hey Paula

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.

The Media Machine and the Bodies It Feeds On

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:

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.

oh Kirstie

I haven't watched Kirstie Alley's new show. I don't want to. I didn't want to watch her on Oprah thin, I didn't want to watch her weight-loss commercials (those were harder to avoid), I didn't want to watch Fat Actress. I don't want to watch any of it.

I feel I should know more about her Fatty Oeuvre, as someone interested in issues of size, but I am really uninterested when I'm not actively repelled, to be honest. I don't like feeling complicit in people's emotional battles about eating or about their size. Oprah has a bad habit of encouraging this kind of sticky, mess stuff: with herself, with Wynonna Judd's public self-flagellating.

Not to mention there is a crass, mercenary side to what Alley's doing that turns me off from the start. I can see where it comes from, in a way: why not focus on this stuff, as an actress who's aging, whose looks are something of public property.

But it's all so dead-end. And non-resolvable. And nobody's fucking business. There's no grand redemption--and we should know that. You go up, you go down. You've "solved" your fatness--whoops, now you haven't. It's a marketing dream, in a way--the constant drama. As long as you are in agonies about it, it's okay to be fat. Okay & good business.