Unpacking My New Relationship to My Body as it Gets Smaller

April 15, 2018 Alex Williams

When people ask me what I've been up to since I graduated, my first response is always "living". College was a rough time for me (like almost everyone I know), and the months since have allowed me to take steps to become the person I want to be. My mental health has improved, my skin has cleared up, and most obviously, I've lost a lot of weight.

Being fat my whole life means that I grew up hyperaware of my body in a way that smaller people didn't. As I got older, it became increasingly obvious that the world had disdain towards me for being fat. Fatphobia is more than just fat-shaming, and has real consequences in the lives of fat people. I remember when I had my first panic attack after my grandmother died when I was 16. My doctor acknowledged that I might have an anxiety disorder but didn't want to consider medication because "most of those medications make you gain weight and that's the last thing a 16 year old girl would want". Maybe I wanted better control over my health, but sure, let's keep me from getting fatter. At 18, I was told that I would probably be infertile because of my PCOS and having excess weight would make it even harder to conceive.

I've noticed my body changing over the months, but it's a side effect of having the time and money to go grocery shopping as well as having a partner who pays for my gym membership and a job that affords me the time to go 4-5 days a week. I can say from experience it's not just as simple as "buy and cook healthy food". There's classism inherent in our societal conversations around fatness but no one really wants to hear that. I was in college and pretty well off for 4 years, and I still didn't have time to buy food, cook, and eat anything other than garbage most of the time because of everything I had to do in a day.

The conversation around weight loss is still one I'm not sure how to step into, or one I should step into at all. Even at my biggest, I was still considered a smaller fat. I've always occupied a relative amount of privilege. Now, depending on who you ask, I'm not even fat anymore. I'm technically average, which is mind boggling as a person who wore a size 16 in middle school.

In this body, trying to speak about fat positivity and body acceptance seems disingenuous at best, privileged and space occupying at worst. Knowing that this is the case doesn't make it any easier to cope with, but I've genuinely lost a community and that's heartbreaking for anyone to deal with.

People who wouldn't believe me about the way I experienced the world in a bigger body would be more inclined to listen to me in my smaller one, but those aren't my experiences anymore so it seems weird to talk about at all. I would've preferred to live my life and not have anyone acknowledge that i look different, because most of the time I feel like I look the same as I did a year ago. The physical adjustments were relatively easy to handle, but nothing can really prepare you for the mental aspects of becoming a new person.

The way I move in the world now is different from anything I've ever experienced before and I'm not sure how to feel about it or where I can even process my feelings, but it's a very unique space that I occupy. Trying to explain that I feel just as visible but only because I'm perceived as more attractive and less of a social burden makes me sound like I'm seeking validation. Fat people don't care because they don't have to, and thin people don't deal with the social impacts of living in a fat body so it's irrelevant to them.

Walking around in a more privileged body carrying the knowledge of what it was like to have less privilege just a short time ago feels like being really good at random trivia but never having any opportunities to show what you know because your knowledge is so specific. I don't resent anyone for not caring about my "skinny tears". I just hope that I'm able to find a space where I'm able to use my privilege and experiences to advocate and amplify the voices of others who aren't given the same opportunity.

"My White Boyfriend" YouTube Videos and Self-Fetishization in Interracial Relationships

April 2, 2018 Alex Williams

Talking about relationships has always been weird for me. I’m very private about my personal life--as much as someone who talks about their relationship and sex life on the internet can be. When my high school boyfriend and I broke up, because we were so public with our relationship, our breakup played out for the world to see and it was not pretty.

I’m more mature now and my current boyfriend is an incredibly private person so we both feel comfortable keeping our relationship business to ourselves. It doesn’t bother me when a couple likes to share details about their relationship, it just doesn’t appeal to me. Interestingly enough, I’ve had people tell me they thought my boyfriend wasn’t real until they met him because I don’t talk about him much on social media and almost no pictures of us together exist publicly. For context, two of the five pictures of us on my instagram have been posted in the last year, and we’ve been together for five years.

