The Extender

2012-03-08T19:54:00.002-08:00

2012-02-03T20:38:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles, CA. Photo by Weegee, c. 1948-1950.

Stand Against Weight Bullying

2012-02-01T14:43:00.000-08:00

I have been very happy the last couple weeks to donate my Photoshopping time to this project:

http://istandagainstweightbullying.tumblr.com/

...which is one of the organized responses to the Strong4Life campaign in Georgia. It's a project that is trying to reduce rates of childhood obesity with "harsh" (their words) advertising showing chubby children in black and white photos staring sadly into the camera with fat-shaming slogans like: IT'S HARD TO BE A LITTLE GIRL WHEN YOU AREN'T.

That one breaks my heart. How dare they say little fat girls aren't little girls. It's hard not to be mad and heartsick when you see advertising that recreates visually the worst of what it's like to be treated as a fat kid and then tells the kid it's their fault. Basically the campaign is an endorsement of fat prejudice.

I don't know that they're trying to do this--I don't know that they even see that they're doing this (well, now they probably do). I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt at the moment for no other reason that contemplating the opposite makes me exhausted, and note that truly, yea verily, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that like many organizations like this--organizations that make heavy-handed mistakes like this--they are probably passionately interested in the health of children. The problem--the dead-end--is tying health to size, full-stop, and working backwards from there. Good health--bad health--health is much more complicated than that. And why is there no concern for thin children who have health problems that may stem from their different diets? And is there anything about this project that would make a fat kid want to run around outside?

It seems like so many conflicts that the people promoting this and the people aghast at it are quite close together, as well as far apart, like the ends of an unclosed circle. If people could set aside the blindness that comes from fat prejudice, there is common ground here. We all want healthy, active kids.

So, the "I STAND" Tumblr and photos (called "STANDards") are one response to all this. They're fun, they're real, they're diverse, they're happy, and they are positive and focused on health. People are smiling! I really like that.

If you'd like to do one yourself email Marilyn Wann at Marilyn@fatso.com with a photo and a short slogan that completes the phrase "I stand...".

Another response to Strong4Life is the fabulous Billboard Project run by Regan Chastain. The idea is to put up positive messages on billboards to counteract the message of Strong4Life in the Atlanta area. Fundraising for this project starts at midnight tonight--here's the link!

In the meantime, some more great STANDards (the first one is Debora Iyall of Romeo Void):

all evidence to the contrary

2012-01-31T00:22:00.000-08:00

Yes, fat can be healthy. Thin can be unhealthy. So whenever we make assumptions about a person's lifestyle based on weight, we should know that our judgment is really based on aesthetics, not health. If we won't listen to the many fat acceptance experts who have been telling us this for years, maybe we'll listen to a "cute" thin girl whose diet is killing her.

An extremely good point--the point about all this stuff, really--from a tight, well-written piece by Amanda Hess about media coverage of Stacey Irvine, a girl in England who's eaten nothing but chicken nuggets and fries from McDonald's for years and is now suffering anemia and other problems. Cultural bias is so strong that the assumption Irvine is fat persists even though all the articles show photos of her. She's thin.

People seem to be clucking in bemused shock at her. Does seriously nobody care about unhealthy thin children? This worries me as much as the way fat kids are treated.

hey Paula

2012-01-27T01:51:00.000-08:00

photo accompanying People poll

I haven't written about the Paula Deen story here because, well, I haven't wanted to. Something about the way this story revealed just how wide and fucked-up the landscape of people's relationship with food, health, fat, and celebrity is took the wind out of my sails.

What's to say? She has diabetes. Kinda awful. The story, like all of these news stories with huge amounts of traction, represents a challenging test case of our feelings. In this country we really love issues when they are attached to one person, preferably in some intense form. With all the variables ratcheted up. That's how we like to shape our discussions of issues. We think we can solve them if we crack the dilemmas one person embodies. Except of course, they're not solvable that way--you don't "solve" issues looking at individual people.

Anyhow, I saw this today on People's home page (what, was I not going to click on it?):

It occurs to me that what is so wrong with this may not leap out at everybody, but the reason I'm finally blogging about this little chapter in the whole PD story is HELLO WE DON'T AND IN FACT SHOULD NOT HAVE ANY INPUT IN WHAT SHE OR ANYBODY ELSE EATS LAY OFF WHO CARES NONE OF OUR BEEZWAX.

She is a person engaged in the ugly business of money and celebrity, and that makes it hard to see where the boundaries are, and yes that Krispy Kreme burger she made on her show sure looks gluttonous, and yes it's all kinda sticky, but that question above shouldn't be asked. It scares the hell out of me in some ways to see it put as baldly as that.

When you click on the poll, these are the two options:

--which at first make the whole thing look better, but there is ultimately no difference between the two. Either way--she shouldn't eat hamburgers or she can enjoy the occasional burger--we're telling her what to do.

Plus--are we saying if she gorged in private then it'd be okay? (Since this is about appearances and setting examples.) Or if she starved herself? How will we be sure she is only occasionally enjoying a burger? Are we planning on photographing her every time she eats? Will we know by whether or not she is thinner? Are we getting her A1c numbers and fasting glucose levels?

Modern celebrity being what it is--we might see those numbers. She might show us these numbers. And she will from now on probably get photographed every time she eats in public. She may involve us in all this á la Kirstie Alley and Wynonna Judd and people like that--make us complicit via the media in her weight guilt or struggles or angst or do the opposite and dive into a chocolate trifle on TV (although I think Deen actually has some decent boundaries in amongst all this murkiness, weirdly). But you know what, we don't get to tell anybody what to eat. We just don't.

I think the issue in this case is a lot about seeing her eating. It's one thing to talk about it, but to actually see it seems to spark visceral reactions in people (and in People!). To me this reaction feels instinctively connected to the way fat people are often effaced and desired to be invisible in public and in the media. Because if a fat body is Wrong, then you're just kinda supposed to hide until it's Right. Kind of like--you go home and fix that, and then you can come back. You may be begrudgingly allowed out in the meantime, but if you're seen doing something to make it Wronger, especially eating--something that people are dead sure is making it more Wrong--then you are violating an unspoken contract with the world.

I know this sounds melodramatic, but think about it: If your body is wrong, and you caused it, how are you allowed to exist--to be seen, which is the same thing in the media--right now? In what way? Eating what? The only way you're 'allowed' to be fat with any approximation of autonomy is if you are shown to be trying to change it--or if you at least aren't seen doing things that everyone is quite sure make fat happen (like eating a hamburger). Then the criticism is held off just a little. At a fundamental cost, of course, because you must always make it clear first you don't like your body either . But if you don't do this...all bets are off. The world's going to go get the belt.

The other day somebody posted this comment by her sister on her Tumblr page: "I think people who don’t actively try to lose weight should be euthanized." People have posited that fat children should not be given food stamps, because "they've already had enough food." That's what I'm talking about. These horrible sentiments are nothing more than the usual thinking--all the much nicer, concern-trolly versions--taken to their logical ends.

Anyhow. I certainly won't solve anything by writing about her either, but I do wish people would back off.

As of right now, by the way, these are the results of the poll. I guess if one of them has to be 84%, might as well be #2.

Prince Fielder!

2012-01-24T16:21:00.000-08:00

Such a great name (and such a great name for a baseball player).

The dude signed an enormous contract for the Tigers today, but the thing that caught my eye were these old photos, posted by the Twitter account @si_vault (complete with a little fat-bashing--of a little kid--yay), which showcases photos of athletes from the Sports lllustrated archives. Here is a young Prince Fielder, shown in two of the photos with his father, former MLB and Tigers player Cecil Fielder (how cute is that first one of him at 9 years old):

Sports journalism being the obsessive thing it is, I am sure Fielder's size has been examined all to hell and back. That's basically how I know his name, from it popping up in conjunction with "too fat?" discussions. (One description of him from The Hardball Times: "Up close, compared to his teammates, he looked like a man among boys. His arms were bigger than my thighs, but he didn't look fat--he just looked huge.")

The thing I think looking at these photos today, when we live with so much emphasis on and hysteria about childhood size, is: how should the world treat kids like him? How did the world treat that kid? Did his family/his dad know he could be a great athlete and more or less let him be himself? How much did he have to fight to become who he was?

A fat, talented kid like that these days--I'm not sure he would have been left alone. I'm not talking about the bullying aspect: he would be put on diets, and sent home from school with notes for his family, and tsked at in various ways. All that stuff happened when I was a kid, and when he was a kid, but without quite the large-scale institutional hysteria that informs most aspects of our discussions of children and food now--the constant chorus of childhood-obesity-childhood-obesity.

You can't know what that kind of stuff will do to a child, but I do know that it usually increases your chance of being fatter, of developing an eating disorder, of yo-yo dieting. How much does our emphasis on size over health interfere with kids becoming who they might be? Is it okay that this little dude grew up to be a famous fattish athlete? Is being a fat child so bad that it is worth the risk of taking away what he might become on the chance you might get him thinner now?

always having the wrong reaction

2012-01-24T15:35:00.000-08:00

This billboard--yes, you would see this driving down the street--is from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, who advocate a vegan diet and are targeting dairy products as a major contributor to body size.

I think we're supposed to be appalled by the butt, but all I could think was--wow, what a fabulous ass. Plus the hands squeezing the hips add to the overtly sexual nature of the image. I guess it's supposed to be a doctorly squeeze of the fat, though.

Are fat bodies so devoid of sexuality in the minds of the advertising agency/PCRM that this image is in their minds completely clinical? And can be used--negatively--to shame people? PCRM must think so, but the billboard that resulted is a bizarre kinky mess of shame, sex, hate, and dehumanization. They don't know what they're doing.

p.s. Some vegans are fat. Just sayin.
p.p.s. Thanks to The Society Pages for the article above (worth clicking).

women's sumo

2012-01-24T14:52:00.000-08:00

How cool is this lady? (Even if the Daily Mail's hook is the calories she gets to eat, whoopdeedoop*.) She looks very strong. I'm not sure I knew or remembered that there even is women's sumo wrestling, but--neato.

*Ah, the Daily Fail. Where would we be without it? Although really, because that paper is an absolute shitstorm of obsession with the female body it can be strangely inclusive compared to other media in its coverage. At least you actually see different kinds of bodies: fat bodies, thin bodies, old bodies, whatever. You see them with crazy judgmental, hostile, sexist commentary attached--but you see them.

Miss. Etta. James.

2012-01-23T15:00:00.000-08:00

This was the first time I saw Etta James, in Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll (1987), a tribute to Chuck Berry on his 60th birthday. I remember I was shocked at the sight of a big woman singing like that, shaking her ass and taking the stage for her own. It's cool to watch and in 2012 still seems kind of bold and unusual. She's really big, she's really moving, she's really good at it. I wish I could have seen her in action more. And heard her (apparently) fantastically nasty stage patter.

I have been reading snippets of her autobiography via GoogleBooks and here is something she wrote about that:

Fans will see me kicking off my shoes and stomping on stage, turning my back, sticking out my big butt and shaking it like a fool. I'll rub my hands all over my body, roll my tongue, and play the slut. Been doing that shit for years. Why? I'm conflicted. Sometimes when I sing live, I feel like the devil gets in me. I want to scandalize the squares; I want to be bad. I'm defiant. I know people are thinking--man, that woman is fat!--and I want to show 'em right off that I don't give a shit.

But I do. I feel like the clown. I feel the humiliation every fat person feels. I get tired of treating myself like some joke. The joke, you see, is my way of hiding pain. It's protection. And it feels like punishment.

Depending on which obituary you read, the gastric bypass surgery James in 2002 had either created complications that contributed to her death or saved her life (maybe both, eh?). I wouldn't know. She wasn't a clown, though. She may have felt like one sometimes, but from where we sit, she wasn't. She was fantastic.

the singing at 3:30 - 3:50 kills me:

ADDENDUM: This is a fabulous obituary I hadn't read when I posted the above. By Kenyon Farrow.

Why Women Need Fat - will repost soon

2011-12-20T14:29:00.000-08:00

ERRATUM: I need to more carefully reframe what it was I liked about this article--will repost soon.

have a fattastic 2012

2011-12-19T15:04:00.000-08:00

There are two--TWO--fantastic fat-themed calendars to hang, flip the pages of, or scrabble on, in 2012. Yeah, I'm dangling my prepositions!

1) The Adipositivity Project wall calendar (11"x17")--twelve months of arty, nsfw, fat lady visuals. Beautiful photography and a worthy, exciting project, as always. I was honored to make a minor contribution to their holiday message.

2. The Fat!So? dayplanner--a cover to decorate yourself, and double pages inside with tips, quotes, images, drawings, and dates to help inform a size-positive year, from Marilyn Wann and others. Here is a brief video showing the book. Proceeds go to build the Weight Diversity Action Lounge, a community center in the SF-area.

on NHANES and data-gathering

2011-12-19T14:33:00.000-08:00

Worth reading: this recent interesting post from an interesting blog by Kjerstin Gruys, who is spending a year not looking in mirrors and writing about the experience. Gruys details participating in the CDC National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES) and what it was like to have such detailed information taken and given about her health, especially as a former anorexic.

The part that really leapt out at me was this fascinating paragraph about (basically) the framework within which the CDC is collecting information about weight and food, and how the way it is designed will never allow a full picture [emphases are mine]:

. . . I can honestly say that the NHANES study seems to be biased toward preventing weight gain, as opposed to preventing eating disorders. My first clue didn't come on my "Preliminary Report of Findings" but in the wording of one of the interview questions asked during our home visit. The field interviewer asked me if I'd "ever participated in any weight-loss diets". My answer was "yes." Then she asked me, "How much weight did you lose in your most successful weight-loss attempt?" The NHANES computer program only allowed her to record the (horrifying and unhealthy) amount of weight that I'd lost in my most "successful" attempt, but there was no space to specify that "it was due to anorexia and she could have died." Upon my urging, she added a special note, but I have no idea how this will be handled when the data are analyzed. This is troubling: the wording of this question frames any weight loss as good, which we know isn't true. Another thing I noticed: despite asking me to describe, in detail, every bite of food that I'd eaten in the prior 24 hours, I was never asked whether I'd purged any of this food, or if I had taken laxatives or diuretics (I hadn't, but that's not the point). Through these questions (and non-questions), some of the most dangerous health behaviors - such as crash-dieting, purging, laxative abuse, and extreme food restriction - are made invisible.

Worth a read. Thoughtful post.

good quote on the Jessica Simpson blah-blah

2011-12-14T17:33:00.000-08:00

This article in Slate about Jessica Simpson's possible pre-birth signing with Weight Watchers for post-birth weight loss endorsement sums up the whole game really well:

This . . . body-policing cycle—weight gain, scrutiny, weight loss, more scrutiny, repeat—that is one of the most powerful motors in the machinery of celebrity journalism. No celebrity can ever achieve the right weight, because there is no right weight; one is always too fat or too skinny, and one is always eating too much or too little. There’s no escape. There is only—for the publications that sell copies by stoking readers’ body anxieties, for the celebrities who manage to ink multimillion-dollar weight-loss deals, and for the diet companies that rake in consumers’ cash—profit.

In fact, this piece points out that Simpson—or her handlers—or the machine—whatever—may be encouraging a bidding war by placed items about her weight gain/prenant eating habits. The real fuel of people's pain and worry makes this industry possible, but it feels like money will never let it stop.

Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America

2011-12-11T12:46:00.000-08:00

This book by Lynne Gerber, Seeking the Straight and Narrow, looks fascinating. From the U of Chicago Press website:

Drawing on fieldwork at First Place, a popular Christian weight-loss program, and Exodus International, a network of ex-gay ministries, Lynne Gerber explores why some Christians feel that being fat or gay offends God, what exactly they do to lose weight or go straight, and how they make sense of the program’s results--or, frequently, their lack. Gerber notes the differences and striking parallels between the two programs, and, more broadly, she traces the ways that other social institutions have attempted to contain the excesses associated with fatness and homosexuality. Challenging narratives that place evangelicals in constant opposition to dominant American values, Gerber shows that these programs reflect the often overlooked connection between American cultural obsessions and Christian ones.

How Glad I Am!

2011-12-11T12:40:00.000-08:00

How can you not like this song? This version of this song, I mean.

I always think there's an unintentional dash of size love in the lyrics, somehow. And her version is so crisp and happy, so Nancy Wilson.

My love has no beginning, my love has no end
No front or back and my love won't bend
I'm in the middle, lost in a spin loving you
And you don't know, you don't know
You don't know, you don't know how glad I am

My love has no bottom, my love has no top
My love won't rise and my love won't drop
I'm in the middle and I can't stop loving you
And you don't know, you don't know
You don't know, you don't know how glad I am

I wish I were a poet so I could express
What I'd, what I'd like to say yeah
I wish I were an artist so I could paint a picture
Of how I feel, of how I feel today

My love has no walls on either side
That makes my love wider than wide
I'm in the middle and I can't hide loving you

And you don't know, you don't know
You don't know, you don't know how glad I am

my dinner with @robdelaney

2011-11-30T23:10:00.000-08:00

Nah--not dinner, a seven-tweet exchange. Which he thoughtfully deleted on his end, so as to keep his kooky followers (wait, that's me!) from targeting me as a civilian.

