Archive for the 'fat' Category

A Trinity of Fatness

scrappybadger February 4th, 2008

As usual, I’m being bombarded with fat-related news this week. I’ll quickly sum it up:

  1. A few days ago Piig read about that insane bill in Mississippi that would have restaurants refuse service to fat customers. I wish she hadn’t told me about it, but there has been enough press coverage (and subsequent yammering about the dum-duh-duuuuuh Obesity EPIDEMIC) that I would have heard about it no matter what. Have we seriously grown so afraid of fat that we would subject people to public weigh-ins or BMI calculations before letting them eat out? Oh wait, that’s what Weight Watchers did for us, it (and a host of other diet programs) normalized public shaming of fat people while glorifying the loss of even the smallest amount of weight. Lose a pound? Yay!!!! Congratulations on your hard work and dedication! Gain a pound or fail to lose any? Awwww. You’ve let us all down with your overindulgence and lack of willpower. Willpower builds character and proves that you deserve things — like the freedom to live in your own skin.
  2. If you are able to rip yourself away from the Abercrombie and Fitch scandal you might have heard that 5 women were killed in a Lane Bryant store this weekend. Call me cynical, but I can’t help but wonder if we’d be hearing more, if the story would have been more than a blip on my local news, if a bunch of Victoria’s Secret shoppers had been killed. Just the opportunity to flash pink thongs on the news probably would have made that story too good to pass up. I can see it now. Anderson Cooper would be interviewing witnesses in front of the Valentine’s Day crotchless panties and feathered negligees.
  3. The Fat Avenger, Oprah Winfrey, had yet another weight loss surgery show. Never one to rest on the success of previous episodes, she made this story exclusively about teenagers. Viewers just didn’t get enough of the adolescents on Oprah’s other weight loss surgery shows, so she put several former teenage fatties on all at once. They expounded on the wide and various health benefits of having their insides tied up or cut out, and one young girl returned to visit the clinic in Tijuana where she’d had her surgery at the age of 13. According to the girl and her mother, she just mysteriously started to put on huge, massive amounts of weight. Suddenly her body started to change and she couldn’t explain it. It’s called fucking puberty!That’s right, I watched it. I had to; I couldn’t stop myself. It was like some sick obsession. In the end all it did was infuriate me, of course. And if Oprah had overemphasized the words hundred or two or three (as in two hundred pounds or three hundredpounds) just a couple more times I would have barfed. I expected to see the self-hatred oozing out of my tv screen like the not so uncommon postoperative anal leakage.

And I’ll leave you with that pleasant thought.

Sometimes Weight Does Matter

scrappybadger February 1st, 2008

But not in the way that most people would have us believe.

As I drove to my morning classes today I heard a report on NPR that pointed the finger at high priced medical equipment as being the number one cause of rising health care costs. (I would like to include a link to the clip from Morning Edition, but I couldn’t find the story in the archives.)

You can’t turn around these days without hearing about the dum-duh-duuuuuh Obesity EPIDEMIC.* What’s worse, fat people are being blamed for skyrocketing health care costs while insurance companies and high priced specialists sit back counting their money. Nowhere in the typical fat-is-horrible-and-scary story are these or other issues mentioned. The NPR blurb just goes to show that, of course, the issue is never as simple as so many make it seem.

Oh, and those overweight medical machines obviously need to go on a diet.

* I swear, one of these days I will record an audio file to do that for me.

Oh, Queen Latifah, Not You Too

scrappybadger January 26th, 2008

Don’t do it; don’t buy into the idea that your body is still imperfect. Please, don’t hide the difficulty of being fat and the obvious pressure you feel to conform in euphemisms about “getting healthy.” Don’t pretend you are our friend, looking out for our “health,” when really you are peddling a diet program.

It was bad enough that they started covering your real beauty with make-up. It’s been hard to watch your demons manifest themselves in fluctuating weight as you try to make your body do and be something that it constantly feels the need to buck against. Now we have to watch you work for Jenny Craig.

Resist. Your fat is beautiful, and you know it. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

Don’t let them tell me otherwise.

