In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Fat, Fashion, and Scapegoating

Couple of items came to my attention regarding fat women being presented as sexy and the reactions thereto.

First up: Trouble at the Lusty Lady, the country’s only unionized strip club, over an email from a male worker (who wants to see the union gone now that the club is a co-op owned by the union members) relaying complaints he allegedly heard from customers regarding a night at the Lusty Lady featuring “BBW”* performers:

Like a lot of San Francisco businesses, the Lusty Lady prides itself on diversity, offering up dancers in a variety of sizes, shapes, ethnicities, attitudes and tattoos.

But like a lot of North Beach clubs, business at the Lusty — while steady — isn’t what it was a few years back during the dot-com years, so every customer and dollar counts.

That’s why it was such a big deal in July, when someone booked an entire night of “BBW” entertainment — big, beautiful women — and the clientele reacted by walking out.

The counterman wrote up the customers’ objections — “I came for fantasies, not nightmares” being one of the more printable ones — and sent them off in what he thought was a confidential e-mail to the club’s board of directors.

However, one board member, who worked as a Lusty dancer, took offense and plastered a printout of the e-mail on the dressing room mirror for all the entertainers to see.

Talk about an ugly situation.

Now, from this account, it sounds like “the clientele” walked out en masse. Because, my God! Who would want to see fat women dancing naked?

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Moving the Goalposts

Jennifer Ouellette at 3 Quarks Daily has a must read post on the moving target of sizes in women’s clothes. While the couture industry is scaling down sizes so that zero is the new four, and sizes less than zero are being created, the mass-market apparel industry is, thankfully, beginning to realize that they’re in the business of selling clothing to people with actual bodies — and only a very small number of women’s actual bodies, regardless of size, fit the industry’s hourglass standard.

The post is too chock-full of great stuff to excerpt here, so hie thee over to 3 Quarks Daily and read the whole thing.

What Was That About Gluttony, Again?

You know the drill. Someone’s fat, and someone else comes to the conclusion that the fat person got that way by stuffing his or her face with cheesecake or donuts or what have you.

Not so fast.

News Flash: Soda Is Fattening

Add a report from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition to the growing list of evidence that sugary soft drinks are adding pounds to kids. The report, a meta-analysis of others’ scientific research, says one extra can of soda a day can translate into 15 pounds a year. The report concludes: “Although more research is needed, sufficient evidence exists for public health strategies to discourage consumption of sugary drinks as part of a healthy lifestyle.”

And, as certain as night follows day, the sugar industry begs to differ.

Doesn’t take much to get fat if one spreads the calories out. There are only about 140 calories in a can of sugared soda, and most people can down one or two without giving a thought to the calories, and without any sensation of satiety.

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That Pig Picture Was No Fluke

We’ve seen the kind of woman that Hollywood and Details magazine deems “fat” and worthy of being represented by the image of a pig’s ass wearing heels — such noted porkers as Kristin Davis, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Rachel Weisz and a Butterfield 8-era Elizabeth Taylor.

Now, apparently Katie Couric is getting the oinker treatment by her new network — the official photo attached to the story in the network’s magazine announcing her move into the anchor chair at CBS Evening News has been doctored so that she appears to be 20 pounds lighter than she really is.

n the magazine, which is distributed at CBS stations and on American Airlines flights, Couric appears on the front dressed in a dark business suit and flashing her pearly whites.

But on an inside page, the touched-up – or rather, slimmed-downed – photo shows Couric in a striped designer dress suit standing in front of the CBS eye logo.

The original photo, which shows Couric looking more bosomy and thicker in the shoulders, waist and cheeks, was snapped in May.

Apparently, the woman pictured below is so enormous that the network that will be putting her on camera, live, every weeknight beginning Sept. 5, felt the need to airbrush out her ass because God forbid anyone see that she could crush the anchor’s chair under the weight of her massive, flabby ass:

An “overzealous” photo editor has been blamed for the airbrushing, but you can’t tell me that network standards and cultural standards and the standards that drove the Details crowd to declare this woman to be piglike didn’t have anything to do with it. Nor can I quite credit the idea that nobody at the network had editorial control over the magazine. The news division may very well have had nothing to do with it, but they’re only one part of a network that contributes to the screwed-up body images of this culture through its entertainment programming.

“The freaking pig in the freaking heels.”

That’s what Rebecca Traister found herself sputtering when she went looking through Details’ website for an article about men who are frustrated with their stay-at-home wives and found this photo:

The story it illustrates?

“Why Fat Is Back In Hollywood.”

Yes, Details chose to illustrate a story about how Hollywood is moving away from the human lollipop look for actresses in favor of such lardasses as Kristin Davis and Gretchen Mol . . . with a photo of a pig. In heels.

