Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Lori Gottlieb is the author of _Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self_
(Simon & Schuster 2000; Penguin/Putnam paperback April 2001; Audio book
2001).

A national bestseller, _Stick Figure_ has received acclaim in numerous
publications and from the American Library Association, Book-of-the-Month-
Club and Quality Paperback Book Club. The film rights have been optioned by
Martin Scorsese, who describes the book as, "It's like Holden Caulfield goes
on a misguided diet." Gottlieb's work has appeared in The New York Times,
Time, Elle, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Seventeen, Slate (guest diarist), Salon,
The San Jose Mercury News Sunday Magazine, Daily Variety, and The Industry
Standard, among others. In another life, Gottlieb was a film and television
executive in Hollywood, and is currently a medical student at Stanford. For
more information, please visit http://www.lorigottlieb.com
 
Lori will be interviewed by Molly Wright Steenson, who has worked with the
Internet since 1994 as a writer, editor, community host and user
experience designer. She was the co-founder of Maxi
(http://www.maximag.com), a pop-culture feminist zine in operation from
1997-1999. Currently, she works on user experience projects in Chicago.
Her daily blog and personal site, Girl Wonder, resides at
http://www.girlwonder.com.

Please join me in welcoming Lori and Molly to inkwell.vue!

 
  

    
Wow... this is so cool.  I'm amazed that I found my way in here - as I
told Molly, I'm THE most technologically-challenged person on the
planet.  Or at least my age.

It's Thursday night, and for the first few days, I'm gonna seem sort
of MIA because I have to go to L.A. to do a quick photo shoot for
Mademoiselle, so I won't be online much.  That's SO not a name-drop,
btw.  I bring it up because my book, a collection of my adolescent
diaries, rants about things like the hypocrisy of "women's magazines"
and here I am doing a photo shoot for them.  So does that make me a
hypocrite?  I don't think so (I can explain, really!), but I'll let you
draw your own conclusions.
  

    

Hello, Lori -- I'm glad to see you found your way in here.

So... for starters, a few thoughts on what we're talking about here.

Lori Gottlieb's book Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self is a journal of
her 11 year old self as she developed anorexia. But Stick Figure is much
more than the description of what it's like to be anorexic -- it brings up
issues about control, body image, cultural values of girls and women versus
those toward boys and men, and how comments that might seem innocent and
innocuous have a way of warping what we see in the mirror.

Over the next few weeks, we'll discuss these meta issues around the body,
image, memoir versus journaling, and control, among many others.

It's also interesting to note that Lori's background adds some unusual
facets to the discussion. She was a tv and film exec in Hollywood, where she
encountered anorexic actresses and saw body image issues play out first-
hand. And currently, she's a medical student at Stanford, and sees things
from "the other side" (in her words).

Lori, you also worked at Kibu (and did an article for the Industry Standard
called "The Cult of Kibu," which described the problems and the cliques
surrounding a startup focused on teenage girls). Maybe we should use your
Mademoiselle photo shoot and your Kibu experiences as a jumping off point.
How do you sort through the cliqueishness of adult women, and the messages
that girls and women still get, having had the experiences you talk about in
Stick Figure?

(and if anyone else would like to chime in with questions, thoughts, or
comments, feel free to post.)
  

    

Also, if you are reading along on the Web and don't have a WELL
membership, but would still like to ask questions or make comments - send
e-mail to inkwell-hosts@well.com and we will be happy to post your
comments or questions for you.
  

    
Hmm... Molly, you start off with an interesting question because my
personal feeling is that instead of supporting one another, women
contribute (a lot) to the problems we have as a culture around our
schizophrenic attitudes toward beauty and attractiveness.  The
prevailing opinion out there (at least this seems to come up at book
signings or on talk shows I've been on) is that men constantly send
messages that women will be unlovable-slash-unacceptable-slash-ignored
if they don't conform to the media-prescribed "look" - which always
means molding one's body into something it probably isn't or can't be,
without plastic surgery.  Whereas we women, being "enlightened," stay
away from superficial judgments about aesthetics. 

Ha! Ha ha ha ha he he ha.... baloney!

