Pleasure is Power with Shay Neary

not alone sometimes, So I'm going to say it. You are not alone. I am here. We're all in this together. I wanted to return to how Rebel Eaters Clubs started with the hopes that we could help you thrive through fearless interrogation and intimate conversations that centered the human relationship to food. When the coronavirus state of emergency was called last week, I went back and listened to each episode.

If I'm honest, I think I was doing it out of fear that everything we had discussed was now irrelevant. But what I realized as I listened was there is nothing farther from the truth. Family, history, sustenance, wisdom, humanity, love, justice. These are what's at stake in this show, and they're what's at stake in the world right now. I hope that as we finish out the season, you will be moved, maybe in a different way than before, to ask important

questions of yourself and our culture. And I hope that the show can be a source of laughter, fun and comfort. If you want to reach out, our email address is Rebel Eaters Club at gmail dot com and our phone number is eight six two two three one five three eight six. Here's the show. When I was four years old, I had a boyfriend named Ray Ray. We'd met in our Tiny Tots preschool. Ray Ray was the smallest kid

in the class and I was the biggest. I can't entirely remember how our love connection began, but knowing me, I probably initiated with a pickup line that went something like, guess what I like you? You're my boyfriend. Now. Back then, I lived in a world where I was the hottest, funniest, smartest girl on the planet. I had swagger, and Ray Ray was one hundred percent there for it. My friends in Tiny Tots hadn't been taught body shame or fat phobia yet, so no one thought our relationship was weird

or worthy of commentary. None of Ray Ray's friends told him he shouldn't be dating a girl who was way bigger than him. Ray Ray didn't feel like he needed to hide his love for me, and I didn't think twice about the fact that this boy I was in love with probably wouldn't be able to pick me up and carry me across the threshold on our wedding day like I'd seen on TV. I hadn't learned shame about my body, and he hadn't learned to be ashamed of

his innocent desire. It all just flowed. After Ray Ray, I would go on to learn that my body was seen as undesirable, and that made me forget how to sparkle. I forgot how to live my life unapologetically. Today, I'm talking with someone who lives her life with zero apology. Hello. Shane Neery is a plus size model who lives and works in New York City. Shay, do you have your true eat? I do have my treat. I see honchos and cheese fries. I got like an extra little bit

of onion add on too. It's like there's a lot of special fries you have over there. Yeah, yeah, I know it's like magical fries. I ordered them from a computer onions and sauce and shit. Bit I'm in Brooklyn. I got I got French fries with white American cheese melted. I wanted to talk to say about desire, about how we are drawn towards the things that give us pleasure and comfort and healing, including food. So do you want to take a delicious, loving bite together? Sure, make sure

it sounds extra delicious. Make it sounds sexual. I'm a former sex worker. I wonder if I can make cheese fries sound sexual. I'm sure you all that I'm trying. These are really good. Yes, yes, so like wait, so can we back up? So when we were talking about this snack we're gonna get you, you were like hanchos, but only the rand flavor. You discuss your relationship to this item. Hanchos are my drug, Like if I like, I can't describe the innate love I have for hanchos.

But they're a tortier chip. What is that they are? They're like they're dorito. They're they're kind of like doritos, but like the old school ones before before they started like spraying on the flavoring the hand toss doritos. That's exactly what they taste like. Oh I love that. So let's back up, like pre hanchos. Who are you? She is a thirty two year old M plus size transsexual from Pennsylvania and the Poconos and she's a busy gal.

She works as an office manager for a large advertising company in Flat Iron and as a model when she's not doing those things. And you know she's a busy gass. You got things to do, yes, So, actually I want to drill down on something you said. So, you're known as being the first trans plus size model to be featured in a major fashion campaign. I am doesn't that sound fancy? Lord? It is? It's very sound fancy. It is. How did you get into modeling? Um, it wasn't intentional.

I a friend. I was working in the food industry for twenty years and a friend of mine who I worked with, saw this ad in Time Out magazine and it was like this trans modeling agency and he was like, girl, you need to apply. And I was like, I Am not applying, Like they are not taking my fat ass. Like I literally at this moment where I was like, um no, I'm not doing it, and he like forced me like the next day to like send my pictures over and this girl responds and she's like, oh, oh,

aren't you pretty? And she's like, come in, we'll do some test shoots. And I got booked that like next week to be in the agency for trans models. And I came across this advertising for cover story. It was this woman looking for plus trans woman to put in her ads, and I remember going to the Goho Sie to meet her, and I point blank was like, why do you want to put a fat trans woman in

