you dear little girls

Text from Eight Cousins (1875), by Louisa May Alcott:

Happy Birthday, Extender!

It's been a year since I spun off size-related writing from my regular blog and created The Extender and so--let Bacchus rule! Woo! I know I am a somewhat erratically-updating creature, but I am a sincere one, and hope to keep providing my own take--for what else do you or can you do in a blog--on all things related to size. In aeternum floreant! Sorry for cropping the Rembrandt.

p.s. Bacchus' extender is the kind that clips round the side where you can't see it. He asked for it nicely when he sat on the wine keg.

diets and the damage done

My high school years parked two really bad songs in my brain for the rest of my life--at least two, but these are the worst.

One was from German class. I desperately wanted to take French when I started high school, but French was full, and thus were the next eight years of my life and two exchange programs decided. In eleventh grade my German teacher had us learn "Das Lied der Deutschen" as part of our curriculum. At that point the third stanza was the national anthem of West Germany, but for some reason we learned all the stanzas, including the first. Not a good stanza. Not only did we sing the song, I accompanied us on the piano, which guaranteed that the tenaciously catchy tune lives on in my babbling singing brain and surfaces occasionally at bad times. Any time is horrible to start singing "Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles," really. I try not to let that happen, but wish I could just unlearn it.

The other song came from a diet center I belonged to. I don't remember the name of the center now, or that much about it at all in some ways. The experience feels like a dream, comes back to me in whole flashes of feeling for brief, thick moments. The place was a relic of the 1970s, maybe, or the 1960s, named after a woman, I think. I know that I was a member there sometime before my two tours of duty in Weight Watchers, which would put this in the early 1980s, when I was around 16.

The center was in a mall. I remember a pink and purple interior with no windows and low ceilings. It was flowery, maybe, or paisley. I vaguely remember vibrating belt exercisers--those things hurt--and other old-fashioned equipment. I thought the place was sort of old-fashioned, and felt shame that my fatness would bring me into contact--as did clothes-buying, for instance, in that era of double-knits--with the world of middle-aged women; not only that, that's the world I was eligible for. It was disorienting and shaming.

One of the only things I recall at all vividly about the place is the song we had to sing while doing a little calisthenics routine that involved toe-touching and other movements on the floor:

Who hit Sally in the belly with the meatball?
Oh dear! I fear! I've over-developed my rear!

We did our large, jerky gestures on the downbeats, so that the whole thing had a very singsong, drums-on-a-boat quality:

WHO hit SAL-ly in the BEL-ly with the MEAT-ball?
Oh DEAR! I FEAR! I've OV-er-de-VEL-oped-my-REAR!

To this day that song appears unbidden in my brain whenever it feels like it, or perhaps when a piece of prose with the right meter triggers the rhythm. I wish I could excise the song and let something else take its place in my brainpan, but I think it's stuck.

I wish I could excise the whole experience. I wish I could save me and all the housewives from that windowless place; blast in, push all of us through the door like a member of the SWAT team before all that bullshit explodes and takes us with it.

It's hard to know what to wish for in healing from diet experiences, because they are so far-reaching in every direction, so tenacious, so complicated, so woven into every aspect of your life. The wound it would leave if you yanked it out whole would not heal. It would be easier to just start over at the beginning and hope to crowd it out with acceptance. But you can't.

One day when my mom dropped me off at the diet center--she and I had argued about how much weight I had to lose; I said, wildly, "Thirty pounds!", hoping against hope she would say, "No, you don't really need to lose any," and was heartsick when she countered with, "No, fifteen"--I discovered when I went inside there was a potluck. I could hardly believe they dared bring explosive material such as food--lots of it, not all diet fare--in this place, but I was very excited. Stirred-up. I remember somebody urging me to eat. That's all I did for my hour, although I pretending to be doing other things, as if it wasn't important. I scarfed food I didn't normally get, like Oreos, at one point pushing them in my face while hiding in the dressing room. How could anybody just let cookies sit there? Have just a few? Have none? I lied to the people at the diet center about what I was doing, sure everyone was watching me pretending not to care while all the time I watched the food like prey. I lied to my mother in the car afterward about my hour "exercising," and felt dirty and ashamed.

And stirred up. I don't know that anything could have saved me from impetus of disordered eating at that point of my life. Experiences such as the diet center were just one push in the forces that set the pendulum swinging so hard I didn't know where the point of equilibrium was for years. The forces that keeps us off-balance about food are huge, period. When the pendulum isn't swinging the earth itself under our feet is. It is worth finding the position of repose, though, to come back to, over and over. It's possible to find it, to heal. You may have to let the whole world tilt without you, though.

the need for matched sets

In his review for The Dilemma in the New York Times, A.O. Scott writes:

Mr. Vaughn and Mr. James play bulky best buds romantically paired (because they’re Not Gay) with pretty, fine-boned women. Mr. James is Nick, married to Geneva (Winona Ryder), and Mr. Vaughn is Ronny, gathering the nerve and the money to propose to his longtime girlfriend, Beth (Jennifer Connelly). To ask if Mr. Vaughn and Ms. Connelly have any chemistry is to invoke the wrong science; extreme disparities of size and shape suggest, instead, a fascinating problem of zoology, as if a whippet had decided to cohabit with a yak.

A whippet and a yak! Goddamn. And here I thought they were Homo sapiens.

We don't know what to do--we think we don't--with mismatched couples, when the violated criteria is that of some presumably agreed-upon Hotness. How can it happen? What is the hot one getting out of it (seems to be the idea)--when it's not an obvious question of material gain? If body size is something we make and earn with every action we take, how can somebody who's done the "right" things "deserve" somebody whose done the "wrong"?

Sometimes you just need scare quotes.

Despite our confusion, we see a lot of examples in modern media of "regular guy with the hot wife" phenom that offends so many's sensibilities, such as The Dilemma:

They can offend me too, but not because it violates some sense of symmetry that I think is part of the natural order.

It certainly bothers me that it's considered so far out of the realm of possibility to show a large woman who is loved, partnered, perhaps even has a child. (Who knew the phenom of a fat mom would be so rare? I almost miss that stereotype). It bothers me that media execs are still so ready to build shows and movies around men who don't fit extremely stringent criteria for conventionally attractive, when the women must--they are pinned down in a very, very narrow range of acceptable. There is a reason these couples do look sort of clunky sometimes.

But what bothers me the most is that the "mismatching" is created because media folk get boxed in by beauty ideals, not from any real belief that that people can like qualities different than themselves in their partners. People really do like different things sometimes (heterosexuality being a good example). They're called preferences. Crazy. There really are smaller women who like bigger men.

There are tall people who like short people, short people who like tall people, fat people who like skinny people, skinny people who like fat people, black people who like white people, white people who like black people, older people who like younger people, younger people like older people...for however much time you have to match things up and however many columns A and B you can think of (or more), there are people out there mixing it up in low- to high-contrast ways. Nor does the fact that somebody likes something different necessarily make it a fetish, either. That seems to be the category that preferences get dumped in when they are too obvious to be borne or involve preferences of which people disapprove. Such as a fat partner. Some people actually prefer them. Just because they do.

The chunkier guy/thinner woman idea, while not approved (see above), does have some traction from just sheer force, maybe, or from a lurking suspicion that the average woman might indeed like a hug from a solid, money-earning guy at the end of the day (or however they might rationalize a physical preference). But the fat woman/skinny guy thing is rarely to be countenanced. It's hard to imagine a skinny Mike/fat Molly sitcom, when the idea of a skinny man preferring a fat woman still seems to be associated with a kind of emasculated delusion about what he's getting into. Two fat people, well--they just don't know any better. One fat, one thin...why are they putting up with it?

Unconventional female looks being a much bigger violation of social order than male ones, I'm not sure the media even knows how to approach it, given that it runs on steam-powered looksism most of the time. Look at all the vibrations that emanated from the marriage of Elizabeth and John Edwards; after her death people were still trying to make sense of what they felt had no real way to understand. Or of what needed examination to comprehend. Maybe he just thought she was attractive, you know? She was.