I love reading Rob Delaney on Twitter, as do many other people--as of this exact moment, 257,212 other people, which is maybe 200K more than when I first started following him. (I cite this not as hipster cred but to show how fast things can change on Twitter. Tis bonkers.)

If you already follow him you probably get the appeal of his funny and nsfw feed (watch as I make it unfunny with a little sketchy analysis), which more than many uses the tools that only 140 characters allow, including lots of change in voice and tone using punctuation, spelling, and length, doing stuff like: responding to fake tweets he's made up (Barack Obama) or to real tweets from dumb corporate/celebrity feeds (Kim K); employing a great sense of the goofy and macabre; showing a strong, sincere POV about politics, shitty popular culture, and dumb women's beauty ideals, which shines through in all the fun, nasty tweets. I can't sum up his tweetin' in one paragraph, but it's really fun, and worth a surge through it, as is the stuff he writes for Vice. He's smart. He doesn't ha-ha at his written jokes--just lets them rip.

He often talks about liking chubby women (see category "he likes it sturdy," here), which is always what makes it an extra-bummer to see guys like that draw that line where "fat" becomes a lazy, meaning-packed diss. They just move the line over a little, a distinction that people in their preferences always seem to need to define by talking about how gross the things they don't like are.

I think I'd responded to one of his "fat" tweets before, but in October I tossed another response at him (bleary-eyed, unthinking, first thing in the morning) because of the first tweet below, here, and then had the following exchange:

Who knows if he actually thought about what I said. "Fat" still pops up in his tweets in kinda meh ways. It must be such a temptation to use that word, especially in that context--three words of great power and connotation--although to me it means only one thing. I don't mean that in any kind of ennobled way! This is not about being PC. It's just that all the word describes is body size...that's it. Any other meaning is long gone for me, to the point that when other people use it I can feel confused at first. He's right--it is lazy to use it as a descriptor, because it doesn't mean nearly as much as people think it does, which also makes it misleading. And confirms its general role as an insult. And he didn't need to mention that his weight fluctuates (inasmuch as it's relevant, which it isn't)--everyone in America has issues about size, otherwise people wouldn't be so fucked up and mean about it to other people.

But I quite appreciated him writing back (and quickly deleting the posts). It was very exciting and I do think he was a mensch for doing it. And I love his ballsy way of using the space he has on Twitter--opening up a lot of space with his jokes, especially by being both raunchy and real (ungh, why are the words describing nsfw humor so humorless) and sort of feminist at the same time. Which was why it was a bummer to see him patting prejudice into place using "fat" the way he did, but you know--Twitter goes by fast. Things change fast too. Who knows.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention that the day after our interchange, this piece by Delaney appeared on the Vice website: "I Fuck Food." Which is a phrase from this blog--I used it in an entry about Bridesmaids: ". . . a lame sight gag involving a sandwich that makes it clear that people think fat people fuck food, not people." Simultaneous genius?

"It's that fat lady from the station!"

2011-11-30T19:13:00.000-08:00

A lady needs tools in her self-esteem arsenal, yes? Of all kinds?

I like to collect and savor moments that demonstrate (a sometimes delightfully unexpected) admiration for fat women in movies or TV (or paintings or books or). Earlier in my life I think I used to snatch at them, really--as evidence of something I wasn't quite sure existed--but regardless, I am still now, as then, ever on the lookout for bits of culture that praise or otherwise provide an appreciation of the larger lady. They are fun.

As such, I offer up a scene from Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991), a rather chaotic adaptation of the novel by E.M. Forster. It is one of those stories that shows horrid English people doing horrid things in Italy (and how), which opens their insides up and teaches them how to be otherwise, although it may be too late? Yes? No?

Earlier in the film, the exceedingly horrid Harriet Herriton (played fearlessly by Judy Dench) and her brother Philip (Rupert Graves) have bumped into a woman (Evelina Meghnagi) on the train and rudely pushed her out of the way [see above stills]. After disembarking they all end up waiting in the sun at the same train station in Monteriano, where the fat woman, whose conversational advances Harriet has cut, is unaccountably (to Harriet) picked up first by the pleased driver.

Later, Harriet, Philip, and Caroline Abbott (Helena Bonham-Carter), attend a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor and discover that the woman they were traveling with is fact the star of the production ("It's that fat lady from the station!"). She sings the mad scene from Lucia ("She's sure to be very vulgar," says Harriet) as the Italian audience--mostly men, and mostly rather swain-like--sit rapt and silent before breaking into crazy applause at the end (and Philip climbs the balcony to meet the man they've come to Italy to see, as if he's leaving his own culture and joining theirs). I was enchanted by this scene when I first saw it. There's a nice little bit of comeuppance in it, as well as the fun of seeing a room full of Forster's Italians swoon over the singer. Enjoy!

what a twit

2011-11-15T08:40:00.000-08:00

From the Gordon Ramsey interview in October UK edition of Playboy. Credit to Playboy for the extremely stupid question about the nature of being a chef, and to Ramsey himself for the asshole answer, which has SWEETFUCKALL to do with cooking (interesting to contrast his with the "never trust a skinny chef" dictum, which was also assholely). Also, credit to both of them for barging ahead immediately afterward with the idiom "spreading yourself thin" in a way that to me adds extra Duh to his already specious thinking about the phenom of the chef brand:

Q8 PLAYBOY: How do you not weigh 300 pounds?

RAMSAY: I like the Chinese ethic of eating four or five small bowls a day. I don’t think chefs should be fat. I was a fat chef once. I think it’s the most disgusting trait for any chef to walk into a dining room at 450 pounds and expect people to eat his or her food. My father died of a heart attack at the age of 53. I’ve never smoked in my life. I love keeping fit. I don’t like sitting around.

Q9 PLAYBOY: Clearly not. You have more than two dozen restaurants around the world, three TV shows here and three in the U.K., cookbooks, promotional tie-ins, four young kids. Do you ever worry you’re spreading yourself too thin?

RAMSAY: Oh, come on. Do you think Wolfgang Puck has spread himself too thin with Puck Express and a $400 million company? Fuck no. For a guy with 127 restaurants, he looks great and he’s cool as a cucumber. I can only hope to continue at that level at 62. But he does it the same way I do it and the same way Thomas Keller or Joël Robuchon or any other great chef does: You hire great people.

photo Tuesday - NSFW

2011-10-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

The bottom pic has been making the rounds on Tumblr, which led me to look at the artist's website. There's some other interesting stuff on it. This is not a whole-hearted endorsement, btw--the dick-worshipping pic on the front page right now is kind of hilarious, and you could argue that the bottom pic is problematic--but still--interesting.

Never read the comments.

2011-10-15T19:55:00.000-07:00

This time I read the comments. Dumb me.

My friend Lorna (the gorj redhead) was featured in this piece in the Daily Mail (the Daily M being its own problem, yes), and for some reason I let my eye drift to the land of text AT THE BOTTOM. Never do that.

What struck me this time, in addition to the usual sneering, bottomless derision, was how goddamn sure commenters--especially the concern-trolling commenters, who make sure they check anybody's perceived complacency with their size (they can identify this by a lack of proper self-hate) before it goes too far with medical "concerns"--how goddamn sure they are that they KNOW EVERYTHING.

It's almost funny. They know why a group of people or in an fact any one person is fat, how they live, who will get diabetes, who is paying for fat people's drain on the economy (them). They know a fat person's psychology, medical history, test results, future, past, state of being--all from looking at a 5" square 72 dpi photo online with some accompanying shitty prose. They are there to make sure we all know what they know. It's even more ridiculous when you know the commenter is a grossed-out 18-year-old who is so incredibly sure about this stuff. The 18-year-olds don't sound any different from the crazed adults, actually. Which should tell us something.

I think it would be great if commenters had to include the unspoken part of their concern-trolling (in brackets):

I know your fat will make you diabetic [because I am the wizard of diabetes future!]

I hate to tell you but [I am an MD because I am online and I can diagnose illness from online photos and] you are unhealthy because you're fat

You are promoting obesity by showing [and not flagellating] these fat women [who using my logic aren't really people at all]

I don't believe you are happy at your size [because you shouldn't be and I will keeping treating you like shit until you realize you this]

I appreciate fat acceptance but there is a line between curvy and unhealthily obese [and I can tell where it is by when my dick gets soft]

I know that if you ate less and exercised more you'd be happier [because I AM SUPERMAN & I CAN SEE WHAT YOU EAT WITH MY X-RAY SPEX!!]

Anyhow: ungh. And: hehe. Vent over.

Never read the comments.

whatevs

2011-09-25T15:58:00.000-07:00

via Failblog

Big Big Love! by Hanne Blank

2011-09-23T02:20:00.000-07:00

In August of last year I wrote here about the revised version of Big Big Love coming out in 2011. Well...it's here! And can be bought by anyone desirous of doing so, as of a few days ago.

The subtitle of Big Big Love is "A Sex and Relationships Guide for People of Size (and Those Who Love Them)." Which is just what it is, in the best, broadest, kindest, firmest, most positive way. I actually think it's a great resource for anybody, whatever your size, and a great primer for managing your own needs and treating yourself well while navigating life as a sexual being. There is an air of kindly authority to (especially the new version of) this book that ever pleases me.

In addition to the delicious and nutritious text from Ms. Blank, and the wonderful slidy, bosomy cover photo by Fat Bottom Boudoir, there are interviews with:

Substantia Jones, photographer/founder of Adipositivity
Lesley Kinzel of Two Whole Cakes (formerly Fatshionista.com)
Golda Poretsky of Body Love Wellness

and others; wonderful peeps with great specific ideas and advice.

Look, it's a snippet!
A sexy snippet.

What I didn't mention in my last blog entry about this book--and didn't know at the time--was that I'd be illustrating it. There aren't many illustrations in this book--just five--but they were all extremely carefully chosen, and drawn, to complement the text in very specific ways. I mean, duh, right--that is what illustrations are for--but a lot of thought went into them, from Hanne, from her great editor, from me. I hope they please.

It is a wonderful book and I am honored to have been part of it. I have seen it in every stage (and I mean every): from working on the zine from which it grew in the late 90s; to reading the edits in the original version ten years ago; reading edits for this one; offering bits of input all along the way. And I still find helpful and new information in it. I still go back to it for its solid yet nuanced perspective, and I'm sure I always will. If I hadn't gotten my illustrator's copy, I'd buy it. I can't recommend it more highly than that.

Hanne will be doing readings and events in the fall. You can find out more about them here. HB is one of the best public speakers I know--go have fun.

Love love!

Dear Jamie Oliver - You're the Human Rights Issue

2011-09-08T04:25:00.000-07:00

Dear J.O. -

Fabulous fat suit. Really. Heh. Fat man likes his french fry.

That photo is taken from this week's Guardian piece about your "calls for a global action to tackle obesity."

The gist of your campaign--the first part to your ideas--is that: children in the US and UK live in a world of westernized fast food and food deserts; family cooking is a lost skill; there is little actual food in a lot of the food children eat; companies, obsessed with profit, are clever at finding what will appeal most to children and selling it to them, with no real interest in nutrition.

I agree with most of that. I am fat, I believe wholeheartedly in size acceptance, and I agree with that (if not the moralizing about it). I think the issues that inform what children eat are extremely complicated--more complicated than just corporate influence and a lack of information--but--yes. You can see the problems you describe with one trip to the grocery store--if you can get to one where you live, and if you can afford to buy anything once you're there. Carbs and processed foods are cheap, and protein and produce are not.

However, the thinking that immediately follows these ideas of yours is where you--and Michelle Obama--lose it every time. And lose me. You take off in a plane with lots of thrust, but don't realize that your machine is missing the parts to get it where you want to go. You don't see that the plane's crashed, and crashed fast, from faulty logic.

How does concern for all children's nutrition and health immediately and completely turn into concern about obesity? Why is obesity assumed to be the only response in the human population to the problems of the world in which we live and eat?

There is no sketchy explanation going from one topic to another, in fact there's no explanation at all; you just assume a leap in understanding from the concepts of "poor eating habits" and "food deserts" to fat, quickly followed by fatisbad (not only bad, "PREVENTABLE," as it says on your campaign site.) The pledge you want us to sign reads:

Jamie needs you to join him in taking a stand against obesity. Let’s show the world that we demand more. PETITION: 'I support the Food Revolution. Kids need better food at school and better health prospects. We need to keep cooking skills alive.'

Shouldn't you be asking us to "join you in taking a stand against bad [whatever] food" if that's really your concern?

The way you and most everyone else regard fatness is the exact opposite of the poignant de Montaigne quote, "Every man beareth the whole stamp of the human condition." In your thinking those who are fat do the wrong things in response to the fast-food world we live in, and those who are thin do the right things. Fat people are marked; thin people are not. You can see it and know it.

Forget the fact that this is bad science. Forget the fact that a myriad of factors influence how or if the human body gets fat. Forget that there are thin children suffering from the same issues of nutrition and ill health, from the same diets. Forget the fact that we haven't actually been spending the last 100 years praising being fat in this country; we've been horrified at it, discriminating against it, dieting about it, obsessed with it, trying to make it go away, and it's never worked. Forget that we don't actually know how to make a population thinner. Forget the fact that juking the stats ("obesity in the US costs $10,273,973 per hour!") is a time-honored, suspect way to defend your opinions about the health of a large group of people. Forget the fact that although size and fatness is absolutely interwoven with health, the degree to which it is, and how it plays out in individual cases, varies wildly.

Forget all that. You, and Michelle Obama, still end up in an untenable, illogical, and hateful place by focusing on size instead of health as a solution to whatever it is you really have a problem with.

When obesity is the entire locus of attention, you end up mopping yourself into a corner by (as the Guardian piece put it) urging "western nations to play a key role in halting the dramatic rise in numbers of obese people [emph mine] across the planet."

Try that sentence with any other modifier: "halting the dramatic rise in numbers of old/disabled/black/tall/skinny/short people across the planet." People. The key word there is people. Somehow people get lost very fast in the shuffle talking about fat, when fat is considered an endlessly influenceable state of being and a product only of (bad) decisions. Even when (as the Guardian piece does) experts acknowledge that the "current obesity epidemic was not caused by people being lazy or overeating" and that "research...showed that individuals had much less choice in the matter of their weight than they would assume," you're still choosing to focus on size, not health, as the key to fixing it.

What you end up with, as Melissa McEwan wrote in her excellent Shakesville post, is eliminationism. This is almost always the end result of discussion of size: somewhere, somehow fat people are being asked not to exist. No, I don't want you to go away, I just want you to be skinnier and healthier. Don't come back til you are. Don't be til you are thinner. Don't...be.

To all the folks whose response to any of this is ever, "why the fuck don't they just eat less?" that will sound self-pitying and dramatic. But it's true. Even if fat people could present you with a card that swears they dislike their fat bodies and swears they are trying to change them, and have eliminated every possible "excuse" for being fat, would you still accept fat people as they are, right now? Allow them every right and privilege? Because that's all we have in this world--right now. Fat and apologetic, fat and unapologetic--we just are.

The "flip" side of your alarmist and self-serving headlines such as "42 Million Kids Are Obese--Help Me Save Them" is that THERE ARE 42 MILLION FAT KIDS. That's kids--people. Not 42 million cases of diabetes, not 42 million families that don't know how to feed their kids: 42 million people. The only reason that many people put up with, and wholeheartedly defend, the right to be treated like crap (which, unfortunately, is where efforts to influence body size get us) is because we're taught fat is bad.

And the way we learn that now--the way we justify it--is health. That is how we hate fat people now, by knowing they are unhealthy, dying young, out of shape, eating more than their share, ignorant of nutrition, diabetic, "morbidly obese," and with giant carbon footprints. (It's amazing how fat hating turns everyone into an M.D. And a sociologist. And the coolest part is that you can know this just by looking at em!) You, Jamie, are doing your bit to drive that home.

You and the First Lady could end up somewhere so great--seriously, great--if you just let your ideas go where they want to go--with a focus on health, and let body size come along however it wants to. Not to mention that focusing on health (see HAES) is the only demonstrable way you can effect it. (Weird, isn't it, how that works. Focusing on health improves health.) It just kills me that there is all this good intention--and I think there is a lot of it in the mix--if there weren't, this would all be much easier to deal with--but it goes somewhere so dead-end. With just one crucial tweak you could do so much good, but as it stands you are poised to perpetuate and create a lot of damage.

You called in your recent speech for a "global movement to make obesity a human rights issue," and that's exactly what I think we need--in a different way--to protect ourselves in this very fat-phobic world from the well-meaning, if proselytizing and ego-heavy, efforts of people like you.

Sincerely,
Liz!

p.s. Here's that Shakesville post again.

p.p.s. Here's another great one at Red No. 3.

Bed by David Whitehouse -- some thoughts

2011-09-02T05:21:00.000-07:00

UK edition (l.); US edition (r.)

Asleep he sounds like a pig hunting truffles in soot. It isn't snoring, more of a death rattle.

"A Pig Hunting Truffles in Soot" is the name of British author David Whitehouse's Tumblr account. It comes from the first line of his debut novel, Bed, which is written from the point of view of the brother of the fattest man in the world, Malcolm Ede, who weighs 100 stone, or around 1,400 pounds. Bed is many things, including slight (it feels like a stretched-out novella), turgid, overwritten, occasionally beautifully written, and not all that successful in its significance, but it is also notable for leaning on indulgent and horrified depictions of a very fat man to give it meaning.

Published in August in the US and earlier this year in the UK, Bed got its publishing contract after winning the To Hell With Prizes contest in 2010 for best unpublished work. For two years before that it sat in the drawer of an agent at William Morris after being turned down by "every publisher in the country." Now it is a finalist in The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize contest and the film rights have been sold.

Most reviews, whether middling or glowing, praised the writing in Bed, acknowledging it as the biggest advantage in this book that is "...ultimately a bit too sparse and empty...Bed is light, getting across a simple point with a low degree of difficulty" (The Onion's A.V. Club). The New York Times called the book unsuccessful but acknowledged the author's gift with words: "Mr. Whitehouse’s great talent for outlandishly clever description is not matched by a gift for storytelling." The Guardian had something of the opposite reaction: "...[T]oo often this writerly exuberance strains for an effect it doesn't achieve, leaving the novel cluttered with unnecessary flourishes, and extended metaphors that collapse under their own weight. Which is a shame, because once you've got past the sentences, Bed is a satisfyingly complex meditation on what it means to need and be needed." But most reviews were along the lines of the San Francisco Chronicle--"Whitehouse's prose is pure sparkle"--or the Boston Globe: "gorgeous writing lifts a story that could feel quite heavy, even dull and sleepy, into something that soars." The starred Publishers Weekly review said: "A masterful balance of displaced emotion, black humor, and reportage, this accomplished debut offers an offbeat insight into the lives of a family dealing with morbid obesity."

To what is Whitehouse's eye and pen turned? Many things, but the extended metaphorical riffs, the sustained passages that seem to propel this choppy book and have his attention, are the descriptions of Malcolm's--Mal's--body. Three paragraphs down from "a pig hunting truffles in soot," Whitehouse picks it up again:

Those photographs you see of whales that have beached and exploded, split by the buildup of gases inside, the thick coating of blubber that blankets the sand, that's what Mal looks like. . . . He has spread out so far from the nucleus of his skeleton, he is an enormous meat duvet.

. . . Peppered with burst capillaries, a truck-size block block of sausage meat packed into a pair of cheap tights. The fat has claimed his toe- and fingernails, his nipples have stretched to the span of a female hand, and only something with the tenacity of a biscuit crumb could meander through the folds of his tummy. There must be enough for a full packet of biscuits in there by now. In twenty years Mal has become a planet with its own charted territories. We are the moons caught in his orbit, Lou and Mum and dad and me.

That last bit goes to the main point of Bed. Mal was an unusual, uncontrollable kid, prone to shedding his clothes in inappropriate situations, and dominated the life of his family. He grows up, gets a job, has his girlfriend (Lou) who loves him and sees his specialness, but he suddenly cannot take the mediocrity that adulthood, only recently embraced, brings:

"I work in a chair. I fight on a computer game. When I vote, it changes nothing. What I earn can't buy anything. Maybe my purpose is to give purpose to others."

The morning after his 25th birthday Mal opts out of life and refuses to get out of his bed. All he does is eat, fed by his compulsively care-taking mother, and he abandons his girlfriend, with whom his brother is also in love. Mal becomes a media sensation, and brings an American, Norma Bee (a large, laughing black woman who veers dangerously close to a Mammy type), into the narrator's life, a woman who herself had a husband whom she fed in bed as he grew bigger until he died. That is: It is not at all obscure what will happen to Mal by the end of Bed. If the words "death rattle" in the second sentence didn't make it clear, the unnamed brother also says in that first chapter: "Mal's death is the only thing that can save this family because his life has destroyed it."

We have clues about what this is all supposed to Mean: Whitehouse said in a Publishers Weekly interview that, "There was an extra feeling of inertia around [my family] because of the debt my parents were in, and Mal's decision to go to bed and not get up is a metaphor for that." I think I might be more likely to buy this idea if Whitehouse didn't mostly give it impetus with outside-in and smells-of-the-lamp descriptions of what it means to be very fat. Whitehouse carves up Mal's body as meat for metaphor. Very little time is devoted to the transition, told in simple periodic flashback, from skinny Malcolm to 1,400 pound Malcolm--he is just--boom--a fat man, the fattest man in the world, and no longer a person. Malcolm says much less once he is fat; he's mostly described.

And then there are creams and medicines. Lotions to rub on his sores and serums to massage into his skin, all of which Mum did on her own. The latter years of her life were effectively spent basting an enormous turkey in the oven, lifting it, turning it and coating its flesh without the reward of a hearty meal.

The visual stimulus of watching Mal be bathed wrenches my stomach up into my esophagus. He looks like an enormous sea monster caught and displayed in a Victorian museum of the grotesque.

His arms are thicker than my legs. Four times as thick. Five or six, maybe. They look like rolled ham. Mal sheds skin, snakelike, with every move. Each morning he nests upon a fresh coat of it. His fingernails are thick, cracked, yellow and shiny like laminated lumps of cheese. His huge torso is contoured with stretch marks the length and thickness of a cowboy's leather belt. I imagine them tearing.

Whitehouse, a former magazine writer and editor who says in every interview that he's "always preferred making stuff up to reporting fact" (a perfectly reasonable thing for a novelist to note, but it jumps out at me), got the idea for the book, he says, watching shows on TV: "Almost every programme was about people who couldn't get out of the house because they were too big. I watched all of those documentaries and was fascinated by the grotesqueness of it and the sadness." When asked about his research, his response wasn't that different:

I watched a lot of documentaries and did a bit of reading on the topic, but I never wanted to get too forensic. I wanted it to feel like a description of something totally alien and abstract, something impossible to imagine.

A lot of the descriptions of Mal read rather like the casual (well-crafted, but casual) comments of somebody watching a documentary on TLC. The attitude of the book is more intentional than that, though. In another interview Whitehouse said:

...I never wanted to describe [Mal] as a human – or at least I wanted to avoid doing so as much as possible. That's why I stayed away where possible from issues about the toilet etc. I didn't want it to seem graphic and real. The whole notion of going to bed and becoming the fattest man in the world is so strange, so abstract, that I tried where possible to dehumanize it in terms of its physicality. I guess the emotions I describe related to the act are human, but in my physical descriptions of Mal's metamorphosis I could be describing a planet, or a strange sea creature. Something difficult to imagine. I never wanted it to be that explicit. [emph mine]

This quote makes it pretty clear, if the book's orgy of metaphor didn't, that Whitehouse feels it's fine to dehumanize a fat person to make a point--that it's not in fact necessary to do anything else. "Dehumanize it in terms of its physicality"? Is that "write whatever hateful thing I want and call it abstract, because somehow if the character is fat then it's not necessary to see a person in it"? His descriptions of Mal are graphic and real--extremely--they are just not clinical. Somehow Whitehouse thinks they're not, or perhaps only to be expected. And while going to bed for your life might be unusual, being fat is not, but either way Whitehouse is definitely choosing to see it as such. He works to keep Mal alien and unknown, a shitty and lazy thing for a writer to do. His body is supposed to mean everything, and nothing.

I am taken aback as I am every morning by the deterioration in the health of Mal's skin. Where once was florid boyishness is now a ruddy, mean-spirited mess. The lack of fresh air has turned his face into a miserly wallet for dirt and sweat and grease. The resultant clusters of immature acne glisten at the sides of his nose, growing like a coral reef across his chin and down his neck, blinking in the sunlight as they slowly marinate in their own juices.

I dream sometimes of standing on him, my feet disappearing up to ankle heights in his flab, schloop schloop schloop as I stepped, like quicksand.

...[a butcher] would need to dig for a long long time to find Mal's bones. Burst a spade with a sharp downwards jab through that dirty thin top layer of skin. Force the shovel with his foot through the sinew and the meat. Lift, drop and dig, spooning out the maggoty-white tubes of fat.

The growths and deformities caused by poor circulation chart a route up him to his knees, huge, flattened spheres of flab the size of satellite dishes, the bony caps long since buried.

Fulsome beads of sweat map Mal's emotionless face. On television he looks even bigger. His arms appear as bags of salt swollen to splitting. The physical stress of the occasion makes it too much for him even to hold his mouth closed. The lighting makes the insides of his cheeks glisten as the spit runs down them. His eyes are dust bowls, sunk back into his face like the ugliest of dogs.

Whitehouse is under no obligation to make the realities of being 1,400 pounds pretty or tell his story from any point of view other than the one he wants to--he's under no obligation to do anything in fiction, including make it realistic (the largest weight ever recorded for a human being was around 1,320 lbs.). But to make Bed a better book, and a less tediously offensive one, he might have done more than look at a very fat person and say "You! I must have YOU for my metaphor!" The meaning in Mal's grand gesture is what's supposed to contextualize the idea of his size, and this gesture and his death are supposed to have (as Whitehouse has said) "altruism" in them, saving his brother and his family from their middle-class trap. But Mal's death feels to me, while inevitable, unkind. It's not altruistic, it's the story's creator killing something he thinks should die. Mal is sacrificing himself for his family, but Whitehouse is sacrificing Mal for us.

David Whitehouse

I wouldn't be working out all my reactions to Bed if I didn't rather bitchily note here--as the book jacket and its promos do not--that Whitehouse was for a period features editor at Maxim UK (and an editor at Peaches Geldorf's brief experiment in magazine publishing). The descriptions of Lou--the beautiful girlfriend Mal's brother inherits through Mal's death and sacrifice--can be just as indulgent as the descriptions of Mal (in a different way). Sometimes she ends up sounding a bit like a Maxim Girl write-up:

Lou was beautiful. Some people are so attractive that looking at them makes you feel as though your own skin doesn't fit properly, and Lou is like that. She has blond tumbling hair that wisps and frays as though she's washed it in the sea every morning, combed it through with the finest shells and rinsed away the foam in a freshly formed rock pool.

Despite that there is, as I said, good writing to be found in Bed if you feel like it. ("Home was always the same inside. Its exterior grew and shrunk depending upon how long I'd been away but indoors it was a precise mold.") The mind boggles, however, picturing what a film company will do with Bed. Given that Mal, once he's fat, doesn't do much but lie in bed and be described (literally) to death, that will leave us with--what? Lots of lurid imagery, I'm sure--the "schloop" of fat and swollen bags of salt--but what else? Not much, since Whitehouse's orgy of metaphors will be gone and all we will be left with is a character about whom, once you strip away the horrified language, the author doesn't quite know how he feels.

Lucian Freud

2011-07-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

Lucian Freud died a week ago. His death surprised me, somehow. I'm not entirely sure why I thought he'd live forever--maybe it's because his last name always had him pegged as someone who came after something else long gone. Maybe because his paintings did not age that much compared to other artists. His nudes, especially, do not date.

Like a lot of people, I have been a little drunk on Freud's paint and palette from looking at his paintings so much since his death. It's the nudes that want my attention.

There has been a lot of intelligent commentary on his paintings of the human body, but there still seems to be a sense at times that his paintings of large people were grotesque. Some of the more pointed phrases from obits and tributes:

"showing off the human figure in all its gorgeous, swollen, egregious fleshiness" (Independent)
"The flesh [of Freud's nudes] was mottled, lumpy and, in the case of his 1990s portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the phenomenally obese civil servant Sue Tilley, shockingly abundant." (New York Times)
"Almost all of us carry an image of a 'Freud' around in our minds – a gracelessly posed, grossly sagging woman, perhaps, or a face sculpted in paint that appears to fold and puff like a cauliflower ear." (Telegraph)
"Astonishment, even disgust, often greeted Lucian Freud’s paintings when they first appeared. In Benefits Supervisor Sleeping a mountainous friend lay snoozing on a sofa, one blubbery breast cupped in a hand, revelling in rolls of fat like a beached whale." (Economist)

I don't know much about how Freud's paintings of large people were received in their time, but I can believe that they shocked then. I can see that they still shock now.

I do not think of Freud as a fat person painter. He's not Jenny Saville or Botero. I think he painted the human body (and other animals) with complete integrity, in the sense that his view of things was whole and consistent from one subject to another, whatever their size. Other than one painting--Evening in the Studio (1993)--I don't see anything that particularly editorializes in the way he has his fat subjects posed, and even then I'd argue he does the exact same with smaller models, in works like Painter and Model (1987) and The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer (2005) (also featuring clothed/unclothed models). All his subjects are under the same eye, including himself at times.

The man really did paint what he saw as he saw it: veins, fat, skeletal structure, hair, flopping breasts and genitals, muscle mass, skin; most of his models lying, leaning, splayed, pitched over, bent, draped, slumped. Pushed or fallen over. Not many stand.

He famously said:

I'm really interested in people as animals. Part of my liking to work from them naked is for that reason. Because I can see more, and it’s also very exciting to see the forms repeating through the body and often the head as well. I like people to look as natural and as physically at ease as animals, as Pluto my whippet.

In the same show catalog from which that quote comes it was also written:

In the sense that they are at their most animal-like when resting or sleeping, those who sit for Freud trust him to bring out the animal in them.

I think his paintings of fat people shock only because of the subject matter and the fact that he chose to paint them--and because we are still shocked by images of fat nudes--not because of how he painted them. We're all animals in his work: all fleshy, hairy, mortal, pulled on by gravity and age, doing the hard work of being still as time passes.

the voluptuous nudes of Norman Lindsay

2011-07-13T21:49:00.000-07:00

There are many nudes by the prolific Australian artist Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) to be found and enjoyed! (This, despite the fact that he lost a lot of his work in a 1940 fire.) The dude loved naked women. And Sirens isn't the world's worst movie if you want to get a look at Lindsay's home (where they filmed it); a fluffy film, but not too terrible. Hugh Grant is extremely well cast as the earnest and blushingly pervy vicar.

p.s. This is my copy of Lindsay's children's book The Magic Pudding--I think it might have been my my mother's or her siblings; it's an American edition from the 1930s. The illustrations are great. Love the aminals!

"Is childhood obesity proof that not all parents love their children?"

2011-07-12T13:03:00.000-07:00

Dr. Michael Katz came to my attention in April because of a thread he started at TED.com, entitled: Is the Childhood Obesity epidemic proof that not all parents love their children?

I thought it was a joke at first, but it turns out Katz is a doctor who runs the--let's get this out of the way now--unfortunately named website EatingKids.com, the K of which is seemingly capitalized to discourage the sense that the site is about the best way to sautee toddlers (I'm not sure it helps). EatingKids is devoted to childhood eating issues, "created not only to provide information, but to create a collaborative community of parents, doctors and educators who could fuel each others' passion to eliminate Eating Disorders & Childhood Obesity."

The dude seems well-intentioned, and the site includes, for example, a lot of good ideas about managing the onslaught of damaging media imagery for young girls with eating issues. But the parts of the site devoted to childhood obesity demonstrate the same thinking that fueled the TED question:

Obesity is a disease. It is also totally avoidable. While there do exist some genetic and thyroid deficiencies that can contribute to obesity – these are extremely rare.

As a rule: you show me an obese child and I’ll show you parents who are not doing their job.

Katz's question--can parents of obese children actually love them, given that they are fat?--makes a certain horrible sense in the context of our culture's current understanding of fat and especially children who are fat. It is the natural next thought in a world where body size is always and ever the result of what you do or don't do, and what you teach your children to do and do for them. If fat is a failing, then fat children are their parents' failure. If fat = death, then parents who 'let' their kids be fat are killing them. They do not love them.

So Katz tries it out on TED. Here are some of Katz's comments, taken from the thread. He wrestles with the do-they-love-them question as he considers the fact that this cannot all be an issue of information/knowledge:

Considering how many children are obese in the USA we can safely assume that not ALL the parents are ignorant of these factors. In fact, I think it is safe to say that most parents DO understand them - which is why I asked the question in the first place.
- - -
First, I TOTALLY reject the notion that a parent could truly LOVE their child, yet somehow NOT be able to feed the child a healthy diet on most days. ALL the stories you hear about fruits/veggies being more expensive than fast food are lies and I can prove it on any trip to the supermarket. I don't mean to be aggressive here, but I am truly SICK of that kind of false "meme."
- - -
I see this same thing happen time after time in these online "debates" and I'm beginning to get annoyed. I said what I said and there's no reason to cook up some false extrapolation about what I said. So, let me be clear: Based on what I've seen in my life, as a physician and as a person on this earth, I do not believe that all parents really love their children. I was interested to know if Childhood Obesity could be seen as a proof of that. That's about as far as I wanted to take it.
- - -
...If you love someone I believe you will stop [harmful] behavior . . . the abusive husband who beats his wife out of frustration with his life could still actually and truly love her. I think that is NOT true. So if a mom feeds her kids pizza and potato chips and the like on a daily basis, with the kids growing ever fatter (and sicker), can we say she really loves them? I think not.

