Fat – Page 11 – Feministe

MeMe Roth wants fat people to hide in their homes lest they get airs that they belong in public without showing the proper shame for existing

Unfuckingbelievable. Lauren passed this one along to me:

Got that? This woman here is so unbelievably obese that she did not deserve to win American Idol because she might inspire children to think that not starving yourself is acceptable:

My god, look at her! She’s twice the size of Ryan Seacrest! How dare Idol voters reward her for having the temerity to appear in public without wearing a circus tent!

Of course, it’s not an aesthetic thing with MeMe, mind you. Oh, nonononono, she’s just thinking of the children. The health of the children. Because there’s an epidemic! A pandemic! Of childhood obesity! And how can we fight it if kids go getting the idea that fat people deserve to walk among us without shame? Without sleeves????

Oh, my stars and garters!

Ahem.

I have one thing to say to MeMe Roth: fuck off. You know you’re an idiot when the commenters at YouTube aren’t agreeing that Jordin is the cow you believe she is.

And I have something to say to Jordin Sparks: Go talk to Kelly Clarkson, who told her label to fuck off when they wanted her to do what MeMe Roth wants you to do. It hasn’t hurt her career any.

Fat chicks should be glad someone would want to rape them in the first place

Yes, really.

A barrister provoked outrage yesterday by claiming that the victim of an alleged gang rape was so fat she would have been ‘glad of the attention’.

Sheilagh Davies, defending one of three boys accused of raping two girls, said the 16-year-old girl had ‘slimmed down a lot’ since the alleged attack.

She told Inner London Crown Court: ‘She was 12st 6lb – not quite the swan she may turn into. She may well have been glad of the attention.

…which is exactly why she accused them of rape. Right.

I don’t know quite what to say about this one. Sometimes there aren’t really words. Stories like this make me embarassed to be human.

Thanks to Little Cabbage for the link.

Two, Two, Two Moral Panics in One!

Ah, you have to love a good cable-news moral panic story. This time, it’s a twofer: CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta tells us that working moms cause childhood obesity!

Gupta starts by coyly acknowledging that mothers get blamed for an awful lot:

CHETRY: This just another case of blame mom for everything? Could working mothers be responsible for kids getting fatter? Well, it’s a controversial theory that Doctor Sanjay Gupta takes a look at in today’s “Fit Nation” report.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, good morning, Kiran. I was a little — talk about blaming women. I have to be a little careful here.

Women have been blamed for everything going back to the Garden of Eden for sure. But we’re taking a look at some — some people believe that working mothers may actually be contributing to the childhood obesity epidemic. We decided to take a look at this controversial theory.

Gee, it’s really not fair to blame mothers for everything, but gosh darn, “some people” are blaming them for something else, and since that something else is the latest moral panic to come down the pike, let’s roll tape!

As if his portrayal of Spock weren’t enough

Leonard Nimoy, photographer, has been studying the fat female nude for the past eight years.

And? He gets it.

He has a show of photographs of obese women on view at the R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, Mass., through June; a larger show at the gallery is scheduled to coincide with the November publication of his book on the subject, “The Full Body Project,” from Five Ties Publishing. The Louis Stern Fine Arts gallery in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston have acquired a few images from the project. A few hang at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York. (Their explicitness prevents the images from being reprinted here.)

These women are not hiding beneath muumuus or waving from the bottom of the Grand Canyon à la Carnie Wilson in early Wilson Phillips videos. They are fleshy and proud, celebrating their girth, reveling in it. It is, Mr. Nimoy says, a direct response to the pressure women face to conform to a Size 2.

“The average American woman, according to articles I’ve read, weighs 25 percent more than the models who are showing the clothes they are being sold,” Mr. Nimoy said, his breathing slightly labored by allergies and a mild case of emphysema. “So, most women will not be able to look like those models. But they’re being presented with clothes, cosmetics, surgery, diet pills, diet programs, therapy, with the idea that they can aspire to look like those people. It’s a big, big industry. Billions of dollars. And the cruelest part of it is that these women are being told, ‘You don’t look right.’ ”

Mind you, he didn’t always get it. He didn’t always understand that how women were viewed in relation to body size depends on cultural factors, until he met a woman at one of his shows who wanted to know why he never shot fat women:

His enlightenment came about eight years ago, when he had been showing pictures from his Shekhina series — sensual, provocative images of naked women in religious Jewish wear — at a lecture in Nevada. Afterward, a 250-pound woman approached him and asked if he wanted to take pictures of her, a different body type. He agreed, and she came to the studio at his Tahoe house. She arrived with all sorts of clothes and props, “as if she were playing a farmer’s wife in a butter commercial,” he said.

His wife, Susan, who was assisting him, said, “No, we want to shoot nude.” So the model removed her clothing and lay down on the table. At first Mr. Nimoy was very nervous, he said.

“The nudity wasn’t the problem,” he said, “but I’d never worked with that kind of a figure before. I didn’t quite know how to treat her. I didn’t want to do her some kind of injustice. I was concerned that I would present this person within the envelope of an art form.”

But soon he relaxed into it, lulled by the clicking of the camera and the woman’s comfort with her body. He placed some of the shots in various exhibitions, and they invariably garnered the most attention. “People always wanted to know: ‘Who is she? How did you come to shoot her? Why? Where? What was it all about?’ ”

He decided to pursue the subject further and was led to Heather MacAllister, the founder and artistic director of Big Burlesque and the Fat Bottom Revue, a troupe of plus-size female performers in San Francisco. Ms. MacAllister died in February of ovarian cancer, but something she said to Mr. Nimoy in one of their first meetings struck a chord. “ ‘Any time a fat person gets on a stage to perform and is not the butt of a joke — that’s a political statement,’ ” he recalled. “I thought that was profound.”

And the reaction has been, predictably, a mix of admiration and revulsion:

“We do overhear some reductive ‘Is Nimoy into fat chicks’ comments when the gallery room is first entered,” he continued, “but in fact the fun nature of the work and the quality seem to shut people up by the time they leave. I’ve had a few crank e-mails with snide remarks, but not a one from gallery visitors.”

Hey! Sounds like the Salon letters section whenever something even passingly size-positive is posted.

Clavicle Chic

clavicle
Nothing turns me on like protruding collarbones.

Is there any part of the female body left that we aren’t supposed to obsess over? Now even my collarbones have to be skinny?

I hate that billowy, shapeless shirts and dresses are in right now. Unless you are tall and have long legs poking out underneath, they make you look short, shapeless and like you’re wearing a tent. They always look cute on the runways, and like shit when you actually put them on (and by “you” I mean “me”). But it’s pretty sick that the response to billowy dresses that hide your hip bones or flat stomach is to emphasize a protruding collar bone. Not because protruding collar bones are bad or unattractive — skinny gals, don’t get mad at me quite yet — but because fetishizing any single part of a woman’s body as “proof” that she’s attractive (i.e., thin) is pretty fucked. And it’s especially pretty fucked because, aside from the people who are naturally very thin, getting your collarbones to protrude an inch or two demands some serious starvation.

This region has been emphasized by the skinny celebrity acolytes of the stylist Rachel Zoe, including Nicole Richie and Keira Knightley. Their ubiquitous deep V-neck tops show off sometimes skeletal frames, and other actresses have taken their cue and sized down as well, to the point that the Internet teems with fashion and celebrity bloggers and message board posters carping about protruding A-list clavicles.

Nicole Richie has a serious eating disorder. Her disorder is likely doing serious harm to her body. Girls and women die from it, or permanently damage their bodies. It is not something to be idealized; it’s also not something that should be turned into a freak show. It’s pretty disturbing when she’s the model for the new clavicle craze.

The blogger diaryofamadfashionista has written about “the disturbing rise of the clavicle,” adding, “We women of Rubenesque dimensions must band together and DEMAND that fashion take note of bosoms, buttocks, legs, plump dimpled elbows, and all of those other beautiful touches that make a female, well, female.”

Well, skinny bony-clavicled women are female also, and I kind of hate this “real woman” thing which ties femininity to having hips or full breasts or a round ass or a soft stomach. I hear what she’s saying, and I agree that it would be nice to see a more representative range of female bodies in fashion, advertising and entertainment in general. It’s refreshing to see women who look more like me, and more like American women in general, being imaged as sexy and attractive. It’s refreshing to hear women say that they aren’t going to conform to the beauty standard, and that instead they’re going to make the beauty standard conform to them. But I’d rather see us not be broken down into parts, whether the part is a dimpled elbow or a protruding collar bone.

I love this idea

Seems that more and more school systems are incorporating Dance Dance Revolution into their phys ed programs.

What’s amusing about this is that the gym teachers are surprised that kids today don’t enjoy team sports:

Children don’t often yell in excitement when they are let into class, but as the doors opened to the upper level of the gym at South Middle School here one recent Monday, the assembled students let out a chorus of shrieks.

