Episode 202: Lu sits down with photographer Lindley Ashline to chat about weight stigma, size-inclusive photography, the benefits of exposure in body acceptance work, access, equity, and support for all bodies.
Lindley Ashline creates artwork that celebrates the unique beauty of bodies that fall outside conventional “beauty” standards. Lindley is also the creator of Body Liberation Stock and the Body Love Box, a monthly body acceptance subscription box. She lives outside Seattle with her husband and two feline overlords.
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Lu Uhrich: Welcome to Episode 202 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which you can find at seven-health.com/202.
Hi, everyone. I’m your host, Lu Uhrich, and this is Real Health Radio.
Real Health Radio is presented by Seven Health. Seven Health works with women who feel obsessed with and defined by their bodies. Using a non-diet, weight-neutral approach that combines science and compassion, we help you to transform your relationship with food, movement, your body, and yourself. We specialize in helping clients dismantle diet mentality and fatphobia, overcome disordered eating, regain their periods, balance their hormones, and recover from years of dieting, binging, exercise obsessing, and body hating by learning how to think critically about the messages they’re consuming and the beliefs they’re maintaining – and, of course, learning how to connect with and listen to their bodies, too.
If you’re looking for support in healing your relationship with food and your body, please don’t hesitate to contact us. You can head over to seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how we work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is seven-health.com/help. You’ll also find it in the show notes.
As you may know if you’re a regular listener of the show, Seven Health has been giving away a book from our resource list with every episode. It’s our way of saying thank you to you, our Real Health Radio community, while also asking for your support and feedback through rating and reviewing the podcast.
If you’d like a chance to win, all you need to do is leave a review on iTunes, take a screenshot of it, and email it to info@seven-health.com. Then you’ll be permanently entered into the drawing. Weekly winners have the opportunity to select a book from our resource list, which includes some of your favorite publications on a variety of topics and can be found on our website at www.seven-health.com/resources.
For the book giveaway this week, the winner is Ilinca C. Congratulations, Ilinca, and thanks for your review. We’ll be in touch to send you a book of your choosing.
That’s all for the announcements, so let’s get on with the show. On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Lindley Ashline. She’s a photographer who creates artwork that celebrates the unique beauty of bodies that fall outside of the conventional beauty standards. Lindley is also the creator of Body Liberation Stock and the Body Love Box, a monthly body acceptance subscription box. She currently lives outside of Seattle with her husband and her two feline overlords.
So listen in as two cat ladies (that’s me and Lindley) discuss weight stigma, size-inclusive photography, the benefits of exposure and body acceptance work, access, equity, and support for marginalized bodies.
HI, Lindley, and welcome to Real Health Radio.
Lindley Ashline: Thank you.
Lu Uhrich: It’s an honor to have you here on the podcast. I’m very excited to talk with you and get to know you more and to learn from you. But before we get into our conversation, do you mind just introducing yourself, who you are, and what you do to the listeners?
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Lindley Ashline: Sure. my name is Lindley. It’s spelled L-I-N-D-L-E-Y, but because I’m Southern, I don’t pronounce the “D,” so it’s just “Lin-lee.” I’m a photographer and artist. I currently live outside Seattle, Washington.
I do all sorts of body positive and fat positive photography. That includes client photography, like portraits and boudoir and small business branding sessions. I also do stock photos, which has been a really cool thing because I’m currently the only person in the world producing fat positive, fat centered, commercial use stock photography. I also run a subscription box that’s called the Body Love Box. So I have my fingers in a lot of different pies, and that makes me really happy.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah, I love the work that you do, and I ‘m so excited to dive into our conversation around that. But before we do that, do you mind telling us a little bit about your relationship with food and body growing up? Historically, it’s something we talk about with every guest on this podcast, and I’d love to get to know more about you in that way as well.
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Lindley Ashline: I had a bit of an unusual relationship with food and my body and with pop culture and diet culture as a kid. I grew up without a TV. I lived in rural North Carolina, and I was kind of isolated. I was that kid who would rather go into the woods and have a pretend tea party with the fairies than go to the mall. So I just didn’t have a whole lot of exposure to pop culture as a kid.
What that meant for me was that until I was a teenager and started connecting more with the rest of the world, I just didn’t have negative thoughts about my body. I just didn’t really think about my body at all. It existed. It was a tool for me to go outside and play with or ride my bike or climb a tree, but I wasn’t aware of it being a cisgender female body or of it being a body that might not be okay in the way that diet culture and pop culture teach us.
The first time I got catcalled, it was a huge surprise because I wasn’t used to thinking about my body. At the time, I was an adolescent, and I was on the side of the road looking for rock sediments or something. I got catcalled, and it was a fundamental shock that other people were looking at my body and judging it. It literally hadn’t occurred to me.
With food growing up, I ate when I was hungry. I didn’t eat when I wasn’t hungry. I rested when I was tired. I moved my body when I wanted to go play. It was a very simple relationship. Until I was a teenager, I wasn’t absorbing diet culture. I just wasn’t.
I regret missing a whole generation, my own generation, of pop culture because whatever movie you’re talking about, I haven’t seen it. [laughs] I don’t get pop culture references. But at the same time, I wasn’t absorbing diet culture.
When I was a teenager and I started being more connected to the world around me, I was an average size kid, but when I hit puberty, my body all of a sudden took the shape that every woman in my family has. We’re all German peasants. Once my body took that shape, people started noticing and judging, and I got a lot of negative feedback about my body. Suddenly I was very aware of it.
But even then, I had this foundation where I hadn’t absorbed these diet culture messages, so when I discovered body acceptance in my mid-twenties, it wasn’t – I don’t have a dramatic story of healing from diet culture. It’s a bit unusual. People are like, “How did you do it? How did you get to a point where you accepted your body?” For me, that journey was very easy because I didn’t have as many fishhooks to pull out.
So my relationship with my body and food growing up was relatively, in the world we live in, a relatively healthy relationship. It didn’t occur to me that there was anything wrong with me, or wrong with the way that I ate food.
Lu Uhrich: That is rare. Oddly enough, that’s my story, too. Listeners of this podcast who have heard the episodes where I’ve shared my history are going to say we’re two peas in a pod, because my story is the same.
I was much more interested in playing and art and being active, and my parents and my family were totally intuitive around food. Yes, food was a big part of our lives and our gatherings and our time together in a celebratory fashion and a connecting fashion, but it wasn’t judged. We weren’t made to go on diets, and no one was critiquing my body. My sister and I have very different body types, but no one was critiquing our bodies against one another. We didn’t really make those connections either, like you said, until adolescence, things like that. You start learning the way that the world is viewing bodies.
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It’s so interesting for me to hear you say body acceptance generally came pretty easy to you because of that. I was curious, and one of the questions I had been hoping to ask you, was about that – the moment where now, you’re this voice of body liberation in the world, and you speak strongly and articulately about the issues related to bodies and weight stigma and oppression, not just around size, but also gender and sexuality and race and ability status.
What caused that shift for you? I’m wondering if it was this “aha” moment where you’re like, “Here’s a pivot point and this is what I’m doing in the world,” or was it like a series of events and circumstances that led you into this work and using your voice in this way?
Lindley Ashline: It would be funny if I had that sort of exciting epiphany moment to share, but I don’t, really. It was a series of very, very small events over time, and mostly internet-based because I’m essentially a creature of caffeine and the internet.
Back in the LiveJournal days, in 2007-2008, I discovered a LiveJournal group called Fatshionista. It was all these amazing, wonderful fat women – I’m using fat as a neutral descriptor here, not as a judgment – who were completely rocking plus size clothing. As a younger adult, I had learned at that point, I had internalized, that I should feel terrible about my fat body.
But again, because I had not been exposed to a lot of the specific strategies for what you’re supposed to do when you have a “bad body,” in the early 2000s I embarked on – I was going to diet. [laughs] My version of dieting – because I hadn’t grown up with seeing the commercials for South Beach or Atkins or whatever. So my version of dieting was to eat a lot of cucumber and nothing but cucumber for like 3 weeks. Of course, it made me hungry and cranky, and I lost like three pounds and that was it.
At that point, a much younger Lindley said, “Well, clearly dieting doesn’t work for this body. I’m a failure. But I don’t actually care enough about becoming a not-failure at dieting to seek out anything specific.” So that was my one bout with dieting.