Not long after the TED discussion, Katz posted this page on his site under pretty much the same headline/title--"Childhood Obesity Epidemic: Do all parents love their kids?"--incorporating some of the responses he got at TED (including, in a few cases, quoting them word-for-word with no attribution in his "points," "questions," and "answers"). He quotes, by way of answer to his question, a line from somebody else's post: "It’s not as easy as yes or no."

But it's clear he still does not seem to know what to think about it all--how to reconcile his ideas and the facts. I think he's honestly trying to understand it. He goes back to the idea that people just do not know what they need to know. He wonders if perhaps institutions should step in if parents "would not" feed their children properly. In one of his points he wonders, if a parent's schedule is contributing to their child's obesity, whether or not they should quit:

Assuming that one’s finances make it possible, then “Yes,” quitting is probably reasonable. This may seem extreme, but my answer is “So is diabetes" [emph his]. Love for your children requires you to make certain sacrifices if they are really in the child’s best interest. In fact, if the decisions you make really ARE best for your child, then they probably shouldn’t be considered sacrifices at all. If you love someone I believe you will stop hurtful behaviors, and leaving your kids a frozen pizza as an after-school snack IS a hurtful behavior. So…if a mom feeds her kids pizza and potato chips and the like on a daily basis, with the kids growing ever fatter (and sicker), and this is a result of the fact that she’s at work and doesn’t have time to cook a healthy, nutritious meal, then can we say she’s really doing the best for her child? I think not.

Dr. Katz seems to have created an extremely narrow definition of healthy and normal at EatingKids.com. I have to wonder how his treatment and understanding of eating disorders is informed by his understanding of obesity.

And it may "make sense" in our world, but it is still appalling to see this guy wrestle with the idea of the amount of love in a child's life--love--trying to get his mind around and explain body differences. Let me answer the question for him, by the way: no, actually, childhood obesity is not proof that not all parents love their children. It's proof of a lot of things, including socio-economics and genetics, which Katz dismisses, as well as food choices. If the standard statistic that one in three children is obese is true, that means he is honestly wondering if one-third of American children are not loved. That right there--the fact that he is positing the question at all--should tell him this is more complicated than the factors he sees at hand. He's answered his question already. The fact that he persists in it at all seems too appalling and dehumanizing to believe. But that is the world we live in.

Katz has also written a book about orthorexia; would be interesting to check it out.

check it out

2011-07-12T10:43:00.000-07:00

The Museum of Obeast Conservation Studies!

...created by Rachel Herrick. "Her installation-based work spans a wide variety of media including sculpture, video, photography and performance. Herrick’s pseudo-scientific museum exhibitions document the field of study around the North American Obeast, a genus of mammals she invented to satirize fat bias and the cultural panic surrounding the obesity epidemic."

On Megan in Bridesmaids

2011-07-11T17:25:00.000-07:00

I don't know what to say. I saw the movie twice. I took notes. I tried to keep an open mind. I didn't read any articles (because I'm weird like that sometimes, but also) because I wanted to have an unshaped reaction to it all. But ungh. Megan still kind of broke my heart.

I hate calling out Melissa McCarthy, who is great, gets a lot of screen time and in some ways steals the show. I love her--I think she's a great actress and comedienne. And I liked that Megan turns out to be the "together" character. And I liked the movie all right (Maya Rudolph is just wonderful).

But what the fuck. Is this the only way we can let a fat person into a mainstream movie, by making them as out of it, as weirdly-dressed and outsider as possible--arriving in the form of some weird stereotype? Does it make us that nervous to have a fat actress as just a another character?

Megan is definitely the Zach Galifianakis of this movie--the giant clueless toddler with no sense of social norms. McCarthy being a very pretty woman, effort is needed (and expended) to make her to look weird. Her makeup is handled differently than the other female characters--she's made up (or not at all) in harsh ways. Her clothing is unflattering and full of ZG-like touches--arm braces, etc.--as well as being strangely mannish (paired with pearls) and tailored in awkward ways. She gallops around, flops over couch backs, is sexually rapacious in unwanted ways as only fat people are in movies.

Okay, she's weird. Her character has a right to be weird. McCarthy's good at it! But it feels, watching it, as if the makers of Bridesmaids were so nervous at the thought of McCarthy on the same footing as the other actresses who, while all having personality quirks, were allowed to look semi-normal in Hollywood ways, that they make her a freak. The only scene in which McCarthy's makeup and wardrobe is treated as the others is the final scene when she is in bridesmaid wear and it suddenly becomes clear on what a different footing she has been treated through the movie because she looks gorgeous.

The absolute worst part of the movie is the little coda during the end credits of a videotaped homemade sex scene between Megan and her boyfriend. It's a lame sight gag involving a sandwich that makes it clear that people think fat people fuck food, not people. It was just miserable to watch (twice).

I feel like my original guess about the movie was right: McCarthy is miscast. She would have been a great lead and Kristen Wiig would have been a good Megan. I like Wiig a lot, but didn't feel like she had the emotional range needed for the character, ultimately. McCarthy would have been great.

The best thing to come out of Bridesmaids with regards to McCarthy is that she is getting more high-profile work: the Knocked Up spinoff, and another Paul Feig movie with she and John Hamm as "unconventional lovers," about which I don't even know what to think. From where I sit it would make sense to just cast them as lovers, but you know--we'll see.

The Media Machine and the Bodies It Feeds On

2011-07-11T16:22:00.000-07:00

There needs to be a new word for the editorial point of view demonstrated in the constant rotation of articles in the UK's Daily Mail devoted to the excoriation of the female form. Dysmorphomaniacal. Celebricorpusrabidity. Hyperbodyhyperactiviscrutiny. I used to take screengrabs in open-mouthed shock to document articles such as this:

or this:

...until I realized that the Daily Mail looks like that every day. Truly, every day of the year. It's a microscope! Photos catch female celebrities from multiple angles while chiding them for their clothing choices (too slutty, too demure, too fancy, too rumpled), their footwear (they went after Nigella Lawson for her bunions recently), their hair, their panty lines, for sweating while exercising--anything. Women intrusively photographed with telephoto lenses "flaunt" their (either) Perfect Bikini or Somehow Wrong--fat, old, thin, wrinkly--Body in their bathing suits. Every (transitory, misleading, temporary, sustained) facial expression or bit of body language captured in any still photograph is valid evidence of and captioned as part of whatever narrative about their love life the Mail is pushing--jilted, spinster, happy, cheated on, cheating. You can not win.

In a perverse way I almost (almost) admire the Daily Mail for its insanity. It's so thoroughly superficial, in the literal sense. It's only about how things look: an insatiable Gargantua of body scrutiny. It's not admirable, of course--it's awful--and I feel terrible for anybody caught in the papp's sights in the UK, for good or for ill. It all sucks, although in a kind of equal-opportunity way. Everybody/everything gets put out there.

Also, weirdly, humanity shines through sometimes--at least to my eyes. Bodies are just bodies, and you show enough of them, even with all the commentary, they just seem like...bodies. And in the meantime the Mail looks stupid, like a bully jumping up and down harassing somebody on a bus while no one pays attention. They make themselves look ridiculous.

I found a few recent articles chastising otherwise looks-sanctioned female celebrities for evidence of their age especially mean, even given the Mail's usual MO--although it proves this point. Both of the articles criticized the women's hands and arms. One was about Kirstie Alley:

and one was about Meg Ryan:

Their arms are a dead giveaway! The bracelet only brings more attention to Alley's 60-year-old hand! The summery dress only shows Ryan's bulgy veins! They're not getting away with their grand plan to...

...wait, what are these women getting away with? Nothing. Yes, they are aging female celebrities who engage in the dance of beauty ideals. WE ALL KNOW HOW IT WORKS. We all know what they--and we--are supposed to look like, what the requirements are and when people don't fit them. Being thinner (as Alley is for the moment) means she is OK, as is Ryan, but they both sadly, stupidly, forgot to magically de-age their hands. Boo-ya! Failure. The Mail grinds these women through the body ideals machine and finds them wanting, cleverly exposes the tests they don't pass, but the only 'weaknesses' it exposes is the machine itself. Because Christ almighty, old hands age. Bodies age.

It's shitty journalism and pointless crap and it does harm, but I can't help feeling that articles like this mostly point out the flaws in the media's body-scrutiny machine. Rather the way that this article in People does:

The article is about a dancer on "Dancing With the Stars," Cheryl Burke, who gained (she estimates) five to ten pounds a couple years ago while on break from the show (some estimates by other helpful people put it closer to 20); she also said at the time she went from a size 2 to a size 4. When photos of her in a bikini surfaced at this time she started getting a lot of flak. There was a story at that time where she defended her weight, and then this story in January detailing the the heartbreak of the original story...

Ungh, I can't keep up. Whatever. She gained weight, spouted the party line about "loving her curves" in public while panicking and dieting in private, then talked about it all later again. The point is that this is all this story is about: ten pounds. That's it. The media machine is fucked--because it exists, but also--if a ten pound-change triggers this kind of journalistic need (and note: there were two cycles of stories about this). You can see the spectre of money in it all--Burke gains attention for her autobiography and for the show--which creates its own impetus, but still. This is all we're talking about. Ten pounds. And 60-year-old hands. That's it. That's all. The trigger is filed down insanely low.

Unfortunately stories like this and the Daily Mail insanity are more convincing proof of a flawed system than the scrutiny tendered to people who "deserve" it--Alley, for instance, when she gained 90 pounds. Then somehow it's okay. Merited, even if we won't admit it. But lets take the proof where we can find it: if the detectors start blaring when there's very little to detect, maybe the machine is broken.

no "fat lady sings" puns in this post (from me)

2011-07-11T13:37:00.000-07:00

Opera is a fascinating place to look at issues of size because sometimes fat people just have to exist there. That is not true everywhere, despite what fatphobes might think about this world in which fatness creeps ever upon us. It is easy to watch TV or pick up a magazine and find it curated free of fat people. But singing opera is a rarefied skill and sometimes size goes along with it, for reasons that are not well understood, including in their necessity.

As opera continues its fiscal quest to be relevant to modern opera-unfamiliar audiences and leverage its plots to fill seats (rather than turn people off), there is a lot of conflict about Looks. Creating a digestible, artistic, Thing. Deborah Voigt's dumping by Covent Garden and subsequent weight loss surgery, and Daniella Dessi's fight with Zefferelli after he berated her for her size, are obvious examples.

Opera's conflict over fat people on stage is different than the battle that goes on in other media, though, because to some degree, sometimes, fat singers have clout. Not the final word, and not enough clout, probably, but you cannot sweep--for instance--Stephanie Blythe under the carpet. The contralto of a lifetime cannot quite be dumped wholesale because you are uncomfortable with the fact that she is fat.

And still there are people who would do that. This piece about Lyndon Terracini, the artistic director of Opera Australia, is the most elaborately unchallenged defense of looks-related prejudice in opera I think I've read:

The fat lady has sung. And if Lyndon Terracini continues to get his way, she won't get an encore until she at least shifts some weight.

Lest the man charged with overseeing the future of opera in Australia be accused of sexism [whew], he is quick to point out that his shape-up-or-ship-out message applies to all performers, regardless of gender.

''If you're seeing a couple making out and one of them is obese, who wants to watch that?'' he says with a theatrical grimace. ''It's obscene. You just think, 'Jeez, for Chrissakes, don't let the children see that'.'' [emph. mine]

. . . If casting ''triple threats'' who can sing, act and look good helps spark an interest among people who think opera is only for the old and rich, then he makes no apologies for upping the unemployment rate of overweight singers.

''You go to a movie and you see people who look exactly right for that role,'' he says. ''They're consummate actors and they're completely involved in what they are doing, so their performance is totally believable.

''That's what I'd like in opera: for people to be fabulous singers, look wonderful and be completely and totally absorbed in their character. If you can't get off the seat, if you've got to sit on a rock all night, who believes that?''

His circular argument, boiled down, is basically: fat people are gross and we should not have them on stage to interfere with our suspension of disbelief that the world does not have them in it. So we won't. It's horrible, but refreshingly open, in a way, in the workings of its prejudice.

I can't help thinking that artistic decisions like this will bite people like Terracini on the ass. People who love opera adore good singers, and functioning prejudice like this can alienate even standard issue opera fans who would prefer thinner singers to look at. It's just not that simple. The reason? Opera happens in 3-D. You don't just look at it: you take a bath in it, listen to it, feel your body vibrate from it. Good singing is good singing. Nobody appreciates that taken away from them.

[Link via Brian of Red No. 3]

some ladies

2011-07-11T12:04:00.000-07:00

Illustrations by Arthur Watts from Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield. "Cousin Maud" hung on my bulletin board for years...I especially love her.

"Fat Kills"

2011-07-09T09:33:00.000-07:00

I was reading Marilyn Wann's wonderful commentary in SFWeekly today when I found out Betty Rose Dudley had died. I didn't know her, but I knew her piece, "Fat Kills," quite well. It was much reproduced and still holds up as a beautifully shaped piece of short fiction. It's worth a read. I am so sorry to hear she's gone.

luv!

2011-07-07T22:27:00.000-07:00

...luv the bottle for Damiana liqueur, that is, which is reportedly based on an Incan goddess of fertility. I find the bottle design interesting for many reasons, including the fact that I think she looks rather pugnacious. Those look like fists--or almost-fists--to me, held low so she won't lash out, maybe, while you say something stupid. A powerful little woman. I wonder how she felt about being hoisted in the advert (below).

Mrs. Avoirdupois

2011-06-21T10:18:00.000-07:00

If you don't already, I recommend you follow Mrs. Clarence L. Avoirdupois on Twitter or perhaps 'like' her Facebook page to enjoy her teachings. Her firmly sensible advice for the plump, offered in the face of life's confusing little challenges and the occasional ill-mannered boor, is both charming and pragmatic. Enjoy, plumplings!

Letter from a fat woman to a mother who is afraid her daughter will look like me

2011-06-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Ma'am, walking down the street:

There are some things I know, and when I say "know" I mean I know. They burn holes in my brain. You should listen.

Every fat woman I know was wrong about what she looked like when she was younger. Every--and I mean every--fat, larger, two-airplane-seat-buying woman such as myself whom I know has said, looking at a childhood photo, "Wow, I wasn't that big." Images from childhood, adolescence, high school, college. "That's how big I was?" "I thought I was so huge then--I was so normal-sized." "I wasn't big at all." I have lost track of the number of times I've had this conversation. I've lost track of how often I've heard women say these things: in astonishment for the first time; in unbelieving fury; with real grief; in matter-of-fact resignation. It's an ongoing rite of passage. It is downright shocking as an adult to see evidence that you used to fit in, when you were sure you didn't. Especially if you don't now.

And the time when it turns out we weren't very big at all--that's actually when we learned we were huge.

There is a particular impetus to the worry that gets attached to a growing body's perceived differences, perpetuated with common stuff like "if you don't stop eating you butt will be as wide as a barn." Because you are young, because your body is changing, you know even less than you might about how to hear a statement like that. It is chaotic, occupying a growing body, especially in a world where trusted adults may be less trustworthy in this area than anywhere else, about their own bodies and yours. Perhaps it's almost a relief to grab onto this idea that you are too big, just as a way to orient yourself.

Most fat women I know lost autonomy of their body around this time, and instead got invested in--usually completely lost in--a narrative about how big she was and needed to be smaller. In many cases the story was thrust upon us, sometimes it was outside confirmation of what we believed. Regardless, most of us were told constantly in word and deed that we were fat--too big--different--outsize.

What I have never known is if the parents who tell their child how fat they are at the time look back at those photos now and also think: "Wow, she wasn't that big." Do parents do that? Or is it too painful? Or do they not see it, even now?

Let me say it again: we weren't that big then. Sometimes we were somewhat bigger, but not unusually so. Sometimes it's clear in retrospect that we "looked" bigger--in the face, for instance--but were pretty average-sized. Very often we were just a different body type. Or taller. Or differently-proportioned. But rarely much bigger.

Most of us probably would be smaller now if we had been left alone then. Most of us were probably headed to size 14/16 land. If it would have been okay to be that size, well--we might have been able to be. Things would be different. But is size 14 actually okay?

I'm telling you how to not have children who look like me, although I refuse to believe that is the worst thing in the world. I do not believe a size 30 is worse than a size 14 is worse than a size 2. But I'm willing to use your horror at the idea to get your attention. I've heard "Wow, I wasn't that big" too many times to not crystal-ball it a little. I think I've earned the right.

