a very literal-minded & rules-oriented girl has a very literal-minded & rules-oriented mother. one rule that the mother has is be skinny. there are many subrules involving treadmills, and almonds. she follows the rules as much as she can, and feels horrible when she can’t. but anyone who is this interested in following rules, this able to follow rules in the face of her natural urges, will prefer the concreteness of text to the shimmering uncertainty of human interaction, and so this young girl unsurprisingly becomes extremely online, and encounters body positivity. she absorbs it in its strictest and most rule-bound form, created disproportionately by the clashes of previous microgenerations of literal-minded rules-oriented girls suffering under literal-minded rules-oriented mothers. as she previously was able to make herself not notice that she was hungry, she is now largely able to blind herself from judging which girls are more attractive than others.1 she believes starry-eyed that this will not only raise her self-esteem but make her relationships with women less fraught and competitive. it does not make her relationships with women less fraught and competitive. she actually treats all women the same regardless of what they look like, and this turns out to not be a very good idea—especially considering her history of pain around her body image, and obsession with her body image. when she’s vulnerable about her low self-esteem about some trait, she literally isn’t thinking at all about whether the friend she’s opening her heart to, has that trait but more so. but they are, and they’re hurt, and they are so aware of their internal sense of their own rankings that they reasonably believe she is aware too. their counterattacks feel like random stabs to her.
or, to be precise, because she’s pretty young she’s able to stop her development of this skill, which due to her literal-mindedness was never going to be great in any case
https://youtu.be/fJWJcSTPNpM