your ad? And she's like, I have tons of plus trans friends, none of them are model worthy, but in reality she's like, they all have wonderful personalities and they deserve to have imagery out there. And I was like, well, that sounds friendly enough. Like when the shoot went live, Refinary twenty nine picked it up, Mike dot Com picked it up, AOL Yahoo. It went all around the internet,

hardcore viral. It kind of like spread like wildfire, and then I was getting contacted to do other stuff, and then a UK company contacted me, and then I became the first plus sized trans model to book a UK campaign. I will say, you give really good face. But this actually brings us to our meat cute. Um. So, the first time I laid eyes on you was when we were both doing that shoot for a plus sized company called Dia and Co. In New York. Um it was this,

I just remember. It was this huge loft space in Chelsea? Was it Chelsea? I remember like walking down this long corridor for what seemed like half a mile, and then all of a sudden, I heard like dozens of people, lots of people, and and the craft services table was the first thing I clocked after that, and it was it was pretty impressive. Yeah, yeah, fun. Don't get me wrong. They're hard work, but it's fun. Yeah. No, it's true, and I've been. I mean I remember that day like

I had never seen so many lights and cameras. There were racks and racks of clothing, dozens of shoes. There was like a bunch of tables swished together, covered in every imaginable accessory, and there were about half a dozen hair and makeup artists and the person did my hair named Chucky put about twenty pounds of glorious hair extensions into my head. And I just remember like the photographer

just asking me to hop around like a bunny. It's just like it's just like amazing, right and absurdum And anyway, so you were there that day and I probably heard your laughter furs and before long I was listening to you tell stories and entertain everybody there. So you remember this, yeah, yeah, for sure, you know it's funny. I didn't want to intimidate the other girls, and I felt bad because like I had modeled all the time, and these women in the room they had not ever modeled before. I become

very different on shoots. Um, Like I take my modeling really seriously, but when I'm behind a camera, I always see I become my character. It's like my drag persona is Sha Butter. But when I'm behind a camera is when Sha Butter comes out. That's been like Sha but It's like I'm gonna make some money now, like pay

attention to me. I will steal your focus in the frame in any shot, like I will make you find me so Like a lot of times, like women yet shoots, they'll they're like they get like a timidity invite because I'm not afraid to like step in front of you. I will like literally shift in front of you to get this shie like, I'll be respectful, but know who know who's who? Yes, I mean shake, and I ask,

how did you become this person? I think years of hating yourself and then finding a re like, finding a re establishment for your identity really like puts you in a different headspace. Before my transition, I very much I didn't like who I was, like, I didn't like my personality.

I didn't like my identity, my appearance. And then when I started my transition, I started seeing myself in the mirror the way I wanted to see myself Not that I needed to change to be happy, but that I was finally recognizing the person in front of me instead of it being this like mystery individual. I felt like I was living in the shell of like. So a lot of a lot of my attitude, a lot of my strength has come from leading a very challenging life

growing up. Sha says her family was pretty poor. Then when she was six or seven years old, the river next to their house flooded and Shay and her family literally watched their home float away. After that, they moved from place to place to place, which only made a bunch of difficult family and dynamics worse like my parents were. Really they were heavy alcoholics, heavy trauma built individuals like that didn't understand their past nor did they want to

deal with it. And like cheese fries. It's funny, like we talked about cheese fries. How that's one of my favorite foods. One of my favorite foods because it's easy to bring home from a bar because like, you didn't really have time to cook that much when you're out drinking at a bar all day long. My parents always could bring home cheese fries. It's something like chicken cheese fries and chicken tenders. It was like a regular dinner

for me if my mother wasn't cooking. I think food has Food is kind of a witness in some sense to your experience, and we our lives are kind of catered around that. We have foods that bring us innate comfort because there they were with us in times of struggle or times of positivity. And sometimes it can bring us great pleasure, and sometimes it can remind us of pain and things we've been through. And I think you kind of view food as you've kind of experienced it

through your life. But if you become aware of when you do these things and how you eat them, or what you choose to do when you're in pain or in pleasure, Like then you you kind of like start to choose things base off of that. More that after the break, everyone's got comfort foods, things that bring us warm feelings of home, of plenty, feelings of being held

and loved. Because, my god, there are a few things that make me feel more amazing than a warm apple crisp with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, or hot Cheetos with slightly maltebres or manutho. The way it feels to top off the bowl of soup with a small fistful of onions and cilantro, to squeeze little slices of fresh lime, the little bit of juice that dribbles down my wrists and out to anyone close enough to be

in the manuvo slash zone. I even love being part of the elite club of people who understand the glory of tripe. Then are those sacred ingredients. We all know how strong our associations with food can be, because food is a witness to our experiences, a witness to the sweet memories and the difficult ones. Eggplant, parmesan literally is like things I will never eat again, Like the amount of fights my mother and father had over eggplant fucking parmesan.