The world is ready to eat your child up, and you are going to have to fight, and not by fighting your daughter. The earlier you mess with growing children's metabolisms, the earlier you screw with a girl's sense of ownership of her own body, the earlier and more harshly you interfere with your child's relationship with food, the better your chance of having a child who becomes fat.

When you see your child, or see a photo of her, what do you see? Can you really see her, not some fear of what she might be? Can you see that she's not that big? Or somewhat big? Or big--whatever she is--but can you see her? Can you see that your child might just be different from something you've decided is the norm? Can you see her instead of yourself? Are you willing to get better at recognizing and more accepting of the differences in human bodies? Are you willing to stop calling yourself fat (if you're not)? Are you willing to unhook from the lazy barrage of body-judging in the air we breathe? Are you willing to teach your child to disagree with her peers? Are you willing to side with your child? Because although it may not feel like that now, that is the battle. There isn't any middle ground. It's an illusion. I-love-you-honey-but-you-just-need-to-lose-a-little-weight is the same thing as I don't love you as you are.

Here's something else I know: very often when you hear adults talk about wanting to lose weight or to be a smaller body size, what they are really saying--so close to the surface it tears through--is that they want to be younger. I want to have the mobility and ease of being younger--I want the freedom of youth--I want to be young and coltish and less banged up. I want that old body back. And a lot of times the body people want back is the hated, "fat" body of those early photos, when we thought we were huge cows. It is corrosive to live like that, looking back. It's horribly painful to not be able to let go of the fact that you missed a chance to know you were okay. If your goal is to save your child pain, think about this.

You don't save your child from pain--including the pain the world inflicts on fat people--by making her thin. You save your child from needless pain if you love her and support her as she is, teach her to manage the changes that come to all of us as our bodies age, give her a chance to know she is okay in the present. That is what will make the difference.

This is what I know, the large fat woman walking down the street.

From,
Me!

Great bums.

2011-06-13T01:19:00.000-07:00

Great hug, too. Website for film.

Jill & Anthony

2011-06-01T17:18:00.000-07:00

I've been playing this gooshy-sweet, hooky song from Jill Scott's new album a lot the past few days. Very hooky, down to its breathy, talky Diana Ross-ing toward the end. A fabulous thing about the video, which is set at the wedding of an older couple: it's full of dancing (moving! not just decorative), gorgeous big girls--as well as people of different ages and ability levels. I don't mean that in a dour, PC approval stamp way--it's happy.

The song features Anthony Hamilton, whose voice I don't really know how to describe in its distinct appeal. It's creamy-smooth, but granular and grainy too. Rough and smooth. Even sort of (this isn't the right word) nasal--in a beautiful way. Like a reedy sax, bolstered by deep bellows. He's great.

If you've never heard "Sista Big Bones," Hamilton's 2005 ode to big beautiful sisters, you should. The expression on his face when he looks at Mo'Nique in the video is adorable.

.

from Rob Delaney

2011-05-20T05:04:00.001-07:00

...in this piece in Vice:

I talk about bushes, big thighs, saggy boobs, gaps in women’s teeth, big noses, and more. Sure, I think it’s funny, but the fact is, I really do dig that stuff. And I’m not alone. My guy friends and I have a much broader palate when it comes to women’s bodies than Maxim or Cosmopolitan would lead you to believe. And I’m not putting this forth to sound noble; what I’m saying is absolutely a variation on “Guys’ll fuck anything.” But I’d like to expand that and say, “Guys’ll fuck anything, and they’ll enjoy it. AND they’ll fuck it again. AND they’ll even be nice to it and tell it it’s beautiful and take it to dinner and listen to its dreams and fuck it exclusively and brag about how happy they are to be doing it to their other guy friends who reject the notion (as vehemently as any Women’s Studies major at Wesleyan) that women should fit into some unforgiving, unvarying Barbie mold.”

it's tomorrow!

2011-05-05T13:02:00.000-07:00

photo courtesy of the ever fanfuckingtastic Adipositivity

on weight loss surgery and Malissa Jones

2011-05-05T00:47:00.000-07:00

This blog entry concerns a story reported in the UK's Daily Mail, a newspaper I've come to hate for its constant frieze, running up and down the right side of its web pages, of body-scrutinizing imagery of every kind. Women (celebrities) who are: too fat, too skinny, dressed wrong, dressed slutty, dressed right, have bunions (bunions; there have been at least two stories about Nigella Lawson's feet in recent weeks), stretch marks, unkempt hair...it's your worst fears about being Watched as a female come true. Whole separate pages with huge photos devoted to a woman's panty lines, back fat, sloppy footwear, whatever.

The story in question is more than horrible, though, and although it has a sickening, tabloid, over-reported feel--the girl in question has been a fixture in the media for a while and the screaming headline is horrid--it seems worth noting.

Malissa Jones is 21, and was called, in a gesture of sideshow freak labeling, "Britain's fattest teenager" when she had gastric bypass surgery three years ago. At that point she was around 475 pounds. In 2009, after losing around two hundred pounds, she made news in an interview in which she said wished she had never had the surgery. She was depressed from the hanging skin and wrinkles which she could not afford to fix, suffering from a severely compromised immune system, and discovered she was no longer able to carry a baby to term after a miscarriage (her inability to eat/lack of interest in eating was called the cause of the miscarriage).

Now she is diagnosed as anorexic. Her photo [same link as above] shows someone who looks like the battlefield of our body wars itself: fat, emaciated, ill, all at once. Starved in some deep-down, fundamental fashion. It's heartbreaking. It's also heartbreaking that we see so much of her--there is an invasive quality to the way the photos are used, as in all the stories I've read about her, as there often is pieces about fat/formerly fat people, who have to walk the perp walk and show their shame.

It also seems problematic to talk of this anorexia in the terms we usually do. Jones says:

I am not deliberately starving myself but, right now, I would rather die than force myself to eat. I'm too thin. My body shocks me. But swallowing is painful. Eating a tiny amount gives me stomach cramps or makes me sick. My consultant says, if I continue like this, I only have six months to live. I will most likely die of a heart attack, so I must persevere with eating. I am trying, but it is so hard.

To what degree there is an emotional root cause contributing to her physical inability to eat we can't know, but judging from that quote it sounds like it just hurts her body to eat. Her body's ability to handle food was (deliberately) taken away--why would we expect it to work correctly? That is how weight loss surgery works. According to the 2009 article, she had to give up work after suffering "stomach pains and constant diarrhea," which are common side effects.

This woman is young. Terribly young, far too young to be ravaged by so much brutal decision-making and unnecessary body trauma. From the earlier pieces it sounds like Jones had problems with compulsive eating and learned at an extremely young age to match that with diets of similar intensity; her body has been in reaction, in extreme ways, to the world around her and its fear of fat for most of her life. She hasn't gotten to just be. If she is indeed an anorexic then it almost seems as if she's become prey to some new, extreme monster--an eating disorder that combines the strongest elements of both ends of the spectrum and the worst of all the physical effects. The Daily Mail being the Daily Mail, the focus is on superficial examinations of how Jones did the wrong thing (ate too much), then the wrong thing again (ate too little), and now her "fears" are keeping her from doing the right thing, but that doesn't feel like the whole story to me. Why do we disable people's digestive systems, then expect them to work? And why, when you've probably never felt like you owned your body, never even had the chance to (she was 17 when she had gastric bypass surgery at the urging of doctors), would you expect her to know how to do it now? We hobble people when we do this to them.

There are a lot of reasons why weight loss surgery exists, but medicine was its creator, and medicine needs to figure out how to feed the people who've had it: how to handle patients like Jones, who live with its effects--or die from them. The human body is an extremely complicated machine. We betray its design when we mutilate our insides in the name of weight loss; if we are going to do so, we have to be prepared to treat the damage, which comes back to us in exponential ways.

"What the Internet reveals about sexual desire"

2011-05-02T15:43:00.000-07:00

A Q&A from an interview in Salon with the neuroscientist authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts, a look at the Internet and human sexual behavior (I'm finishing reading Sex at Dawn right now; the article provides an interesting complement to that book, if you've read it):

As far as men's interest in pornography goes, what of your findings were actually surprising? Because a lot of it -- like the interest in large breasts -- is totally expected.

I'll give you the top three. No. 1 is that men prefer overweight women to underweight women. There are almost three times as many searches for fat women as there are for skinny women, and lest you think that's some way we treated the search data, this is also reflected in popularity on adult sites. There are many more video sites devoted to overweight women than underweight women. Now, I should say as a caveat that men prefer healthy weight women overall. But if the choice is between a woman with a few extra pounds or a few less pounds, most guys will choose more pounds.

I'm not choosing to see this as evidence that all men Really Prefer Fatties (although many more do than admit it or are aware of it, I think)--the images we ingest and fantasy we pursue is not the same thing as known physical preference--but it is quite interesting.

As somebody who spent a significant amount of time in recent months combing BBW porn sites to illustrate this book (there are just a few illustrations, but very specific ones) I can tell you that nothing about this fact surprises me. For a lot of reasons, but mostly because: more happens in fat porn. If what you want to do is look at (sexy) things, there is more to look at in fat porn. More movement, more shapes, more dangle, more jiggle, more flesh, more cause and effect, more postures, more difference in postures, more textures, more change in body shapes from moment to moment, more body size differences, more contrast, more kinetic energy, more finagling, more acoustical sound, more force, more More. More (I'll just say it) PHYSICS! Physics in action. Mmm...physics.

The illustration for the article (at left) is a MILF. It's interesting that Salon didn't choose to show a big girl, which maybe highlights (to my mind) part of what's being talked about here: because images of fatness are ritually excluded from the media, another reason men (who may not be that into fat girls in real life) like fat porn is that there is the jolt of the "unfamiliar" in it. You don't see naked fat bodies online/in print as often, so they seem more naked when they are. They look more unclothed. A naked thin body is more of a known quantity. The shapes and forms of the fat body depart from the iconography of Naked Lady and that can bring additional attention, good or bad. Fat bodies are going to lose some of their currency as unknown quantities once they get let out of the media cellar a bit.

Anyhow, the book looks interesting. Shall add it to the list.

photo Tuesday

2011-04-12T12:45:00.000-07:00

Model and photographer Velvet d'Amour.

if you Twitter...

2011-04-10T19:11:00.000-07:00

...or even if you don't, consider checking out the testimony coming in under this hashtag this weekend:

#thingsfatpeoplearetold

Lots of interesting experiences and commonalities. It's not the happiest hashtag in the world, but it's fascinating.

bikini livin

2011-04-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

Okeydoke. This article is, nominally, reportage, so you can't argue with its facts, even if they are thinly-veiled corporate shilling (Weight Watchers, Shedding for the Wedding--ungh, what a grimy name for a TV show), but still--the blithe nature of the headline, the Barbie pic (her hands look...posed), and the story itself, validates a really frustrating cultural conceit: You have to earn your right to wear certain pieces of clothing.

I'm in the mood to find this exasperating idea exasperating, even if it's so pervasive it's in the molecules in the air. (Growing up as a chubby teenager I thought a bikini would be allowable only by presidential dispensation or maybe by fantastical time travel or magic body-switching.) So I am going to hand some of this shit back:

A bikini is not the Maltese Falcon, an Olympic medal, the Heisman Trophy, or 1600 on your SATs. Another way of saying this: wearing a bikini is not news. A bikini is a piece (or two) of clothing. It's not a badge of honor, it's not a key you receive to enter an exclusive club, it's not something you earn the right to wear once you're thin enough to allowed to be naked enough to wear one.
If you want to wear one, whatever your body size, wear one! If you follow People magazine thinking, it is the most daring thing you will ever do, but honestly it's not very important, ultimately. That is galling, and rather humbling--our bodies are supposed to be earth-shattering, but they aren't. Go on and put one on and swim.
Depending on your body type, you actually may be more securely and completely clothed in a bikini than in a one-piece, which has its own sartorial demands. Two-piece suits keep things nicely in place with large bodies.
If the word "bikini" carries too much Gidget-Annette-Funicello-Sports-Illustrated-Hawaiian Tropic-Maxim-FHM connotation, just call it a two-piece! I think that sounds very neutral.
Sunlight is very good for you, and can help in small doses with mood disorders, bone density, and skin problems. The more of your skin exposed to the sun, the better! Just don't forget sunscreen.
Being in a bikini is not the same thing as having the cameras of the world upon you. Just because people make post weight-loss-debuts in the media in a bikini as proof of their new selves, this does not mean that in order to wear one you have to bear the scrutiny of a dermatologist's magnifying lens upon your self.
Go to Europe. Watch the 70-year-old women in two-piece bathing suits. See how that works.
On a larger level: Who wants to wait to be told when it's okay to do something? I understand why it happens--I understand why some women don't go swimming in public, period, given all the pressures about women's bodies--but it makes me bristle. "Letting" only a certain tiny range of body types wear bikinis, thereby excluding a lot of fat ones and a fair number of skinny ones, is fascist. Who wants to be a fascist! Not I. So uncool.
Articles like this one are demeaning. Rue is not a child, but the headline sounds rather like Sara Rue Walks/Ties Shoes/Chews Gum for the First Time Ever! (And should this be any of our business?) Or try it with another piece of clothing: Sara Rue Wears Pants for the First Time Ever! Stupid, no?
Stores with 1x-4x plus sizing such as Lane Bryant, Old Navy, Torrid, One Stop Plus, Wal-Mart, and K-Mart, sometimes sell bikinis in large sizes, and usually sell bottoms and tankini tops. Here are some places that consistently sell full bikinis on large sizes. I have bought from all of these places.

Clockwise, from upper left:

• Big on Batik
• Big Gals Lingerie
• Love Your Peaches
• By Ro! Designs

I would also throw in a plug
for Junonia's suits, which,
while not two-piece glam, are a great resource in general--I love their swim bottoms--especially when they're on sale (pretty spendy).

I also love this Monif C. bikini the company introduced this season, although it's already sold out (and I couldn't afford it anyhow), but still--how fabulous is that cut? Love the high-waisted bottom. I think that's a great look.

Happy summer! Go swimming!

his people were thin, but his cats were chubby

2011-04-02T18:05:00.000-07:00

(From Goreyana)
(I swear I'm not turning this into a cat blog.)

ever thus

2011-03-23T00:57:00.000-07:00

At the left: Variation #209,873 on making something completely out of one's control--body type--a fad, so as to spur impotent fanciful longing and money-spending, a reaching for an ideal that has likely SFA to do with what your own body looks like, however big it is or isn't. It is not possible, note, to move your body fat around like clay, to pad some bits ("keep your [socially-acceptable] curves") and lose the "extra." Not how the human body works.

When I was growing up it was all the same, just a different ideal: if you dieted and spent money and worked hard enough you could suddenly be a hipless preppy wonder. The ideal changes, the longing to change doesn't. "Spot-reducing exercises"...remember those? They were supposed to make the right things thin, leave the rest.

I hate when people push any look as the Real Whatever. The whole Real Women Have Curves thing, for instance, is such crap. Real women: have boobs, don't have boobs, have hips, don't have hips, are big, small, thin, fat, tall, short, blah, blah. Nobody needs the validation of "real"--any woman is a real woman. To use the word real is only, as people say, to suggest its opposite.

sigh

2011-03-22T19:55:00.000-07:00

I was excited at first to see this photo in People; it's a promo shot from the new Judd Apatow movie, Bridesmaids, and, Mike & Molly aside, I am just a big Melissa McCarthy fan. Kind of hard not to be--she's so pretty and funny and there she is wearing hot shoes and skipping across the street. Go Melissa.

For some reason I had Bridesmaids conflated with another bunch-of-chicks movie and thought Melissa McCarthy had a fun part in it, but then I checked out the previews. Ungh.

I do not think fat actresses shouldn't play grotesque, macabre characters. I do not think fat actresses--any actress--should always have to look pretty or aren't allowed to risk being out there.

But--ungh. Some part of this fat girl died a little inside when I saw McCarthy's outfits. If this is The Hangover for Ladies, McCarthy seems to be Zach Galifianakis: she's the icky one. She dresses in a weird, mannish way, is artless, kinda gross, weird. Bigger people in Apatowian films are like giant gruff babies, unaware of their inappropriateness, barging around, causing problems.

I haven't seen the movie, so I'll shut up for now, but from the previews it strikes me as strange casting. McCarthy is a great comedienne and can do lots of parts (she was in the Groundlings), but she's also very pretty and feminine and not really a second-banana type--she looks more like the lead to me than Kristen Wiig. Not really sure why she gets to be the Alan Garner here, at a squint, other than size. We'll see.

2011-03-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

Maru means round or spherical.

Yes, there is a closet.

