I.

I want to write about something for which I do not yet have proof nor anyone else's esteemed theories to help substantiate.  I want to write about something I am just beginning to think about.  The thought map goes something like this:

There was a very good line in an otherwise very silly movie.  To paraphrase: Women in America seem to punish their bodies, punish them through strict diets and hard workouts.  It is almost as if they are trying to punish any curves, any softness, any maternality out of their bodies and souls.  Rather than see curves as signs of physical and emotional strength, things to wear with pride, some women choose to view them as signs of weakness, negative softness, a status of being less-than.  

Curves are the physical manifestation of an extraordinary sensuality.  Curves come about through loving and caring and eating...eating well and eating lovingly...eating foods that not only nourish the body but excite the soul and palate.  I think that some women run from and punish these curves because the sensuality they represent is powerful and thereby terrifying.  Terrifying because...we have been trained to be tough but not powerful...because we are afraid to become alienated from these very social circles that are invested in keeping us alienated from ourselves...because recognizing our own power may cause us to question the secure trajectory of our lives...

MFK Fisher wrote in response to the critique that she did not write of important things that when one writes of food and hunger and the sensual satiation of that hunger, one is "writing about love and the hunger for it...and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied...and it is all one."  When we spend time with food, with making, with giving and with eating, we are trying to care for each other as we seek out fulfillment of the "wilder, more insistent hungers."  We can starve ourselves and leave our bodies no time to feel anything of those wilder more insistent hungers.  We can gorge ourselves and leave our bodies no room to feel anything of those wilder more insistent hungers.  Or we can surrender to the sensuality, the fulfillment, the ecstatic joy of a full stomach and a pleased palate, and then face head-on those wilder passions for which there is no socially acceptable expression.