One of the things you hopefully learn as you get older is that you can't even know all the ways love--or lust--looks at an individual level, which is to say a million different ways, even without strong preferences in the fray, which mix it up a million times more. Surely we don't need one more astonished celebrity-rag article about men cheating on their "perfect" wives to prove this. If people really are free to love who they want, and do, let's show it. It we're still not really free to do so--all the more reason to show it and get people used to it. You like what you like. Even when it doesn't look exactly like you.

yay

from blunt card.com

"Dear Fatphobia/Thin Privilege deniers"

From Bitch, Please. Go check out the other screen grabs, or make your own!

beyond our ken

This is a great, really significant article from the CBC profiling Dr. Arya Sharma, chair of obesity research and management at the University of Alberta. It says some important things, I think, about all the factors that contribute to why some us are fat and some of us are thin:

And while sedentary lifestyles and poor food choices do play a factor, one of Canada's leading obesity experts believes much of the problem stems from basic metabolism and the yo-yo dieting that so many obese and overweight people experience.

"I think one of the biggest misconceptions when we talk about obesity in general is that obese people are obese largely because of their lifestyles and because of the way that they live."

Sharma points to studies where people's eating and activity are carefully monitored. They show that some people can eat an additional 1,000 calories per day and not gain a gram, while others would gain five to six kilograms over a six-week period.

"There's a huge variability in how people can cope with extra calories."

We are so sure we Know, at a glance, even, why one person is thin and one is fat. One person does the right things, one does the wrong--right? I feel more and more that we are just a big pile of guinea pigs in our pen, our little genetic predispositions fired with surges from calorie restriction, HFCS, stress, not sleeping, whole foods, processed foods, hunger, prescription meds, no meds--whatever--all of it, and seeing all of their effects in all of us. Body size is just the most visible bit of it, and less in our control than we think. Bodies respond millions of ways to the variables of modern life.

"We keep hammering home the stereotype of the fat, lazy slobs who are eating fast food all the time who are not moving, not exercising or not taking care of themselves, making poor choices, when there's very little science that actually backs this up."

Also worth checking out, and in a similar vein: this piece in Newsweek, "Fat Canaries in a Coal Mine," about an obesity researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmington who discovered a rise of obesity in the majority (23 of 24) animal populations chosen for study since the 1940s. With no explanation.

Food marketing, more TV, and less phys ed can no more explain these fatter animals than they can the epidemic of obesity in babies under 6 months. 

Both pieces well worth a look--fascinating.

photo Tuesday

Mujeres dormidas

Nu aux bras levés

Paintings by Jose de Togores i Llach (1893-1970), via the great website Art Inconnu, a home for "little-known and under-appreciated art."

perp walk

This blog by Nina Matsumoto recently featured images from the 2002 book by Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein, Athlete, that contains beautifully photographed lineups of all kinds of athletes, of all kinds of body sizes, types, heights, weights. The images are fascinating to inspect at leisure, and really rather smokin hot. Matsumoto, a comic artist, posted them as a guide for artists, pointing out that the body type we think of as athletic or strong comes in many forms. Smokin. No, wait--instructional. I'm particularly fond--mostly fond--of the images that display the most body size diversity, such as Mr. Hamman there, hello.

Thanks to HB for the headsup.

old time fatties!

I am really enjoying this Tumblr site: Fuck Yeah, Old Time Fatties!, which posts old photos of all kinds--from galleries, libraries, stock photo agencies, other sources--that feature fat people in them. The goal is to illustrate the fact that fat people did not just arrive on the earth in the last ten years, toddling in in our giant boots that leave huge ecological footprints for the rest of the world to pay for. Mostly it's fun because I am a sucker for old photos, and I think they're beautiful.

From The Library of Congress Flicker set:  [Portrait of Sylvia Syms, Little Casino(?), New York, N.Y., ca. June 1947] (LOC)  Gottlieb, William P., 1917- , photographer.

hally hoppidays! (photo Tuesday)

oh dear

This year for the holidays I'm giving my mom better legs. I'm giving my brother a tighter core. My cousin, better posture. My sister, a cuter butt. Now--my man? This year he's getting a sexier me.

Unhhuh. I kinda want a pair of these shoes, even with the tell-tale roundheel (!), but this ad clanks so hard. Mean.