That being said, I love love and seeing happy couples warms my heart. I’m a huge fan of “relationship youtube”, the genre of videos about couples sharing their experiences, advice, or participating in different viral challenges. However, the videos of interracial couples (WoC/white men specifically) almost always make me very uncomfortable.

It sounds hypocritical to say that as a Black woman in a relationship with a white man, but the way those kinds of videos are marketed and find popularity in certain corners of the internet reveals something about the way that marginalized people in relationships with more social power than them can feel compelled to justify their existence. Most of the time, these videos are used to demonstrate how normal this relationship is, that ultimately love is love and skin color shouldn’t matter when you care about someone. That perspective doesn’t personally resonate with me, but I understand the logic.

At the same time, it comes off as if these couples are trying to demonstrate how unique and special their love is because it's different, which creates a contradiction that is off-putting to me. More than anything though, I find it annoying that were I not in an interracial relationship myself, I'd probably come across as a hater or a bitter bitch for critiquing how people express their love (I still might come off like that anyway).

I think my discomfort is rooted in how in a lot of these videos, the women (mostly Black) seem obsessed with pointing out that their partner is white, almost as if they’re seeking validation from others? That’s an assumption of course, and probably isn’t the real intention of the videos, but that’s how it looks to me.

It seems counterintuitive to constantly point out how irrelevant race should be in a relationship and in the same breath exclusively make content that points out the differences between you and your partner. Filming yourself holding a sign that says “my partner is white and that’s special so you should pay attention to us” would have the same effect as far as I’m concerned. I’ve heard people in these videos claim they’re just trying to spread understanding of the challenges that interracial couples face, which I can understand if you believe there's a market for that kind of thing (I don't) but I don’t agree that parading yourself as some sort of exotic "other" is the way to do that.

There's so much to unpack about why people choose to invest in romantic relationships with people of other races. Be it a way to seek acceptance from the majority, preconceived notions about that race because of stereotypes (see: Fetishization 101), or whatever, the rationale unfortunately does not negate the social reality of that relationship. These relationships can't be seen as just love because we don't live in a world that sees people as just people, for better or worse. Navigating the world every day is a political statement for some of us, and our relationships reflect that. My relationship is not "just love" when people tell me that "mixed babies are the cutest ones" or ask me how my boyfriend feels about my natural hair.

This is an unpopular opinion, but I think its irresponsible to create content from a "we're all human" mindset when it's almost guaranteed that it won't be seen that way. To you, it's a cute video about sharing some aspect of yourself or your culture with your partner. To some of us, it looks like we're supposed to be entertained that your boo is looking at you like a sideshow act.

But I get it, I really do. For many people in interracial relationships, owning that and claiming it for others to see is a big deal, which I respect even if I don’t feel the same way. The landmark Loving v. Virginia case was only 50 years ago, and I’m not so naive to believe that there aren’t people today who oppose interracial couples solely because they believe that races shouldn’t mix. I know they exist, so I understand feeling like you have to defend your relationship.

On the other end of the spectrum, I've had to defend myself and my relationship because I've been accused of self-hate. That in and of itself creates so much insecurity, I used to obsess over proving to people how "woke" my boyfriend was, how much he "gets it". I don't do that anymore because i learned that people who are going to have an issue with your relationship, regardless of their reason, are probably going to do it anyway no matter what you do.

Even in those moments where my commitment to Blackness was challenged, my response has never been to show off how my partner loves me even though he’s never seen my real hair before or eaten some food from my culture. At that point, all I would be doing is reducing myself to the things I think people want to see from me because I’m Black in an attempt to normalize that. I'd be fetishizing myself for who's benefit?

I don’t take this position because I want us to adopt a race-neutral perspective when talking about relationships. In fact, I think that the healthiest relationships are those where all parties are able to acknowledge their privileges and empathize with the other’s marginalizations (if they’re not the same). To me, being in an interracial relationship should go beyond acceptance or tolerance. There is an extra layer of complexity when it comes to navigating our race-conscious world with a partner who's different from you. But if love is just love, we should be able to talk about our relationships without trying to justify their existence or prove a point to others.

Race, Representation, and Desire: Black Panther and Fetishization 101

March 12, 2018 Alex Williams

This post was originally published via the Sex-Positve Blog, run by the Houston-based adult retailer Mystiq. Check them out on Medium and Twitter @MystiqStores!

Marvel’s Black Panther changed my life, and in only the best kind of ways. From the cinematography to the costume design, the writing, the social themes addressed by the movie, I am thoroughly impressed with Ryan Coogler’s storytelling. It was incredibly refreshing to see people like me on screen saving the world while still having human flaws. It’s something that we don’t see often enough, especially on the scale of Marvel/Disney.

I could go on and on unpacking every piece of the movie, but you can read those takes in another (thousand) article(s). Suffice it to say, I was thoroughly impressed with the story, and possibly more impressed with how ridiculously attractive all of the actors were. As problematic as his character was, Killmonger is my imaginary boyfriend, and no one can take that from me. More than that, the movie wasn’t all about the characters running around being hot. There were moments of sexual tension for sure, but that’s not all there was to the story or the characters’ motivations.

As a Black woman who exists at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, seeing sexuality as a normal part of the character’s lives instead of either their primary or sole motivation, or conspicuously missing entirely…shocking, because of how infrequently it happens. I attribute it, in part, to the dearth of popular media in which Black people are allowed to tell their own stories authentically without having something to prove to the mainstream (read: white) gaze. Historically, Black actors are mostly cast in roles designed to either completely desexualize or oversexualize them, perpetuating stereotypes about gendered and racialized sexuality.

It’s important to acknowledge that anyone can have (and share) feelings about who they find attractive, but when those people are part of a historically marginalized community, it’s important to tread lightly and analyze where some of those feelings come from. For example, Winston Duke (M’Baku) is attractive as all get out. However, for someone who isn’t Black, finding him attractive doesn’t mean it’s okay to refer to all large Black men as M’Baku or make references to wanting to be taken to his cave in the mountains. The previous references are paraphrases of tweets I have seen since the movie came out, which got me thinking.

It’s hard to explain how uncomfortable it makes me feel to see things like that. It’s something that has to be lived to be understood. I’ve always had to reckon with either not being seen as attractive at all because I’m a Black woman, or only being seen as attractive because of racist sexual stereotypes and prejudices. Even in the sex-positive community, I see racist sexual stereotypes proliferate under the guise of “sexual freedom.” Freedom for whom, exactly? While Black Panther can open the door to important conversations about who society considers desirable, the fetishization of Black people is a media-driven continuation of racialized violence that has existed since slavery.

Think of the Black servant archetype such as Viola Davis’ and Octavia Spencer’s Abileen and Minny in The Help or Morgan Freeman’s Hoke Colburn in Driving Miss Daisy, not meant to be seen as a sexual beings at all, despite normally being parental figures. On the other hand, there are Black characters whose ravenous sexual appetite drive most of their actions. For women, these are characters such as Halle Berry’s Leticia in Monster’s Ball or Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope in Scandal.

For men, there are fewer examples in modern media because the Black Buck stereotype tends to be overtly violent more than sexual when present at all. Think of the generic criminal in any major crime drama. The violent Black man will show up sooner or later. Honestly, take a trip down the “interracial” category of any porn site and the sexual aspect of the Black Buck stereotype makes itself apparent, especially when paired with the “pure” white woman.

I’m speaking specifically to Black fetishization since that’s where I have the most experience (personally and academically), but members of all nonwhite cultures have to reckon with racialized sexual stereotypes. The Spicy Latina and the Demure Asian Woman, for example.

I should clarify — it’s not inherently racist or fetishistic to be attracted to people of other races, but when your attraction (or lack thereof) is rooted in stereotypes about sexual prowess, they should be reevaluated. There has to be a middle ground between completely rejecting people of a certain race based on stereotypes and exclusively being attracted to them for those same reasons. We don’t live in a vacuum. Even the most socially aware of us are still influenced by the society in which we were raised and inside of which, we learned to view the world. Having these kinds of perspectives is not a sign of a character flaw, but unpacking them indicates an openness to be honest with ourselves as we work towards a more sex-positive future.