"Is It Okay to Be Fat?"

...is how recent discussions of the topic in the media have gone--Dr. Phil, Nightline.

You can see where the question comes from/where it falls, evolutionarily, in cultural discussions of fat. It represents a crack in the usual discussion about it being completely wrong--it represents some voices being heard. Not just that, I think it arises from inevitable problems with the absolute monolith of unhelpful--whatever your POV--oversimplified thinking about fat. This question was coming one way or another at some point.

It's such a sucky question, though. It's progress, but it's so grim. Surely the one thing that people agree upon about fat, hate it or love it, is that it is. We are. Fat people are.

On some level it boggles my mind that there are people who (as Dorothy L. Sayers would say) maintain their right to disapprove of my existence, because this is what in effect happens when the answer to "Is it okay to be fat?" is "no." It's a very short hop from "no" to you should be smaller to it's not okay to be. That's how that goes, best intentions notwithstanding. The question doesn't hold water philosophically. Look at the responses to the Kevin Smith situation; how many people chimed in with, "They should just stay at home"? To be fat sometimes is to be weirdly invisible, to have people wish you were.

I know there are a lot of ideas to be discussed under the umbrella of this question. But the way it is framed reflects how sure we are that body size is entirely a choice and how it is assumed to always be--need to be--in flux. We are always supposed to be changing, always supposed to be getting smaller, all of us, fat or thin, really. There is a distinct lack of the present tense when talking about body size. There is always an assumption that what you are now you won't be in the future. Semi-measured articles like this in the Observer have bizarro subtitles like: "As obesity becomes a greater social and political issue, campaigners say they have a human right to be fat."

Well, er...yes. I do have a right to be me, I think. In the most calming of possible circumstances for those who hate fat people and see them--us--as walking embodiments of bad behavior--what am I supposed to do? Go home and think about what I've done? Swear I'm changing? Have something to prove my shame, like a passport? Show it when necessary to reassure people I'm not blithely unaware of how wrong I am? I am accountable to others, it feels, for existing as I am.

I keep thinking about Jude Law being dragged up in the helicopter at the end of A.I., saying, "I am. I was." I just am.

We have to ask different questions. This one's wrong. Whatever questions you want to ask next, this is the wrong one to start with.

Lane Bryant kerfuffle

Amanda Hess pretty much nails it about the dumbass Lane Bryant commercial controversy and the smoking hot LB model who's too good-looking and stacked for American to handle.

When I read about it, I immediately flashed on an old Glamour "Fashion Do/Fashion Don't" column that cautioned against wearing the sheer shirt/black bra combo (remember those?) if you were big-busted, because it'd "look slutty."

Outcries like this are about more than not liking fat (that model isn't fat)--they are about how narrow the prison of acceptable looks really is. You can't win.

More from direction of City Island

Very weird to see my world (well, part of it) written about on the pages of Salon: blog piece more or less about BBWs and FAs, from the director of City Island. Dude appears to have discovered some liking for the fatties with feelings about the John Warner-era Liz Taylor. Still haven't seen the movie, still tired at idea of feedery stuff, but--interesting.

meh

Great interview by Kevin Pang with Anthony Bourdain in the Trib's Cheap Eater thingie, but Bourdain stumbles in his comments about Jamie Oliver. Oliver is not doing "the difficult thing" or (as I think Bourdain used to say about Mario Batali and his emphasis on offal) "God's work," he's full of SELF-PROMOTING CHEESE. If Sandra Lee was doing Oliver's show, he'd trash it. Fat prejudice makes people stupid.

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

Kate Harding's BMI Slideshow

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

not again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ticker shock

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

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

oh pliz

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

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

hard copies!

I will figure out a way to write in this blog more. There are barriers! More than the usual attached to procrastination and such.

I am realizing how much of the public discussion of size out there I have absolutely no desire to engage in. At all. What a very helpful skill for keeping a size acceptance blog! First and foremost because I think the way we are feel that what we or anybody else eats is perfectly appropriate fuel for every kind of revelatory, punitive, boundary-less public discussion is off-base.

