luv!

...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

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

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--larger 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. I'm willing to use your horror at the idea to get your attention, 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'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.

Great hug, too. Website for film.

Jill & Anthony

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

...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!

photo courtesy of the ever fanfuckingtastic Adipositivity

on weight loss surgery and Malissa Jones

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"

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

Model and photographer Velvet d'Amour.

if you Twitter...

...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

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

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

ever thus

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

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.

Maru means round or spherical.

Yes, there is a closet.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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:

...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: