Post-recovery, I started to try and respond to the most recent comment in the intellectual dishonesty thread. I typed up a few paragraphs, and debated about a comparison to religion and abortion before thinking better of it, and just trashed my response.

But watching yesterday’s Oprah got me thinking about this in a different way. It occurs to me that some of the angst about weight loss may be represented by Pink’s “Stupid Girls.” In the song and video, Pink dings Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Jessica Simpson for playing dumb in order to succeed in our celebrity-crazed society.

But Pink isn’t arguing that girls need to go back to the days of Peyton Place (after all, look how well that worked). But instead, she’s arguing for something more powerful:

My point is not that sexy is a bad thing. My point is that sexy and smart are not oil and water and that you don’t have to dumb yourself down to be cute.

This resonated with me a lot re the issue of fat politics and weight loss. And I think it has to do with the issue of being a subject versus being an object.

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the issue of power, desire, and overeating, and mentioned I really liked this quote from Mark Epstein’s Open to Desire (emphasis mine):

Freud’s perennial question, “What does woman want?” was not phrased correctly … The question is not what do they want, but do they want, at all. Do they have their own desire? Or perhaps the question might be more correctly stated: Can women be their desire? The challenge for women … is to move from being just an object of desire to becoming a subject: she who desires.

This concept of subject and object came up on Oprah as well in the context of young girls emulating celebrities like Lohan and Simpson:

Dr. Robin: We have been socialized again by men to be objects … to stroke their egos. Their sense that they are big and we are small. The more we stroke that, the less we exist.

Oprah: So what people are saying as the definition of stupid is … any time you have to play yourself small.

Dr. Robin: Absolutely. You play yourself small because you are scared. You are scared that if I don’t play small, then I’m going to lose out. I won’t be invited to the party. Guys won’t want me.

Oprah: I won’t be accepted.

Dr. Robin also said she might not use the term “stupid” to refer to this phenomenon Pink sings about, but rather, she’d use the expression “lost.” The point is that in trying to gain someone else’s approval, you easily lose who you really are.

In that vein, I’d argue you can approach weight loss from the perspective of either a subject or an object. From the object perspective, weight loss is about the future. In the future, I’ll be thin and then I’ll be happy, because I’ll fit in. Men will like me. I’ll be accepted.

But there’s another perspective. For me, the point of being a subject is that it is a position of strength, i.e., you’re not doing harmful things in order to gain someone else’s approval. Instead, you’re “finding yourself” and learning how what you eat and how you move can improve the quality of your life.

It’s about being sexy and smart.