So I gotta figure that out. Haven't figured that out.

In the meantime: what should I do with all my old copies of Radiance magazine? Getting Radiance in the mail was a really important, really big part of my life and development as a fat chick. Very different than reading things online.

I held it in my paws, and turned things over and over, and absorbed them much better than I do know. So...I don't know. I have many of them and haven't looked at them for years. I don't like them taking up room, but I'm still loathe to let them go. Hmm. We'll see.

yah yah roly!

terrible video quality, but I sure love this song

Lives are at stake!

I was so thoroughly offended by the ads for Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, wherein he brings enlightenment to the shores of fat stupid America with his cocky brand of charm, that I had to get up and walk it off. The promos even threw a few Headless Fatties™ shots in there to make their editorial position clear. The combination of Extreme Home Makeover style TV with childhoodobesity sanctimoniousness...I wanted to choke a bitch. I'd link directly to the promo (it's the 30-second one), but the ABC site is fascist. Makes you watch lots of vids to get to a particular one. LIVES ARE AT STAKE! Jamie says.

Gah. Fuck. The weird compensated public torch-passing (kirstiealley 2 valeriebertinelli 2 jasonalexander) is very hard to watch!

whatcha find?

If it didn't mean that people never took me seriously again too late! I think I would start a blog called What Did You Find in Your Bra at the End of the Day? Or maybe Pennies From Heaven. Women could write in after totting up what they find in there: change, food, phones, hankies, whatever. Companies could match the monies found there dollar-for-dollar and donate to favorite charities. It would be an exercise in archeology for generations to come.

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.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton died. This poem made a huge impression on me in my twenties as I found my way through things, as I'm sure it did for many people. Opened my mind (that is the right phrase here). And that top thing is for real.

homage to my hips

these hips are big hips

they need space to

move around in.

they don't fit into little

petty places. these hips

are free hips.

they don't like to be held back.

these hips have never been enslaved,

they go where they want to go

they do what they want to do.

these hips are mighty hips.

these hips are magic hips.

i have known them

to put a spell on a man and

spin him like a top!

no way

One of the shittier names I've seen for a diet product (it's showing up on late-night informercial rotation here). Reminds me a little of the days of the AYDS chewable diet candies.

bad boy!

Really, really, really stupid column in Chicago Sun-Times by Laura Washington about Kevin Smith situation (thanks, Martha-baby, for the link).

"He needs to lay off the tweeting and put that energy into reducing his girth. There's nothing funny about America's obesity epidemic." Now you go upstairs and you think about what you've done!

One peril of our country's unwillingness to intelligently address issues of size is, well, unintelligence. In print. Over and over. Among the other problems with this dumb-ass column is that the writing is terribly superficial.

yoiks

From E!Online, about Kelly Osbourne's interview in US:

"...this is what Miss Kelly O. has to say about battling her weight vs. the painkiller addiction that sent her to rehab a few times: I took more hell for being fat than I did for being an absolute raging drug addict."

I'm struck by:
1) E! creating the parallel between "weight" and "painkiller addiction" as beasts to be slayed. (It never sounds right to me to say "battling her weight"--if one's weight were "beaten," we wouldn't exist.)
2) What she said.
3) The curse of having a face that doesn't pass as thin. I'm not sure that she was ever fat, exactly, but she's certainly thin enough now to 'prove' to people that her face is naturally bigger. Keep them off her back. That kind of thin.

on the Kevin Smith situation

About two months ago I posted a blog entry here about my experiences with Southwest Airlines. I boycotted Southwest for years after it became the first airline to actually enforce the written all-airlines' policy of making customers of size buy an extra seat, but I've come to appreciate SW and the no-fuss way I can handle travel with them as a person who buys two seats. (The point of that piece being that my experience with them exists in contrast to other airlines, which have less practice enforcing these rules.)