Breathing While Fat

scrappybadger August 31st, 2007

Don’t do it. Seriously. If at this moment you are both fat and breathing then just stop it. If not for yourself then for the rest of us. You are fucking everything up, and we don’t have enough oxygen to power that body of yours.

Every day. That’s how often my right to exist is questioned. Some days, most days, I fight it; I recognize the fear that is behind that message. I know that fat is hated and that everyone is afraid of being associated with that hatred, so most of the time I meet it with the same kind of disdain I have for misogyny, racism, or homophobia. Meanwhile, I’m working overtime not to internalize it. It’s like radioactive slime in a comic book. You see it coming and you know if it gets on you that’s it, so you run and you fight back at it trying not to trip, hoping that it doesn’t have the ability to sling itself in your direction. All it takes is one drop and you are done for, so you struggle and you run. Every day feels like that to me, like I’m constantly running, trying not to let the fear and hatred spewing in my direction get on me and work its way into my head.

I have to fight it because I’ve given in before, and it wasn’t pretty. It didn’t make me thin to hate myself for being fat. It didn’t make me feel good about myself, didn’t get me lots of dates, didn’t change my life for the better, and it sure didn’t make me healthier. No, the realization that I was a horrible person for being fat didn’t do anything good for me. And no matter how many times I went to the gym, berating myself for needing to go in the first place, life never got better. No matter how many times I threw up — in the bathroom when my roommate was out or locked in my bedroom, head hung inside of a trash bag, when someone was home — I didn’t feel better about myself. One year in college I would take my Walkman, loaded with angry music, and walk to the post office 4 miles away to mail my bills. I was exercising, and I screamed self-hatred inside of my head to the music in my ears. Despite the mad walking, I don’t think I ever really lost any weight, or if I did it wasn’t enough to make me remember.

So I know I can’t give in. Been there, done that, and it sucked. What sucks just as much is knowing that this is what I have to look forward to — a constant struggle to assert my right to sit here/eat/be comfortable/be liked/find clothes/fill-in-the-neverending-blank. The latest reminder comes in the form of airline tickets. I’ve been dreading it ever since I got the notice that my paper proposal was accepted to a conference too many miles away to drive. To keep the anxiety at bay I have told myself that I can back out. I can make up an excuse, I can lie, I can just say I’m not coming. The thing is, I really want to go.

I’ve only really travelled once. I was 16 and was able to go on a school sponsored trip to France and Spain. It was only 9 days long, and I don’t remember much about it, but I did it. I went somewhere. Other than that I’ve been exactly one state away in each direction except to the north. I’ve been two states to the north. Two very small states. I live, right now, 45 minutes away from where I grew up; 20 minutes from the hospital where I was born; 30 minutes from my elementary and high schools. My parents live in the same county they’ve always lived. All of my grandparents except one grandmother live in the same area they’ve always lived. My family doesn’t move, and they don’t go anywhere. Ever. That’s fine really, but it isn’t what I want for myself. I want to experience new places. It is fun and exciting to go someplace new.

Most of the time it’s a money issue for Piig and me. We can’t afford to go anywhere. In fact, we can’t really afford this particular trip, but we decided to do it anyway. We’ve given ourselves permission to spend money in order to build the beginnings of my academic career, and we’re secretly giddy about the idea that we will also get to go somewhere.

We are taking a big financial leap. That and the idea of flying – in a plane, where I can’t touch the ground, where I can’t even see the ground, where I’m trapped inside with no way out – is scary enough. The added pressure of extra seats, seat belt extenders, and fat hating passengers and flight attendants is making me really nervous. Our decision as of right now is to go ahead and book two seats for me. I’m afraid that if we don’t one or more of the airlines we’re flying will require that I buy an extra seat the day of the flight, and not knowing the cost of day-of tickets is just out of the question. I can’t run the risk of some outrageously priced last minute seat. To make matters worse, the blatant hostility exhibited by most airlines when dealing with fat passengers is unbelievable. Piig sent me a copy of Continental’s extra seat policy. I especially like the way they require that you be able to buckle your seat belt with one extension but are unable to tell you the exact length of the extenders available on the plane you are booking. Additionally, “the carry-on allowance is not doubled” despite the fact that I will be paying for two tickets. This presents a big problem for me. Where oh where will I keep all of my snack cakes, chips, soda, and that large cheese pizza that I’d planned to bring if I can only have one bag? After all, no fat traveller can be on a plane for more than 30 minutes without a supersized snack, right?