That right there tells you all you need to know about how fucked up body image is here in America.

Read Rebecca’s whole piece.

So All I Have To Do Is Keep Them Chained Up And Half-Starved?

Lauren passed on this little item from the BBC: Study finds that hungry men prefer larger women.

A study of 61 male university students found those who were hungry were attracted to heavier women than those who were satiated.

The hungry men also paid much less attention to a woman’s body shape and regarded less curvy figures as more attractive.

The abstract of the study, published in the British Journal of Psychology, suggests that the researchers were trying to find out why male preferences for female body weight followed a consistent socio-economic pattern. You’d think general resource allocation had more to do with that than hunger qua hunger. After all, the heavier female ideal occurs in cultures where there is a lot of scarcity, and having a fleshy figure is a sign of prosperity and of having enough resources to feed oneself (as well as enough leisure not to have to work off all the calories one consumes). In cultures like ours, where not only is hunger not so widespread but the kinds of foods available to the poor are those that tend to pack on the pounds, the ideal is one of thinness — of the sort that can be achieved if one has plenty of leisure time to hit the gym and the resources to buy fresh foods.

In other words, the ideal across cultures has more to do with wealth; not only the wealth of the women themselves, but the wealth of their men. There’s a reason for arm candy.

What can be regarded as a normal and acceptable body size is also influenced by what we see, including advertising, and can change. For example, migrants from rural to urban societies show an increasing idealisation of thinner figures.

Dr Viren Swami from University College London and Dr Martin Tovée from Newcastle University believe there are biological factors at work too.

Dr Tovée explained: “Your cognitive state, your drives and your interests are dependent on your underlying physiology, your blood sugar levels and your hormone levels and these depend upon hunger.”

Except that those are transitory states, whereas cultural beauty standards are somewhat more constant. Not that they don’t change, of course — witness the shift in beauty standards from, say, Marilyn Monroe in the 50s to Twiggy in the 60s — but it takes more than a meal to make the difference.

And apparently, they didn’t test the same men both when hungry and when not hungry:

They recruited male university students as they entered or exited a campus dining hall during dinner time.

They asked the men to rate how hungry they were on a scale of one to seven. Using these responses, the researchers selected 30 hungry and 31 satiated men to take part in the study.

The men were then asked to rate the attractiveness of 50 women of varying weights, all within a healthy range, who had been photographed wearing tight grey leotards and leggings.

The hungry men rated more of the heavier women as attractive than the men who were full up.

It also doesn’t sound like they had a terribly wide selection of body types, if the weights of the women pictured were all “within a healthy range” as that is understood by the BMI-obsessed medical community.

Apparently, the researchers think that the findings are small but significant and might, given extrapolation (for instance, over time with many missed meals) could explain cultural shifts.

Maybe. But I think they’re getting closer to it when they discuss obesity and its class-relatedness:

The work could also help further our understanding of obesity, he said.

“A lot of what we are doing is looking at how flexible these representations of body size and shape are and the effect of environment. If you are growing up in an environment where you are seeing heavier body types, is this what you set your norm?

“We know that diet is related to social class and obesity tends to be class related too. So we are looking at how diet then impacts on your ideals and perceptions of what is a good or bad body shape.”

Maybe they ought not to discount the class issues.

Oh, No! My Boyfriend’s Fat!

It’s time for another Cary Tennis column!

Actually, while I usually think Cary gives crappy non-advice, I do think he got this one right. First, the letter:

Dear Cary,

Currently I’m dating a man who just won’t leave my consciousness, not for a moment. I think of him all the time. He’s pretty special.

My problem is this: This wonderful man with whom I’ve shared some amazing moments and do share a phenomenal connection … he’s overweight. He’s not merely out of shape or a hike and a swim away from fit, he’s fat.

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Terrible Genius

A new product has David Segal of the Washington Post a little nervous.

It’s chocolate that is specially formulated to help women alleviate the symptoms of PMS.

Would you like a moment to process that?

It’s a hunk of chocolate, designed specifically to alleviate the effects of premenstrual syndrome. (More than, say, a Snickers bar already does.) The irritability, the anxiety, the moodiness — all of it is allegedly soothed by the Wonder Bar, at $3.69 a pop. As it says on the wrapper, “Take sweet revenge on PMS, menopause & everyday cravings with this delicious Swiss chocolate, rose oil, herbs and soy.”

Sounds good to me.

Your first reaction to the Wonder Bar is probably something like, “Now, that is a great idea.” Among women, that might be the second and third reaction, too. But fellas, mull this one for a moment. Think about the concept of craving. Now consider a rather different concept: impunity.

Are you starting to see the terrible genius here?

You will after we call Adrienna Kramer, Ecco Bella’s general manager. Let’s get straight to the point, shall we?

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