This one time a tray of eggplant parmesan fell out of the stove because my father didn't use like a proper thing, and he burned his hand and it created this massive, massive fight, or my dad got belligently drunk and it got very abusive, and my like, because my childhood is so built upon that, like food has become

so tied into those experiences. My life has kind of been in disarray so many separate times where like I got thrown out when I was fourteen, and I live with my drag mother for a large period of that time, and kind of started escorting at a very young age and nowadays, like we like even then it was considered like child prostitution, but then it was like survival for me,

you know what I mean. Like I wasn't I wasn't looking at it like that, right, I was sort of thinking about, you know, going back to escorting and sex work. And there's kind of this I don't know, like this fascinating binary of like good, bad, secret public those kinds of binaries that I feel are really at work when

we're talking about sexuality and sex work. I was thinking about when I first moved to San Francisco and I was dating someone and we had this like really incredible sexual chemistry and he just worshiped my fat body in this way that was really extraordinary and that I kind of I don't think i'd ever really experienced, and it gave me so much freedom, and I was sort of falling for this person because he was so clear about

his desire for my larger body. And then you know, a little bit of time goes on and he straight up tells me like, listen, you're my ideal body. You're

really awesome. But I do not have he said this, raise I don't have the balls to deal with the ship my friends are going to give me if I date you publicly, So that might make me a coward, but that's just the reality of the situation, and just kind of thinking about like, right, I mean, obviously how hurtful and humanizing it is to hear something like that, but the other side of it being like, wow, you know this, there's so many layers of the secrecy, the hiding,

the closeting, whatever you want to call it. You know it's you said, you said that you felt good about yourself, like you felt like you you, and then all of a sudden they didn't want you, and you're like, oh well, they were like, I'm being a coward because of this, because of what society thinks I should date and should have. And I deal with that every day. People find me attractive or want to be with me, but won't facilitate their desire. They won't actively pursue it. What they want

is a societal picture. They want the imagery that will make everyone in their life happy for them, not what actually makes them happy. Because a lot of times what we desire is not innately what we want. What we want is typically a picture of what our families want for us, what our friends want for us, who will judge us to make us into who we are, not exactly what we desire, which is sometimes outside of the spectrum of what one is considered normal. I've never lived

in a position where I've been considered societally normal. I'm a freak. I'm an outcast, you know what I mean? And that someone doesn't want to fall in love with an outcast. Anything that doesn't fit within the white line stream of what is supposed to be and what isn't is going to be considered fetish which is why there's such a huge amount of sex work and pornography, because people have to sires that they're not actively willing to push.

For a lot of people in American society, there is an unspoken rule that some relationships are meant to be public and some are meant to be private. There are the relationships that are acceptable that don't shake things up. Often its relationships within people, white people, sis gender people, able bodied people. We learn those are safe to make public.

Then there are relationships that we are told to hide, people that we're supposed to feel ashamed about desiring about accepting even we're told that we should not desire to be close to people who are fat, people of color, people who are trans or gender expansive, people who are disabled, people who do sex work. In our culture, we're taught that having desire for these kinds of people is taboo

or deviant, So they are fetishized. They are stripped of their full humanity and reduced to a source of sexual release or pleasure, all that total poop garbage. People are capable of finding beauty, sexiness, appeal in all kinds of bodies and personalities. That is normal, it's natural. And burying that desire that's what's harmful to ourselves, to the people we love, and to our culture. Like we're all turned on by something. My key question always is is, like

what gets you hot? If you're not, if you're not seeing something or facilitating a relationship with something that doesn't get you hot, you may want to check why it's not going to work out in a year or two, Like, right, because you're you're trying to befit the cookie cutter, and not everybody fits in a cookie cutter. Honey. Some people are a bunkcake. Some people are freaking Italian loaf. They're

not all cookie cutters. Yeah, you know what I mean, Like some bitches get you a slice, Like yes, yes, yes, I mean I think you're getting at I mean to me, right. I think for a lot of people, they believe that attraction and desire are things that we're born with. Right, They're innate, they're perhaps evolutionary. At the end of the day, though most attraction is socially constructed. We learn who to be attracted to by our culture. We get the thumbs up when we're doing the right thing, we get the