I’m frustrated and worried about travelling. Maybe I’d feel better if I boarded the plane wearing this t-shirt.

Star Lite, Star Bright

scrappybadger July 31st, 2007

My first reaction when I saw the news stories this morning about Star Jones was, “No shit, Star.” I mean, really, who just drops half her body weight in such a relatively short period of time through diet and exercise? Drastic, sustained weight loss without surgery is extremely rare - more so than most people want to admit. So I wasn’t surprised, as I’m sure most people aren’t. After reading the AP story I found her full Glamour article online.

I’m not a fan. I tried to like her. I remember the first few times I saw her as a legal correspondent on TV. It was nice to see a fat woman looking back at me. She knew the law and she wasn’t demure like most of the other women on the news. On The View she usually talked about fat women in positive ways, but she also acquiesced to patriarchal norms. Her views about women were often dated and over the years she became increasingly conservative and spoke disparagingly of women, the poor, and racial minorities. She also seemed to settle into some kind of caricature of blackness, one that was largely created and supported by her white co-hosts. I didn’t enjoy watching her perform her blackness for a predominantly white cast, crew, and audience. I also didn’t enjoy her ever prevalent self-hatred. She didn’t have to verbalize “I hate my fat body” because nearly everything she did said it for her.

Remembering all of that, my initial reaction this morning was one of disgust. I didn’t want to hear her fat bashing anymore, and I certainly didn’t want to hear one more person heralding gastric bypass surgery. Nevertheless, like a rubbernecker at the scene of an accident, I followed a link to the article she wrote for the August issue of Glamour, and I’m glad I did because it humanized her for me. It reminded me, as she talked about her “out-of-control behavior,” that her struggle and the path she has taken to deal with it are constructed by a patriarchal system that demands ownership over women’s bodies. I remembered the Saturday Night Live skits, comments by the (male) late night talk show hosts, and the incessant buzz about Star Jones’s body. Anyone and everyone felt the right to talk about her body, and that hasn’t changed any since she’s lost the weight. We are still talking about her body; we are still claiming ownership over that which should be hers alone. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the comments to the AP story. Some people were overjoyed that she was, in their estimation, healthy now, others urged her to gain back the weight, and still others are still blaming her for her former fat body - a body that doesn’t even exist anymore.

It sickens me really. None of this is about Star Jones and her health. Commenters don’t really care whether she is happy or not. What people want, what society demands, is that she be pretty, that she be consumable by and, more importantly, acceptable to the male gaze. Her femaleness made her into a commodity, but her fatness negatively impacted that commodity’s value. She was doubly, triply ours in the collective sense. Our patriarchal society owned her femininity and her blackness and got to determine how much physical space she should, and ultimately will, take up in the world.

I wish she hadn’t had the surgery. I wish she had felt good in her own body and that it, and not society, had been able to dictate its rightful size. I wish those things for her, for others, and for myself. I wish, too, that my first reaction wasn’t anger with Star Jones but with the real roots of the problem - the isms. Sure, I took a step back and reminded myself that blaming her didn’t really make sense, but that first reaction, the one that immediately rose to the surface was the patriarchally programmed one, and that pisses me off.

Ultimately, Jones missed the opportunity to talk about some really important issues. She mentioned that she “wish[ed] someone had shouted: ‘Put that fork down and get active!’” when she was younger, but she never connected her body and the way she felt about it to the relative poverty in which she grew up. She never analyzed why her mother worked so hard to make large, good tasting meals even when they had very little money. She didn’t connect her loneliness to the way the world disappears fat people and how, the larger you are, the less likely you are to be seen. She didn’t wonder how her fatness and people’s reactions to it were connected to misogyny.

Maybe it isn’t fair for me to take her inventory, but it would have been nice, in an article that purports to be about her mental growth, to see a few of these things. Instead, it was a series of missed opportunities with her body laid out once again for public consumption and ridicule.