2011-03-09T05:29:00.000-08:00

Gawker recently posted a blind item from Buzzfoto in their gossip column:

This actor, known mostly for his great hair and good looks over his acting ability, might surround himself with stick thin supermodels at times, but we're told he has a 'big girl fetish.' He scours the internet for listings and photos of lovely, big, and curvaceous women and hooks up with them whenever possible!

There are a lot of closets to find fascinating in the weird world in which we live, but this one--the men-who-like-big-girls closet--is my favorite. Well, it's not my favorite; it's not fun--it's hurtful and depressing--but it sure is chronically fascinating. It is a real thing, filled with a wild mix of people. I find it especially interesting because most people don't know it's there, as is often the way with closets. (Why would you even need that closet--nobody likes fat women anyhow, right? You might get saddled with a fat woman as you age and make the best of it, but nobody chooses them from the outset, yes?)

I saw the blind item in a blog entry by Tami Winfrey Harris, whose writing I like, in which she said:

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how sick we are about weight in America.

I am accustomed to blind gossip items being the domain of cheating spouses, drug addictions, five-finger discounts and other bad celebrity behavior. Apparently, loving a little junk in the trunk and meat on the bones is a) a fetish (Curious that a love of underweight models is never deemed a "fetish.") and b) a moral sin comparable to crack addiction.

I'll alert my husband to beware the vice squad.

She is quite right that it's all ridiculous, that "fetish" is the wrong word here, and that model beauty is a very weird norm, but I also think she might be missing something by pointing a finger at the gossip writer and not at the facts (can you even use that term about a blind item?). She, in a way, would also seem to be saying: why do you even need that closet?, although for opposite reasons than those I described above--she's saying it shouldn't be weird to like big women (it shouldn't). But the truth either way is that the FA closet (I am going to use the sometimes divisive industry standard term here: "FA" stands for fat admirer) is a really deep one and isn't just a media construct.

If a young actor "known mostly for his great hair and good looks over his acting ability" likes somewhat acceptably chubby or unacceptably fat women, wherever you're drawing the line, and on whatever side of it he falls, then he is in the closet. Either way. Other than women who generally top out in the size 12/14 range, such as Pierce Brosnan's wife Keely Shayle Smith and Freddy Rodriguez's wife Elsie, name one contemporary high-profile entertainer who walks the red carpet with a more-or-less-consistently-fat girl on his arm. (Women like Mo'Nique, Gabourey Sidibe, and Dawn French, who are the celebrities in those cases, are separate from the issue I'm addressing, although maybe Lenny Henry could be our exception here--I can't say.)

Think about it. You can name a flurry of people who say positive things about size, or sing songs about fat girls, or paint fat women, or maybe once admitted [nsfw] to sleeping with a fat girl, and most everyone either used to or still does obsess about their weight, or "struggles" with it, so that the issue of size becomes relevant to everybody (I think just drawing breath in 2011 makes that happen)--but that's different. I'm talking about celebrities who choose to date or marry actual fat women and are actually seen doing so. It's pretty difficult to point to any images of it happening. I'm not saying people who say positive things about size but have thin partners are by definition in the closet, I'm just saying--when do you ever see the fat partners? Nor am I trying to sneer at size 12/14 types to say they're "not fat enough," I'm saying: that isn't actually the absolute end of the fat girl size rainbow--more like the beginning. Nor is whom you love a test of anything but whom you love, but (to say it again), when do you see a guy, whatever his size, with a big woman?

People probably assume you don't see fat girlfriends with celebrities because celebrities have earned the right to choose thatwhichismostdesirable (thin partners). And there's no getting around male celebrities' ability to re-up with new young wives as part of the equation. The fact, though, is that some men like fat women. They just do. (Usual thinking is 5-10% of the population--who knows).

Whoever thinks that the pressure to date thin people isn't real isn't really looking at the fanatical disgust with which fat is generally treated in our lives. If fat is disgusting, what does that make someone who is often, or even exclusively, attracted to fat people? Physically attracted? Someone perfectly capable of loving the whole person, but likes when it is a whole big person? The drone of Fat=Unhealthy, which has created a real "reason" and a million new ways to hate fat people, makes it all more tenacious too, because now not only do FAs' families and friends get to disapprove, they get to "justify" it, because how could you love somebody who is killing themselves with fat? We just want to help you honey.

Men who like large women: don't see in the media (especially in the white world) images of men, whatever size, with large women; can be ridiculed for liking them ("you must have been really drunk when you took that one home"); can be penalized professionally for being married to them. I know men married to large wives who have been told when their partner leaves the room that they have somebody in mind for them when they're ready to do better. I know men who lost friends and family for coming out of the FA closet.

Not every man is ready to risk that kind of criticism for themselves or is ready to risk subjecting someone they love to it. Not every man is ready to risk loving someone he's attracted to who doesn't fit the mold. Not every man is ready to risk facing the "guilt" of being attracted to an aspect of someone they love that will make them die young (or so the messages go). Not every man is ready to defend a sexual predilection or call it important, whatever their inclination toward divulging personal information.

Everybody's horny, though. Some FAs will not risk going public, but as ever, the horny will out--sort of. At least into the closet. Some closet cases park there for the rest of their life, surfing fat porn, buying sex, dating and sleeping with fat women on the DL. Many of them embody all the fat-hate and fat-lust within themselves, saying without any sense of disconnect, "Of course I wouldn't date her" about somebody they'll go to great lengths to spend time with. Closet cases can do a lot of damage to a population that can be pretty damaged already by the messages the world sends about how nobody will ever want you if you're fat.

You run into these guys as just a regular fat girl in the dating world: married men with trophy wives they're not attracted to and a never-ending extramarital career of dating fatties; the guy who claims he's attracted to all sorts of women although it gradually becomes clear he dates the thin ones in public and fucks the fat ones in private; men with two Facebook pages; the guys who want to come over to your house on your first date and won't be seen in public; the ambitious young academic who told me straight to my face he would never marry a woman my size but would always be most attracted to women who looked like me. They're out there.

I actually have sympathy for closet cases--to a degree. Nobody has a right to treat other people badly, but I understand where closeted thinking, at least, comes from. I know how easy it is to be a closeted fat person, to desperately try to not take up all of your needed space, to try to hide. I know how hard it must be to date people who often don't like the way they look, who find you in turn disgusting for liking something they hate about themselves. I know all the shitty cultural thinking about fat can skew things into the forbidden so strongly and at such a young age that it's pretty hard to put it straight.

For that reason I think closet cases need to be encouraged to come out, to work through their mixed, sometimes disgusted feelings and apprehensions, so that they can, you know--nut up and COME THE FUCK OUT. That would be the point there. As fat people always say when talking about this: I can't ultimately hide being fat, but you have the luxury of hiding. Who has it worse? Plus it's just sad. Life is short. You like what you like--why deny yourself it? Why hurt others, but why hurt yourself?

You have to wonder if a really high-profile celebrity FA came out what it would do to all this. I can't help thinking that it would do a lot of good if a famous man who was proud of his 350-lb wife just (wait for it)...went somewhere with her and was photographed while doing it (omgnoway!). More than once (noWAY!). Made it clear he was dating a fat woman. Held a fat woman's hand, escorted her with pride somewhere, let somebody take a photo and publish it. Whatever. Everyday stuff. The idea of such a photo seems startlingly revolutionary, more so even than a photo of just a fat woman, which is the biggest clue I can think of pointing to the closet's existence for people who don't get it. Fat women, when they are pictured, are pictured alone. Right now the only place you ever see an image of a man touching a fat woman is porn, but that's not because it's a fetish, that's because it's Not Okay anywhere else but damn if it doesn't have unstoppable momentum when it comes to our libidos. That is how closets work.

Last year, when rumors were swirling about a famous actor who secretly or not so secretly liked the fatties--please note, this is a favorite parlor game in Fatland; figuring out which celebrities might "really" like big girls from all sorts of clues--and the gossip is good, all the more because this shit comes out, yo--I thought that it might be cool to start doing flashmobs. Fat girl flashmobs, at this particular actor's appearances, or those of others known to be struggling with the closet. We would gather a group of 100 beautifully-dressed fat ladies, scatter ourselves in the crowd, then at an appointed time move forward to the front in a surge, so that as far as the eye can see there were gorgeously put-together fat women circling the celebrity in question, looking up at him like the little green aliens in Toy Story. We would not be shaming him or taunting him or indeed saying anything at all: just looking up and smiling, showing him and world what he likes in one long, long look, then walking away without a word.

photo Tuesday

2011-03-08T00:13:00.000-08:00

From Earl MacPherson's Pin-Up Art: How to Draw and Paint Beautiful Girls. Click to see larger version and read pin-up directions: "Enlarge bust line"; "Bring out curves"; "Dots indicate actual waistline before thin[n]ing for pin-up." I love pin-up art, but this is all still pretty amusing.

Thanks to R for the scans.

looking back, looking ahead

2011-03-04T16:13:00.000-08:00

I created this schedule above [click image for larger version] for a field trip on the (ever-so-fake) holiday of National Fat Day as a semi-serious lark for my zine, Gastrolater, in 2002. I was looking at it the other day, in an idle curiosity about who among the mentioned fat celebrities might not be so big anymore, when I noticed this little bit (below). It's odd to think now about how far-flung and wild the idea of so much weight-loss surgery was at that point, but 2010 has come and gone and the rate of bariatric surgery has more than doubled since I wrote that.

Knock it off, all of you.

2011-02-22T15:38:00.000-08:00

One ass-backwards benefit of fat hate is that it can allow you to see straight into the pulsing heart of human stupidity.

People simultaneously talk more about and are more dumb about body size than almost any other topic I can think of, which means that when they open their mouths you can get a look right into the core of people's most insecure, lazy, hateful, myopic, hurt, catchpenny thinking. Such stupidity is not helpful, and although it's all horribly discouraging, it does give you a 1/8 second head start on calling bullshit sometimes because it comes with glowing red signs.

I am aware that this is just a way of saying I Know Better--but still; there is really nothing quite like how dumb people are around body image, precisely because we are all--all of us--so persecuted by it. We're all victims and bullies, which pretty much guarantees the Duh.

On Rush Limbaugh's show yesterday he took Michelle Obama to task for not having the body to back up her policies (!):

The problem is--and dare I say this--it doesn't look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary, dietary advice. And then we hear that she's out eating ribs at 1,500 calories a serving with 141 grams of fat per serving, yeah it does--what do you mean, what do I mean?

What is it--no, I'm trying to say that our First Lady does not project the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, or of a woman Alex Rodriguez might date every six months [whom A-Rod is dating right now: click here] or what have you. I mean, women are under constant pressure to look lithe, and Michelle My Belle is out there saying if you eat the roots and tree bark and the berries and all this cardboard stuff you will live longer, be healthier and you won't be obese. Okay, fine, show us.

It is appalling (and stupid) that he would criticize individual food choices without context like that--not to mention an extremely harsh (and stupid) way of viewing the world, where every single thing you eat is either Wrong or Right and somebody's keeping track--not to mention a very self-defeating (and stupid!) way to go after somebody politically, since we none of us would pass that test--not to mention extremely revealing of his own struggles with public criticism of his size, that he can whip out data about fat grams so easily there.

But it's terribly angering that he would criticize her for her size--whatever it was--and not only that, decide the the point of comparison for the First Lady should be the Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover. The conflation of ideals and pressures and sexual thinking there is quite appalling, and at base seems to be extremely hateful, because, note, the woman is thin; the only reason he would seem to be able to--or want too--latch onto this as a thing is because you can actually see Obama's body. She doesn't hide it. He is criticizing the fact that she has one, and, perhaps, that it is a body type associated with African-American women. That's unforgiveable.

But you know what--I hated the title of Al Franken's book (Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot) too. I did. I don't enjoy Limbaugh being body-shamed. He is a florid-faced fat man, and an easy object of sputtering derision. It would be extremely easy to say to him, and I'm sure people are, regarding Obama: who are you to talk? You are actually fat yourself, how dare you? But that would be wrong too, and dig the hole deeper. Nobody should do that. It benefits nobody. It bolsters more stereotypes. It foments more hatred towards self and others.

Which--it must be said--is what Limbaugh is about, consciously encouraging hate, which is spectacularly exhausting as well as mean. It would be lovely to not feed the troll here, to just let him, and people like Andrew Breitbart, sputter away in misguided, misogynous, pain-fueled hate without any traction.

Because they're being hateful, but they're also just being stupid. So is Sarah Palin, in her reactionary anti-Michelle Obama food-related stunts. So--unfortunately--is Michelle Obama at times in her efforts fighting childhood obesity. All of them are focusing in various ways on body size, not health. The focus is on fat people and what is assumed that fat people do to be fat as the cause of our problems, rather than a symptom of the world we live in.

Don't they know nobody wins here? Nobody is immune? A 400-pound woman has stuff thrown at her on the street, earns less money, won't fly for fear of ridicule. But a tall, thin woman in a position of power is also torn down for not looking like an SI model. Rush Limbaugh takes another turn on the spit of fat-hating and believes even more in the worth of his vitriol. A fat little kid who loves running around is told she's doing something wrong and starts to hate her body and get fatter. Nobody wins.

photo Tuesday

2011-02-22T14:12:00.000-08:00

Rosie Mercado. The highest-profile more-than-plump plus-size model I know of. So exciting to see her in the public eye. Girl can work a blue dress.

fun.

2011-02-22T12:30:00.000-08:00

Meet Jimbo Pellegrine, one big bad-ass surfer. It is extremely fun to see images and videos of him at work. Surfing being a sport where the physics of the endeavor are right up front, it's interesting to see the way bigger bodies work doing it and think about the equipment they might need (I really hope that's actually JP in the comments there, telling some punk to shove off.) It looks like this guy lives in Indonesia so he can surf big waves all the time. Just brill.

Thanks to Big Fat Blog for the link.

first world problems, first world fun

2011-02-20T14:33:00.000-08:00

I have a place to swim! I joined a gym so I could use their pool. It's all rather thrilling.

I-joined-a-gym I-joined-a-gym I-joined-a-gym...that's how the phrase flows out of your mouth whether you want it to or not. The beginning of a new year being high season for I-joined-a-gym, it is almost impossible not to say it that way. Although I did, note, join said gym in December, not January. Whatever.

January in America. When we are assumed to be participating in some agreed-upon group penance for being our greedy, horrible selves. It is so tedious. And tyrannical. And, well, incorrect. And part of why we get fatter. Fuck our inescapable Puritan roots, or however this mass, commercialized mea-culpa is chosen to be understood: it's bullshit. Who decided that it's not okay to celebrate our celebrations? That is, in fact, how celebrations work. By celebrating them. Aligning the post-holiday downshift with virtue and an assumption of guilt is delusional. And playing into the I'm Good/I'm Horrible pendulum that keeps the diet industry in motion, which in turns pours the GNP into making sure we're sure we need to fix things we haven't been fixing. What a waste of time.

Whoa, okay. I'm back. Anyhow. Up until joining the pool I had been "working out"--also another term it's hard to avoid, but whatever--it flows--by using the treadmill in my building, until my Achilles tendon...how you say. Squawked. Splurgoyed. Swigguned. I want to say "snapped," which isn't accurate--if the whole thing really had I would be in a wheelchair--but something sproinged back there and all that became impossible.

Sample pool about to be used by a nice couple!

Although I adore swimming, and it is in fact medically advisable in my case, the hassle of it all had kept me avoiding it for a long time. The hassle is, in fact, the exact opposite of the ease of using a treadmill. When I used the treadmill, I could pop downstairs in whatever I was wearing and toddle away for a proscribed time, and then it was done. That's it. No prep, no clean-up particularly. 15 minutes, 30 minutes. Done. I loved that.

Going swimming means committing yourself to a two-hour to-do list of constant tasks involving packing things you'll need, getting to the gym, changing clothes, locking things up, swimming--oh yeah, swimming--then doing it all in reverse, only more, as you wish somebody designed a people-washing machine that got rid of the chlorine you can smell emitting from your pores and/or that somebody could hold you upside down by your feet and swish your hair in clean water like a little girl with her Barbie doll. Honestly, I find the hoo-ha surrounding swimming much more exhausting than swimming itself.

"Swimming" probably isn't quite the right word: it's probably more accurate to say I caper about. I do swim some laps, but I do lots of exercises, stretching and "weight-lifting" (styrofoam "weight"-pushing)--things like that. It has occurred to me more than a few times that what I do is basically hop in the water and start demonstrating the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Being in the water makes me so happy. It makes me so happy that it tells you something about how much of a hassle swimming is, as that kept me from going swimming for so long when I might have been able to. The pool I go to is not far away, and other than a few problems, it is pretty much all one would hope for in a pool. I am embracing the two hours of hassle and constant slight chlorine pong for the joy of being in the water.

The lovely ladies of the Padded Lilies

Someday I plan on having the pool of my dreams. It will have the sturdiest stairs and handrails to ease to the journey into and out of gravity, a big deep end, an infinity edge for happy water flow, be kept at the cool temperature I like, and I will be able to just walk out the door and hop in it. It is going to be beautiful! You're all invited.

thanks, ladies!