Now, I'm not saying men are innocent in this, but my experience and
that of women I know tells me that women can be the harshest judges of
both their own bodies and those of other women.  Much harsher than men
might be when it comes to women's bodies.  Just go to a gathering, hang
out by the ladies' room, and listen to women talk about Susan, who's
gained a few pounds and has therefore "let herself go" or Jennifer, who
hasn't lost the weight after her pregnancy, and so on.  Or think about
this:  how many women do you know who secretly feel better about
themselves if they happen to be the thinnest woman in the room?  Be
honest. I'm sure you know some.  You may even BE one. There seems to be
more competition than support from the very women who complain about
the problem.

Part of the reason I published my diaries is that they're chock full
of seemingly innocuous comments made by the women around me (our
mothers, teachers, older sisters, friends at school) that I, as a
girl-in-transition-to-adulthood, took quite seriously and eventually
internalized.  They very much informed my attitudes about my body.
Which is why, actually, I kept the diaries intact instead of writing
STICK FIGURE as a memoir - the power or impact or whatever you want to
call it, I think, comes from hearing the actual words of a girl
observing, Margaret Mead-style, her surroundings.  And recording these
observations in real time. 

What I mean is, it's one thing to say, "As a kid, I heard our mothers
say..." but it's quite another to read what the girl wrote at that
time.  Because girls today (and women, for that matter) are both
hearing and saying these same things.  So we're perpetuating the
problem, which is a very un-P.C. thing to say, but I do believe that
WOMEN have to change their behaviors and attitudes if this problem of
perpetual dissatisfaction with our bodies is to have any hope of going
away. 

Oh God, I'm starting to sound earnest, which, if you ask me, should be
one of the Seven Deadly Sins.  So, moving on...

Kibu - This was a Silicon Valley startup run by women who hoped to
"empower" and "inspire" teen girls, but instead, the culture
behind-the-scenes rivaled that of the "Heathers" crowd in high school. 
I'd suggest reading the piece (www.thestandard.com and search for Lori
Gottlieb - I have several pieces so click on the "Year In Review"
issue and you'll find "Inside the Cult of Kibu") because it addresses
Molly's question better than I can at midnight after traveling all day!
But I'm happy to revisit if people read the essay and then have
questions...it seems to strike a chord with anyone who's worked at a
startup, or with anyone who wanted to put arsenic in the popular girls'
Diet Cokes in high school.  (Hey, kids - don't try this at home.)

Mademoiselle photo shoot - I'm doing it in the morning, so stay tuned
for tomorrow's report.
  

    

>Ha! Ha ha ha ha he he ha.... baloney!

Thanks so much for saying that.  As I read the preceding paragraph, I was
mentally composing a response to it, protesting that not all men are part of
that weird thing.  In a way, we're victims of the same impossible standard.
I know I am, having struggled with my weight for all of my 47 years.
  

    
Lori, I think you're right -- I think that women are more often than
not the people who enforce judgments of weight and appearance. It's
something that comes up a lot in your diaries -- where you were writing
out diets for other teenage girls in your class, or all the popular
kids are "fat" and on diets. I think of it in the stories of one of my
close friends, whose mother pulled her out of softball practice at age
8 to go to Weight Watchers meetings (and she wasn't fat). 

In some of these cases (and again, this is something that comes up in
your book), it's the further perpetration of the myths that our female
role models have -- in your book, your mother, or maybe someone's best
friend. In the case of my friend above, it seemed to come from her
mother.

So why do these myths get handed down (don't eat dessert) from women
we look up to (these same women who we catch eating cookies over the
sink at night)? And David, where do we learn the "impossible standard",
as you put it? 
  

    

>And David, where do we learn the "impossible standard", as you put it?

I think we are exposed to huge amounts of cultural information throughout our
lives, and not all of it gets procesed sufficiently.  We see a lot from an
early age -- my generation saw it on TV starting almost from birth, and in
magazines from the time we were old enough to steal our dads' Playboy
magazines, etc -- and if there is sufficient reinforcement, we never unlearn
it.

I can think of various prejudices, stereotypes, etc. that I acquired from my
peers, family etc. that I later figured out were not for me; if my classmates
didn't have the same sort of enlightening experiences that I did, then they
may still be carrying some of those notions.
  