A few years after that, I discovered this LiveJournal community, and there were these women who were wearing tight skirts and wearing bright colors and being fashionable and stylish, and it was just amazing. It was a big fundamental shift for me, but I don’t know that it was one event. It was very gradual over a few years.
I started thinking about larger bodies as bodies that could be worthy and stylish and fashionable. I’m not a person who is particularly involved in fashion myself, but seeing others have access to that was a gateway for me that all fat bodies can also be athletic. Fat bodies can be all these other things that we assume that people in smaller bodies would have access to.
From there, it was this gradual unfolding of, oh, if people in bodies like mine can be fashionable, then they can be athletic, and they can be this and this and this, and all the other things. Full access to the world around us. Then it came like a ripple in a pond that expands and then comes back, because as I realized that there were all these wonderful things that people in smaller bodies can do that people in fat bodies can also do, then this ripple hit the edge of the pond and came back to me that yes, fat people can be athletic, but if we can’t get athletic gear, how are we supposed to go do that?
Somebody in my body is perfectly capable of learning to kayak, and that’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but finding – if I just go out and rent a kayak, there’s not going to be one that fits me. So the fact that the world was built to exclude these bodies that should be perfectly capable of full participation in the public sphere felt like a slap in the face. Like, now that I believe that big bodies are worthy of doing these things, I’m discovering as I look around that big bodies can’t do these things because people in smaller bodies have decided that we shouldn’t be able to do these things, so they limited access. Sure, in theory you could go scuba diving, but good luck finding a wetsuit. Sure, you can go skiing, but good luck finding ski pants.
I started to get mad. I’ll be honest, I started to get mad. I’ve been taught that I’m not worthy of doing these things, and now that I believe that I’m worthy, I can’t because I don’t have access. So I started to get mad. The more I looked around me, the more mad I got.
That’s why I do talk about things like full access for gender rights and disability rights. Those things, I don’t live those experiences. I’m a cisgender white woman, so I don’t necessarily have expertise in the lived experience of being someone who is in the LGBT community or a person of color or a person who uses a mobility aid like a wheelchair. I don’t have that experience. But I’m mad on their behalf too. I want them to have full access to everything too.
You can’t say – I mean, I guess you can, but it would be terribly hypocritical to say “It’s okay to love your body as long as…” You can’t put caveats on that. You can’t say “It’s okay for people to have full access to the world as long as…” It has to be true for everybody, or it doesn’t count.
Lu Uhrich: Right. I like what you said there about the fact that – and I’ve seen you express this online and in other places – the idea that you don’t have those lived experiences, and yet you’re still, first of all, angry on their behalf; second of all, willing to continue to learn and, because I know you and I know your work, also excited about centering individuals who are under other forms of oppression in your work as well.
Lindley Ashline: Yeah. That was a very deliberate decision that I had to make because as a photographer – and don’t even get me started on oppression in photography culture –
Lu Uhrich: We’re going to talk about that later.
Lindley Ashline: Oh good. Yeah, you’re going to get me started.
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When I started photographing people, I had been doing nature photography for a really long time, but when I started photographing people, I was on my way out of a really horrible day job. I knew that I wanted to take on photography as a career, but at this point I had already been involved in the fat acceptance movement for about 7 or 8 years at the time, either as a spectator, reading LiveJournal entries, reading blog posts, and gradually starting to become a voice myself.
So I knew that I wanted to serve fat people in my business, but that is not a standard photography path in the normative, mainstream photography world. I had a hard time finding resources on working with larger bodies as far as posing and so on. I had problems finding respectful resources on working with larger bodies because when you look at posing resources for photographers, you find things like the plus size posing will be the afterthought, and it’s usually really condescending. It’s like, “If the mother of the bride is plus size, here’s what you might do with that.”
This is how you end up with things like plus size bodies, fat bodies, being shoved to either the edge of photographs or hidden behind other people or cut off in group photos. They’ll be at the end, and then suddenly on the Instagram version of that photograph, “there just wasn’t room, so we cut them off.” Photography culture is incredibly toxic when it comes to larger bodies. Anybody who’s ever been on Instagram for a hot second can see this. This is not a hidden problem within the photography world.
The point is that I had to make this decision that I was going to make this very non-mainstream choice and hope that there were enough people out there who wanted that. When we’re talking about centering marginalized bodies in a photography business, a lot of – I’m going to do a little bit of a callout even on some of my body positive competitors. [laughs] A lot of people who claim to be body positive in their photography work, somehow larger bodies don’t actually make it into their portfolio on their website, or their Instagram feed is full of thin bodies and will have one black body or one fat body, and that is their evidence that they’re body positive or that they’re inclusive.
I decided really early on that that wasn’t enough. If I can’t center fat and marginalized bodies in my work, then that is not being consistent with my own beliefs. I’ll be honest: it has been really, really, really, really challenging to continue to center because when you do that, you are going counter to business theory. You’re going counter to marketing theory. You’re going counter to the advice that everyone will want to give you.
I do believe that if I were willing to center aspirational bodies – and when I say aspirational body, I don’t even necessarily mean thin, although usually when we think of a body that we want ours to be like, we do think of thin. Not just that, but heavily Photoshopped, because everything you see is Photoshopped. So anything that is not looks really strange.
It’s been really challenging to continue to center bodies that are marginalized and bodies that are not Photoshopped and still run a business because it’s not only culturally counter to everything that you expect to see in a business; it also gives you a lot of “If you would just shift a little bit…” It makes people uncomfortable.
But also, as customers, we’re not used to seeing that, and as photography customers, we are trained to behave as customers to want a photographer who will make us look more like an ideal body. So I end up doing a lot of customer education as well.
It’s really scary to look at a website full of bodies that are visibly fat and are not hiding that, they’re not being Photoshopped to look thinner, they’re not being posed in a way that minimizes those bodies, and to think, “I have a body that’s big. If I work with this photographer, am I going to look like a fat body on camera in a photograph?” That’s really scary. To accept that and to move forward with that with a photographer who’s not going to erase you, you do have to be in a certain point in your own journey where you can either be comfortable with that or be willing to use that as a tool to see yourself as you actually exist. So it’s scary.
Lu Uhrich: Oh man, you’re touching on so many of the topics I want to talk about. We got here just from me saying, hey, was it an “aha” pivotal moment or this trickle effect that led you to the work you’re doing? I now see it was a trickle effect, like the ripples, like you said, and a really beautiful trajectory towards what you’re doing now.
I’m going to ask you a question based on right where you ended, which was this idea of photography being – like you said, people either come to you already at a place where they’re ready to take up space, including in a photograph, or you said as a part of that process of getting ready, of becoming ready to take up space, of allowing themselves to do that.
I wanted to talk to you about this because I know in my work with clients, I encourage them so often to take more pictures of themselves and familiarize themselves with their own body, and also to get photography if they have access and can afford it, or find somebody who they trust to take photos of them, for this very reason: to familiarize themselves with their bodies and to begin to build that confidence in taking up space in imagery and seeing themselves and recognizing their own bodies, not as other or worse or different, but as worthy and as them, as who they are.
So I’m just wondering, what are your thoughts, and how is that a positive experience to see photographs of yourself?
Lindley Ashline: I think the positive experience encompasses more than just seeing the photos of yourself – although of course, that is fundamental – but working with a photographer who is positive about your body is a whole different experience because it means it’s completely a safe place when you come in. We sit down and we talk about – I do ask people, “What do you love the most about your body?” and also maybe “What do you love the least?”
If you are not ready to see your stomach and you come in for a boudoir session, your stomach is part of your body. You’re going to see it in the final photos. We’re not going to pretend you don’t have one or that your belly looks any different than it actually looks in real life. But I might not emphasize that as much. Or, depending on the client, I might emphasize it a lot because they’re ready to really grasp, metaphorically – or maybe literally, in some of the photos – what their belly looks like. So it depends on the client and what they’re ready for. But yes, being able to see yourself in the final photos is really a fundamental thing.
It’s fascinating the way that people choose to engage with that. I’ve had some people who – depending on the type of session, sometimes they’re coming in in person and we’re reviewing the photos together and sometimes they’re getting a gallery online. I’ve had some folks before who have come back to me and said, “The first time I looked at my gallery, I couldn’t look at myself. I took 2 weeks, and every day I would open that gallery in a tab and I would look for 2 or 3 minutes, and then I’d close the tab. The next day I’d come back and I would look at myself again.”
So some people are ready to see their bodies and some people need – it’s literally exposure therapy. [laughs] They literally are doing it in these tiny little snippets until they can see what’s actually there. Having professional photos done of ourselves particularly, because when we have somebody else hold the camera, we’re not in charge of the angle, so this is very different from taking selfies. Seeing the way that other people are seeing you, even if it’s just that split-second capture that the camera gets as opposed to a video or magically seeing yourself, like cloning yourself, and watching the way that you move – that’s the closest we can get.
Watching people engage with that is so fascinating because some people are ready for it. They’re like, “Yeah, that’s me and that’s great,” and some people are like, “I need a minute. I need to gradually expose.”
I was sympathetic to all these different approaches, but it really hit home for me when I had my own portraits done a couple years ago. I had to figure out how I was going to engage with photos of myself that were professionally taken. There is a photo of me that I use quite a bit now in my professional presence online, but I’m wearing a sleeveless dress and I’m standing in this really narrow brick alleyway up in Victoria in British Columbia, and I have my arms thrown up in joy. They’re spread wide, and my arms are bare.
The first time I saw that photo, all I could think of was, “Oh my God, is that what my arms look like in real life? Holy crap!” I had no idea. It wasn’t that I necessarily thought “oh, my arms are huge” or “oh, my arms are a lot smaller than I thought.” It was more, “oh, I have my grandmother’s underarm wings.” I guess I hadn’t really realized that before or noticed that. My grandmother on my father’s side had these really pronounced, really, really noticeable underarm wings. She called them her bingo wings. I guess I hadn’t realized I had inherited that.
That is not something that we value in our culture, extra skin on the bottom of our arms. I had to do my own exposure therapy. I had to keep looking at that, and now I love that photo. But it took me a little while.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah, it’s a good photo. As soon as you started describing it, I’m like, yeah, I’ve seen that. I know exactly what you’re talking about, and it’s beautiful. I love hearing it from your perspective, being somebody who’s behind the camera so often and going, “Yeah, I was in front of the camera, and then I received the images and I had to go through my own process.”
It’s almost like familiarizing yourself with your own body, which I think is so interesting because we live in our bodies day in and day out, we do all the things in our bodies, but for so many of us, we don’t actually take the time to see ourselves and to know ourselves and to recognize that as “normal” because it’s us. It should be, because we’re constantly, like you said, looking at this barrage of touched-up, Photoshopped, one particular type of body style image all the time on social media and marketing.
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Which brings up something else that you touched on earlier, too, which is interesting to me – this idea that you mentioned. A lot of photographers aren’t taking pictures of people in diverse bodies. They’re just not, and I see that, because I see media and marketing every day. But in my actual lived experience of going to the store, picking up my kids at school, or any other thing that I choose to do, I am seeing those bodies. It’s so interesting to me that you brought up the point of it’s hard for people to see their bodies because it’s not what they see all the time. It’s not something they’re familiar with in the imagery that we’re typically seeing, and yet in our everyday life, I see every type of body.
Lindley Ashline: Yeah. I’ll be honest. This is one of the areas where I get mad again. [laughs]
Lu Uhrich: Do it.
Lindley Ashline: I would not have said until maybe 2 years ago that anger was a significant emotion for me or part of my personality, but the more that I learn about oppression and marginalization and politics and diet culture and how trauma is expressed in the body and how oppression is expressed in the body and how fatphobia kills, the more angry I get.
One of the areas where I get really angry is when people who are invested in diet culture for one reason or another want to tell me that fat bodies don’t belong in the public sphere. And of course, not only are the people living in those fat bodies entitled to just as much access to the world as the rest of us – and quite often when I’m arguing with somebody on Instagram, this is where somebody says, “What if the person weighs 400 pounds?” I mean, I know people who weigh 400 pounds. I know lots of people who weigh 400 pounds. You don’t know what 400 pounds looks like. Hush. [laughs]
But people pick the biggest number and say, “Oh, but what about that? What about that?” That sort of fear mongering, “What if somebody is 600 pounds?” Of course there are plenty of people who weigh 600 pounds, and they deserve just as much access to Olive Garden as the rest of us. So I get mad about that.
But also, when people who are fat, people with disabilities, people who are otherwise at risk for being abused or shut out of access, when they don’t go out in public – because we have made it very hard for them to go out in public – when they can’t get on the bus because people are going to be so nasty to them that it’s not worth it to use public transit, or because there’s not a seat that will fit or there’s not a spot for their wheelchair – when we don’t see those people in public, it further skews what looks normal to us as far as bodies, what looks okay as far as bodies.
So I think your point is really, really, really, really valuable. If you pay as much attention to the bodies around you in daily life as you do to what you see in a magazine or on Instagram or on Facebook, you will start noticing that the bodies around you are normal, and that there’s a much wider scope of bodies around you. But you still may not be seeing extremely marginalized people, and it’s because we have created a public space in the U.S. where they are not welcome.
And when I say not welcome, I mean we have built an infrastructure where some people don’t fit. We have built an infrastructure where some people are visibly not welcome, and that does skew. People think that they never see people who weigh 800 pounds. I guarantee you, first off, that you’ve seen people who weigh 800 pounds and you just didn’t know it because bodies vary so widely. I weigh 270 pounds, and I wear a size 26/28 pants in like Lane Bryant sizing. I know people who are half my weight, literally, who wear close to the same size in clothing, and I know people who weigh twice what I do who wear the same size in clothing. So you cannot tell what somebody weighs by looking at them.
But when we exclude people from the public sphere and we make them invisible, first off, that’s really crappy to the actual people in those bodies because they need to be able to get into the grocery store and navigate the aisles too, and it’s not fair to shut them out. But it also continues to reinforce that “I’ve never met anyone in an 800 pound body or a 600 pound body. That’s not a thing. That’s a theoretical person. That’s not a person whose body could possibly be okay because I can’t even imagine it.”
I was talking to this photographer the other day, and I had to excuse myself from the conversation because this particular photographer were trying to think of a really large size that they could list in a model call, and the largest size that they could think of was a 14 clothing size.
Lu Uhrich: What? Which is the average size.
Lindley Ashline: I had to excuse myself from the conversation. This is what happens when we prioritize very, very small bodies at the cost of everyone else. We don’t know what larger bodies look like.
Coming back to when we think of large bodies and public access, we think of people at Walmart, which is one of the most toxic and cruel ideas that anyone could ever have come up with. But when you go to Walmart, look at people. Don’t look at what they’re wearing. Don’t look at “oh, that person is really, really fat and they’re on a scooter, so they must be lazy and unhealthy and whatever.” Just look at the bodies. Look at the bodies that are actually around you in real life, like Lu was saying, and internalize that as opposed to “when I scroll through Instagram, all I see is svelte, Nordic 18-year-olds, and thus that’s what’s normal.” Look at the people actually around you when you go out.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah, but I do hear what you’re saying, which is even when we look at the people around us when we go out, we’re still not seeing the full spectrum of bodies because not most of the places that we go to are accessible to the full spectrum of bodies.
Something that has been rocking my world – I interviewed Jen McLellan of Plus Mommy, and she brought up – we were talking about chairs in doctors’ offices and in restaurant seating and airplane seats, and I know that you have brought up before a moving van that couldn’t even fit a friend of yours. All of these places, again, where there isn’t access for people in larger bodies.
And Jen brought up, just like a one-liner in our conversation, think about when you park in a parking space, how closely you’re parking to the other cars, because all sorts of bodies are coming in and out of these vehicles and if you park too closely, you might inhibit someone from actually being able to get whatever done they needed to get done, go to whatever store they needed to, get out of their vehicle. Or get back in.
Lindley Ashline: Or get back in.
Lu Uhrich: Right. I was like, holy shit, I am 37 years old; I am still learning every day the things I take for granted being in a thinner body, and still being fat positive and doing this work and caring so strongly about body liberation, and there are still things I miss. That has just – ever since, I don’t not think about it. I have to think about it every time I pull into a parking space. But even so, that in and of itself probably keeps a lot of people out of the public sphere. Just the way that our parking spaces are lined.
Lindley Ashline: Oh yeah. I know so many fat people who have horror stories of being trapped outside their car in a parking lot because while they were in a store, somebody came and parked right up on their door, and they’re having to crawl through own trunk into their car.