thumbs down. We're doing the wrong thing, we get the carrot, we get the stick. Right, I don't know. I'm just thinking about like how like how we end up in these situations where people are incentivized to act and authentically, to not pursue pleasure, to not do things that feel good. And I feel like this is this is in a big way, the big sort of the big takeaway from

this conversation in general. But I kind of want to to really dive into the fact that, like the culture really fucks us up by telling us that there's something wrong with our desires, and so we end up denying them and repressing them. And I think this goes to this concept like the metaphor of taste, right, I don't know, Like the metaphor of taste reminds me of going to

college for the first time. I was in a white world, in a white affluent world, having grown up in mostly immigrant suburb of the Bay Area, and all of a sudden, I'm at UC Berkeley, and it was a very rapid education in how to perform taste, how to how to like, and how to perform that through food choices. Right, like I like I could perform that I was passing, or like I could imagine in my head that I was passing by mimicking the foods of the people that people

around me were eating. Obviously, it's so tied up in my own, you know, experience with disordered eating and dieting

and stuff like that. But I remember actually developing physical aversions to food that I knew was like food that was quote unquote off limits to me at that time, Like I would I would literally develop like nausea when I thought about or got close to food that I thought would you know, lead to like my worst case scenario, which at that time was that I would stay a fat person, or that I would regain some of the weight that I had managed to through some method, through

some terrible method, to lose. Our relationship with food and society is so torn. It's like it's just a sensibility that like you're being you're better than someone, you know what I mean. The difference between shopping at whole Foods or shopping at stop and shop, Like the difference between shopping at Trader Joe's, Vida, shopping at Aldease, Like they're all selling the same exact shit. But it's like we look at people who kind of who buy their stuff

at cheaper stores as like trashy. You see Foodtown on someone's cheddar, and you're like, oh, you went to Foodtown. Ill. I think food is very elitist. So you know how taste has more than one meaning, like your literal sense of taste, the party in your mouth when you take a bite of a red velvet cupcake, and it also has a second meaning that's all wrapped up in class indicating the ability or inability to tell if something is refined. Taste is defined by tastemakers, and in food for a

long time, one of those tastemakers was Gail Green. She was a New York magazine food critic for more than thirty years. Shaye told me when she was young, she wanted to be just like Gail Green. I went to

college to be a food writer. I wanted to make a lifetime writing about food and sex and how those two are so innately the same, and how like the control between making a good meal and the patience to establish a great recipe, between the compromise of making passionate love to your partner or sharing a free moment with a sporadic individual, and how food is so innately combined with that. I wanted to master that. And then I worked.

I worked for a red farm for a while, and my the owner, was best friends with Gail Green, and I met her in person, and I realized how unlike this woman I was, how like I didn't come from a wealthy background. I didn't come from money. I didn't know the difference between good great food and good food or fancy food, like the difference between per Se and McDonald's. Do you think I gave two damns back then? I didn't. I just loved cooking. I loved enjoying myself with food.

You know, I'm I'm Sicilian, so like food is love, I want I want people to enjoy food for what it is like. I don't want them to over absorb themselves in the nutritional values of food, because in reality, any food you're putting in your mouth is good for me. So you have a special relationship to cereal, if I'm not mistaken, I do. Yeah, I found girl for Cereal, and you've identified food as cereal as a soothing food

for you hundred percent. Because it's easy. It was easy to get Like if my mother had made food that I didn't want, my grandmother would give me a bowl of cereal, like she want me to starve. Yeah like like so like like my mother, my grandmother didn't believe my mother. If I didn't want to eat what she put on the table, she would literally send me to my room and without anything. And um, so like my grandmother would always always give me cheerios or like frosted flakes,

like a bowl of it. She'd poured me some and she'd act like she was going in the kitchen for herself, and then she'd ended up bringing it to my room. So a lot of like my comfort and joy, I always eat cereal. It's the first thing I did yesterday.

I got home and I literally made myself a bowl of shredded Trader Joe's maple whatever the hell they are, Yes, the frost, yes, yes, yes, So like cereal is a food that still gives you all these yammy good feelings that it's sort of reminiscent of like this really special caring behavior that your grandmother did for you. And I'm sort of like great, like what's the power and being able to give ourselves what we want? The power in

giving us what we want. Um, I like, I feel like adulthood is like finally making choices for yourself that you actively wanted to make as a child but couldn't. The positivity that's blossomed from my relationship with food is because I don't. I don't want to look at it negatively anymore. I don't want to. I don't want to have a negative relationship with food because it's not It

doesn't control my life. I control it. So like if I if I want to have and enjoy a piece of pizza because that's what I want today, that's what I'm going to have. And whether I have to suffer through the thoughts of eating that piece of pizza and what the terms mentally that come along with it, I'm going to try to reshape those mentalities. Like eggpan parmesan is not something I can reshape, you know what I mean.

