Fat – Page 5 – Feministe

End Fat Talk

via Kate comes this great website combating “fat talk” — the constant little comments that women make to other women about themselves.

I hate “fat talk.” It makes me uncomfortable when other women do it. I never quite know what to say — I don’t want to issue the knee-jerk response of “You’re not fat!” because that kind of implies that being fat is The Worst Thing Ever. I also don’t want to ignore the comment, because then the commenting friend walks away thinking that I think she’s fat, and for her, that is a Very Bad Thing.

And yet I’m the absolute worst when it comes to fat talk. Like many women I have a whole slew of body issues; my weight is always on my mind, and I feel like I’m in a constant battle with my body. I’ve started to make my peace with how I look, and I’ve started to accept the fact that I love physical activity and exercise, I love to eat (and I like to eat food that feels nourishing, clean and healthy), but my body is just a certain build and shape and I’m never going to be 5’10” and 110 pounds. I can turn things I love — physical activity and food — into things I resent in order to be thinner, but it’s not worth it. I’ve done it, and it makes me unhappy. Deciding “I would rather be happy” sounds simple, but it’s psychologically challenging when for so long I associated happiness with thinness — as in, “I’ll be happy when I’m 20 pounds thinner.” I’m learning how to allow myself to be happy and not thin. It’s a process, though, and as I go through it I still find myself complaining to my friends about the way I look. I also have a group of friends who are mostly very thin — significantly thinner than I am. It can be very difficult to always feel like the “fattest” in the group. And when I spend time with women who are larger than I am, I also find myself feeling envious — of their curves or of the way clothes fit them or of their confidence or of whatever else they have that I don’t. I feel like I never measure up.

Part of the reason why Fat Talk is so harmful is that it’s a constant reminder that women have an obligation to look good, always. It’s our burden as women to present an attractive face to the world — to be ornamental and to decorate. It’s also about fat-hate and fat-shaming, but even for the not-fat among us, it’s that little whisper of you aren’t doing your job.

What’s especially difficult, I think, is balancing the need for honest conversation and support with the obligation to not do harm to other women. I want to be able to talk, even in feminist spaces, about body issues, but I also don’t want to engage in Fat Talk or trigger women who have have histories of eating disorders. Even more importantly (at least for me), I want to be able to have honest discussions with my closest friends — not in a vent-y “Blah I feel fat today” way, but in the intimate way we discuss everything else in our lives.

All of that said, though, it’s good practice to nix the Fat Talk. So that’s what I’m going to do this week. No Fat Talk starting now. Only positive body talk.

It’ll be a good exercise. Who’s with me?

Is This Fat-Hate?

Reading this New York Times round-up, it sounds like the Corzine campaign in New Jersey is targeting Republican candidate Christopher Christie for his weight. But after watching the video, I’m not sure. Check it out:

Yes, the video uses the phrase “throwing his weight around,” and it shows Mr. Christie getting out of a car where you can see the fact that he’s fat. But the ad is criticizing Christie for bad behavior on the road — evading tickets and whatnot. The entire video leading up to the footage of Mr. Christie features different shots of automobiles. It makes sense, in context, to show him getting out of a car.

If the Corzine campaign is trying to use Christie’s weight against him, that’s obviously abhorrent. After watching the ad, I’m just not convinced that’s what’s going on here.

Effed Up Post of the Day

Wow, Susanna Breslin, this is a new low: Would You Marry A Man Who Is Morbidly Obese?

At the very least, Breslin’s post is a good reminder that just because something crosses your mind doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to publicly opine on it.

“Obesity,” health, and the pro-food movement

In my first post this week, I talked about how I became interested in the consequences of our industrialized food system, both macro and micro, and what I’ve done in my own life. Now I want to talk about what’s coming to be called the pro-food movement, and one thing about it that has been driving me a little batshit crazy of late. (NB: I am not saying that the topic of this post this is the only flaw in the pro-food concept and prevalent analysis; it’s just the one this post is about.)