In they rushed, past the Ping-Pong table, past the balance beams and the wrestling mats stacked unused. They sprinted past the ghosts of Gym Class Past toward two TV sets looming over square plastic mats on the floor. In less than a minute a dozen seventh graders were dancing in furiously kinetic union to the thumps of a techno song called “Speed Over Beethoven.”

Bill Hines, a physical education teacher at the school for 27 years, shook his head a little, smiled and said, “I’ll tell you one thing: they don’t run in here like that for basketball.”

I submit that most team sports, particularly as they’re practiced in gym class, enforce a hierarchy and instill bad feelings. I can remember being picked last for every team in junior high except basketball, where I was always team captain simply because of my height. But whether or not I was picked last or did the picking, seems like whoever lost was in a very bad mood.

Not that I’m saying team sports are bad or anything; just that they’re not the best model for gym class all the damn time. And maybe finding a way for kids to move their bodies in a way that’s fun and that they enjoy will help them with lifelong fitness.

Just saying.

By all means, let’s use the fear of fat to justify feeding (patented!) hormones to infants

Yet another example of the fear of fat leading to ridiculous outcomes: Catherine Price of Broadsheet has a piece from the Guardian about British scientists working on an infant formula designed to prevent obesity later in life:

British scientists are working on a baby formula which would chemically restructure the metabolic system of children to ensure they never became obese.

Studies in mice have found that large doses of the appetite-controlling hormone leptin during infancy permanently prevent excess weight gain and reduce the chances of type 2 diabetes.

Now researchers at the University of Buckingham say a leptin-enriched baby milk which does exactly the same is less than 10 years away, raising a plethora of medical, legal and ethical questions.

To say the least.

For one thing, as Price points out, who’s going to offer up their infants for experimental research? And then, how do control for the diets these kids will eat later in life, or for factors that have nothing to do with appetite, like stress eating and the fucked-up relationship a lot of us have with food?

Leptin turns off appetite throughout life, but the scientists last year proved that high doses in mice through pregnancy and early life permanently reduced weight. They now believe it plays a role in hard-wiring the brain’s appetite response in infancy.

Mike Cawthorne, who led the researchers, said: “The supplemented milks are simply adding back something that was originally present: breast milk contains leptin and formula feeds don’t.

So, um, why not, say, make it much easier for women to breast-feed if it’s so vitally important to deal with the “obesity epidemic”?

Well, I guess that would be because nobody profits from breast milk. But a leptin-based formula would probably be patentable, and certainly profitable if you could convince people that it will keep their kids from getting fat in adulthood, no matter what they eat after being weaned.

Which of course is bullshit. People are fat for a variety of reasons, many of which are difficult to change because of structural issues like lack of funding for physical education, more busing to school and less walking, ginormous portion sizes at restaurants, godawful food served at school, food programs like WIC being geared more toward the needs of the dairy industry rather than good nutrition, the simple lack of availability of fresh, affordable foods in many neighborhoods and the time to cook them, and a car culture that encourages a sedentary existence.

Science keeps offering magic bullets for weight loss that promise to help us with our weight problems without us having to do anything else to change either our individual lifestyles or take a hard look at changing the way society is set up and doing the hard work to make lasting changes that will benefit everyone. And what do we get for all these breakthroughs? Heart damage and oily anal leakage — and not a whole lot of pounds lost to show for it.

And now they want people to put all kinds of hormones into their infants — hormones which will have lord-knows-what kinds of effects in the long term. And there will be people who will break down and give this stuff to their kids, because the cost of being fat is so great in terms of social disapproval and blame and shame. They’ll put down the money and hope that the formula won’t have any weird effects, all the while hoping that this will be just the thing to keep their kids from being the objects of disgust and ridicule. And they probably won’t do anything else to change their habits, and if the kid winds up fat anyhow, they’ll blame the kid.

UPDATE: Just to nip any mommy drive-bys in the bud here, this is not about breast vs. bottle and what’s better for kids and whether good mothers use formula.

Does this insecurity make my ass look fat?

Amanda’s got an interesting post about the way women run themselves down as a matter of course, both to bond with other women and to show others that they don’t suffer from any grand notions that they’re actually self-confident:

Some researchers have looked into female self-degradation and found that women tend to treat the practice of making derogatory comments about your own body as mandatory. (Hat tip, Lisa in KS.) Hating your body is considered a baseline behavior to demonstrate that you are not exhibiting threateningly high levels of self-esteem.

Fat talk also allows females to appear modest, a prized quality in a culture that shuns egotism.