    <scribbled by castle Sat 2 Jun 01 23:17>
  

    

Sorry, posted in wrong topic.
  

    
Molly, I think these messages get passed down because they're so
pervasive that we don't even realize we're passing down any messages at
all.  It's like, "How's the weather?" - we think we're just making
value-free, "normal" conversation. 

Case in point: today I did the Mademoiselle photo shoot with my
childhood friends - some of whom are mentioned in my diaries in STICK
FIGURE. The photographer took a few Polaroids to get a lighting read
and when we saw these test shots, several of my friends said, "Oh my
God, I look so fat!"  (No one was even CLOSE to being "fat"!)And one of
these women has a very young daughter. So here we were as adults,
talking about our bodies they way our own mothers did when we were
little girls.  

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with wanting to look good.  I
mean, I hated the outfit they'd given me and I insisted on changing
into something I felt more comfortable in, something I felt I looked
better wearing.  But what bothers me is that women often go straight to
the "I'm fat" knee-jerk response, whereas I just hated the color on me
(bright red - and my wardrobe consists mostly of black, white, or gray
- I'm not a "bright color" person).  So it was interesting to see
these girls (now women) making the same comments about their very thin
bodies that our mothers did.  This is how these attitudes get passed
down to the next generation.

David, what kinds of "enlightening experiences" did you have that
changed your attitudes?  
  

    
Lori, was the Mademoiselle photo shoot about your childhood friends,
in part? Were they battling the same demons as you? Will they raise
their children with the same "seemingly innocuous" comments that people
around you made as you were growing up? It also strikes me that
there's this connection where "I don't like how I look" or "I hate this
color on me" to "Eeuw. I look so fat." 

David, I'm curious as well about what you learned that made you ditch
some of the standards you'd been hearing all along. And along that same
line, Lori -- how have you dealt with those messages you were hearing?
How do they affect you when you hear them today?
  

    
One other thing that's coming out in conversation here at home around
the book and this discussion is whether these attitudes of Susan (who
gained a few pounds and "let her self go") or Jennifer, who hasn't lost
the weight after her pregnancy are about winning a man, or keeping the
man you have. 

I get a lot of misguided email for Maxim (its URL is one letter off of
Maxi's URL). A lot of it is greatly sexist -- one message to the Maxim
editors last week had to do with the sender stating that sometimes you
just have to tell a woman what's what, and to treat her however you
want to treat her.

So we've been talking this morning and wondering, are these attitudes
connected -- we're saying that so and so has let herself go, and that's
a bad thing because now she'll never get a man? Or the woman who never
did lose that weight post-pregnancy will have a hard time keeping her
husband? Are those some of the attitudes under the surface?

Lori, in Stick Figure, you talk about your mother saying that you
shouldn't have dessert, that you should leave it for your brother and
father. I wonder too that by dieting and having these thin-image
problems, there's something at work that serves to separate women from
men, and make women almost a separate species. 
  

    
Lori, your book sounds fascinating.

I'm a Registered Dietitian, not involved in Clinical for some time,
and in fact one of the reasons for that is the spooky obsession the
profession has with their height/weight charts.  I long ago moved to a
model of healthy food choices, exercise, self-acceptance and away from
even the concept of 'dieting', which is like playing with a loaded gun
for some adolescents.

Good point about women perpetuating this nonsense.  In a group of
women, what would be some good responses to the "Eeuw, I look so fat?"
syndrome?
  

    
Diane, I don't know what a "good response" to "Eeuw, I look so fat"
is, but MY response is simply to ignore it.  I mean, why sit there and
go, "No, no, you're not fat"?  That just sets into motion a
conversation that goes something like:

"No, you're not fat."

"Oh my God!  I SO am!  You should see my thighs."

"What?  You don't even HAVE thighs!  What are you talking about?  Look
at my hips!"

"I wish I had hips like yours.  All my curves are on my butt."

It's sort of like the guys-dissing-each-other-as-a-bonding-thing
phenomenon.  Except with women, it's a twisted version of reverse
psychology: I will insult myself so that my friends will compliment me
and make me feel better about myself.  Then my friend will insult
herself so that I will compliment her and make her feel better about
herself.  Then we'll engage in a faux my-body-is-worse-than-your-body
contest, which will make us both feel better about ourselves, because
we'll each reassure the other person about the acceptability (if not
the beauty) our respective bodies.  Barf.
  