You’re standing there. Think about what this would feel like. You’re standing there, in a parking lot. People have parked so closely on both sides of you that you can’t get in either of your doors, and you’re standing there debating whether you’re going to try to break into your own car through the trunk and somehow try to crawl in this tiny little space and humiliate yourself, and somebody comes along and offers to back your car out for you.
Not only is that a completely humiliating experience for most of us that that might happen to, but then you have to depend on the kindness of this stranger not to steal your car on top of it. [laughs]
And I want to emphasize that part of the background of all of this is to know that when you are in a fat body and something bad happens to you, you will be blamed. This is true of any marginalization, any oppression. If you’re in a black body and something bad happens to you, you’re going to be blamed. If you’re in a female body, if you’re in a body with a disability or in an LGBT body, you know in the background, in the back of your mind, that this is going to be “How can we blame this on you?”
Honestly, I think the reaction to a local news story where a fat woman was trapped outside her car and a man walked up and offered to back it out and then stole it instead – the reaction would be laughter. Out of 100 Facebook reacts on that local news story, 99 of them would be the laughing face. So you know in the back of your mind all the time that if anything bad happens to you because of your body, most people are just going to think it’s funny. So I get mad about that too.
Lu Uhrich: Oh, totally. As you’re talking, I’m like, and this is why the idea of the minority stress theory is so true, and the fact that when you are constantly stigmatized and oppressed, that is doing something to you physiologically, raising your cortisol, messing with your hormones, because you’re daily living under that scrutiny and under that fear. And like you said, the idea that in some way, in any way, it will be blamed on you, which is why a lot of people in marginalized bodies have particular health concerns not related to their bodies, but related to the stress of being in that body in a culture that’s bigoted.
Lindley Ashline: I recently started seeing a doctor who is very firmly in the Health at Every Size philosophy and framework. My entire life, I’ve had a series of increasingly less fatphobic doctors as I stopped putting up with it and started seeking doctors who wouldn’t shame me for living in the body that I live in.
But my blood pressure went down 20 points when I had it taken sitting in that Health at Every Size doctor’s office. 20 points, just from being taken in an office where I wasn’t stressed because I felt like I either had just been shamed about my weight or was going to be shamed. 20 points.
Lu Uhrich: I believe it.
Lindley Ashline: I’m reading through the book The Body Keeps the Score right now, and it’s fantastic. I highly recommend it. It’s quite academic; it’s going to take you a while to work through unless you’re used to reading academic material. But it really emphasizes how our bodies tell that tale.
00:39:00
I want to come back really quick to – you were talking about you just hadn’t realized, being a person in a somewhat smaller body, how strange and terrifying an environment like a parking lot might be for someone in a marginalized body.
I have been running a thin privilege series on my Instagram that is primarily meant for people in smaller bodies who just don’t realize what it’s like to navigate the world in a fat body, and the responses to that have been, again, really fascinating. Some of the responses have been “Oh my gosh, I live in a thin body and I had no idea that the same environment that I’m navigating with no problem is designed to exclude you.”
But to be honest, the primary response that I get from people – and sometimes it’s outright trolling and sometimes it’s just people who don’t get it and don’t want to because they’ve never had to face any kind of oppression and they can’t grapple with it – is, “You deserve that.” Some people are softer about it and some people are harsher about it, but the message is “You deserve that because of the body you live in. You deserve that because” – I’m not going to list them because I don’t want you to internalize them any more than you have to, but insert anti-fat stereotype here.
Okay, I’ll list two. “You deserve that because you don’t have the self-discipline to have a thin body. You deserve that because you’re too lazy to have a thin body.” Like I said, you can fill in the rest yourself.
But it’s been really interesting to watch that because this notion of “deserving” is fascinating, and it’s depressing. These are people who are saying that I don’t deserve to be able to sit down in my doctor’s waiting room. These are people who believe I don’t deserve to have a seat when I have to go to the emergency room. These are people who believe I don’t deserve to fly on an airplane or to sit down on a bus or a train or to be able to sit down at a restaurant.
A lot of it comes back to seating because that’s very visible, but people who think I don’t deserve to have healthcare that doesn’t consist just of “lose weight.”
Lu Uhrich: Or learn to kayak.
Lindley Ashline: Yeah, people who think I don’t deserve to ski or to kayak or to ride a horse. Yes, there are horses that are bred to carry heavier weight people. That’s one that always comes up, like animal cruelty. No, no, no, I’m not talking about riding a pony in my 270 pound body. A Clydesdale can carry me. Come on.
At any rate, these are people who think that I don’t deserve to have full access to daily life. People who think that I don’t deserve to be able to get to an office so I can work. People who think I don’t deserve to live.
They’ve been taught that. This doesn’t come out of a vacuum. When you see these responses and you see these trolls, dozens of trolls, every day, over and over and over, the through lines become very clear. There’s so much fear in this. There’s so much fear. Of course, fat people are taught that we don’t deserve to have access, but thin people are taught that they’d better not become fat or they will no longer deserve access.
There’s so much fear in this trolling. There’s so much fear in these responses because when they say, “You don’t deserve it because…”, what that means is that if they ever show the slightest sign of any of those things that they assume fat people do all the time – “if I eat an extra donut…”
And I want to be clear here that we know from actual science that fat people and thin people eat about the same types of food and about the same quantities. But thin people are taught that if you eat an extra donut, or if you eat a donut at all, if you eat sugar, if you have the regular pasta instead of the whole grain pasta, if you rest when you’re tired instead of going to the gym, that that’s a slippery slope to becoming like me, and that means that you’ll no longer deserve access to the world. How terrifying must that be?
I’ve been fat since puberty, so my entire adult life, I’ve known that the world thinks I don’t deserve to have nice things. But how terrifying must it be to be in a thin body and be scared of “sinning” all the time, or of proving yourself unworthy, and then suddenly you’re in the outcast class? That must be terrifying to live with all the time. Not as terrifying as not being able to access the public sphere already, but… [laughs]
Lu Uhrich: Exactly. That’s what I was going to say. You listed the two types of clients that we work regularly with here at Seven Health. It’s either people who are in thin bodies who are afraid, for whatever reason, of gaining weight, or getting larger, who are experiencing disordered eating and eating disorders, or people in larger bodies who are experiencing disordered eating and eating disorders, negative body image – again, at either side of the spectrum – but who are already experiencing the bigotry, the shaming, the concern trolling that happens. And like I said before, the previous group of people are the ones who are afraid of experiencing it, whether that’s a conscious fear or it’s subconscious.
But what I find so interesting about this whole conversation and about trolls in general is they’re so quick to put the onus on individuals. It could be really alleviating and lift all this fear – I guess except for the fear of change – but it really could alleviate a lot of fear to say, “Hey, you know what? Our system is broken. Our culture has some changing to do.” We could shift this together when it comes to the places and spaces and situations – or we could just put the onus on somebody who’s fat.
I guess that’s what’s hard for me to understand. What harm does it to do to a concern troll to start trolling the systems that are doing this? Troll the airline industry. Troll the people who decide – the municipalities, the cities, the counties that decide where to paint the lines for parking. Why are we not trolling these people, and instead we’re trolling the people who are negatively impacted from those choices?
I don’t get it, but I will say that it took me time, obviously living in a privileged body, to see that. And I’m still seeing it, as I shared, so it’s no condemnation to anybody who’s listening who’s like, “Whoa, mind is being blown.” Let it be blown and then let it be blown again and again as we continue to shift the focus from someone living in a larger body or an otherwise marginalized body to the systems that are keeping them oppressed.
00:46:00
Lindley Ashline: I think it comes back to the just-world hypothesis. As we’re talking, I actually pulled this up in my browser so I can read you the proper definition. The just-world hypothesis – thanks, Wikipedia, for this definition – is “the cognitive bias or assumption that a person’s actions are inherently inclined to bring morally fair and fitting consequences to that person, to the end of all noble actions being eventually rewarded and all evil actions eventually punished.”
I talk about this quite a bit in my work in various forms because that’s one of the fundamental parts of diet culture, and it’s also one of the fundamental parts of ableism. It feels very simple in that it gives us this really – it’s false and it’s toxic, but it’s also really simple and easy. It gives us this “If you have been a bad person and done bad things, then that is expressed in your body. If you have been virtuous and done good things, then good things will come to you, and thus that will also be tied to your physical body.”
Diet culture gives us this super awesome shorthand that says “If you live in a fat body, you are…” a long list of negative things here. I mentioned a couple of them earlier. “If you are a thin body, then you have done things right and you have been rewarded with a thin body.” Of course, that ignores science and genetics and reality in general, but this just world – it’s very simple and it’s very easy to fall into and stay in because it gives you this wonderful shorthand.
I don’t want to repeat or emphasize bigotry here, but similar things for people who have visible disabilities, or even invisible disabilities – chronic illnesses. It’s like the inverse of The Body Keeps the Score, where we talk about trauma being expressed in the body. This is like the Bizarro World toxic version of that.
Lu Uhrich: Like virtue or something.
Lindley Ashline: Right. This is why, if you think about Disney villains – think about Jafar. When the Disney Aladdin movie came out, the original animated one, I was pretty young, but I took one look at Jafar and I knew he was going to be a bad guy. You look at Ursula and you know she’s going to be a bad guy. You look at all these villains – and like I said, I grew up without a TV, so I’m sure there are a thousand more examples across media. Their negative traits have been expressed in their bodies, so they are deformed, they look strange. They don’t look normal. They don’t look okay.
Think about the pirate with the peg leg. [laughs] It’s really direct and very toxic. Or Captain Hook with his hook hand. That’s what I was thinking of. But this very direct, the body is an indicator of character. It’s a super easy shortcut.
And again, the fact that it’s not true doesn’t mean it’s not emphasized. Diet culture emphasizes that, and that’s part of that fear, too. “If I become fat, it proves I’m a bad person. It shows the whole world that I’m a bad person.” So again, there’s this fear keeping people in line.
Lu Uhrich: Oh, totally.
Lindley Ashline: Coming back to the trolls, part of this just-world thing is that there are a lot of rewards to perpetuating oppression. If I go troll somebody because “I’m not like that person and I don’t want to be like that person,” I’m reinforcing in my own mind the fact that I’m not like that person. “Maybe I didn’t go to the gym today, but I’m not like that person, and I’m feeling really threatened by this person existing, so I’m going to go reinforce that I’m not like you.”
But then also – this is a little bit inside baseball, and this is very of its place and time, so I don’t want to go into a lot of details about it, but there has been a pretty high profile cluster on Instagram where there’s a particular group of fat activists who’ve been targeted by a particular group of really dedicated trolls that are all very based around a particular guy who runs some online fitness accounts. These are all people who are very, very, very, very, very involved in bodybuilding/gym/fitness culture. They have been making these very high profile attacks on a bunch of fat activists on Instagram.
They are a really good example of how there are rewards to reinforcing oppression because every time one of these dudes goes and trolls a fat activist, he’s also proving to his friends that “I’m one of you. I’m not like them. They don’t deserve to have nice things, and I’m reinforcing that because I’m one of you. I’m a good person.”
So every person who sneers at people at Walmart, every person who doesn’t hire a particular professional because they would rather go with a thinner professional instead, every person who is a concern troll on Instagram, every person who chooses diet culture over body freedom – and again, that doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person because there’s a certain amount of protection in that. If you are a thin person who picks a fat photographer, that’s a brave choice in the world we live in in the sense that you could choose to be associated with someone who is higher in the hierarchy and thus associate yourself with those positive traits that we assign people.
I’m not saying that if you have ever had a talk with your niece about “I’m just worried about your health” – if you have ever done some things and you’re feeling a little called out right now, that’s good. You probably need to feel called out. Like I said, I’m an angry shouty lady on the internet, so I’m probably the one to do it.
But I’m not saying that that makes you inherently a bad person because aligning ourselves with oppressive systems has rewards. There are social rewards in that. There’s safety in that. I’m getting a little muddled here about it because I feel so strongly, but these people who are trolling, people who are making choices to invest in diet culture, there’s safety in that.
Because let me tell you how much crap I get from even people that I’m close to sometimes about my choice to not diet. My mother feels differently than I do about diet culture and about dieting, and we have occasional discussions where I have to reinforce that I’m not going to diet, even now. My entire career is based on anti-diet concepts.
I lost friends. When I stopped participating in diet culture, I lost friends. I’ve had family members drift away. And that’s fine. They’re full human beings. They get to make decisions too. I’ve found wonderful friends. I’ve found amazing colleagues. I have the most incredible clients. The people who buy my subscription box say, “You’re making a real difference in the world,” and that’s amazing. But there’s safety in going with the mainstream.
Every time you post an anti-diet meme to your Facebook page, that can be hard and scary when you start doing it because it’s not safe. You risk losing the rewards of privilege and you risk losing the rewards of thinness. If you don’t live in a thin body and you participate in diet culture and you stop doing that, you risk losing that reward. You miss out on approval. You miss out on belonging. You miss out on sometimes physical safety. That’s hard.
I’m not in their heads, but the people who are the loudest proponents of diet culture, I just assume they’re the ones who are most afraid.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can only really relate it to – obviously, I’m doing this work too, so I see the concern trolling and I get the fear side of it as well. In my personal life, I can relate it to I am the survivor of religious trauma. In that way, it is very similar, this idea, like you’re speaking of, of the just world. Some of the experiences that I have had with religion and the ideas around “You’re in or you’re out; here’s what keeps you safe, here’s what keeps you not safe.” You’re safer still if you call out people that are out and you make more of a fuss about people who are on that side of the line because that way, you can remind yourself that you’re in, that you’re safe, that you’re still okay.
I can understand that human nature side of wanting survival and wanting to make sure that your place in the group is secure. I see that. And also, it causes a ton of harm.
So this concern trolling thing – we’re just randomly talking. I like it because I feel like we’re just hanging out and like “Oh yeah, that. Yeah, that.” But we’re hitting on so many of the things that I’d wanted to talk to you about. Concern trolling was certainly one of them.
00:56:05
I want to bring that back, as you were sharing about this idea of the safety in either calling people out for their bodies, putting the onus and the responsibility on them, and continuing to try to make people in larger bodies or other marginalized bodies invisible – bringing that back to photography, do you think that’s the same reason why most photographers aren’t taking pictures of a range of body types?
Lindley Ashline: I’m sure there is a component of that. When you run a small business – and I want to note here that I have the privilege as a business owner – my spouse has supported me financially and emotionally. He’s a fantastic person. We were high school sweethearts. We’ve been married for a really long time. I love him very much.
But he’s also supporting me financially because small businesses, particularly as inequality grows in the United States – all small businesses are precarious. The small business failure rate is like, I don’t know, 95%. Those of us who have some sort of privilege financially or in connections or whatever have a huge advantage here. I broke even on my business for the first time last year. It took me 4 years. That doesn’t mean that I’m paying myself or that I’m making money. It just means that the business itself broke even. So I have a huge amount of privilege in that I’m able to do this work.
But all small businesses are precarious, so when you’re running a small business, particularly if you are not deeply, deeply convicted about the worth of all bodies and the conviction to center the bodies that get ignored the most, honestly it just makes financial sense to go with the most mainstream market where you think you can make money.
Of course, it would also make sense to think, “Nobody is serving fat people in my market, in my area geographically. I should do that.” But that’s when our internal prejudices take hold because, particularly in any sort of business that’s related to art, when all the artwork we see is centered on thin bodies, when everything we see and everything we’re trained to do is centered on thin bodies, that’s when diet culture and fatphobia and prejudices take over and prevent us from seeking out markets of marginalized people.
And honestly, as a business owner, I’ll just say too that it’s hard to serve marginalized people as a small business owner because marginalized people make less money and have less access to services, and also are trained by all of our culture to hate themselves.
When I work with fat and marginalized clients, these are people who have overcome internalized self-hatred, they’ve overcome financial barriers that thinner people don’t have – because we know that fat people are paid much, much less than their thinner counterparts – they have overcome a bunch of hurdles to come see me. Again, because I have the financial privilege to offer these services that are centered on large bodies, I am able to hold that space specifically for fat and marginalized bodies.
But if I were a single mom or I were in a thin body and hadn’t really been exposed to these concepts, or if I weren’t firmly, firmly convicted about these concepts, then I would probably be out there only serving thin people too.