Disabled Character: Able-Bodied (Emaciated) Actresses Only, Please

Laurie and Debbie say:
Cross Blogged on Body Impolitic

We had our attention brought to this casting call for Stargate: Universe, a Stargate franchise TV show due to debut in October of this year as a movie, and then a regular TV show on the Syfy channel.

[ELEANOR PERRY] (35-40) and quite attractive. A brilliant scientist who happens to be a quadriplegic. Affected since childhood, her disability has rendered her body physically useless. However, after being brought on board the Destiny as the only person who may be able to save the ship and her crew from certain annihilation, she is given temporary powers that enable her to walk again and to finally experience intimacy.sptv050769..Strong guest lead. NAMES PREFERRED. ACTRESS MUST BE PHYSICALLY THIN. (THINK CALISTA FLOCKHART).

How do we hate this? Let us count the ways:

1) Do you have any idea how much most disabled people hate the oh-so-familiar story where a disabled character (always in a wheelchair) gets to *drum roll* WALK AGAIN? To take that one apart a little bit, at least two things are wrong with this story.

It plays into the endlessly repeated cultural conviction that walking and being vertical are somehow essentially more fully human than sitting. This is why disabled children are often kept in painful and awkward braces much longer than they should be, and why it’s been necessary to create wheelchairs that bring people up to “eye level,” (whose eye level was that?). It’s so hard to be taken seriously if you’re not vertical.

It also plays into the able-bodied person’s myth that the only interesting story about disability is the one in which it is cured or magically redeemed in some way. This is a thing of our time and place–150 years ago, the only story about disability was about romantic wasting away. Our culture desperately tries to believe that if you take care of yourself, you will live a really long time and never get sick. Seeing disabled people makes us afraid that we might not live fit and forever. Wheelchairs and the people in them become the bogeyman, the goblin who will be you if you don’t watch your health. To fight the cultural fears, we build myths about people who “walk again.”

The “finally experience intimacy” line from the casting call is the clincher for this myth. Apparently, whoever wrote this believes that disabled people can’t “experience intimacy,” which wouldn’t be true even if the phrase was about love, friendship, deep connection, or true confessions. We all know that those three words aren’t about any of those things: they’re about sex. Of course, disabled people can’t/don’t have sex. Because we’re so afraid of what it’s like to be them, we don’t look at or imagine their bodies. When we have to talk to them, we look relentlessly above the neck, which is one reason we’re more comfortable when they’re at eye level.

News flash! People in wheelchairs have sex. People on respirators have sex. Sometimes they have great sex. And what’s more, they can have sex without being fetishized for their disability.

2) If you’re a disabled actor, the “walk again” story has an even nastier angle. It means that the studios “have to” cast able-bodied actors and actresses to play disabled people. They can’t be expected to cast someone who is quadriplegic, or has spina bifida, if the role requires that the character eventually get up and walk. This saves the director and the actors having to deal with all those scary, messy real disabled people. It saves the writers from having to learn anything about real disability. It is yet another factor in keeping disabled people unemployed. (In the last fifteen years or so, the disability activist community has done a great deal of work to get disabled actors into disabled roles, and we’ve seen somewhat fewer “God saved him! He can walk!” plots as a result. It’s not enough. Google Images has only five images for “disabled actresses.”)

3) Wonder why she has to be so thin? Callista Flockhart thin? We can tell you. It’s because if she has any weight on her at all, viewers can say her disability is her fault. People believe that unhealthy behavior, weight, and disability are inextricably linked. People look at a fat person in a wheelchair and think, “That person must not have taken care of herself.” But a thin person in a wheelchair is exempt from blame. She’s a victim, not a bum.

Here’s the casting call we’d like to see:

[ELEANOR PERRY] (35-40) and quite sexy. A brilliant quadriplegic scientist, who has used a wheelchair since childhood. She needs help with basic cleanliness and dressing tasks. Her scientific ability makes her the only person who may be able to save the ship and her crew from certain annihilation. She’s an excellent flirt, and will have an affair with at least one crew member during her tenure on the show. sptv050769..Strong guest lead. NAMES PREFERRED. ACTRESS MUST BE A WHEELCHAIR USER.

