make him chase the chunk

more sleep talkin man

I feel like such a sucker for being such a sucker for this site, not to mention writing about it again, but I am. Suckahhh. I like the silly, imperious fuck-off-ness of the dude's sleep talking, although it adds a a funny element when he rambles in fatty themes too, some of which are collected here for your pleasure:

"My butt cheeks are for squeezing. Go on, take a handful. Take two."

"All I want out of life is ice cream and cuddles. Is it too much to ask? Is it?"

"I need it soft. I'm talkin' marshmallow kind of soft. Lay me down and let me just sink in. That's what I'm talkin' about."

"Whoever invented calories is gonna get their face fucked with ice cream cake."

"If you want me to be honest, then I have to say, your arse makes those jeans look small... Well, you did ask."

"It's cake o'clock! All day long."

"They're not love handles. No. I've got love impact protection barriers."

"Well, so what you call me fat. I'll forget you even existed the next time I see a doughnut."

"I haven't put on weight. Your eyes are fat."

"I'm just a chubby ninja. Able to move between skinny people. Tiptoeing elephant. No one can see me. And then I attack! With ice cream and jelly, with chocolate sprinkles on top. Mmmmm."

"There's only one thing that comes as close as being as fantastic as me, and that's my reflection. All hail the beautiful mirror. Wow."

"Kiss me. Tastes good, doesn't it. Why don't you go back and have a second helping? Be greedy."

photo Tuesday

Photograph of Heather Graham by David LaChapelle.

Here's what I want

I wish Herve Leger made bandage dresses in large sizes! Right now he makes them in XXS, XS, S, M, and L (sizes 0-12), but think how freakin cool they would be on a much larger body. They would be so neat scaled up with bigger bandage widths and around/shaping larger curves. This idea is as much about the phun physics of it all as it is about the never-ending wish for nice clothes available in large sizes--I just think they'd look cool. Plus, as a person who needs compression-wear 18 hours a day (google lymphedema and compression), I'd love a dress that actually provided the PPI I need in my clothes with some chic bandaging, although I'm not entirely sure how I'd get it on. But still. Phun.

the velvet razor wire

A Montreal nightclub recently got heat for posting an invitation on its Facebook page that read: "NO FAT GIRLS ALLOWED!!!!" A club staffer said it happened because "a friend of the club's partner thought it would be funny to add the line to the event invitation as 'an inside joke' ." Farther down in the article is this alarmingly matter-of-fact line: "Race tends to be more of a factor when it comes to selecting people at the entrance." Remind me to never ever go to this place (Muzique), even though the story doesn't really describe unusual club behavior. Still, though. Blech.

life with Lane Bryant

Last Thursday Lane Bryant posted this on their Twitter feed:


The link was to this t-shirt design (below), by Australian artist and blogger Natalie Perkins, which, it appears, was supposed to leave us all appalled n stuff. The beauty thing about social media, though, is that companies find out right away when they screw up, which LB did in a barrage of Twitter messages and blog posts. The apology on was on their website the next day. Lane Bryant thought they were defending our (the customer's) honor, but they were, as ever--as always--out of it.

That's one big reason LB's mistake tapped into a well of frustration for me: not just because a bumbling company stepped on an independent (and fat-positive) artist, but because this is how Lane Bryant always is. LB has built a business out of finding ways to clothe and take money from the fat woman without ever using the word fat, showing fat women modeling their clothes, or admitting that their customers are fat. I wouldn't expect anything different from their corporate culture, to be honest. But it still was discouraging to see evidence in real time. It's like it wouldn't even occur to them to see the slogan in any way but negatively.

There are a lot of beautiful, supportive people slogging it out as Lane Bryant employees and customers, but there is still for me an element of shame in the LB experience, and it has a lot to do with how the company markets itself. They have long held the idea of not using fat or even particularly plus-size models for their clothes, using as their argument the fact that they sell more clothes that way, because they do--

--women don't really want to know what they look like. So the company holds up an unusually fake mirror that collides with reality and guarantees your inability to choose clothes well when you shop from their catalog, because who the hell knows what their clothing actually looks like on a fat body. Their models are basically the size of people who would never have to shop Lane Bryant--the exact opposite of who is actually in Lane Bryant at any given time, the exact opposite of who has to shop there. So you never see yourself there or on their website--

--and all this in turn continues to drive the world of imagery where fat peeps are not represented in the way and to the extent we do. And because LB makes money this way--people buy more clothes, plus they also buy the wrong clothes (that don't always get returned) without fat models to help make better purchasing choices and to help clothe our bodies as they are right now--the company doesn't take the initiative to change it. It sucks.

I'm thrilled LB got slapped on the wrist. I hope they think twice before ever lazily trafficking in that kind of shame disguised as we-got-yer-back-girl blah-blah again.

- - - - - - - -

Note: I happen to like this simpler (design-wise) version of a similar slogan from Ephemera, if you need a sticker!

tell us again, Grandma--

Tell us about the days of Print!

