I loved Betsy Phillips' post about the Tennessee Obesity Task Force. I thought it put the anger right where it should be. That is some seriously dehumanizing shit there.

Kate Harding's BMI Slideshow

Do you know what "obese" looks like? "Underweight"? Worth a click!

not again

I'm happy there's a movie coming out with a plus-sized character in it (the totally cute Carrie Baker Reynolds in City Island) but why why WHY WHY WHY WHY does she have to be into feederism? Why always with this shitty conflation of topics?

I don't know how the issue is handled in the movie, but between this movie and the recent incredibly widespread coverage of the Donna Simpson story--not to mention adopting it as any central point of cultural reference--I despair. Feederism is one funny little corner of fat sexuality that receives never ending, gushing, disproportionate attention because of how it thumbs its nose at/gains excitement and traction from people's horror with fat. The focus (and the fetish, if you ask me, as with many fetishes, or basically any fetish you don't share yourself) is BORING. Feederism is the reddest red herring that ever herringed. It's just one small area of the world of fat people and sex. That's all.

The really bad part about all this attention is that it creates an enormous hateful cloud of misperception about fat sexuality. Not to mention it confirms--since people cannot separate the fetish from the fat person/fat person-liking population at large--every bad stereotype about fat people and basically guarantee that people see fat folk through a haze of...Food.

All in all, a very frustrating trend. I wish it'd go away.

"Man Goes On Meat Rampage To Save 'Chubby Girls'"

Reposted from The Consumerist:
"The AP says that an Indiana man went on a bizarre rampage in a supermarket, pulling out a hunting knife and attacking packages of hamburger. He then threw dog food onto it...."

Watch the news video on the link if you dare! ("Uh...she was preparing a pot roast or something...") This story is funny, but it's also really scary.

ticker shock

In case you haven't seen it, here is the story about the University of Rochester study that discovered non-obese patients had a 76 percent greater risk of sudden cardiac risk than obese patients. ("When overweight patients were factored out, the researchers were startled to find that underweight and normal-weight patients ran a 99 percent higher risk of sudden cardiac failure than obese patients.")

The line from the author of the survey - "He theorizes that because their bodies are already surviving bad treatment, they are more resistant to heart failure" - brings up something I find interesting, which is that people always seem to assume fat people's hearts are in bad shape because of all the checks they see in the con column without taking into account factors in the pro column as well. Every time a fat person climbs the stairs they are working much harder than the skinny person next to them. Which is good and bad or whatever it is, but it is ultimately a fact. That heart is working hard. Why isn't that ever in the equation?

oh pliz

No way is this story real. It started out all over British papers, not US ones, although it looks like the incident might have occurred in Florida...although you can't tell for sure where the story happened, that's how journalistic it is. I can't find any original reporting, just editorialized wire repeats.

And--it reads like a Fat Moral Tale told by MeMe Roth. The wages of sloth are fat! He built his own prison!