Thanks to Lynn Kendall for the pointer.

Will the Real Kelly Clarkson Please Stand Up?

Laurie and Debbie say:
Cross Blogged on Body Impolitic

Self Magazine isn’t ashamed that they clipped pieces off of Kelly Clarkson’s body for their current cover. They’re proud of it. Lucy Danziger, editor-in-chief at Self, did a whole blog on the Self site about the decision to photoshop Clarkson’s figure.

Here’s a picture of Clarkson as she’s been looking recently, without photo manipulation. Note how her clothing choices reflect comfort in her body.

kelly_clarkson1

Danziger explains their decision:

Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her personal best. Did we publish an act of fiction? No. Not unless you think all photos are that. But in the sense that Kelly is the picture of confidence, and she truly is, then I think this photo is the truest we have ever put out there on the newsstand. I love her spirit and her music and her personality that comes through in our interview in SELF. She is happy in her own skin, and she is confident in her music, her writing, her singing, her performing. That is what we all relate to. Whether she is up or down in pounds is irrelevant (and to set the record straight, she works out and does boot-camp-style training, so she is as fit as anyone else we have featured in SELF). Kelly says she doesn’t care what people think of her weight. So we say: That is the role model for the rest of us.

This is absolutely classic. Clarkson is confident and doesn’t care what people think. We just wanted to make her look her best. So we trimmed off some pounds Clarkson is fine with showing. By doing that, we once again perpetuated a lie about how women really look. This adds to the burden that every woman who looks at this cover carries.

“No matter how much I diet, I never look like the women in the magazines.”
“My boyfriend says I’m too fat. We were in the supermarket the other day, and he was pointing out women on magazine covers whose hips and waist are slimmer than mine.”
“I give up; I’ll just stop eating and maybe then I’ll look like Kelly Clarkson.”

But Danziger isn’t done. She waxes elegant about some casual shots of Clarkson with her sister (but doesn’t reproduce them in her blog). She says:

Frankly, those are my favorite pictures, the ones that are snappy happy. My husband has given me an appreciation for the beauty of a snapshot. But that isn’t a cover. A cover’s job is to sell the magazine, and we do that, every month, thanks to our readers. So thank you.

Your job: Think about your photographs and what you want them to convey. And go ahead and be confident in every shot, in every moment. Because the truest beauty is the kind that comes from within.

By the way, she also tries to claim that photoshopping off that weight is no different than make-up, or hairstyling. Here’s what’s different: if you’re there on the shoot, you would see the make-up and hairstyle as they were finished, but you’d also see Clarkson’s actual body.

We agree with Margaret at Jezebel:

Danziger is is right: Kelly Clarkson is a “great role model for women of all sizes.” When the press goes after celebrities for gaining weight many apologize to the public, like Oprah Winfrey or Kirstie Alley, or frantically exercise and appear on the cover of Us flaunting their slimmed down selves like Jennifer Love Hewitt. So far Clarkson has only declared that she’s OK with her body and backed her statements up by performing in clothing that exposes her figure, rather than hiding under billowy outfits.

So here’s our advice to Susan Danziger and Self:

“A cover’s job is to sell the magazine, which can be done without lying to your readers.”

“Your job: Think about your photographs and what you want them to convey. And go ahead and believe Kelly Clarkson when she says she’s not tweaked about her weight. Because the truest beauty is the kind that you’re not ashamed to show on your magazine cover.”

Body Impolitic Greets Feministe!

Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin say:

We are delighted to be invited to guest blog here at Feministe.

We can usually be found (along with a couple of regular guest bloggers) at Body Impolitic, where we blog about body image (interpreted as widely as possible), photography, art, and occasional other topics.

We got into working together more than 20 years ago, when we started work on Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes, which was published in 1994.

Cover of <I>Women En Large</i>

Ten years later, we published Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes.