That's a box that's closed. She's not eating that ever. Like, but like there are things that I'm kind of reworking, and I think we all can do that within our power. We all have the power to refoster things mentally for ourselves, and it requires work and effort and things like everyone wants things to be easy, and there's nothing easy about your mentality, not a damn thing. Things don't happen overnight.

You have to work on your mental health. You have to work on fostering healthy mental relationships with everything you have, And if you don't do that, you're kind of you're leaving yourself on the disadvantaged side of the scope. And I have no want or desire to do that, not anymore. At least say you are amazing and wonderful. You've shared so much. Are you looking in the mirror when you

say those things. I'm so grateful, Like I can find a little bit of time talking with you about your food history in your life, and thank you, just thank you so much. I love how Shay talks about our power to reconstruct and reimagine things that are paid to turn things that suck into things that work for us. We live in a culture that loves to label things as good or bad, a culture that uses those labels

to control our actions and our desires. There's good food and bad food, public relationships and private ones, the right kind of desire and the wrong kind. There's so much pressure to make the socially acceptable choice when we want something else. We get some pretty strong messages that there's something wrong with us, but we should feel guilty and ashamed. If you're sometimes debilitated by those feelings, you are not alone. Defying all that pressure is especially hard work if you're

also dealing with things like classism, trauma, and fat phobia. Well, rebel friends, I'm here to say that you can go at your own pace, find your own way through it, and I'm here to say that it's work that is worth doing. Standing up for what you want and need is a powerful kind of transformation. For this week's prompt, Shay talked a lot about how food has been a witness to our experience. What foods have been witnesses to your life? Remember try not to see food you write

about as good or bad. Focus on the details of the story, and leave room to honor what you've been through. For the past few weeks, I've been closing each episode with a journal prompt and encouraging you to share your stories, and many of you have written and called in. Thank you so much to each of you for sharing your personal experiences with all the diet culture poop garbage. Here are a few of the calls. Hello, my name is

Kellie and I am calling from Rolling, North Carolina. My family's food is Doritos and cream cheese, plain nacho Doritos dips and just a block of cream cheese that we have the snack at every party, every gathering, every tree night. When we watched American Idol together, a family would just devour two solid rectangles of cream cheese like four bags of Doritos. I should definitely try it. And thank you. Hi there, Viggie. And my name and Jessie, and I'm twenty five years old and I live in a town

called Sudbury, and I'm in Canada. My food that I'd like to talk about is mashed potatoes. When I think of mashed potatoes, I think of comfort, I think of home. I think of my mum making my favorite food when I was young, buttery, goodness, family. So quickly, unfortunately it turned into carves, starch quote unquote bad too, potatoes, bad, indulgence. Bad. As I worked into my own personal journey with even this sort of recovery, I realized white foods are fine

now again. Mashed potatoes, revelation, yummy, comfort, bottery, fluffy, versatile bulists, indulgence in every acquick that I need, want and desire. Thanks for listening, Virgie, I love your podcast. Thanks again to everyone who called. If you'd like to share your story, call the Rebel Eaters Hotline at eight six two two three one five three eight six. That's eight six two two three one five three eight six. You can also write us a note and send it to Rebel Eaters

Club at gmail dot com. I can't wait to hear from you. When you're done, don't forget to give yourself the merit badge you earned, the pleasure is power badge. You can print it out on our website Rebel Eatersclub dot com and show us what you're eating. Tag us on social with hashtag rebel Eaters Club or at transmitter Pods. Next week, we're talking to Soleho about being a new

kind of food critic. If I can change the way people think about, for instance, Vietnamese food, and maybe the next time they get a bund me they think about colonialism, they think about like, oh wow, like the resilience of these people. That's so interesting to me, that's really important. Rebel Eaters Club is an original podcast from Transmitter Media, the podcast company that's like a surprise Lasagna your friend brings you when you're sad. I'm Virgie Tovar. The show

is produced by Lacy Roberts and Jordan Bailey. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Greta Cohen is our executive producer. Like what you hear on the show and want to sponsor us, Send us a note at Rebel Eaters Club at gmail dot com and let us know. And please head to your favorite podcast app and give us a review. It will help us grow the club. See you next week.