So yes, of course photographers and all business owners should be making their services inclusive, but at the same time, I don’t agree with not being inclusive and not being good at serving large bodies, but I get it, too. I get why people don’t. If I desperately needed to pay my rent, yeah, I’d probably be out there Photoshopping people too, to be honest.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah. I hear what you’re saying as something that we’ve echoed in other places and spaces as well. Those people with the most privilege have the greatest responsibility of doing this work. It shouldn’t be on the shoulders of the people who are marginalized. It shouldn’t be on the shoulders of the people who aren’t privileged in other areas, financially or the like. But the people who do have privilege – in this case, you’re saying as a small business owner, you have the privilege of another source of income through your partner, and that’s something that you know and you can rely on. And because of that, you have more opportunity to do this work.
I really think that’s so valuable to hear because we can share that same sentiment across all things. Those of us in thinner bodies have a responsibility, have the privilege, of being able to – like you talked about earlier, I have the privilege of being able to post anti-diet memes all day, and I’m going to get way less of the trolling – I still get trolls, but not nearly as many as somebody who’s in a larger body who posted an anti-diet meme is going to get.
I have more privilege, so I can speak up more. I can do it more often. I can use the platforms I have to be able to speak in that way. The same way with ability status, the same way people of color should not be the ones responsible for fixing the system that’s broken and built against them. This is a message that we can share across the board. So I love that you brought that into, “Hey, as a small business owner, we have varying amounts of privilege, and here’s how I’m using mine.”
01:01:45
For other people who are privileged and maybe are photographers or artists and their curiosity is beginning to be sparked by what you’re sharing, what’s your advice for getting into the work of being more inclusive? How do they start?
Lindley Ashline: I have so many thoughts about this that I’m literally writing a book. It’s called Body Liberation for Business, and I’m working on writing it. I don’t have a release date yet. But there are so many components. I’m sitting here trying to condense it.
I think the first thing I would say is unless you have been involved in the work of identifying and dealing with your own internalized fatphobia for a long time, work on that first. You can’t pursue “I’m going to serve people in fat bodies as a business strategy” if you don’t like fat bodies. And by like, I don’t mean sexually attracted to. I mean respect and treat like normal human bodies. If you think fat bodies are weird and gross, it’s going to come out in how you interact with people. We’re not stupid. We can tell when people think we’re gross. [laughs]
So you have to deal with that first, because if you start – I’m going to pick photography because that’s my jam – if you start photographing fat bodies when you don’t like or understand fat bodies, the client will be uncomfortable, or the model. It will come out in the photos. They’ll look awkward and weird because they’re uncomfortable, and it will be very clear, and clients aren’t going to like working with you. So first you’ve got to deal with that.
There are many, many strategies already on the internet for dealing with internalized fatphobia, but the big one, the one that was a big deal for me, coming back to those LiveJournal days and seeing people in fat bodies – find people in fat bodies on Instagram. Follow them. Find body positive accounts and fat positive accounts on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and follow them. Start absorbing large bodies. Surround yourself with that. Pay extra attention to the bodies you see in the world.
I think what you would absorb if you went out and looked at posing in the photography world today is that fat bodies are some sort of strange other species who require very delicate handling and must be posed in a certain way that minimizes them. Honestly, screw that. [laughs] Just pose bodies.
Now, it is true that very, very small bodies physically move and interact with themselves differently than a very fat body. A very fat body is going to do different things when you put them in a specific pose, Pose A, than a very thin body would look like in Pose A. It doesn’t mean that Pose A doesn’t work on large bodies, but there will be some times – and this is the same when you work with someone who has any sort of mobility limitations, too.
Say it’s a boudoir session. You stick them on their back on a bed and they’ve got their legs up the wall. Some people’s legs are going to cross at different points than others. But the fundamentals of the pose are still the same, and it doesn’t mean that fat body isn’t going to work in that pose or that fat body can’t do that pose. It just means they may need to have their legs parallel to each other instead of crossed. Fat bodies aren’t some weird other species that require an entirely different set of poses. [laughs] Unless you’re dedicated to minimizing those bodies, and that’s why you hear a lot in the photography world “This pose just doesn’t work for anybody who’s not really thin.” It’s not that it doesn’t work; it’s just that it looks different and it doesn’t minimize the body in the way that you prefer.
So if you are dedicated to minimizing bodies, I was going to say don’t bother trying to work with fat people. But honestly, there will be fat people who want their bodies to be minimized, and that can be – it’s not the ideal offering but a client base, I think, but that can be a really important gateway, too. Just allowing people to see themselves, even if the poses are traditional minimizing ones. I think that can be an important gateway.
5 years from now Lindley may listen to this recording later and go, “What were you thinking telling people that?” But even if you can give people a gateway into seeing themselves, that can be important too. Any step that you can make to let fat people see themselves and to see other people in bodies like theirs, as long as that is not a shaming context – I’m not saying that you should come in and say, “Because you’ve got a big old booty, I’m going to Photoshop it to be smaller.” That’s not what I’m talking about.
But taking boudoir as an example, because boudoir is one of the most posed of all the types of current portrait photography styles, boudoir has very specific poses that you need to get people into. Very specific back arching and popping your boobs out, and very specific leg crossing. Very specific poses to look sexy. Even if you are sticking with those poses, just letting fat people access them is a start.
So I think any incremental move you can make towards non-shaming representation of fat bodies in your work is a good one. You don’t have to go from being aspirational bodies only in your portfolio to my level of wild-eyed activism. [laughs] You don’t have to do that all at once. But any step you can make, even if you are just putting one fat person in your portfolio in beautiful, non-shaming poses, that counts. Even if you’re putting more people of color in. Even just one step.
But to do that step, again, if you’re going to do that step and you are not going to perpetuate fatphobia via your business, you have to work on that first. After you’ve worked on that, I think it will become more clear to you how you can work with clients in a non-shaming way and how you can start representing.
I think the root of it is really do that work first. Go look up Jes Baker and look at Jes Baker’s books. That’s a great, really easy entry point if you don’t have any idea where to start. Just start following fat people on Instagram. The more that you get used to seeing those bodies, the more you’ll get used to seeing the beauty in those bodies.
I don’t want you to go out there and photograph people or draw people because you feel like you have to. Again, that’ll come through. I want you to get to a point where you can do that because you see value in those bodies artistically. If you can get to that point, then you’ll see where the first steps are, I think.
Lu Uhrich: That’s really great advice. I do think you’re right; the work starts there, of working on your own internal biases and then working towards fat acceptance and broadening the scope of the people that you see and the bodies that you embrace and celebrate. Of course that’ll translate into your work, into the work of photography or art. The thing we don’t need any more of is photographs of people in larger bodies looking sad or suffering or without heads or whatever the typical photographs are. We don’t need more of that. We do need more of people celebrating all bodies and all shapes.
01:09:45
This leads to a question I have about a word that particularly comes up with my clients a lot, and I’m really quick to jump on, and I’m so curious to hear what you have to say about it. That’s the term “flattering.” For me and the work that I do, when most of my clients bring up the term “flattering,” they’re talking about flattering as in “Does this outfit make me look smaller? Do I take up less space?” They’re talking about flattering meaning getting them closer to the cultural beauty ideals and standards.
So for me, I’m like “stop talking about flattering.” Actually, what we really do is we do an exercise where we reframe what flattering means, and I have my clients define it for themselves based on their core values. Then that’s how they approach an outfit that makes them feel joyful or more like themselves, comfortable in their own skin, whatever it is. But I’m curious for you, as a photographer – you must hear the word “flattering” all the time, and I’m wondering how you deal with it, how you handle it, how you use the word.
Lindley Ashline: Oh, so many thoughts here. This ties right back into posing because when we talk about posing, it’s always whatever is going to be the most “flattering” to this body, and absolutely, 100%, when we say flattering, we mean as thin as possible. There’s no question there.
On a personal level, screw flattering. The thing is that flattering is also one of those concepts that’s only applicable to a body up to a certain size. At my size, there’s very little – like when I think about clothing, there’s not a whole lot of clothing that would be “flattering” to a body that is shaped like mine. When you are say 10 clothing sizes larger than I am, there is nothing that’s going to make you look thin, so flattering doesn’t even apply.
It’s yet another one of these concepts that is gatekeeping and excludes us because if you can even access flattering, you have a certain amount of body privilege. So not only is it a toxic concept on several levels just as a concept, but it only applies to certain people anyway.
