love it!

If you're not sure what this is about, google "headless fatties."

you go girl

Fabulous op-ed piece in the Baltimore Sun by Lizbeth Binks Carney about Michelle Obama's anti-obesity appearance at Camden Yards as a really badly-chosen place for such a thing:

...here's the hypocrisy of it all, and the finger pointing at our enduring national tolerance for weight stigma: nobody has ever gone to a baseball game and been told by a famous person to stop drinking so much or gambling or wearing that outrageous hairstyle. We don't even get mild warnings about wearing enough sunscreen or going to the ballgame instead of church on Sunday.

"Child Obesity Must Address Mother’s Weight Issues"

...is the title of a piece in Psych Central that came out this week covering the meeting of the Strategies to Overcome and Prevent (STOP) Obesity Alliance Task Force on Women at a meeting on Capitol Hill.

The thing that strikes me strongly while reading it, especially at an online mental health resource, is how glaringly absent is any discussion of psychology and the often extremely fraught triangulation that goes on with mothers, children and food. I'm not saying this in the spirit of adding more blame to this mess, but this article and many other obesity-targeted efforts speak about a lack of information as the main culprit, when I would argue a fear of obesity and the unbelievably harrowing things parents can do to their children in response sometimes do as much to make obesity possible.

The idea that Fat Is Bad really, really isn't new. I don't mean that there isn't lots of information of many kinds still rolling in about how fat and health intersect, but we didn't suddenly just commit to that idea.

drugz

I found this article about weight loss drugs and the way the human animal responds to metabolic challenges interesting and very effective at putting the issues in good scientific context. I'm not entirely sure about the context from which Dr. Katz himself writes, though, from the conclusion, which reads:

When one considers that the problem we are asking weight control drugs to fix--a body turning surplus calories into an energy reserve--is normal human physiology, the conclusion that they may prove to be elusive not just now, but forever, is hard to avoid. And if so, there may be much lost in waiting for them, namely opportunities to turn what we already know about the power of feet and forks over weight into policies, programs, practices and resources that can do what drugs may not.

None of this is to deny the important insights that will doubtless derive from the scrupulous pursuit of scientific details relating to weight control. Rather, it is to note we miss the forest--the fundamentals of human metabolism in native context--for the densely clustered hormonal, neurochemical, and genetic trees--at our evident peril.

Stated differently, even as we analyze and attempt to compensate for the peculiarities of gills in a creature gasping at the air--we should not fail to see the fish. And just maybe devote our best efforts...to putting it back in the water.

...which sounds rather as if it is advocating in turn taking all of these issues--trees, forests and all--and dumping them in the individual's lap.

But still--interesting. The information about the weight loss drug that caused increased rates of depression and suicide was especially scary. I agree very much that most medical developments that have weight loss as a goal fuck with human and environmental biology to no avail.

mo bigger

Interesting article in WSJ about resizing the auditorium seating in New York City Center. "As I tried to put the seat down, I couldn't do it without cutting off my legs."

nope. can't do that.

Someone submitted this (very cool) photo from adipositivity to poorlydressed.com, one of the user-submitted sites under the failblog umbrella. Before I get to the obvious comment that needs to be made here, a note about photo reappropriation.

I have blogged about this before, but on principle I really dislike when people grab images with an agenda in mind. I don't think photos are delicate creatures that can't live out of a curated habitat, but I don't like when a photograph that is meant to speak for itself, raise questions, is slapped with a caption telling us what to think, which is in effect what happens when a beautifully shot photo like this ends up on a site like that. Not to mention flagrant copyright abuse--when every pixel roaming the internet is free for kidnapping--pisses me off. (FYI poorlydressed.com...you're doing that. Bad karma, bad business.)

So now: Is she poorly dressed, since humans seek protection from the elements with our clothing? Debatable, given that it's a rainstorm in NYC; although, really, a bathing suit is rather sensible from that point of view. The real point here is that only difference between this image and a thousand other daring images of underclad women in New York is that the body shown is fat. And the "poorly dressed" is because she's not hiding it.

There is something fascist about sites like this. They tell you what you're supposed to think, confirm what's right or wrong. Keep the other the other. Which is exactly what this image doesn't do.

maybe I should order this

Heh. Although I also like "I'm gonna have a great day. Don't you fuck it up."

new posts added!

I went through and re-/cross-posted size-related blog entries from my other blog onto this one. Basically anything this post and older (early 2010 back through 2006) is from the other one. You can also find them using this tag!

you've got the wrong man

Article from the BBC about a young boy "mistakenly" (no other way to do that but in quotes) sent a letter about his health-threatening BMI here. Article from MSNBC about people who are fat due to specific illnesses/treatments, not "choice" (no other way to do that but in quotes) here.

Interesting.

ehhhhhh

What does rock critic taxonomy call this kind of drifty cutey female singer/head-voiced kind of music? I'm not sure, but I find the song, by South African group Freshlyground, too twitzy twee for my taste in any case. Which isn't the point either; the lyrics are what brought it to my attention and they are "cute" too: "Even though I have fat thighs/flabby arms/a pot belly still gives good lovin'."

Some cranky part of me can't help giving it a hmm. Not a super-cynical hmm, but it feels nonetheless like the song uses "forbidden" words like "flabby" and "pot belly" to give the song a goose it would otherwise not have. They feel sort of out of place. The video is part of that--I might be more likely to take the song at face value without a video featuring, you know--a not particularly pot belly belly.

Ungh, I'm not a horrible purist crank, I swear--and I like the lyrics in the abstract. But...ehhh.

[Thanks to Dan for the link.]

Huge

Three thoughts:

1) How excited are many dudes I know about a fat girl in bathing suit on this poster? Nikki Blonsky is way cute. I mean this just in a yay-pix-of-fat-girls way (not maybe about the attitude it conveys). I wonder if other people get that that is part of the reaction to the show.

2) The New York Times got something crucially wrong in their article about it (not just wrong, wrong right in the lede): "Gainer blogs are an offshoot of a fat-pride movement that has bubbled up in response to what its proponents consider to be a pointless and hysterical national fuss over obesity."

No....no no no. This is more confusion from the feeder world, spilled all over the place. See previous rant here.

It is alarming to me that the NYT got this one wrong. I think it tells you something about how powerful the ideas in question are that people lose their head for logic and it ends up in print, no less. NYT is usually a little better than this.

3) I haven't seen the show yet, but will try to take it in. Very few shows pass my interest/tolerance test, but this one might for at least one viewing.

Hugely,
etc.

Sun Freakin Times

What the hell is going on over at the Chicago Sun-Times? I'm so thoroughly un-proud that all this shitty size-related journalism (whatever) is going on in my town.

Laura Washington, the S-T's self-appointed "Fat Nag," who wants to shame America into un-fat, challenged Kevin Smith in February after the Southwest fracas to "lay off the tweeting and put that energy into reducing his girth." She called his complaints about the airline treatment "just another dangerous dalliance with that tired old denial: It's OK to be fat, even if it's killing you." (Everything Washington has written about issues of size has made me lose respect for her, then quickly replace that with worry about her ability to use logic.)

More recently, this column by Esther Cepeda in the June 21 Sun-Times, "Time to turn up the heat on folks who are obese," presents ideas less monomaniacal than Washington's writing but more frankly bigoted.

After pulling together every recent bit of fat-is-bad news in her intro, Cepeda says: "I'm not going to copycat my tall and thin [? more journalistically credible?] Sun-Times colleague Laura Washington, who used her space in this paper to become the "Fat Nag" . . . but just for today allow me to be the 'Skinny Grumbler.' " Then she goes on to blame fat people and those who "enable" them for making her cold.

That is the point of this piece: too much air conditioning. A/C makes it easy to stay fat. Fat people--the "over-stimulated and over-served"--the "already health-challenged chow hounds"--the "well-padded"--make us keep the air too cold in restaurants and stores. The temperatures in our public places are a barometer of how we are unhealthy and fat.

"Enabling people who are challenged with the burdens and risks of obesity by making them more comfortable in public situations where, under normal circumstances, they'd be uncomfortable only reinforces the idea that their ill health is bearable. Why do we accept our public spaces masking unhealthy people's natural body signals that something is very wrong?"

I guess I didn't realize that fat people were the only ones with their fingers on the thermostats. Or were the only people miserable in the city when it's 100 degrees and humid in the hairy armpit of America that is the Midwest. Or that fat people never get cold.

The column is yet another piece that makes me wonder: even if I agreed with your shitty logic; even if thought that every time an innocent thin person gets cold it is the fault of a fat person; even if I felt that over-A/C-ed spaces were a sign of our gluttonous ill-health; WHAT DO YOU WANT PEOPLE TO DO?

Cepeda's answer is (clearly): smoke 'em out. Turn the heat up and sweat the fatties into shame. If you make them miserable, as nature wants them to be, they'll change. She pushes her thinking very far: "You should be outraged that your hard work in supporting a loved one's quest to make healthier choices is undermined by a society willing to make them feel more comfortable. And shouldn't others get to be comfortable sometimes, too?"

There is scary shit in the ridiculousness here. I do not think people who write "us" and "them" pieces about fat people realize how very much prejudice they pass along, how their arguments are built from hate and very little else.

- - - -

Addendum: at Cepeda's site, she adds that this piece was "satire": "NO, the subject of ridicule is not obese people, but rather, society's passive acceptance of a debilitating and deadly disease." Psych!

Using making fun of fat people to make fun of fat people isn't really satire. Nor is there any passive acceptance of the 'disease' of obesity. Anywhere. And as a group we have been blamed for everything from global warming to the decline of the mitten industry, so blaming fat people for thin people being cold doesn't actually read like satire. Plus: the column isn't funny. No satire there.

The comments on both her site and at the S-T piece are generally pretty great. I hope she's reading them.

the double down

I haven't been paying attention to the flutter about the KFC Double Down--the huge who-will-think-of-the-children ghoulish horror about its existence--but it strikes me as I squint at it as sort of disingenuous.

If you look at the fat content in fast foods, there are pages and pages of other foods with higher fat content, including standard fare like a 6-inch Subway meatball sub.

The horror seems to be directed at the attitude the Double Down conveys by its existence; its flagrant, yes flagrant, lack of shame about what it is (you go home and wipe that makeup off, young lady). Or at our own shame that manufacturers have looked into our souls and know that this picture of excess is what we want. You know some focus groups were eating these things a year ago.

It's as if the DD is no longer disguising what fast food really is: it's a full-blown, wanton, processed, animal producty thing, with no window dressing to make it more like real fud. (As Raymond Chandler wrote: "Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted"). How is eating a Taco Bell Taco Salad (45 grams of fat) so different from dining on a Double Down (32 grams)? It just looks better. You could argue there's more nutrition in the bagged pre-shredded Taco Bell iceberg, but I'm not sure about that. The reaction to the DD also seems a little funny coming so fast on the heels of the Atkins surge of a few years ago, when the DD would have been hailed as the solution to all our no-carb needs.

Being appalled at doubling down seems a little like throwing paint on a fur coat while wearing leather shoes and belt. It's too obvious.

fat fingers officially tools of doom (woo)

Try google-newsing "fat finger" and you will see the problem that brought the stock market to its knees today. That term seems on its way to becoming semi-officially official... The fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To obtain a special dialing wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now.

Happy International No Diet Day!

Photo from Adipositivity.com! Check the site out if you haven't.

blogs of size

I agonized quite a while over what to name this blog.

My other blog was named on a whim, and I still regret it, inasmuch as saying the name out loud makes me squirm: it's pretentious, I don't really know how to pronounce it correctly, and I usually mumble it like an embarrassed teenager, less and less coherently (invariably people don't hear it on the first pass) when people ask me what it's called. It's not catchy at all, except to call it "tha ki-YAY" sometimes. I like it well enough in print, but that's different. All this I hoped to avoid here.

I also wanted to avoid the absolute sea of puns that exist for fat clothing stores and fat social groups and dating sites: More to Love, Big [Whatever]s, Large and in Charge, etc. Any good or thought-provoking punnery in amongst the cheese (and there's a lot) there has long since been exhausted, and I just didn't feel like those kinds of names would strike the right tone. They are too focused, ultimately, anyhow. I love names like Big Fat Blog, but I didn't want to go that kind of route anymore either.

I ended up with a few runner-ups. After speaking with my friend Hanne, I was seriously pondering two somewhat similar ones:

LIPOFILIA
or
LESSONS IN LIPO-LITERACY

...the latter being a nod to sociologist Mark Graham's brilliant term. Another contender was something my friend Damian used to say when he wanted to win an argument (I think it's already a blog name):

IPSO FATSO

The winner, though, came from Martha Bayne, tossed off from behind the bar, no less, in a fit of brainstorming while she served drinks. It's still working for me, and I really like the definite article. Let's meet at The Extender, shall we?

Thanks, Martha.

fearful subtext

There's nothing remotely surprising about this article, "How to Not Look Fat in a Swimsuit," but the subtext is so hilarious I found it worth noting. It's awful, but the fear in it is so strong it's funny.

The content is amped-up classic stuff such as: wearing dark on the bottom, drawing the eye up, hiding the tummy...wearing Miraclesuits and even Spanx while swimming. Full-figured women should "try a maxi dress, or a semi-sheer cover-up to give 'the illusion of a flawless figure.' " Disguise the bosom, moisturize the legs to hide cellulite, fake a thinner waist with a belt... "Your tummy needs to be long and lean . . . any little height will make you walk better, stand sexier, put a little spring in your step and make you look a little bit taller and leaner." Gah! Gah! Panicking, fumbling, worried...

Don't let anybody see you as you are. Don't let any part of you which departs from a norm show. Don't be fat, but really, don't look fat. You are entirely vulnerable to the judgments of those around you, and should be. What others think is the most important thing in the world. How you look is everything. The agony of being yourself is unending, and only a few people are good enough to be allowed in a swimsuit just as they are.

I guess the subtext isn't really funny, and this is an obvious feminist rant, and for what it's worth I hate shitty fashion too, but it's all just so tortured. It's absurd.

The point of wearing a swimsuit is to SWIM!! Action verb! Not to be viewed. I mean, at base. Right? Right? she bleats.

Some people might argue that this article is giving people tips for actually getting out there, but I don't think so. Not to mention--yea verily, some people just are fat, and how you're not supposed to not look fat in a bathing suit when you are fat is a question that can only be answered by not swimming or wearing a suit or even existing, and that subtext is tired and in fact not really subtext at all.

The honest, sad, terrible, kinda cool truth is that nobody's paying that much attention to you. Yes, people are horrible and dismissive to fat people (and everybody), but one ass-backward benefit of all this bathing suit angst is that if everyone is so tortured and inwardly-focused, then what do you have to lose by heading out?

[Thanks to Aris for link.]

the beauty of lines

Interesting piece in Burmese newspaper the Irrawaddy about painter Sandar Khaing, who paints figures and has a specific interest in fat nudes, through painting her sister as model.
I like what I can see of her work a lot.

"I just want to present lines, the beauty of lines."

[Thanks to Felecia for this link.]

ew

the one thing Sarah Silverman won't joke about

Just puttin this out there. From Silverman's interview with Larry King:

"But I guess if there is anything I wouldn't talk about. . . it's fat jokes about women. That always bums me out because I feel like we live in a country where fat women--at least in white America--don't deserve love. You know? And I--I don't think that's true for men, you know. You see every sitcom star is like a fat guy with some gorgeous wife. But we live in a country that really feels that way. It feels--it's in the ether. And that just makes me sad to make a joke of it or to make light of it."

"Many doctors don't discuss diet with obese patients"

...claims the LA Times, per a the 2009 National Healthcare Disparities Report.

I know I should say something intelligent here, but all I can think about is the stock art the Times chose for their blog entry (left).

Doesn't this fatty plate look like a person? Donut eyes, fried chicken nose, french fry mouth? OM NOM NOM.

a lil squint down the 'no fat chicks' axis

The following lines are from recent CL ads all over the country in different categories--men for women/men, women for women/men.

Now this is some parallelism. The point is not (exactly) that people can't have preferences, it's that it's awfully interesting what BBWs are collected in No lists with. It seems like it should be a song. A chanty, drone-y song. NO fatties no FATties no fatTIES!

• NO FAKES, PHONIES, BBWS OR DRUGGIES
• NO MEN, COUPLES, BBWS
  
• NO MEN, NO BBWS, NO SWINGERS, OR GHETTO CHICS!!
• NO BI'S, NO MEN, NO NEWBIES (1ST TIMERS), NO BBWS
• NO GUYS, BBWS, DRUGGIES, STUCK UP/SELF CENTERED WOMEN
• NO BBWS BE CUTE. ABSOLUTELY NO NO NO MEN. OH NO FLAKES
• NO GUYS OR TS/TG OR ANY OTHER T'S AND NO BBWS PLEASE
• NO BBWS, NO FUCKING FETISHES, NO FUCKING ANIMALS.
• NO BBWS, NO EBONY, NO MEN
• NO BBW, NO OLDER WOMEN EITHER
• NO ALCOHOLISM, BBW, BINGO, CATS, CHLAMYDIA, CHEAP WATCH, CHEWED FINGERNAILS, CLASS RING, COSTUME JEWELRY, DRUGS, FEAR OF FLYING, FREQUENT USE OF PROFANITY, GLAMOR SHOTS, HAIRY LEGS, INFREQUENT BATHING, JUDGMENTAL, JEALOUS & ABUSIVE HUSBAND, LINE DANCING, LIVING IN TOWN WHERE BORN
• NO EGOS, NO BBWS
• NO BBWS, PROS OR IMPLANTS
• NO 3SUMS WITH YOUR MAN, NO STUDS, NO BIG GIRLS, NO TEENS, NO BBWS, NO COUPLES, NO MEN, NO MEN, NO BOYS, NO FAKE PICS
• NO BBWS, NO PILLOW PRINCESSES, NO ATTACHED NO COUPLES!!!!!!
• NO BBWS, COUPLES, MEN, CURIOUS PPL, FLAKES, WEIRDOS
• NO BBWS OR TEDDY BEARS
• NO BBWS, DRUGS, SMOKERS OR WOMEN OVER 40. NO MARRIED WOMEN!
• NO BBWS OR BLACKS
• NO PRUDES, NO BBWS, NO OTHER MEN, NO STUDS, NO RELATIONSHIPS
• NO MEN! NO BBWS. NO BUTCHES.
• NO BBWS OR FREAKS OR FAGS
• NO BBWS, NO SIGNING UP AT WEBSITES!
• NO BBWS, DARK SKINNED GIRLS, OR ANYTHING SLOPPY
• NO BBWS, STUDS, COUPLES, MEN OR UGLY CHICS
• NO BBWS OR WHITE WOMEN
• NO BBWS, NO TS, NO MSM, NO NSA
• NO BBWS, NO FEMALES WITH KIDS, NO CONFUSED CHICKS WITH BOYFRIENDS
• NO BBWS, DRUGGIES OR HEAVY DRINKERS/SMOKERS, GAY OR BI GUYS
• NO BBWS, DRUG USERS, SMOKERS OR "PROFESSIONAL" LADIES, NO SPAMBOTS AND GAYS POSING AS WOMEN.
• NO FULL SWAP AND NO BBWS

The following may be the best "NO BBW" ad ever. I guess I'm a heartless jerk, because it made me laugh, but I'm sure not assuming it's real except in placer's desire to get laid:

ONE LAST TIME - M4W - 22 (END OF THE ROAD)

NOT GOING TO BORE YOU WITH ALL THE SAD DETAILS BUT I'LL JUST GET THE POINT OF IT:

I'M NOT LONG FOR THIS WORLD, ITS DAYS WOULD BE BRIGHTER AND NIGHT MORE STUNNING IF I JUST ENDED IT ALL.

FIGURED, I MIGHT AS WELL END IT ON A GOOD NOTE, SO HOW ABOUT IT? [I'm gonna kill myself...let's fuck.]

NO BBWS, ALL RACES ARE BEAUTIFUL, AND KINKY WOULD BE NICE BUT VANILLA IS ALRIGHT IN MY BOOK.

Just to round out this whole no-fat-chicks thing, check out this tattoo below (dude stole the DumpTruck logo). I dunno--when you bother getting an image of a fat chick permanently engraved in your flesh I might argue you don't actually hate them. That is protesting very much too hard indeed.

May Panel Discusison in NYC

Interesting upcoming panel discussion:

Fat Politics and Sexuality in the Face of Hate:
A Forum on Rights You Didn't Know You Needed
May 20th, 7pm
McNally Jackson Booksellers
52 Prince St, NYC

Fat stigma is reaching a boiling point in American society. As Harriet Brown stated in her recent New York Times article: "Public attitudes about fat have never been more judgmental; stigmatizing fat people has become not just acceptable but, in some circles, de rigueur." This evening's panel is a chance to discuss this cultural climate and present recent work by five individuals from diverse segments of fat activism, from academia to the blogosphere. Above all, this forum seeks to provide a nuanced perspective of fat-related issues that departs from the media’s monotone coverage of "the obesity epidemic" and its perceived social pitfalls.

The panelists include:

• Substantia Jones founder and photographer of The Adipositivity Project
• Lesley Kinzel, blogger of fatshionista.com
• Kathleen LeBesco, PhD Professor of Communication Arts and Distinguished Chair, Marymount Manhattan College; contributor to The Fat Studies Reader
• Zoe Meleo-Erwin PhD candidate and NOLOSE board member

in conversation with

• Marilyn Wann author of FAT!SO? Because You Don't Have to Apologize for Your Size!

"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.