2011-02-16T16:16:00.000-08:00

I trekked to Wicker Park Sunday to participate in this clothing swap:

...and was very glad I did. I brought four Peapod bags' worth of clothing in sizes 26-34 (4x-6x) that I hope all found good homes, either with other nice fat ladies there or at Howard Brown Brown Elephant, which is where I understand anything leftover went.

It was, note, a scrum, an absolute, fabulous scrum. I had to wait a few minutes to go in when I first got there, as it was at capacity. The venue (Kathryn Kerrigan Shoes) was too small and needed much more seating, but I am disinclined to fault anybody for that, as it was the first such event. I saw so many smiling faces. The organizers of the event--and okay, honestly, even now I am a little confused about who exactly was organizing (partly thanks to my design-based aversion to Tumblr)--it seems like there were a lot of people behind it, not all of whom are local--were also great. I want to send special thanks to Rachel, who gave me a t-shirt from this Etsy store (and a hug) when I said I hadn't found anything in the clothing piles myself. I also got some free slippers from Junonia across the street at Vive la Femme. I hadn't been there for quite a while--since that store moved from their other location across the street--so it was fun to look in.

As I walked down Damen Ave. that night, which was, unsurprisingly for February in Chicago, dark, grey, sodden, marked on either side with piles of dirty melting snow, lined with subdued storefronts, the building where the swap was, by contrast, the proverbial ablaze with light. It was brilliantly bright inside, full to the gills with chattering, happy women. If I were an entrepreneurial type I would have stopped right there and said: Hey, what's that rush about. How can I harness some of that.

It continues to fascinate me--and please my sense of prediction, which I hope isn't too smug--that clothing is such a flashpoint for action and organization around issues of size. It is a huge point of financial and political power for fat women in this country. We need clothes, whether we hate our bodies or love them, especially as more and more people are fat, and at younger ages. A lot of the women at the swap seemed to be in their late 20s if I had to guess, sort of more of the third (fourth?) wave of fat activism, which has to a degree organized around the issue of what we put on our bodies. What we can fit on our bodies. What we can find to put on our bodies. How we dress, how and what we buy to dress ourselves. How we (don't) hide. How we show ourselves, how we ask for what we need and what we want. It was cool to see it in action.

Well done, Gold & the Beautiful. Hope it happens again!

p.s. I donated a 5x shirt of this design (love this photo & the way it's cropped), by Substantia Jones of Adipositivity. Hope somebody's wearing it!

I saw this:

2011-02-16T14:40:00.000-08:00

...and thought: Huh? Karma? What did they do? I forget sometimes, but note: beauty is a zero-sum contest and we are to hate the winners. Nicely done (not), Daily News. Here's the rest:

photo Tuesday

2011-02-08T13:10:00.000-08:00

the most expensive fat lady in the world getting settled

you dear little girls

2011-02-07T12:30:00.000-08:00

Text from Eight Cousins (1875), by Louisa May Alcott:

Happy Birthday, Extender!

2011-02-06T20:48:00.000-08:00

It's been a year since I spun off size-related writing from my regular blog and created The Extender and so--let Bacchus rule! Woo! I know I am a somewhat erratically-updating creature, but I am a sincere one, and hope to keep providing my own take--for what else do you or can you do in a blog--on all things related to size. In aeternum floreant! Sorry for cropping the Rembrandt.

p.s. Bacchus' extender is the kind that clips round the side where you can't see it. He asked for it nicely when he sat on the wine keg.

diets and the damage done

2011-02-05T15:22:00.000-08:00

My high school years parked two really bad songs in my brain for the rest of my life--at least two, but these are the worst.

One was from German class. I desperately wanted to take French when I started high school, but French was full, and thus were the next eight years of my life and two exchange programs decided. In eleventh grade my German teacher had us learn "Das Lied der Deutschen" as part of our curriculum. At that point the third stanza was the national anthem of West Germany, but for some reason we learned all the stanzas, including the first. Not a good stanza. Not only did we sing the song, I accompanied us on the piano, which guaranteed that the tenaciously catchy tune lives on in my babbling singing brain and surfaces occasionally at bad times. Any time is horrible to start singing "Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles," really. I try not to let that happen, but wish I could just unlearn it.

The other song came from a diet center I belonged to. I don't remember the name of the center now, or that much about it at all in some ways. The experience feels like a dream, comes back to me in whole flashes of feeling for brief, thick moments. The place was a relic of the 1970s, maybe, or the 1960s, named after a woman, I think. I know that I was a member there sometime before my two tours of duty in Weight Watchers, which would put this in the early 1980s, when I was around 16.

The center was in a mall. I remember a pink and purple interior with no windows and low ceilings. It was flowery, maybe, or paisley. I vaguely remember vibrating belt exercisers--those things hurt--and other old-fashioned equipment. I thought the place was sort of old-fashioned, and felt shame that my fatness would bring me into contact--as did clothes-buying, for instance, in that era of double-knits--with the world of middle-aged women; not only that, that's the world I was eligible for. It was disorienting and shaming.

One of the only things I recall at all vividly about the place is the song we had to sing while doing a little calisthenics routine that involved toe-touching and other movements on the floor:

Who hit Sally in the belly with the meatball?
Oh dear! I fear! I've over-developed my rear!

We did our large, jerky gestures on the downbeats, so that the whole thing had a very singsong, drums-on-a-boat quality:

WHO hit SAL-ly in the BEL-ly with the MEAT-ball?
Oh DEAR! I FEAR! I've OV-er-de-VEL-oped-my-REAR!

To this day that song appears unbidden in my brain whenever it feels like it, or perhaps when a piece of prose with the right meter triggers the rhythm. I wish I could excise the song and let something else take its place in my brainpan, but I think it's stuck.

I wish I could excise the whole experience. I wish I could save me and all the housewives from that windowless place; blast in, push all of us through the door like a member of the SWAT team before all that bullshit explodes and takes us with it.

It's hard to know what to wish for in healing from diet experiences, because they are so far-reaching in every direction, so tenacious, so complicated, so woven into every aspect of your life. The wound it would leave if you yanked it out whole would not heal. It would be easier to just start over at the beginning and hope to crowd it out with acceptance. But you can't.

One day when my mom dropped me off at the diet center--she and I had argued about how much weight I had to lose; I said, wildly, "Thirty pounds!", hoping against hope she would say, "No, you don't really need to lose any," and was heartsick when she countered with, "No, fifteen"--I discovered when I went inside there was a potluck. I could hardly believe they dared bring explosive material such as food--lots of it, not all diet fare--in this place, but I was very excited. Stirred-up. I remember somebody urging me to eat. That's all I did for my hour, although I pretending to be doing other things, as if it wasn't important. I scarfed food I didn't normally get, like Oreos, at one point pushing them in my face while hiding in the dressing room. How could anybody just let cookies sit there? Have just a few? Have none? I lied to the people at the diet center about what I was doing, sure everyone was watching me pretending not to care while all the time I watched the food like prey. I lied to my mother in the car afterward about my hour "exercising," and felt dirty and ashamed.

And stirred up. I don't know that anything could have saved me from impetus of disordered eating at that point of my life. Experiences such as the diet center were just one push in the forces that set the pendulum swinging so hard I didn't know where the point of equilibrium was for years. The forces that keeps us off-balance about food are huge, period. When the pendulum isn't swinging the earth itself under our feet is. It is worth finding the position of repose, though, to come back to, over and over. It's possible to find it, to heal. You may have to let the whole world tilt without you, though.

2011-01-30T13:43:00.001-08:00

the need for matched sets

2011-01-13T20:56:00.000-08:00

In his review for The Dilemma in the New York Times, A.O. Scott writes:

Mr. Vaughn and Mr. James play bulky best buds romantically paired (because they’re Not Gay) with pretty, fine-boned women. Mr. James is Nick, married to Geneva (Winona Ryder), and Mr. Vaughn is Ronny, gathering the nerve and the money to propose to his longtime girlfriend, Beth (Jennifer Connelly). To ask if Mr. Vaughn and Ms. Connelly have any chemistry is to invoke the wrong science; extreme disparities of size and shape suggest, instead, a fascinating problem of zoology, as if a whippet had decided to cohabit with a yak.

A whippet and a yak! Goddamn. And here I thought they were Homo sapiens.

We don't know what to do--we think we don't--with mismatched couples, when the violated criteria is that of some presumably agreed-upon Hotness. How can it happen? What is the hot one getting out of it (seems to be the idea)--when it's not an obvious question of material gain? If body size is something we make and earn with every action we take, how can somebody who's done the "right" things "deserve" somebody whose done the "wrong"?

Sometimes you just need scare quotes.

Despite our confusion, we see a lot of examples in modern media of "regular guy with the hot wife" phenom that offends so many's sensibilities, such as The Dilemma:

They can offend me too, but not because it violates some sense of symmetry that I think is part of the natural order.

It certainly bothers me that it's considered so far out of the realm of possibility to show a large woman who is loved, partnered, perhaps even has a child. (Who knew the phenom of a fat mom would be so rare? I almost miss that stereotype). It bothers me that media execs are still so ready to build shows and movies around men who don't fit extremely stringent criteria for conventionally attractive, when the women must--they are pinned down in a very, very narrow range of acceptable. There is a reason these couples do look sort of clunky sometimes.

But what bothers me the most is that the "mismatching" is created because media folk get boxed in by beauty ideals, not from any real belief that that people can like qualities different than themselves in their partners. People really do like different things sometimes (heterosexuality being a good example). They're called preferences. Crazy. There really are smaller women who like bigger men.

There are tall people who like short people, short people who like tall people, fat people who like skinny people, skinny people who like fat people, black people who like white people, white people who like black people, older people who like younger people, younger people like older people...for however much time you have to match things up and however many columns A and B you can think of (or more), there are people out there mixing it up in low- to high-contrast ways. Nor does the fact that somebody likes something different necessarily make it a fetish, either. That seems to be the category that preferences get dumped in when they are too obvious to be borne or involve preferences of which people disapprove. Such as a fat partner. Some people actually prefer them. Just because they do.

The chunkier guy/thinner woman idea, while not approved (see above), does have some traction from just sheer force, maybe, or from a lurking suspicion that the average woman might indeed like a hug from a solid, money-earning guy at the end of the day (or however they might rationalize a physical preference). But the fat woman/skinny guy thing is rarely to be countenanced. It's hard to imagine a skinny Mike/fat Molly sitcom, when the idea of a skinny man preferring a fat woman still seems to be associated with a kind of emasculated delusion about what he's getting into. Two fat people, well--they just don't know any better. One fat, one thin...why are they putting up with it?

Unconventional female looks being a much bigger violation of social order than male ones, I'm not sure the media even knows how to approach it, given that it runs on steam-powered looksism most of the time. Look at all the vibrations that emanated from the marriage of Elizabeth and John Edwards; after her death people were still trying to make sense of what they felt had no real way to understand. Or of what needed examination to comprehend. Maybe he just thought she was attractive, you know? She was.

One of the things you hopefully learn as you get older is that you can't even know all the ways love--or lust--looks at an individual level, which is to say a million different ways, even without strong preferences in the fray, which mix it up a million times more. Surely we don't need one more astonished celebrity-rag article about men cheating on their "perfect" wives to prove this. If people really are free to love who they want, and do, let's show it. It we're still not really free to do so--all the more reason to show it and get people used to it. You like what you like. Even when it doesn't look exactly like you.

yay

2011-01-09T00:41:00.000-08:00

from blunt card.com

"Dear Fatphobia/Thin Privilege deniers"

2011-01-08T23:38:00.000-08:00

From Bitch, Please. Go check out the other screen grabs, or make your own!

beyond our ken

2011-01-08T23:20:00.000-08:00

This is a great, really significant article from the CBC profiling Dr. Arya Sharma, chair of obesity research and management at the University of Alberta. It says some important things, I think, about all the factors that contribute to why some us are fat and some of us are thin:

And while sedentary lifestyles and poor food choices do play a factor, one of Canada's leading obesity experts believes much of the problem stems from basic metabolism and the yo-yo dieting that so many obese and overweight people experience.

"I think one of the biggest misconceptions when we talk about obesity in general is that obese people are obese largely because of their lifestyles and because of the way that they live."

Sharma points to studies where people's eating and activity are carefully monitored. They show that some people can eat an additional 1,000 calories per day and not gain a gram, while others would gain five to six kilograms over a six-week period.

"There's a huge variability in how people can cope with extra calories."

We are so sure we Know, at a glance, even, why one person is thin and one is fat. One person does the right things, one does the wrong--right? I feel more and more that we are just a big pile of guinea pigs in our pen, our little genetic predispositions fired with surges from calorie restriction, HFCS, stress, not sleeping, whole foods, processed foods, hunger, prescription meds, no meds--whatever--all of it, and seeing all of their effects in all of us. Body size is just the most visible bit of it, and less in our control than we think. Bodies respond millions of ways to the variables of modern life.

"We keep hammering home the stereotype of the fat, lazy slobs who are eating fast food all the time who are not moving, not exercising or not taking care of themselves, making poor choices, when there's very little science that actually backs this up."

Also worth checking out, and in a similar vein: this piece in Newsweek, "Fat Canaries in a Coal Mine," about an obesity researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmington who discovered a rise of obesity in the majority (23 of 24) animal populations chosen for study since the 1940s. With no explanation.

Food marketing, more TV, and less phys ed can no more explain these fatter animals than they can the epidemic of obesity in babies under 6 months.

Both pieces well worth a look--fascinating.

photo Tuesday

2011-01-04T15:41:00.000-08:00

Mujeres dormidas

Nu aux bras levés

Paintings by Jose de Togores i Llach (1893-1970), via the great website Art Inconnu, a home for "little-known and under-appreciated art."

perp walk

2010-12-25T22:38:00.000-08:00

This blog by Nina Matsumoto recently featured images from the 2002 book by Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein, Athlete, that contains beautifully photographed lineups of all kinds of athletes, of all kinds of body sizes, types, heights, weights. The images are fascinating to inspect at leisure, and really rather smokin hot. Matsumoto, a comic artist, posted them as a guide for artists, pointing out that the body type we think of as athletic or strong comes in many forms. Smokin. No, wait--instructional. I'm particularly fond--mostly fond--of the images that display the most body size diversity, such as Mr. Hamman there, hello.

Thanks to HB for the headsup.

old time fatties!

2010-12-25T22:23:00.000-08:00

I am really enjoying this Tumblr site: Fuck Yeah, Old Time Fatties!, which posts old photos of all kinds--from galleries, libraries, stock photo agencies, other sources--that feature fat people in them. The goal is to illustrate the fact that fat people did not just arrive on the earth in the last ten years, toddling in in our giant boots that leave huge ecological footprints for the rest of the world to pay for. Mostly it's fun because I am a sucker for old photos, and I think they're beautiful.

From The Library of Congress Flicker set: [Portrait of Sylvia Syms, Little Casino(?), New York, N.Y., ca. June 1947] (LOC) Gottlieb, William P., 1917- , photographer.

hally hoppidays! (photo Tuesday)

2010-12-20T23:21:00.001-08:00

oh dear

2010-12-11T20:19:00.000-08:00

This year for the holidays I'm giving my mom better legs. I'm giving my brother a tighter core. My cousin, better posture. My sister, a cuter butt. Now--my man? This year he's getting a sexier me.

Unhhuh. I kinda want a pair of these shoes, even with the tell-tale roundheel (!), but this ad clanks so hard. Mean.

Ms. Scylla and Ms. Charybdis

2010-11-30T19:22:00.000-08:00

dancer thin

2010-11-24T12:50:00.000-08:00

Mila Kunis is quoted in yesterday's E! Online about losing twenty pounds to play a ballet dancer in Black Swan:

"I could see why this industry [query: which?] is so f--ked up, because at 95 pounds, I would literally look at myself in the mirror and I was like, Oh my God!" she says. "I had no shape, no boobs, no ass...All you saw was bone. I was like, This looks gross."

I hope people notice what I think is the most meaningful portion of the interview, which is about the difference between how she looked to real people--"family and friends became concerned"--versus how it looked onscreen:

"In real life, it looked disgusting," Kunis says. "But in photographs and on film, it looked amazing."

We experience people's bodies more and more through the filter of imagery, but photos do not = bodies. There are worlds of differences living in the (theoretically) thin line between the two.

the big C

2010-11-23T16:02:00.000-08:00

If you missed it, this New York Times piece by Peggy Orenstein about the cultural Pinking of breast cancer is well worth a read. It lays out some things that desperately needed to be said--very straightforwardly--about the bizarre sexualization and commodification of breast cancer awareness, and how harsh it ultimately is to those who suffer from the disease. I was really glad to see this piece.