Ms. Scylla and Ms. Charybdis

 

dancer thin

Mila Kunis is quoted in yesterday's E! Online about losing twenty pounds to play a ballet dancer in Black Swan:

"I could see why this industry [query: which?] is so f--ked up, because at 95 pounds, I would literally look at myself in the mirror and I was like, Oh my God!" she says. "I had no shape, no boobs, no ass...All you saw was bone. I was like, This looks gross."

I hope people notice what I think is the most meaningful portion of the interview, which is about the difference between how she looked to real people--"family and friends became concerned"--versus how it looked onscreen:

"In real life, it looked disgusting," Kunis says. "But in photographs and on film, it looked amazing."

We experience people's bodies more and more through the filter of imagery, but photos do not = bodies. There are worlds of differences living in the (theoretically) thin line between the two.

the big C

If you missed it, this New York Times piece by Peggy Orenstein about the cultural Pinking of breast cancer is well worth a read. It lays out some things that desperately needed to be said--very straightforwardly--about the bizarre sexualization and commodification of breast cancer awareness, and how harsh it ultimately is to those who suffer from the disease. I was really glad to see this piece.

A few days before that article was published, the Teenage Cancer Trust released research listing the top 20 cancer myths believed by teenagers and young adults in the UK. They are all doozies, but note the following examples (numbers are percentages of young people who believe the myth):

• Mobile phones cause brain tumors - 36%
• The color of your skin determines your cancer risks - 22%  
• If you have cancer when pregnant, your baby will get it - 19%  
• Keeping a mobile phone in your bra gives you breast cancer - 15% 
• Being fat gives you cancer - 7% 

photo Tuesday

What can I say, I'm in the mood for a green alien.

cute

from Post Secret

dreamz

To prove that this is a personal blog and not a news outlet (hah), I am going to relay a dream from last night that cracked me up. I don't know about you, but media experiences seed my dreams the way real life does, so this one is the result yesterday--in part--of watching Keeping up With the Kardashians and America's Test Kitchen (French bistro cooking episode), consuming Alexia Waffle Fries, and reading E!Online. I was at the Kardashians' house for an open house/party and they were debating the fat content in roasted chicken and potatoes. They appealed to me for my opinion and I said it was ridiculous to worry about the fat content in a beautifully cooked bird like that. I kept trying to heat up a handful of potatoes for myself but people kept screwing with them, including mixing them in my drink. The last time I was at the microwave Kris Jenner came up to me and said, "Well, what do you think?" I said the party was fine and why do you ask? She said, "Well, we're putting in a bid to host NAAFA convention next year in SoCal." I was on the brink of telling her, "You know, some people who come will actually be really large," when I woke up. Heh! Amusing. I see that family as a group of people that has basically turned management of the Beauty Ideal into a career, so I think my subconscious was mashing stuff up to make a point. Also to confront the idea that "curves," the word du jour used by celebrities as talisman against too-fat/too-thin talk, is not the same thing as fat.

fatty-spotting

More on this later, but for now, note: One current place to spot fatties in the mainstream culture of pop? Outsiders Rising videos, such as the two below: Katy Perry's "Firework" and "Raise Your Glass" by P!nk. Both songs are vague anthemic urges for equality led by pretty pop singers, with videos featuring LBGT, seriously ill, nerdy, or otherwise outsider youth. There is also a big girl in each video: the one in Perry's is chubby and leaps into a pool wearing a bikini (awlright); the girl in P!nk's does less (she knocks over "mean" thin girl cutouts while sitting with them at a lunch table), but she does open the video.

heh

photo Tuesday

who you callin fat?

a fat sand rat (hi!)

