.

Yvonne Marie got emotional talking about how there were no pictures of women with stretch marks on Flickr and has learned to stop calling herself "lard ass." Shauna pointed out that "lard" is not a positive word, is it? In fact, I was struck by some of the positive self body talk from people who still jokingly call themselves "lard ass." And at risk of sounding all "some of my best friends are lard asses," I tend to talk about my fat ass, but for me, the lack of emotional affect there is empowering. I have an ass. It is fat. It is not, however, lard. One could argue semantics, at some point, which brings me to the whole Vagina Monologues contention that one woman's "cunt" is another woman's unspeakable horror. However, I would like to declare Elastic Waist to be a Lard-Ass-Free Zone. Thank you.

I sat right behind Tanya as she liveblogged the panel, and she wonders why the panel wasn't focused "more on healthy eating and non-fat things" (I'm not sure if she means "non-fat things" as in, foods that contain no fat, or if she means issues about something other than fat, or anti-fat issues, perhaps. It remains a mystery.) However, I find it an interesting phenomenon that when we talk about our bodies, which could be a million different things--from the size of our breasts to our height to the fact that we are shaped like a column rather than an hourglass to the fact that we have way too many moles or scars to feel comfortable in a bathing suit--it turns into a discussion of fat and self-esteem. In fact, Wendy took some heat on the BlogHer forums for the fact that she had been on Weight Watchers at one time so someone (who wasn't even at BlogHer, nor planning to attend) decided that Wendy wasn't an appropriate panelist for a panel that was supposed to be about body acceptance. Which brings up some of my contention about the duality of size acceptance while also trying to lose weight. Regardless of the fact that Wendy is no longer enrolled in Weight Watchers and hasn't been for a very long time, does her involvement in active weight loss preclude her from being a valued member of that panel? Is this related to some of the confusion that Elastic Waist gets about valuing size acceptance while also honoring a person's choice to either lose weight or just pursue a healthy lifestyle without weight loss as the end goal? Why does it have to be us versus them? Why the in-fighting? Aren't we all in this together? 

What is interesting here is that everyone has certain ideas about what this panel was supposed to have been about, and indeed, some of the questions seemed to be more about the audience member's take on body issues and disconnect with something someone else had just said rather than actual picking of the panelist's brains for their informed take on the issues. The audience added some great discourse too; for instance, Corinna feels that "our country has an eating disorder" and spoke of how she stands naked in front of a mirror and forces herself to say three positive things about herself every day and I squealed like a fan girl when Kate Harding and Cristin Dillion both stood up and added comments to the fray. But then, some of the audience comments seemed to be a little like an AA meeting. Like when one person revealed that she dislikes fat people, but when she met an online friend for the first time she didn't see the fat first but rather only saw her friend, I wrote in my notebook, "Do you want a fucking medal?"  I'm probably part of the circle of blame.

When our time was up, I was struck by how sad that this obviously important topic was not given more time and attention on the schedule. For instance, the audience kept hitting on so many issues and questions that the topic might really have been split into several panels, one on weight-loss blogging, one on size acceptance, one on issues of feminism and how the patriarchy dictates its standards of acceptable beauty to us. And maybe another one for the group therapy session that apparently everyone sort of needed, between the "lard ass" comments and the "I love myself anyway" comments that seemed to be at odds with each other. But then, I'm sure that the craft bloggers aren't likewise wondering why there couldn't have been sessions showing how to make marble magnets or something.

Sarah and I left the session having so many more questions and no answers, so instead worked out our confusion through a series of interpretive dances to the jazz blaring through the beer garden. We then dropped ourselves outside of the daiquiri hut on the pier and continued to discuss important issues and use our potty-mouths and got a little tipsy with Wendy, Kate and Laurie. I call that time the Snobby Bitch Panel but Laurie gave it the much better title of "Pina Coladas: The Impact of the Lake Effect Breeze on Fat Bloggers." Quite frankly, it was awesome and exactly the reason you go to such conferences in the first place, because e-mail discourse is wonderful but never really satisfies in just the same way. (I hope the craft bloggers had the same idea.) Kate's got some great pictures. (You can't tell, but Laurie looks exactly like Jennifer Aniston.)

Sadly, we had no sunblock and now I have some unfortunate color right on my décolletage, which I prefer to keep pristine and Victorian. Ah well. Scarlet women have a long history of bucking tradition, and my color was well-earned. --Weetabix