On a personal level, just screw flattery altogether. Wear what you want. Do what you want. But I also want to point out that there’s once again safety and a certain level of social reward in being flattering. When I go out in my daily life, I’m treated better if I’m wearing clothes that one might call flattering – clothes that are meant to make me look as small and taking up the least space possible – than I do when I’m wearing what is comfortable and what I enjoy wearing, which today happens to be Hello Kitty jammie pants because I’m home today. I have Hello Kitty jammie pants on and a hoodie. But if I go out wearing this, I’m treated very differently than I might if I were wearing things that were very structured and wearing all black and wearing things that are cut in a certain way to minimize me.
I have the freedom and the privilege, because I run my own business, I can say screw flattering. As a business owner who has clients who come in in a pretty wide range of places in their own body image journeys, to a certain extent I have to meet clients where they’re at. People know when they come to work with me, I’m not going to Photoshop you to look thinner. I’m not going to minimize your body. But as I am running through my posing choices in my head, if I have a client who’s not ready for full-on “I’m fat, here’s my fat body in all its fatness,” I might choose poses that are slightly more minimizing than I might for other people.
The goal is for them to be able to see their body, even if they have to do that little exposure thing and expose themselves to it gradually, if I shock them so fundamentally that they can’t even do that with their photos, then I have negated the reason that they’re here. I’m not ever going to do, like I said, the extreme flattery and stuff like Photoshopping fat rolls off or really extreme minimizing posing. But I might tilt the session in one way or another depending on where the client is in their journey because they need to be able to access their own bodies in a way that meets them where they are.
Lu Uhrich: That makes a ton of sense. Thanks for sharing that. Flattering, whether it’s in photographs or we’re talking about clothing, I haven’t found a definition of it – except for the complete rewrites that I do with my clients to make it personal to them, there’s really no definition that, to me, doesn’t just insinuate being smaller.
But I see how, when you’re sharing working with people who are just getting acquainted with seeing their own bodies and familiarizing themselves with them and learning to accept and appreciate them, you probably have to work with a wide range of clientele who might have different ideas about what flattering is and what they need from your session. So thanks for educating me on that.
01:15:20
I know we’re running up towards the end of time, and I could talk to you for another hour and a half, but I don’t want to end this conversation without hearing from you about your stock photography because I think it’s super important. Aside from the clients and people who are struggling with body image and their food relationship who listen, we have a ton of practitioners and other professionals who listen to this podcast, and I want them to know where they can find stock photography that’s going to center all bodies.
Lindley Ashline: I started my client photography in 2015, and in 2016 I realized – it’s funny; I had done so much work and so much thinking around what bodies we see where, and all the things we’ve talked about in this podcast already, and that we don’t see big bodies in the mainstream unless it’s like this one – I don’t want to say token, because it’s not necessarily always a token fat person in the social justice sense, but just there’s always one fat celebrity we can think of or one fat – I don’t know, I can’t think of any super famous stock photographers off the top of my head. But generally there’s one or two in the public sphere of fat people that we can think of. But that’s not really representation; that’s just one example.
But part of why we never see fat bodies in the media is because so much of the media and advertisement and marketing, all these worlds, run on stock photos. Go look at Getty. Go look at iStock Photo. Go look at Deposit Photos, all these different stock photo sites. What you see is thin bodies and only thin bodies.
What that means is that the millions of people out there who need stock photos for their businesses don’t have any choices. Part of the reason that all we see is thin bodies is because that’s all that’s offered on the stock photo side because anybody who doesn’t have the budget to hire a photographer and roll their own photoshoot for their business is buying stock photos. And when the only stock photos that are available are these very normative ones, well, that’s what we see.
So I found this magical way to change culture with like one person and one camera and a whole bunch of people who are willing to step up and represent for people who look like them. I started creating stock photos. Previously that stock photo brand was under RepresentationMatters.me. I have recently combined that with the rest of my photography business so that I had more time to sleep. [laughs] It turns out that running multiple brands takes a lot of time.
So that’s now under my main brand, Body Liberation Photos. You can get to that at BodyLiberationPhotos.com or BodyLiberationStock.com. Either one will take you to where you need to go. But the whole site is primarily fat bodies, and as much representation as I can get of people of color and people with various illnesses and disabilities.
It’s been such a cool project because every person in there, if it is two women posing together as a couple, they’re an actual couple in the real world. If it’s somebody that I have tagged with chronic illness or depression or bipolar disorder, that’s a person who actually has bipolar disorder. That’s what that person looks like in the real world. If it’s a person who is non-binary or transgender or a Polynesian American, whatever, that’s a person who is legit. They’re not acting. That’s actually who they are in the real world.
So it’s this really cool way to get high quality photos of people who are representatives of real world people. The funny thing is that since I’ve started, it’s become apparent, this yawning cavern of need that needs to be filled. I am one person with one camera, and I have access to certain things and I don’t have access to others.
There’s a desperate need for photos of fat people in medical contexts that aren’t shaming. We’ve all seen that stock photo of the fat white woman with kind of a concerned hand on her stomach and then the thin white female doctor who puts a hand on her shoulder. We’ve all seen that photo, but we don’t have any positive contexts. That is not something I’ve had a chance to tackle yet, medical contexts.
But we don’t have anything. You can’t see representation of fat bodies in medical contexts in the media in a positive sense because we don’t even have that. It doesn’t exist. It’s on my list, I guarantee you. [laughs] But just being able to give companies and small businesses and individual sole proprietors – and there are hospital systems that are starting to use these photos – just giving people a way to choose to represent large bodies – that was something that literally didn’t exist in the world.
At this point in 2020, there’s a couple of competitors who have sprung up who are releasing some things for free. I do release some stock photos for free every month via my newsletter as well. So it’s wonderful that there’s some free resources out there now that are doing things similar to what I’m doing, and then my work, most of it is not free, but that’s because I need to eat. [laughs]
And also because the people who are in the photos, I’m paying them a living wage for their time, too, which is so important because these are marginalized people. Nobody wants to pay them anyway, so the fact that I’m offering them a living wage for their time to come in – or they can choose to get photos from the session, one or the other. Some of them choose photos and some of them choose money. Of course, that’s completely up to them.
But that transgender woman who is walking on the beach or whatever, who else is offering to pay her a living wage for her time? I feel like it’s a cascading way to support causes I believe in. It’s freaking magical because I get to represent large bodies, I get to do it at a living wage for my own time by charging an appropriate amount for the photos, I get to pay marginalized people a living wage, they get a chance to get in front of the camera – because most of the people that I’m working with can’t afford a professional photographer, so it gives them a chance to see their own bodies in a positive context – and they get to help change the world, too.
It’s absolutely a thrilling thing to be working on.
Lu Uhrich: I love that you brought this up. Even the idea around paying your models and thereby charging for the stock photos, I think that’s so important. Any time we are charging a price, making a profit – I know we don’t always make a profit but when we charge a price, but either way, any time we’re receiving money from others directly for work that is centering or using either the skill, the voice, the imagery of people in marginalized bodies, I think it is so important to pay them, exactly because of what you said. They’re already marginalized in our culture, in the workforce, in general. They’re being compensated less for equal work if not better work. So it’s so important to pay them for their time.
And that makes me even more excited. I thought I couldn’t be more excited about the work you’re doing, but that makes me so happy.
01:23:20
I know that’s not the only thing you do, though. We have the stock photography, but you also – I’m a follower; I receive the Body Liberation Guide. You have a Body Love Box. I’d love for you to share about some of those things with the listeners as we’re wrapping up so that they can find out ways they can get more of your voice and more of your wisdom in front of them if they’d like it.
Lindley Ashline: The Body Liberation Guide is my weekly email newsletter, and it’s free. One of my superpowers is organization. I’m an extremely organized person. I always have been. I’m a list maker. Asana is my organizational drug of choice, Asana.com. And in the work that I’m doing, I kind of have to be because I also do writing, editing, and consulting. I have a part-time corporate job, and then I have the photography and then I have the subscription box. Doing all of these different things has lent itself really well to this personality that I have that is very, very organized.
One of the things I have been doing for many years now is collecting resources for Health at Every Size, for body positivity, for plus size fashion, for – I don’t even know. I’ve been involved in this work for so long that I’ve collected a lot of stuff.
The Body Liberation Guide is my way of sharing that in a usable, bite-size fashion with people. “Here’s my giant Evernote archive of 5,000 Health at Every Size aligned articles” isn’t necessarily all that helpful, but “Here are 5 HAES aligned articles on Intuitive Eating,” that’s usable. That’s awesome bite-size chunks.