I was enchanted to discover recently that there is an animal called the fat sand rat (pictured above). Fat is part of the species' name, its binomial nomenclature: Psammomys obesus. The animal is in the news because researchers were able to confirm that traditional treatments for SAD had scientific basis; they are diurnal, not nocturnal, as are the usual animals for testing (mice and other rats). Fat sand rats responded well to light exposure and antidepressants, and got out of their little bathrobes earlier in the day and stopped watching so much TV.

a fat puffer

It's fascinating to me that there is a taxonomic way for an animal to be fat. It is such a loaded and extremely subjective descriptor in the human world (reclamation aside), not to mention seen as a voluntary, mutable, and undesirable, state, but it turns out there are at least thirty species besides the fat sand rat who are blithely, officially "fat."

the fat dormouse

There is, for instance, an entire genus of fat puffers, such as the guineafowl puffer (pictured). There are a lot of "fat" fish: fat snooks, fat sleepers, fat mullets; and fat things in shells like fat pocketbooks and fat horsemussels. There is a fat dormouse or edible dormouse, considered a pest in the UK, and the genus of fat mice, which includes the subspecies of the dainty fat mouse and the tiny fat mouse (query: who doesn't want a play village of tiny fat mice?).

the fat mullet

There are also "plump" animals--plump whelks, plump groupers, and plump cyphomae--and two "corpulent" snails--the corpulent rams-horn and corpulent hornsnail. There are three "ponderous" molluscs. There is a portly spider crab, which I think sounds a very dignified thing.

the rotund 
mystery snail

Then there are the "stout" and "rotund" animals. All the "rotund" animals, around ten of them, are molluscs (words to denote swollen size seem very popular in mollusc descriptors), like the rotund disc, the rotund cleftclam and the rotund trophon. There is a genus of stout newts (how Gussie Fink-Nottle), and at least twenty other "stout" species: the stout red shrimp, the stout blacksmelt, the stout longtom (a kind of needlefish).

the chunky fathead

There is, I'm happy to say, a chunky fathead, also known as the Indian driftffish. There are no "chubby" animals (although the marbled murrelet is described as "a very small, chubby, sea bird that seems to lack a neck"), but a few "obese" animals; mostly, again, things in shells: the obese thorn, the obese dipperclam, the obese pondsnail.

the thin shrew

What about the other end of the spectrum? There are at least twenty "thin" animals (no "skinny" or "svelte" ones, though), including the thin shrew, the thin pillar, the thin moonsnail, and the companion to the fat sand rat, the thin sand rat (Psammomys vexillaris), also known as the pale sand rat (as might befit a thin rattie).

a Marmosops
(slender mouse opossum)

There are lots of "slender" animals, including the slender anchovy and slender sole, and several "slender" genii: slender salamanders, slender mongooses, slender loris, and slender mouse opossums (the spectacularly named Marmosops, which should be a kind of fuzzy absorbent towel or perhaps a cute rodent spy game). There is also, oxymoronically enough, a whole genus of slender chubs.

Just for fun, I pulled out words from FHM's list of 100 Sexiest Women in the World 2010 (with its handy "Lady Finder") with which to search the animal world. I found no animals with "plunging," "epic," "petite," "goddess," "chesty," "healthy," "sexy," "hot," or "ass" in their name, but did get:

a tit

• the genus of tits

• a lot of "naked" animals, including a family of naked catfishes, squeakers, and upside-down catfishes and a genus, the famous naked mole-rats

• over twenty "beautiful" animals, including the genus of beautiful squirrels

a beautiful squirrel

• "pretty" animals, including the pretty shiner

• "wild" animals, including the wild turkey

• "erect" animals, including the erect wormsnail

the pretty shiner

• two "massive" species, including the massive urn crab

• the glorious topsnail

• the horny goby

the sad flycatcher

The subjective/adjectival in animal kingdom taxonomy is pretty much endlessly interesting. There is a nervous shark and a sprightly pygmy rice rat. I found at least eighteen "delicate" species. There is a happy wren, and four "sad" animals," including a bivalve called the sad elliptio. Language related to size is just one corner of all the sometimes goofy poetry.

fat rat!

It also turns out the fat sand rat, which is, note, not particularly fat, is a fairly relevant little animal to the human world. They were called fat originally because of the discovery that some of them become diabetic on normal grain-based rodent diets. So not only do researchers use them for studies about SAD, they are very popular for research about diabetes and its effects. Poor little dudes. They better be getting sunlamps for their troubles.

photo Tuesday

mural in Orgosolo, Sardinia

love it

My current fav photo from the Big Fat Kiss-In: