My offering for you this week: Though I'm not taking on new clients yet for larger projects, I'm opening up my calendar for up to ten 60-minute consultations. This is right for you if you need a quick opinion, want education on a specific fat-related topic or would like to discuss how to make a particular aspect of your work or business more fat-friendly.
The cost is $90 USD and you can respond to this email to get on my calendar.
Hi friend,
It's a good week to cover a few shorter topics.
Thought work and emotional labor: Reader P. replied to last week's Body Liberation Guide and noted that they thought "thought work" was a much better term than "emotional labor." I want to clarify that I don't think these two terms actually describe the same thing.
To me, thought work describes the inner work of either studying and learning and growing, or developing new systems and frameworks. It's intellectual work. Emotional labor is the heart and soul and care work that we do, primarily for others.
The two types of labor overlap, of course, but they are fundamentally their own territories.
Thought work is writing an Instagram post about the privilege, while emotional labor is responding to an empathizing with comments on that post. Thought work is going to the office to write code, while emotional labor is keeping up with how much laundry detergent is left and whether Aunt June got a birthday card. Both types are equally valid...and equally work.
DentalSlim: Of great interest this week has been the promotion of a magnetic device designed to clamp the jaw shut. To be more specific, it's a device designed specifically to clamp fat people's jaws shut so that they are unable to eat solid foods, to force them to lose weight quickly before surgery. And yes, the device is a continuation of the old barbaric practice of wiring a person's jaw shut to force weight loss.
(And yes, just like every other method of intentional weight loss, the weight comes back when you stop wiring your jaw shut, because that's how human bodies work to protect us.)
I generally don't comment on current events because I don't want to get drawn into an endless cycle of doing both thought work and emotional labor on one horrific bigoted thing and event after another.
I will say, though, that beyond the hatred behind devices like these, they're not remotely evidence-based. Not only do we not have solid peer-reviewed evidence that forcing fat people to lose weight before a surgery results in better outcomes, we know that malnourishment in people of every size produces poorer outcomes after surgery.
There is no need for fat people to lose weight before surgery, period.
Any higher risk of complications that fat people experience in surgery is caused by surgeons and in anesthesiologists who have not trained on how to correctly and respectfully care for fat bodies. Weight bias is far more deadly than living in a higher-weight body.
Make no mistake, this type of device will be used to further weight stigma in healthcare by withholding needed surgeries from even greater numbers of fat people until those fat people take drastic and dangerous measures to change their bodies first.
(Except for weight loss surgeries, of course, which mysteriously seem to be magically free of the dire risks posed by performing surgery on a fat person.)
More fat people will die because of devices like this, because surgeries are withheld from them and because devices that clamp jaws shut are deadly in themselves.
If you want more commentary on this device, you can find it here,here, here, here and here.
The discussion around this also produced an excellent example of what we talk about when we talk about centering thinness. This entire post and most of the comments managed to all be horrified about the device without once mentioning the specific marginalized population the device was meant to further oppress.
State of the sleep: My sleep is gradually improving thanks to a lot of experimentation with and dedication to my new CPAP device, which I named Whistler.
I'm now about 80% recovered from the brain fog, extreme fatigue and cognitive impairment caused by last year's sudden onset sleep apnea. On most days I now feel reasonably functional, though I still have bad days here and there.
I've restarted work with my existing clients and will be opening my calendar soon for photography and consulting clients. I'll let you know as soon as that happens.
Beach photos: Right before the record-breaking heat wave that swept the Pacific Northwest, we got out of town for a few days for our first overnight stay out of the house since February 2020.
The Oregon coast was chilly and the water was downright arctic, but we took some great photos of me for an upcoming stock photo collection, that are also a good illustration of what a “B belly” looks like. See a sneak peek and more on B and D bellies here.
Image description: Lindley, a fat white woman in a two-piece bathing suit and sunglasses, walks across a beach and runs through shallow water. This image will be available as a stock photo soon.
Image description: Lindley, a fat white woman, is shown shoulders up in a heart-patterned dress. She has blonde hair and glasses, and is smiling.
Hi! I'm Lindley.
I'm a photographer and activist (she/her, pronounced LIN-lee) who celebrates the unique beauty of bodies that fall outside conventional "beauty" standards. I live outside Seattle, WA. People come to me for:
Body-safe portrait, boudoir and small business photography sessions
Diverse, body-positive stock photos & fine art prints
Health at Every Size (HAES)-aligned editorial services and consulting
The Body Love Shop, a curated resource for body-positive and fat-positive art and products
