Dear Dana is a bi-weekly advice column for humans who engage in romantic relationships. Please send your dilemmas, issues, conundrums, assumptions, conflicts, anxieties, worriments, obstacles, complications, predicaments, queries, questions, and any other synonyms for “problems” to deardana@rolereboot.org. Dear Dana, I’m tired of being overweight. I’m a woman in my late 20s and I really want to […]
No one else has accompanied you through every excruciating moment of your life; your body has served as witness to it all. It has taken me my entire life to realize I should be ashamed of how ungrateful I’ve been to my body, how wrong it was that I did not appreciate all of the […]
I like not having to strive for anything regarding my body other than basic maintenance in the hopes of keeping it running a little longer. I like the freedom to ignore even that. When it’s only us in the room, only fat women, someone might quietly say, like a guilty confession: “I’m trying really hard […]
If we—as women with diverse body types, skin tones, and abilities—get to define for ourselves what beauty and sexiness look like, then the power will no longer rest with those who pad their fortunes with our self-loathing. I’m one of those women who has spent most of my life in and out of cycles of […]
You want to really blow people’s minds? Try this at home: Be fat and happy. I’m going to let you in on a little secret. This girl, the one on the left, she’s me. In the flesh, me. Five years ago, after three babies. Me. This photo was snapped at the lake, two months before […]
No matter how many anti-fat shaming and body acceptance posts I read and share, the feeling of inadequacy returns. A Victoria’s Secret model mocks me from my refrigerator door. Her stomach, smooth and flat, taunts me as I glare at it. How I wish I could take a butcher knife and just slice off the […]
If my body in a swimsuit offends my fellow beachgoers, screw ’em. The constant reminders that there are ONLY THREE MONTHS LEFT before bikini season reminds me of last summer when I was packing for a trip to the beach. I was a little worried about the effect my un-toned body would have on fellow […]
Mainstream media would have you believe that eating disorders are a white-woman problem. When I was in elementary school, I started dieting. I’d drink my mother’s protein shakes and eat off-brand, low-fat frozen entrees. In seventh grade, I decided I just wouldn’t eat at all. It worked for a while, but by high school I realized I […]
The intimacy I experienced with my body and my developing baby during pregnancy was perhaps the most compelling transformation I have ever known. Why would I want to erase that? A close friend of mine from graduate school was in town over the weekend, someone I hadn’t seen since I was mid-way through my pregnancy. […]