Cover of <I>Familiar Men</i>

Our most recent project, not yet in book form, is Women of Japan, a series of clothed portraits of women who live in Japan, which was done in collaboration with Japanese feminists.

Lifelong Friendship

Laurie is the photographer, and Debbie writes, edits, and manages the text portions of the projects.

Twenty-plus years of body image work is long enough to give us a lot of perspective on what changes, and what remains the same. Both of us were active feminists before we started doing specific work around body image; so we knew we were in for lifelong (generations long) battles. It’s been fascinating to watch what has gotten better. For example:

a much larger community of people are talking about and working on body image issues,

good information and health statistics are more available to everyone,

attractive clothing is sold for women of different sizes, and

social awareness and acceptance of transgender issues has grown remarkably.

We’ve also watched what has gotten worse, including:

the media definition of “beauty” is a lot narrower now than it was in 1989,

the sexualization of young girls is rampant,

medical procedures like Botox and labiaplasty have become normalized, and

men’s looks have become almost as commercialized and commoditized as women’s.

As we do in the photographic work, at Body Impolitic, we try to look at the immense number of factors that affect how individuals feel about our bodies, about living in our bodies, and about the vast pressures on all of us to hate ourselves and our bodies. While “body image” is a term that people frequently associate with weight (and we do blog about size acceptance and health-at-every-size issues), we also cover racial issues, cultural expectations of masculinity, parenting practices, ability/disability, and much, much more.

We believe that knowing and appreciating the power and beauty of everyone’s bodies, exactly as they are, is a cornerstone not only of feminism, but of living well in the world.

And we’re looking forward to being a more active part of the conversation here.

Another magazine another photoshopped woman

Seriously, why do magazines think that we won’t notice? Or are they truly going with the “a photo is just the beginning of our art project” theory? Becuase if photos are just an art project for them, then just fucking say it.

This time around Kelly Clarkson is the winner of the photoshop diet.

self-GMA-clarkson

We’ve seen this done to plenty of other women in Hollywood, including my favorite America Ferrera. Kelly Clarkson’s weight has been an issue since her “American Idol” days and she seems to have weathered all the talk very well and with all the confidence most of us wish we had when it came to our bodies. That must be why “Self” wanted to feature her in their magazine. But why then would they photoshop her multiple sizes down? Even looking at the ‘behind-the-scenes’ video you can see that Kelly’s arms are larger in real life. “Self” comments that, “Our picture shows her confidence and beauty,” which reveals to me that they admit that they photoshopped the hell out of her, but hey she still oozes confidence!

Instead of pining over what corporate America wants us to look like, even when we love our bodies, I want to mention a new blog that I learned about at Blogher 2009: we are the REAL deal. It’s a body image blog whose core bloggers include the amazing Claire Mysko, Kate Harding, and Roni of RoniWeigh. It looks like a great site to gather to discuss how we came to hate our bodies, what some of us are doing to love ourselves, how we can get to be healthy and all that body loving stuff.

I’m being taken over by the fear

“I’ll take my clothes off and it will be shameless/ cos everyone knows that’s how you become famous.”

Taking a side step away from specifically trans posts (cos y’all tiring me out already, and I have another week to go here), I want to talk about fear. Recently Mark K-Punk had this to say about Lily Allen’s “The Fear.”

“All Allen can do is point to her own inertia and complicity but awareness can only reinforce the very condition she is talking about [. . .] The verses are unsure whether they want to be satire or not, unsure whether they want to mock consumer-nihilism or celebrate it , unsure because – after all – what’s the alternative, where can all this mocked from? [. . .] Celebrity culture and its critique are coterminous; the jeremiads about its superficiality as cliched and empty as the culture itself, both appearing on the same pages of LondonLite. Only the negative capability of the choruses, only the admission of The Fear, breaks out of this circuit.”

What gets left out of this perceptive critique is precisely how sexed this is, how fear is produced as an affect on/in/through female bodies. What lies behind so much of our self-policing is fear.