A person who buys two seats: this situation requires a fundamental compromise on the passenger's part. After one last humiliating experience on United, when a customer held up the plane to complain about me to a cadre of clucking gate agents, I decided to never put myself through that again, and I now buy two seats whenever I travel on a plane, which I do not think I should have to do. When you buy transportation, you are buying passage, not real estate for the duration, and the implications in the idea that we should pay based on space are alarming for everyone. But I have reached détente with the situation. Budgeting for the second seat (and hoping for a refund on its cost) is part of how I plan for travel.

Kevin Smith, however, exists in the extremely well-populated segment of the American traveling public who are big but not big enough to be forced to engage with the second-seat policy--usually. Smith obviously bumped into it this weekend.

You can hear his version of the events here on the relevant Smodcast ("Go Fuck Yourself, Southwest Airlines"), but the gist is: Smith switched to standby for an earlier flight than the one(s) he had purchased tickets for. In doing so, he let go of the additional SW tickets he had bought (he usually buys two or three), and had just one seat for himself. He sat down in a middle seat between two people and was just buckling his seat belt when he was asked to disembark by a flight attendant. (On his next flight he had two seats and the woman next to his empty seat was also large, and was taken aside to be told that she should have two seats and needed to ask Smith if it was okay if she sat there).

It's confusing that Smith was thrown off the plane at all: he could buckle the seat belt and put down the armrests completely, the latter of which keeps him out of SW's "definitive gauge" for being a "customer of size." That makes no sense. Something left him vulnerable to that decision by the flight attendants, who cited pro forma and vague safety concerns of "the pilot," standard issue stuff for SW's size policies. Why he was subject to them at all is not clear, except that maybe he just fit the profile (with fat, as ever, it is actually a greater sin to look fat than be fat).

Smith says once if he says it thirty times in his podcast that "he's fat but not that fat." "I'm not fat enough to have this conversation," he told a SW agent. "I'm not fat enough to eject off a fucking plane yet. I'll tell you when I am." He talks a lot about "the bar," the point at which you're so fat you can't fake it--can't squeeze into a seat. He says that if he were too big to fit in the seat, he "wouldn't come out in public."

He doesn't say this in a mean way. He's not making fun of anybody. He's eloquent about the way in which fat people have to think "ten steps in advance" about how we fit in to spaces.

And he's right, in the literal sense: he is fat-but-not-fat-enough to have run into this problem. The armrests could go down. He's one of the many many people who fly worrying about the two-seat policy and hoping they don't need it, or--much more likely--are ignorant or confused about it, but still worried about fitting, period. And to date Smith had been protected from the policy by virtue of money. He was able to routinely buy more seats because he could, not because he had to--he actually had the tool in hand (the discarded extra seats) that passengers need to avoid this situation.

But the line that he--that the airlines--draw. What if he couldn't put down the arm seats? What if he were "that fat"? What if he were technically a customer of size? What if he didn't have the money to do it? Should he have been tossed off the plane? Who does deserve that? When do airlines get to start charging more and pulling people aside? When is that okay? I think Smith's sense of chivalry was roused by seeing it happen to a woman after it happened to him, but that's how this works. What about fat children?

Maybe this isn't working. Maybe it's never okay and that's why this is such a mess. Maybe it's only a slippery slope with no solid ground. Maybe this is all about money. Smith's experience was able to light a match (most passengers don't have immediate access to a Twittering audience of millions) to show us how this is not working. The distinctions we draw are challenged and fall apart over and over. People get only bigger (and taller). Southwest has the most experience implementing policies about size, so what does that say, including about what's actually happening out there on other airlines? We're dividing people up based on a word we can't even say, to ourselves or others ("fat"). And fucking nobody's comfortable in a plane seat except maybe a six-year-old.

There are acres of things to address about this situation, but my feeling at the moment is that it's a good thing that it is getting the attention that it is, looming pitfalls in the arguments notwithstanding. I'm not sure the world cares much when this happens to a fat unfamous person, but it's a good thing when people have to resolve it with the power we accord fame. And Smith is speaking up.