I was visiting our friendly locally-owned sex store recently (have you visited yours? they are happy places) and while browsing through their library suddenly remembered being at Good for Her in Toronto sometime in 2001. I was looking at their magazines, and there in the rack to my surprise was a well-thumbed copy of a zine I worked on, Zaftig!. It was a funny feeling, to find something so familiar so far away. It was cool.

Zaftig! Sex for the Well-Rounded, which was the brainchild of Hanne Blank, was published between 1999 and 2001. Hanne was the editor, which meant, among other things, plowing through a bizillion badly-spelled and sometimes hilarious submissions, and I--recruited after the first two issues--did everything else, which meant, among other things, Photoshopping beautiful, very naughty art and agonizing over baseline alignment and diacritical marks. Hanne began Zaftig! with the idea in mind that "no people should be deprived of their own image," and I think we both believed passionately in the worth of what we were doing. Also: our cats were on the masthead.

Unfortunately, the last planned issue of Zaftig! never happened, although we have as a memorial to the experience this amazing piece of cover art by Les Toil, which I conceived as a kind of Russian Constructivist gesture, and I think he succeeded amazingly. I still love this work. I adore our pen-guns.

Zaftig! ultimately helped give birth to two of Hanne's books: Zaftig: Well Rounded Erotica (ed.) and Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them. The very good news right now is that Ten Speed Press is going to publish a reworked and embiggened version of Big Big Love, a book for which I think the demand has only grown in the ten years since it was published.

And you can be part of the new Big Big Love by taking Hanne's survey that will help inform the book. The link is here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BBL2010survey

The survey is "designed to gather information about the sexual and romantic lives and experiences of people who either identify themselves as fat, who are or have been attracted to fat romantic/sexual partners, or both." So if you fit--tightly or not--into any of these categories, consider taking the time to click through the pages and be part of something important.

Yay books!

invisible oranges show some luv

Coming later in August 2010: a hair band salute to fat girls, titled Whole Lotta Love and put together by C.C. Banana. I don't feel I can really do justice to the planned lineup and metal band reworkings of songs like "Whole Lotta Rosie" and "Unskinny Bop," but there is a lot more information on the album's myspace page. And notice the cover art, designed by the ever-fab Les Toil, an homage to William Rimmer and the Led Zeppelin Swan Song label logo.

I've never quite understood the metal/banana/comedy niche that C.C. (real name: A.J.) occupies, but I've met the dude a few times and he is really nice, and, note, really likes the big girls. Take the giant banana seriously.

The Public Pubic

What we expect of women's pussies--in public--is tough.

In the last year at least three products were launched to prevent camel toe. Last month it was a brand of panties called Camelflage; before that it was the Cuchini and Camel Ammo, inserts for women to place in their underwear. Note the similar before/afters for the products: the images on the left side, with (something of) the shape of the vulva showing, i.e., camel toe, are "wrong." The images on the right are "correct"--corrected.

No way around it: there is an increasingly demanding beauty ideal for this most private part of a woman's anatomy these days. A public standard, for the increasingly public parts of our parts. We dare our pubic area to show--make it harder and harder not to show--yet penalize women more when it does. The ideal denies the (endless) reality of the female body, and pushes fat female bodies into a kind of sexual exile.

Our bodies are certainly more exposed in both clothing styles and level of casualness, and clothing is often thinner, clingier, and made from fabric without much tailoring, which can add the bulk and protection of seams. That doesn't mean fifteen or fifty years ago women's bodies were completely unavailable to the public eye, but the pubic area is suddenly there to be seen, much more than it used to be. And under tighter scrutiny--which amounts to the same thing. Nowadays women's pubic area is to be: very flat in all directions; no hint of the pudendal cleft; no roundness, or very little, where the lines of a woman's legs and her pubic area meet; defined by lines that create a sharp, clear V that comes to a point. No hint of depth, no valleys, no mounding, basically. A sheer front of abdomen that ends in the pubic area without notable emphasis.

The ideal seems connected to things such as body size, but also to the wholesale flip in less than a generation to a baseline standard of little or no pubic hair. Pubic hair doesn't just provide physical protection, as it's designed to do, it provides visual protection. It can create its own visible shape but simultaneously prevent further scrutiny. Now, though, all the hair has to go--or at least be trimmed enough so that there is no hint of mass visible from the outside, which makes the talk in my generation about managing the bikini line seem hopelessly outdated. American Apparel ads would be an obvious, aggressive example of the no-hair look, and are a worthwhile (if easy) target to comment on in all this mess, like Camelflage, but I don't think they should be treated with any surprise or as the worst example of our obsessions.

Because there are fierce standards at work here, even with a lot of seemingly modest clothing. We constantly trade in pussy-related beauty ideals at a high pitch whether we admit it or not. Regular low-rise jeans (not even skinny jeans), with their center seam, demand a very particular look. Bikinis do the same. Yoga pants are another a good example; they are really harsh and unforgiving (strange, in such a comfy piece of clothing). They have to hang from your hips and cling nowhere else but your butt. There can't be anything there--protruding, sticking out--for them to look right.