So every week I send out this Body Liberation Guide, and it has my favorite photo of the week that I’ve taken and how you can buy that as an art print. It has some kind of intelligent thought from me on body liberation in some form. Last week’s was “I can’t write if I don’t have pants.” [laughs] Which had my highest open rate of any email ever because people were wondering why on earth I wasn’t wearing pants while I was writing. The answer was what we talked about earlier with the access. If I don’t have access to basic things like pants I can wear, I can’t change the world because I’m too busy looking for pants I can wear. So every week there’s some kind of writing from me on body liberation.
Then there’s a whole bunch of little chunks of bite-size resources, and that has been really fun to produce because it fulfills my organizational kick. [laughs] And it also has been really, really, really helpful for the people who get it. You can get that on my site at bodyliberationphotos.com. There’s a place to sign up for that.
Then I also have the Body Love Box, which is the monthly subscription box. It’s at thebodylovebox.com, and it’s a whole separate thing. The Body Love Box again is one of these amazing cascading ways to support lots of different people and, in this case, support marginalized artists. The box goes out every month, and it always has a Body Liberation Journal, which is something I create. That’s a journaling exercise every month that comes to you in paper form so you can write on it. It has some kind of artwork from one or more different marginalized artists.
Every box, again, pays a living wage to me and it pays a living wage to these artists. The way that most subscription boxes work is they are based on free stuff. And I don’t mean free stuff to you, the consumer; I mean things that the company gets for free or highly discounted. What mainstream subscription boxes do is go to small businesses and say, “Hey, if you give me 300 sugar scrubs to put in the box for August, then you’re going to get all this exposure, so we want you to do this for free or heavily discounted.” And businesses do because exposure is good. It doesn’t pay the bills, but it’s good. Honestly, I don’t know what the return on investment is like for those businesses. I have no idea.
But when I started the Body Love Box, I said, “Nope, we’re not going to work that way. We’re going to pay artists living wage.” That has actually been really challenging, again, as a small business owner because what that means is that the box costs $38 a month plus shipping, and you’re getting five to seven items plus the Body Liberation Journal. There’s always some small stuff that goes in the box too.
But it means that for $40 bucks, you’re not getting a huge box filled with factory-made stuff. You’re getting artisan, handmade goods, so the perceived value may not be as high. That is something where I have to do a lot of customer education. This is what it looks like when we pay people a living wage. This is what it looks like when we pay people for their work, an amount they can live on.
So on my end, it means I don’t haggle. When business owners tell me what their wholesale rate is, if I can afford to put it in the box, it goes in the box. If I can’t, it doesn’t. I don’t ever come back to them and say, “Can you cut that wholesale rate in half? I know you’re going to take a loss, but it would get you a lot of exposure.” I don’t do that. Everything that goes in pays a living wage, and it means that everything that goes in is actually supporting marginalized people as opposed to “Well, you’ll get some publicity out of it.”
This is another thing that I’m so proud of, because once again, it’s this cascading way to help people. It’s a really fantastic way for allies, people who are in various types of privileged bodies – particularly folks who are in thin bodies – to not only learn more about the experience of living in a fat people – I put a lot of zines in because they’re the perfect size to fit physically, and they’re one of the most honest and raw ways to look at the experience of living in a fat body.
There’s one that I sent out in the very first Body Love Box that’s now in the shop, where you can buy a single issue. It’s called “Fat Is Beautiful,” and it’s a whole zine. If you haven’t encountered zines before, they’re small books that people put together by hand, usually in like a photocopier, and they’re sort of scrappy and raw and real. There’s a whole zine on “Fat Is Beautiful,” and where else are you going to find that?
So it’s this really great way particularly for allies – who, again, do statistically tend to get paid more and have more privilege and to not know what it’s like to live in this oppressed body – it’s this really great way both to learn and to support. I have a lot of people in thin bodies who do subscribe, partly so that they can support less privileged people and partly because they’re there to learn.
Lu Uhrich: That’s great. One more thing that I would love you to tell everybody, all the listeners: where they can find you in general, website, Facebook, Instagram. Where can they get more of Lindley in their life?
Lindley Ashline: Central Lindley is always at bodyliberationphotos.com. I’m sure that will be in the show notes too.
Lu Uhrich: Yes.
Lindley Ashline: That will take you to everything. That takes you to the Body Liberation Guide, that will take you to the stock photos. There’s a link in the navigation to take you to the Body Love Box, too. But if you want to go straight to the Body Love Box, it’s at thebodylovebox.com. The Body Love Box does have its own social media channels too. It’s always @TheBodyLoveBox. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
If you want to find me, I am @BodyLiberationWithLindley on Instagram. On Facebook, I’m at Body Liberation with Lindley Ashline. On Twitter, I’m @LindleyAshline. Again, all these things are on the website because they are many and varied, so bodyliberationphotos.com is always your central location.
Lu Uhrich: Perfect. Listeners, you can find all of these links in the show notes as well. We’ll put them right in there.
01:31:25
Lindley, it is time for us to go. But before we do, if you had one thing to share with the listeners when it comes to body liberation, if there’s one thing you want to make sure they either learn from this conversation or something you haven’t yet had an opportunity to share, what would you want to tell them?
Lindley Ashline: Oh wow. I think the thing that I would most want to share is just be aware of other people as you move through your day, both in the sense that we’ve talked about – like look at other people’s bodies because it will help you normalize your own body within the context of the wonderful natural range of human variations.
But just be aware of other people in the sense that if you’re in a waiting room and you happen to have sat on the one bench in the waiting room because you have a purse and it was nice to be able to put it down beside you, and you notice another person walk in, are they bigger than you? Maybe they need that bench. Maybe that’s the only chair they can sit in in that waiting room. So it might be nice to just casually get up and move to a chair with arms so that the person who can’t sit in that chair has a place to sit.
Maybe if you’re in line for a public restroom and a fat person is coming out of the restroom, scooch over so that they can get by you. Just be aware of other people. When you pull into a parking lot, maybe don’t park right on top of the car next to you. That’s an act of activism. I know it sounds really silly and minor, but it’s not. It’s not petty at all. Just being aware of other bodies in the same space as you, you’re actively making other people’s lives better. So that is the easiest act of fat activism that you can start with right there.
Lu Uhrich: Thank you for that advice, and thank you so much for being a guest on Real Health Radio. It was wonderful to chat with you, Lindley, and I hope we can do it again soon.
Lindley Ashline: Thanks so much for having me.
01:33:35
Lu Uhrich: That’s all for this week’s episode. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Now before I say goodbye, I want to leave you with a personal recommendation (or four) as we’ve been doing at the end of every episode.
This month, what I really want to do is continue the momentum I’m hopeful you’ve gained in understanding white supremacy and engaging in anti-racism work as a result of our global civil rights movement to seek justice and equity for Black lives here in America and everywhere. I’m assuming and oh-so-hopeful that you’ve already begun doing the difficult and life-changing work of dismantling your own racism – if not prior to the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and so many like them, then surely since them.
I thought I’d encourage you to keep going and keep learning with some helpful podcast resources direct from my personal podcast listening list to you.
The first podcast I’ll recommend is White Homework, which is a conversational podcast designed to teach white people in particular about racial disparities and restorative justice in America.
Another great one is Seeing White. It’s an oldie but a goodie. Produced by Scene on Radio, this series discusses the origins of race and thereby whiteness. It helps the listener to understand white supremacy and begin the work of dismantling it in our own lives and our communities.
“1619,” which launched last year, gives an honest account of America’s history through a storytelling approach that begins with the arrival of slave ships on U.S. shores in – you guessed it – 1619.
Finally, Codeswitch is a weekly NPR show hosted by journalists of color who share their thoughts on race in America through pop culture, history, politics, and more.
And there you have it: four wonderful podcasts to continue your anti-racism learning and living. Hopefully one, if not all, of them resonates with you.
Happy listening, my friends, and thank you for joining me and Lindley today. We’ll be back next week with another great episode of Real Health Radio. Until then, you can find us at seven-health.com, and the show notes for this specific episode can be found at seven-health.com/202.
As I mentioned at the start of the episode, Seven Health is here for you and continuing to take on clients, so if you’re interested in working together to heal your relationship with food, body, and self, or if you simply want to find out more, head over to seven-health.com/help and apply for a free initial chat with us there.
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