Thin Motives

I'm working on a grant examining lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning community members' perceptions of the local health department.  It is a very small study using qualitative methodology to situate people's understandings of the services provided.  The long term goal is to make the health department more welcoming for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.  To that end, I've been doing a lot of public health reading, both academic and practitioner focused.  On the whole, the literature points out there is a problem and offers commonsense solutions (ask about a person's gender rather than assuming, ask everyone in a medical practice about sexual behaviors without labeling them as necessarily hetero- or homo- sexual, etc.), or some more profoundly basic human rights, like everyone deserves to be treated decently and define for themselves what "family" means.  I agree with all of these things, although it's hard not to read public health literature as somewhat patronizing.  

For example, the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association's Guidelines for Care of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Patients notes,

"There is evidence that lesbians are more likely to be overweight than their heterosexual counterparts, possibly because of cultural norms within the lesbian community and because lesbians may relate differently to, not accept or not internalize mainstream notions of ideal beauty and thinness. While lesbians as a group tend to have better body image than heterosexual women—a positive health characteristic—they may consequently be less motivated to avoid being overweight."  

This somehow assumes that who one has sex with inoculates one to hegemonic ideals of beauty by ascribing this effect to mysterious lesbian culture.  In my experience, it is true that lesbians have a different relationship to their bodies, although not any less complicated, than heterosexual women.  Sometimes, it is difficult for me to judge, since I have a foot in each camp.  I spent my entire Master's work on how beauty ideals are structured by gender, ethnicity, physical ability, socio-economic status, and nationality.  In Belize, one of the most powerful lessons I learned relied on women answering the question "Who do you think is beautiful?" by saying, "I am."  These women primarily had male partners so lesbianism isn't the only variable in the equation for a positive body image.  Many of the women I know (both lesbian and not) in the United States have worked long and hard to accept themselves as beautiful despite their internalization of  hegemonic ideals of beauty.  Additionally, many of the women (and men) in the heterosexual kinky community tend to be larger than mainstream ideals.  Is sexual desirability and fulfillment not based on the constant fear of rejection antithetical to having a "normal" weight?  It sometimes seems to me as if people believe the only thing keeping us as a nation from devolving into slovenly slugs is intense sexual anxiety.  People who decide to check out of this rat race are castigated for not being concerned enough with their physical appearance under the guise of health.

In the same report, the GMLA states,

Gay men are more like to have body image problems and to experience eating disorders than heterosexual men. On the opposite end of the spectrum, overweight and obesity are problems that also affect a large segment of the gay community

I get that this is a toolkit meant to encourage healthcare providers to be sensitive to the needs of members of the LGBTQ community and not a treatise on the genesis of body image issues.  But there is no reason given for why gay men may have more eating disorders than their heterosexual counterparts.  The implication is again that people who are concerned with body image will be thinner, although walking the line between healthy and pathological.  It seems as if one can have a positive body image or thinness, but not both, and somehow sexual orientation makes one extra vulnerable or super resistant to vagaries of American ideals of beauty.

Unstated and unexamined is the claim that it is the male gaze that demands beauty in the form of thinness.  In most of the United States, beauty is performed for a specific audience, namely men.  Women who are not invested in male evaluation tend to be heavier.  Men performing beauty for other men run the risk of eating disorders.  Body image disorders are internalized patriarchy.  Constant self-monitoring for violations of beauty standards are a method of social control.  On a theoretical level, hegemony needs to be deconstructed to be thwarted.  Passing along glib answers as to why some people avoid the beauty trap and then linking that avoidance to pathology (obesity) perpetuates the existing structure, regardless of sexual orientation.