“We tend to dislike arrogance and especially dislike it in women (‘bitches’)”, Martz explained. “Women are perceived as OK if they fat talk and acknowledge that their bodies are not perfect but they are working on it.”

What the researchers called “fat talk” functions as a form of female bonding, basically over our shared understanding that we can never measure up.

See, this is one of those things that my status as a lifetime fat person has given me a much different perspective on. I’m pretty much exempt from mandatory self-deprecation (because, yes, my ass *does* look fat in these pants, because *my ass is fat* and I don’t need to solicit anyone’s opinion on that, thanks, because someone will be sure to scream it out a car window), though it is my role to assure other women that no, they’re not fat — certainly not like me.

This started in junior high, when girls I didn’t interact with much would come up to me in the locker room and ask, “Zuzu, do you think I’m fat?” Why? Because I’m the expert? Because I’ll say of course not? Because anyone who didn’t look like me was, by default, thin?

I always wish I’d had the guts in those days to look those girls in the eyes and tell them that, yes, you’re looking a little chunky there, Susie. Because this was just another reminder that I wasn’t like them, wasn’t normal, and wasn’t part of their world. But instead I just felt shame.

It’s about 25 years too late, but fuck you, Susie.

Miss Tyra: Kiss My Fat Ass

(Via)

Predictably, the fat shamers crawl out of the woodwork to express “concern” about the “health” of women who have an ounce of fat on their bodies. From the comments at Youtube:

* if youre fat youre unhealthy. stop trying to say its ok to be fat becuz simply its not healthy. unhealthy. not healthy. etc etc etc. so tyra can dress up in a fat suit to try to pretend its ok, but if youre overweight youre more likely to become afflicted by diseased related to that weight. ITS OK TO WEIGH 100000 LBS YOURE STILL BEAUTIFUL. oh wait no youre not. youre fat and ugly. and it makes me sick to see fat ugly overweight people.

(later, from the same commenter) oh id still give tyra the slippery sausage tho.

*It’s true. I’m sick of porky bitches who have trouble making it up a flight of stairs claiming they’re “healthy.” Downing a bucket of fried chicken a day is healthy, huh? I think not.

*Oh by the way Tyra, you’re fat and ugly.

*actually she insecure. she lost weight since those photos before doing a show on it. she was hurt big time from them you can see it. BTW ur a fatty

Also be sure to check out the comments at Feministing for a decidedly different take on the clip.

Wonderful, Glorious Me

I’ve been doing a little poking around through our trackbacks, and it seems that a number of people have found the comments to these posts a bit disheartening, in a god-when-can-we-ever-stop-berating-ourselves kind of way. For example, Maia wrote,

What I think is so important in what Jill wrote is that for many women feminism does not solve our relationship between food and our bodies, it just helps name the problems. It’s also a lot easier to talk about food and body politics in the abstract, which can leave everyone feeling that they’re a bad feminist for not figuring out this stuff by themselves.

A lot of women on this heartbreaking, rage-inducing, thread that piny started, talked about the conflict between feminism and their feelings about their body. Or going further, that feminist analysis just adds a level of guilt to what they’re doing, that they should be strong enough and smart enough not to let this society get to us.

Which is bullshit, we do the best that we can, but none of us are strong enough and smart enough to deal with all of this on our own. (I say “all of this” deliberately, because I think body and food issues are about society’s image of women, but they’re also about so much more. They’re about control and losing control. They’re a way of conforming with what women should be, and a way of resisting.)

If we’re going to do anything that allows us to take up space, we’re going to have to do it together.

So. Let me try to open up the floor to give us a chance to do something together.

We’re conditioned, particularly as women, to be self-deprecating, to not take up space, to not revel in our bodies and ourselves. We can get 150 comments in a thread about when we realized that we were aware our bodies weren’t up to snuff; let’s see how many we can generate praising ourselves.

Your mission: list at least five things you love about your body and yourself. Five is the floor; you can always do more. And no self-deprecation! No offsetting a compliment with a dig.

I’ll start:

1. I’ve got great skin.

2. I’ve got beautiful blue eyes.

3. I can lift an 85-pound barbell just using my ass.

4. I can bench-press 50 pounds of plates on a 45-pound bar, and I’m nowhere near my natural limits on that.

5. I’m smart as hell.

Okay, your turn. Tell us how wonderful you are.

UPDATE: Hugo got the idea that this is a women-only thread. Nope. Men welcome. And he’s got some thoughts about male body anxiety and the forms it takes.