That's the deal: the Absence of Things is actually the Thing here. No lumps, no bits, no swelling. Nothing visible--at the same time that very much more of the body itself is visible, so that people end up wearing their insides on their outside, practically. A naked vulnerability becomes the armor, the defense, proof of something. Our clothing isn't protecting us; our bodies are. You show what you don't have to prove that what lies hidden is worth seeing.

We show--expect to see--more and more of everything on the female body around the genitals, but there is allowed to be less and less 'evidence' of its existence or aspects of the body connected to it (pubic hair, belly fat, the pubic mound). What we define as our genitals--that which still remains private, until some line is crossed--is pushed into a tinier and tinier bit of real estate.

We're obsessed with things like camel toe--the Cuchini website runs a blog called Camel Toe Cops; there are sites all over that track camel toe sightings--but ultimately camel toe is in kind of the same category as THO or VPL: phenoms that (hetero-shorthanding here) women think are embarrassing and men think are titillating. What's really significant is the scrutiny. A lot of camel toe photos are often nothing more than evidence that women have bodies that are not very clothed. Or maybe they are just evidence that women have bodies, period, such as this editorialized image of Oprah. No camel toe, just a body that must point more strongly in people's minds to the pubic area it surrounds with its curves.

Which leads to the fact that all this gets much worse, really fast, in the world of the fat body. If we are ruthlessly scanning thin bodies and finding things that don't exist, what happens to the fat ones, where we don't really know how to read bodies at all?

If that which is allowably, publicly "pubic" is just a constantly shrinking 2-D triangle, what about bodies that may actually have fat there? Or a bigger, more delineated mons? Or fat in the abdomen above it? Or all the many possible deviations from the ideal? What about very large bodies? How do we read the "public" sexuality of that part of the fat female body? And why do we think we should? Fat bodies--bad clothing choices apart--can't hide, but what do we think we see anyhow?

It turns out we think we can see a lot, because here there are not just camel toes to be spotted, but FUPA (Fat Upper Pelvic Area--check out the 150 definitions at Urban Dictionary), gunts (gut + cunt = fat that droops over the pubic area), BIF (Butt in Front) or front butt, and moose knuckles. Any part of the lower abdomen that might stick out has a name. There are "FUPA"- and "gunt"-captioned LOLphotos of large women forwarded in emails and Facebook groups with names like "Fat legs camel toe, make a man go, HELL NO!" and "Saving The Planet From Fat Girls In Leggings." Throw "front butts" in YouTube and see what you get.

This terminology has some glaring similarities, in addition to being mean. One is that it is terrifically vague about fat female anatomy, which varies tremendously in this area, but regardless--the terms are confused. It's tummy--it's sexy parts--who knows. There is a much-forwarded image of a woman with a large hanging belly that is sometimes labled "FUPA" and sometimes "gunt," when it's clear it is a belly, complete with belly button.

The other thing that really stands out is how sexual all the language can be--even when the parts aren't, particularly. A fat woman wearing a pair of pants that evidences a fat lower belly suddenly has a "gunt," is suddenly showing part of her sexual anatomy by being fat, when she may or may not be "showing" (as in camel toe) anything at all. Apparently anything south of the navel on fat people is genitalia. Or butt. Fat in the lower abdomen can sometimes simultaneously be read as sexlessness (for both genders; there are FUPA photos of men and the term moose knuckle is misapplied--if you can say this about hateful language such as this--to very large women as well as fat men), but ultimately it's about sex.

And fat women bear the brunt of this slang. Just as all the attention to camel toe may not be based on what we think we see but more on how we read women's bodies, "FUPA" and "gunt" may be about nothing more than whether or not somebody tucks their shirt in. Or is too fat for people to not read their pubic area while clothed. A belly isn't a vulva, but finding a way to call it that--when as far as I know everyone's belly is connected to their pubic mound which is connected to the rest of their vulva--seems to say: look. It's spilling out, we can see it all. You are showing your most private parts--even though you are clothed. We know all of your body and don't like/want it.

These terms are a way to call out sexual humiliation, ultimately, for bodies that can't play the tiny pubic real estate game. This language, to paraphrase Eric Rohmer, denies fat women the mystery we should grant them, that we should grant everybody.

This never-ending, detailed, yet seriously stupid public examination of women's bodies is brutal, and it is especially rough on everything from the belly down. Every bit has a name, every bit or lack of has sexual and cultural value, every fold in a shirt could be a baby bump, every pair of high-waisted pants signifies weight gain and FUPA and sloppy sexuality, every part of female genitalia is "vag." Mom jeans and pubic hair evidence silly and shameful aspects of womanhood, and any hint of a large labia can't be countenanced. It can't be an accident that everything below the navel is the part of the body women, fat or thin, agonize about the most.

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.