I don't mind using the word fat, I don't mind knowing how much extra room I need, I don't mind asking for a seat belt extender. I don't like paying for a second airline seat, but I will do it--because I want to travel. I want to be out there. How many people, though, cram themselves in their seat, still as they can be and full of shame at every part of their body that bumps against the edges of the world around them? How many people don't even leave the house because of all this? How many people hide?

What if

"What if the phrase 'fat admirer' didn't have to exist as a separate part of desire because it was already a part of our collective unconscious of desirability?"

"letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model"

Not that surprising, but entertaining-awful nonetheless! Heh. Roam. January is a very interesting month in which to live in the Western world these days, I am convinced. The holiday blowback about food and bodies is so big and weird, and so thick with all sorts of reactiveness to perceived and real pressures...

huggin'

Yeah, baby (check out #3). Agreed, as both a giver and receiver.

two seats

I was at the NAAFA convention (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance) in Atlanta in 2002, the year that Southwest Airlines began enforcing their policy of making large--I think specifically "obese"--passengers pay for an extra seat if deemed necessary by their staff. It was the first time an airline had done this, although (as I understand it) most airlines had/have such policies in place, just not overtly enforced at that point. The clueless way the Southwest rep handled the press conference, as well as my perception of the general attitude of the company, made me determined to never fly their airline again, and I didn't for almost five years.

Now, though, things have changed, the main point being that I have accepted the idea of paying for two seats. I'm not thrilled, but I am willing to do it, for the comfort and safety of me and others and for my peace of mind. The last time I flew with just one seat (it was on Ted/United) a man pitched a fit and held up the plane--take-off was delayed for 15 minutes--as five flight attendants and customer service reps clustered around him and he complained about sitting next to me. Never again, and I hope that meathead continues to dodge bad karma.

The funniest part is that Southwest has become my airline of choice and I am extremely loyal to them. It turns out that having taken the step early on, the airline is much better accustomed to dealing with passengers of size. They have practice at dealing with the situation, and do so in a quiet, efficient fashion. They don't pretend the situation doesn't exist, they just manage it--no big deal. Their flight attendants hand out seat extenders, no fuss, and you are given a ticket to put in the tray table latch of your second seat to eliminate confusion about the "empty" spot. The airline makes every effort to refund you the cost of the second ticket if there is any empty room or non-working airline staff on the plane, and do so quickly, usually in less than four days. I appreciate that particular gesture on their part enormously--it really changes the flavor of this transaction in which I cough up twice the normal fare.

Most importantly, you are allowed to pre-board, so that you can get your two seats together.

Together. You wouldn't think that'd be necessary, but some airlines make large passengers buy two seats these days, then fight them about the second seat. I'm not going to name names, since the experiences aren't my own, but I have heard more stories these days from people I know flying on other airlines who buy two tickets only to have to defend the second spot. Flight attendants--caught in a fight with gate staff, sometimes--try to give it away, ask to give it away, challenge the passenger, sometimes don't even let them board at a time when they can find two seats next to each other. I've even heard of people who bought seats giving up their extra seat with no compensation, at the urging of flight attendants.

This shit makes me insane with fury. Not to mention it's slightly insane, period (would you like your two seats together, or many rows apart, sir?). If you make passengers of size buy two tickets, you actually can not give away the second seat to somebody else, nor make it impossible to use. What is the point? These policies have to be clear right up front, and the customer shouldn't be caught in the mess as airline staff tries to be "tactful" and tramples all over customer rights in the meantime. Not to mention if the airlines are so concerned about other passengers' comfort, why aren't they ensuring the second seat is used as bought? Aren't they trying to obviate situations where people are squished together uncomfortably? More than usual, I mean.

There is a really nasty flavor to this kind of terrible customer service. Bullying and shaming and dishonest. Unfair. Grinding up people in corporate waffling. Decide what you are trying to do, airlines.

I feel have reached a state of pretty happy détente with Southwest. I make my good faith gesture of coughing up for an extra seat, they reciprocate by refunding me for the gamble if they can. It's not perfect--I had to concede something significant to do it, and, note, there are no frequent flyer miles attached to the second seat if you pay for it--but I'm just fine with it so far. Goddang.