    
Molly - about your reference to my book, I definitely think there are
different rules for girls and boys, or women and men.  These diaries
start when I'm just beginning to develop breasts, and all of a sudden,
people around me are treating me like a "girl" rather than just a
generic "kid."  So suddenly I'm being told that chess (my obsession at
the time) and math (my other obsession at the time) aren't "normal"
interests for a girl, but that trading hairbands (my friends' obsession
at the time) WAS normal.  Same with portion size and who gets to eat
dessert.  And a million more subtle things that you've read about in
the book.

What's interesting about these diaries is that my older brother (who
was a few years older, a bona fide teenager) was being sent very
different messages, and when I questioned this, at that age, no one
could provide an answer that made sense.  A lot of people have picked
up on that from the book - I may have recorded this confusion in my
diaries, but so many other women have lived it as well, and remember
this bias very clearly with their own siblings.
  

    
I'm thinking about Molly's guy question, which comes up a lot. Many
women do feel that thin equals lovable, but again, that's more a female
urban myth than something that all or even many men truly believe.
Just as women may fantasize about Brad Pitt (or whoever People picked
for the latest "Beautiful People" cover) but still can be attracted to
guys who aren't quite so...movie-star hot, men may fantasize about some
really thin women but still be quite attracted to "real-life" women.  

I never thought guys would read my book, but so many have written to
say, "Oh, NOW I understand why every time my girlfriend/wife/whoever
gets dressed to go out, she asks, 'Do I look okay in this?' and if I
say, 'Yeah, you look fine,' she asks, 'So I don't look fat?'"

Sad but true.  A lot of women believe that if they look "fat," men
won't be interested in them, and by implication, they'll be
alone/unloved.  

And also, some women believe that there are only so many men to go
around, and in survival-of-the-fittest sort of way, the thin ones will
"survive."  So they make these catty comments (that we were talking
about earlier) out of fear, more than anything else.  God forbid, the
woman who "let herself go" should be ME, right?

As for Maxim, read my article on Kibu from The Industry Standard. 
'Nuff said.
  

    

So we agree the rules for women and men are different. But why are they
different, and in which ways are they the same? (I'm referring too to what
David Gans said a few posts ago -- that there is an impossible standard for
men as well).
  

    

 The answer to anyone you care about saying "ew, I'm so fat," is
"No, dear, you're beautiful exactly the way you are," followed perhaps
by a gentle discussion of things that truly matter in the world.
  

    

>David, I'm curious as well about what you learned that made you ditch
 some of the standards you'd been hearing all along.

My head was filled with rteceived "wisdom" from my peers, as everyone's is.
As you get older and smarter, you start to realize that the next guy doesn't
have his shit any more together than you do, mos' likely, so the stereotypes
and judgments he's putting out there are the products of his own insecurities
and fears.

Experience taught me not to be afraid of gay people.  Experience taught me to
trust my own instincts and judgments about people and not to listen to gossip
about others.  Experience taught me that the soul of a person is not
discernible from a quick look at their external features, and that beauty
evident in the way a person moves, acts, speaks, interacts.

Being something other than a stereotype good-looking dude -- always
struggling to keep my weight down and not spending nearly enough on my hair
and clothes -- couples with a shred of empathy to enable me to free myself
from the notion that looks are the improtant thing in evaluating people.

I don't think I have explained how I got there.  I guess the answer to that
quewstion is, I paid attention to life as it has happened to me for 47+
years.
  

    
Great insights, David. I've been through similar thinking. When I was
younger my looks were okay, but for whatever reasons I've put on a lot of
weight over the last 4-5 years, and when people look at me they see a fat
person. That's not the way I think of myself, and it's created weird
dissonance. I'm also learning more and more about preconceptions and
discrimination based on appearance... and the constant pressure to be
thin, to be cool... men are definitely not exempt.
  

    
I agree that those are wonderful insights. Thanks, David.

I'd like to bring the conversation back to women, and how they are
encouraged to see their value based on how thin they are. All those
stereotypes definitely play in; I remember my mom talking about how
untrue the stereotype of fat woman as undisciplined or lacking in
self-control was, but at the same time (practically in the same breath)
encouraging me not to gain weight or I would have trouble finding
interesting jobs, getting into college, etc.

Lori, what do you make of this "I feel fat" idea? Someone mentioned it
above, briefly, and it is something a lot of women say, but to me it
feels like a way to get out of expressing more complex or nuanced
feelings; When my friends say they feel fat, or that they're having a
"fat day," I cannot really talk about it with them, because I don't
know if they mean, "I feel unloveable;" I feel out of control;" "I feel
out of sorts," or what. What has your experience taught you about the
responses to that statement or ones like it?
  

    
Ruth: Yes!  Women are encouraged to determine their value based on how
thin they are.  It's a currency of sorts for many women in our
culture.  Notice that thin women are more likely to be liked by a job
interviewer, or that a thin woman who walks into a store will get help
much faster than a heavier woman will.  It happens all the time in
dozens of situations that have nothing to do with the more obvious,
"Will I be attractive to men?" question in terms of dating.  Yet
they're related, politically, if I can use that word and not sound
high-falutin or hyperbolic.

And the contradiction you mentioned with your mother: my book is full
of these contradictions.  There's a passage in the diaries in which I
say:

"Mom's magazines have twelve great cookie ideas, but then on the next
page they always have twelve great diet plans that tell you never to
eat what you just baked."

Or the fact that my mother never said anything about my body not being
thin enough - in fact, she often commented that I was too thin (I was
tiny), yet in the next breath, she was telling me to save desserts for
"the guys" (my father and brother).

"I feel fat" to me, btw, means, "I feel bad about myself today."  In
my book's epilogue, I discuss the way women wake up and get on the
scale or look in the mirror and that number or that reflection often
determines whether it's a "good" day or a "bad" day.  Isn't it tragic
that many women determine their moods based on a number on a scale each
morning?
  

    
Susannah - I've TRIED that, and the woman I'm talking to will
invariably say that it doesn't matter if SHE thinks she's beautiful the
way she is, because although she agrees that other things are far more
important in life, our cultural values don't gibe with that view.  So
she's left with the dilemma of accepting herself for who she is, and
even loving that person for who she is, but being treated as a
second-class citizen in the outside world; or making herself miserable
on diets but being accepted by the world-at-large.  Do you get a
different response?
  

    

I've been a lot happier with the way I look now that I no longer live in
LA.  I don't miss the "LA greeting" - that quick, head-to-toe scan you get
from everyone you encounter, with an extra-long lingering glance at
whatever is "wrong": last year's pants length or width or heel style or
handbag.

I was miserable in LA, always felt overweight and ugly and like the
country mouse visiting the city mouse.

I've been gone nine years, have gained a huge amount of weight that I
don't want to confess to in public, and feel better about myself than I
ever have.  I like clothes and like to look cute in them, but now I just
look as cute as I can under the circumstances.

When it gets hard is when I go home for visits or if my ultra-svelte,
ultra-chic parents come to visit.  All conversations center around
suggestions for my weight loss, including drastic surgery.  But, all my
life, conversations with my mother at least, have centered arounded
suggestions for my weight loss.  I can remember the remarks made by my
then-best girlfriend's mother in seventh grade upon hearing that my mother
wanted to put me a diet:  she looked me up and down and said, where you
gonna lose the weight, in your earlobes??

And speaking of earlobes, one of the many, many tried and failed weight
loss methods I've attempted includes acupuncture.  The point for
metabolism is in your ear where a staple is inserted, or a tiny bead
attached, and pressing them activates the point.  Only, guess what?  My
ears are too thin and the staples wouldn't stay in.  Wouldn't you just
know?

In retrospect, it seems like the pressure coming from my mother to lose
weight started around puberty, as if she were attempting to refute my
development, nip those curves right in the bud.  She's still trying to get
rid of them!!
  

    

>the "LA greeting" - that quick, head-to-toe scan you get from everyone you
>encounter, with an extra-long lingering glance at whatever is "wrong": last
>year's pants length or width or heel style or handbag.

Wow.