A few days before that article was published, the Teenage Cancer Trust released research listing the top 20 cancer myths believed by teenagers and young adults in the UK. They are all doozies, but note the following examples (numbers are percentages of young people who believe the myth):

Mobile phones cause brain tumors - 36%
The color of your skin determines your cancer risks - 22%
If you have cancer when pregnant, your baby will get it - 19%
Keeping a mobile phone in your bra gives you breast cancer - 15%
Being fat gives you cancer - 7%

photo Tuesday

2010-11-23T15:47:00.000-08:00

What can I say, I'm in the mood for a green alien.

cute

2010-11-22T15:43:00.000-08:00

from Post Secret

dreamz

2010-11-21T10:30:00.000-08:00

To prove that this is a personal blog and not a news outlet (hah), I am going to relay a dream from last night that cracked me up. I don't know about you, but media experiences seed my dreams the way real life does, so this one is the result yesterday--in part--of watching Keeping up With the Kardashians and America's Test Kitchen (French bistro cooking episode), consuming Alexia Waffle Fries, and reading E!Online. I was at the Kardashians' house for an open house/party and they were debating the fat content in roasted chicken and potatoes. They appealed to me for my opinion and I said it was ridiculous to worry about the fat content in a beautifully cooked bird like that. I kept trying to heat up a handful of potatoes for myself but people kept screwing with them, including mixing them in my drink. The last time I was at the microwave Kris Jenner came up to me and said, "Well, what do you think?" I said the party was fine and why do you ask? She said, "Well, we're putting in a bid to host NAAFA convention next year in SoCal." I was on the brink of telling her, "You know, some people who come will actually be really large," when I woke up. Heh! Amusing. I see that family as a group of people that has basically turned management of the Beauty Ideal into a career, so I think my subconscious was mashing stuff up to make a point. Also to confront the idea that "curves," the word du jour used by celebrities as talisman against too-fat/too-thin talk, is not the same thing as fat.

fatty-spotting

2010-11-18T08:50:00.000-08:00

More on this later, but for now, note: One current place to spot fatties in the mainstream culture of pop? Outsiders Rising videos, such as the two below: Katy Perry's "Firework" and "Raise Your Glass" by P!nk. Both songs are vague anthemic urges for equality led by pretty pop singers, with videos featuring LBGT, seriously ill, nerdy, or otherwise outsider youth. There is also a big girl in each video: the one in Perry's is chubby and leaps into a pool wearing a bikini (awlright); the girl in P!nk's does less (she knocks over "mean" thin girl cutouts while sitting with them at a lunch table), but she does open the video.

heh

2010-11-16T22:30:00.000-08:00

photo Tuesday

2010-11-16T13:31:00.001-08:00

who you callin fat?

2010-11-11T20:42:00.000-08:00

Hi! I'm a fatty.

I was enchanted to discover recently that there is an animal called the fat sand rat (pictured above). Fat is part of the species' name, its binomial nomenclature: Psammomys obesus. The animal is in the news because researchers were able to confirm that traditional treatments for SAD had scientific basis; they are diurnal, not nocturnal, as are the usual animals for testing (mice and other rats). Fat sand rats responded well to light exposure and antidepressants, and got out of their little bathrobes earlier in the day and stopped watching so much TV.

a fat puffer

It's fascinating to me that there is a taxonomic way for an animal to be fat. It is such a loaded and extremely subjective descriptor in the human world (reclamation aside), not to mention seen as a voluntary, mutable, and undesirable, state, but it turns out there are at least thirty species besides the fat sand rat who are blithely, officially "fat."


the fat dormouse

There is, for instance, an entire genus of fat puffers, such as the guineafowl puffer (pictured). There are a lot of "fat" fish: fat snooks, fat sleepers, fat mullets; and fat things in shells like fat pocketbooks and fat horsemussels. There is a fat dormouse or edible dormouse, considered a pest in the UK, and the genus of fat mice, which includes the subspecies of the dainty fat mouse and the tiny fat mouse (query: who doesn't want a play village of tiny fat mice?).

the fat mullet

There are also "plump" animals--plump whelks, plump groupers, and plump cyphomae--and two "corpulent" snails--the corpulent rams-horn and corpulent hornsnail. There are three "ponderous" molluscs. There is a portly spider crab, which I think sounds a very dignified thing.

the rotund
mystery snail

Then there are the "stout" and "rotund" animals. All the "rotund" animals, around ten of them, are molluscs (words to denote swollen size seem very popular in mollusc descriptors), like the rotund disc, the rotund cleftclam and the rotund trophon. There is a genus of stout newts (how Gussie Fink-Nottle), and at least twenty other "stout" species: the stout red shrimp, the stout blacksmelt, the stout longtom (a kind of needlefish).

the chunky fathead

There is, I'm happy to say, a chunky fathead, also known as the Indian driftffish. There are no "chubby" animals (although the marbled murrelet is described as "a very small, chubby, sea bird that seems to lack a neck"), but a few "obese" animals; mostly, again, things in shells: the obese thorn, the obese dipperclam, the obese pondsnail.

the thin shrew

What about the other end of the spectrum? There are at least twenty "thin" animals (no "skinny" or "svelte" ones, though), including the thin shrew, the thin pillar, the thin moonsnail, and the companion to the fat sand rat, the thin sand rat (Psammomys vexillaris), also known as the pale sand rat (as might befit a thin rattie).

a Marmosops
(slender mouse opossum)

There are lots of "slender" animals, including the slender anchovy and slender sole, and several "slender" genii: slender salamanders, slender mongooses, slender loris, and slender mouse opossums (the spectacularly named Marmosops, which should be a kind of fuzzy absorbent towel or perhaps a cute rodent spy game). There is also, oxymoronically enough, a whole genus of slender chubs.

Just for fun, I pulled out words from FHM's list of 100 Sexiest Women in the World 2010 (with its handy "Lady Finder") with which to search the animal world. I found no animals with "plunging," "epic," "petite," "goddess," "chesty," "healthy," "sexy," "hot," or "ass" in their name, but did get:

a tit
• the genus of tits

• a lot of "naked" animals, including a family of naked catfishes, squeakers, and upside-down catfishes and a genus, the famous naked mole-rats

• over twenty "beautiful" animals, including the genus of beautiful squirrels

a beautiful squirrel
• "pretty" animals, including the pretty shiner

• "wild" animals, including the wild turkey

• "erect" animals, including the erect wormsnail

the pretty shiner
• two "massive" species, including the massive urn crab

• the glorious topsnail

• the horny goby

the sad flycatcher

The subjective/adjectival in animal kingdom taxonomy is pretty much endlessly interesting. There is a nervous shark and a sprightly pygmy rice rat. I found at least eighteen "delicate" species. There is a happy wren, and four "sad" animals," including a bivalve called the sad elliptio. Language related to size is just one corner of all the sometimes goofy poetry.

fat rat!

It also turns out the fat sand rat, which is, note, not particularly fat, is a fairly relevant little animal to the human world. They were called fat originally because of the discovery that some of them become diabetic on normal grain-based rodent diets. So not only do researchers use them for studies about SAD, they are very popular for research about diabetes and its effects. Poor little dudes. They better be getting sunlamps for their troubles.

photo Tuesday

2010-11-09T23:30:00.000-08:00

mural in Orgosolo, Sardinia

love it

2010-11-04T15:56:00.000-07:00

My current fav photo from the Big Fat Kiss-In:

girl group thinking

2010-11-04T15:46:00.000-07:00

"Try the Worryin' Way" by the Fabulettes

So if you want to lose weight too
Here's all you gotta do

Fall with in love with a man that you can't trust
one who won't treat you right
and while he's out messin around
worry about him every night

If you want to lose a pound a day
try a worrying man

I don't count calories
I don't exercise
I just wonder what woman my man's been with
when he tells me he's been out with the guys

From Girl Group Sounds

photo Tuesday

2010-11-02T23:30:00.000-07:00

"If You're Fat-Phobic..."

2010-10-29T15:46:00.000-07:00

Dodai Stewart lays it on the line at Jezebel:

You cannot LOOK at someone and make a judgment about his or her health. So you shouldn't. And really: Even if you do know why someone is thin or fat, what business is it of yours? None. If a fat person disgusts you, if you're afraid of black people, if you're grossed out by gays kissing, know this: Your intolerance says way more about you than about those who repel you. When you're judging someone by weight and not moral compass, intelligence, empathy, creativity, talent or sense of humor, what kind of person are you? If you see two people--one fat and one thin--and say that the fat one disgusts you, what happens if you find out that the fat one is a loving mother and vet and the thin one is a serial killer?

Again: You cannot judge someone based on appearance. That said, you can read someone's words and tell if they are ignorant, biased, sizeist and hateful . . . Back in the day, people used to say that black people were intellectually inferior, that homosexuals were promiscuous. Today we consider this type of intolerant thought disgusting, abhorrent and politically incorrect. Someday we'll realize how bigoted and offensive we were about "fatties."

Snog for Equality

2010-10-28T23:30:00.000-07:00

So, you know, Maura Kelly and Marie Claire fucked up. And are continuing to.

The best possible thing to say or do about it now is show up tomorrow at the protest at the Hearst Tower and smooch wildly at the Big Fat Kiss-In, organized in part by Marilyn Wann and Substantia Jones of Adipositivity.

It's amazing to me how much fat activism--lots of activism--has changed in the era of social media. Responses to balls-out fat hatred had a much harder time gaining momentum even five years ago. Everything is on the boil.

So.

Dear Maura Kelly:

Showing fat people kissing is not "implicitly promoting obesity," it is implicitly promoting the fact that fat people are human fucking beings. Get over it.

Kiss kiss kiss!
Lizzy ♥♥♥♥♥

just a reminder

2010-10-22T12:31:00.000-07:00

This is what the average page looks like on a (multi-retailer) site that offers plus-sized clothing:

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THESE CLOTHES WILL LOOK LIKE ON A LARGE BODY.

That is all.

photo Tuesday

2010-10-19T17:20:00.000-07:00

Back from vacation! Slowly cranking up the Extender again. More soon.

zzzzines

2010-10-06T14:23:00.000-07:00

I finally sent off a box of zines to the DePaul Library Zine Archives. It is an odd experience, handling their familiar, dog-eared (cliche, sorry), pages. One thing printed matter does that reading online doesn't is carry a collection of physical sensations with it: the thickness of the pages under your fingers; the (sturdy, flimsy) way it's bound and how the pages turn; the smells of inks; the sharpness or blurriness of type; the places it wants to fall open to when you pick it up.So when you reacquaint yourself with something like zines, memories that are physical as well as mental emerge. Handling them put me right back into my state of mind twenty years ago.

I found size-related zines I kind of had forgotten I had, including the first edition (does that phrase have the right connotation in this context?)--a first issue--of i'm so fucking beautiful my sister gave me. It's a powerful lil thing.

The page that jumped out at me, the one that I remember engaging with the most, was this one:

I can remember being very intrigued--scared--excited--nervous--about the idea of fat being "punk." I felt like it left me vulnerable, believing that. It could be punctured so easily as a rationalization. I had a sneaking suspicion it was true, despite wanting to call bullshit on it with the rest of the world. Fat could be many things, but never punk, especially in a punk world. But--it was. It is.

photo Tuesday

2010-10-05T14:36:00.000-07:00

oh, 50

2010-09-30T00:34:00.000-07:00

50 Cent (who recently eloquently expressed himself regarding the pleasures and hazards of intimacy with large women) twittered again more recently about about re-gaining weight after losing over fifty pounds to play a cancer patient in a movie: "I'm going to the gym...I feel like a fat boy I'm so use[d] to training. When I take a few days of[f] I start thinking I'm a blimp." It feels kind of stupid to comment on celebrity tweets (because it is), but I don't know, I had a twitch of something or other reading his comment. That's how disordered eating starts, you know? It was a very clear little look at how basic fiddling with eating begins a tension/creates momentum that most people don't leave for their lifetime. Most men don't engage with it in to the same degree as women, so sometimes you can see it more sharply when they talk about it. Anyhow, yoiks. Not hopping on this in any ghoulish Cassandra-like way, just noting.

Full Beauty Project (NSFW)

2010-09-30T00:21:00.000-07:00

Photographer Yossi Loloi has been photographing large women for his Full Beauty Project for a while (I met him in Massachusetts a couple years ago, I think). He says:

What larger women embody to me is simply another form of beauty. I believe we have 'freedom of taste' and we should not be ashamed of expressing what we really like. Limiting this freedom is like living in a dictatorship of esthetics.

I believe there are other ways to perceive beauty, it is not measurable and has not got a standard size.I photograph my models nude and often indifferent, to create a comfortable, proud and constructive representation of themselves in front of the viewer.

Check out the site!

huh?

2010-09-29T09:55:00.000-07:00

There is a lip gloss by Purple Lab called "Huge Lips, Skinny Hips." It comes in eight colors, including No Panty Lines, Kitty Pole Dancer and Love Your Thighs. Hence the wth (here it comes): Wth? Blech.

photo Tuesday

2010-09-28T20:31:00.000-07:00

Edward Steichen, In Memoriam, New York

leapy! no--stridey

2010-09-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

starving a "fat" infant

2010-09-25T00:19:00.000-07:00

This news is upsetting to read, and extreme in its particulars, but still feels connected to the screwed-up world in which we live. It almost makes sense, in a horrible, heartbreaking way. It doesn't--it's not sane--but it isn't happening in a vacuum.

It is the latest development in the ongoing story of a couple in Seattle, Brittainy and Samuel Labberton. Brittainy starved her children from birth, basically, and continued starving them in response to interference from hospitals and child welfare, who ended up taking them away from her. She did all this with her husband's approval, terrified they would get fat (her husband has a "weight problem"). She saw regular developmental weight gain as bad and would not feed them, sometimes barely for days. She gave her youngest daughter--five months old at the time--a bottle with laxative in it to make her lose weight after a visit when the child had been in foster care and recovered a bit. When she was told of the child's recovery in hospital she apparently complained, "Oh my God she's fat" and "I have a fat baby," insisting that the girl "should be under the 50th percentile in weight, not over it." Her oldest child apparently arrived at a foster home "'ravenously hungry,' eating so fast that she nearly choked on her food."

Most recently, the couple's sentencing for child mistreatment charges was suspended because Brittainy was about to give birth to their third child (she has said she wants to have 12). She herself, who suffered from severe suicidal post-partum depression and what sounds like very disordered eating, was admitted to the hospital over the summer, where she "failed to eat enough to provide good nutrition" for the unborn child.

It is incensing to even ponder what's happening inside these young, young children, who are being chemically trained to have an insane relationship with food and with physical survival--that is, assuming they survive (the Labbertons are working to regain custody), and there is certainly no guarantee they will. The court took custody of the couple's second child after Brittainy said she felt she would kill herself and the child; this kind of feeding-related abuse, while "about" fear of fat, is also good way to kill them.

All the body dysmorphia this woman is visiting upon her children--brutally pushing a skewed adult beauty ideal onto tiny infants, unable to see them as people in their own right--feels like a worst example, but not only example, of how people can treat children, especially girls. I am not trying to say that any sane person would starve their children in this way, but it has been shown that people do not (for instance)--all variables aside--feed girl and boy babies the same. And it makes macabre sense that someone could land obsessively on the difference--the conflict--between the image of a what we think of as a healthy baby--chubby, fat-wristed--and a healthy--thin--adult, and try to reconcile the two in this horrible way, at their children's expense. I mean, we are terrified our kids will be fat; why wouldn't it start with babyhood? Well-meaning, well-informed people do bad things to kids in the name of this fear all the time.

I hope this story has any kind of good resolution to it, somehow. It's probably ghoulish to focus on it, but it feels not unrelated to the world in which parents of fat children are vilified and the agonies of size begin earlier and earlier.

photo Tuesday - Wilhelmine von Sylt!

2010-09-21T15:47:00.001-07:00

It took me a while to figure out what this image was--I've seen it often with no identification attached--but it turns out it's a fountain in Westerland, the northern-most town on Sylt, itself the northern-most island off of Germany, in the Frisian Islands. Wilhelmine von Sylt--Wilhelmina from Sylt. The sculpture was created in 1980 by a local artist Ursula Hensel-Krüger (now deceased, I think) and is something of a central landmark in the tourist town. I don't know why she's wearing a hat, but I think she's hella cute. The artist said at Wilhelmine's unveiling:

Let us take a look around. How terribly serious we all are, how closed and embittered are our faces. I would like to give people their joy back. This round, buxom creature, who is at one with herself and with everything, smiles at you. Smile with her, you should, and you can!

thanks to HB for help with the translation! Oh, doth my German decay...

Dawn fan here!

2010-09-20T18:11:00.001-07:00

Dawn French apparently popped out of a cake for the 250th episode of Later With Jools Holland. We can't see the video in the US, though. Wah! Wooboo!

Dawn has also recently started doing promotion for her first novel, called A Tiny Bit Marvellous [British spelling there], which will be published next month (October 2010). I never hold out high hopes for actor-fiction, but I sure like the cover! (click to see larger image)