Archive for the 'misogyny' 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.

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.

2007: Shopping at Hardware Stores Still Requires a Dick

scrappybadger August 18th, 2007

A few of our tomato plants have outgrown their cages lately, so we decided to get some wooden stakes after work yesterday. We went to one of those big box hardware stores. I don’t think it is right to name names, so I won’t tell you which one it was, but it rhymes with Lowe’s. We avoid big chains when we can, but there isn’t a local hardware store near us. There are a few garden centers, but they didn’t have what we needed. Plus, we were still nursing a gift card from Christmas.

While we were there we decided to spend some money we didn’t have on something we really need. We looked at electric weedeaters. They are, after all, the only ones near our price range. Most of the ones they still had in stock had been opened, taken out of the box, and messed with. When I asked for a discount, after waiting forever for an answer, some guy came up and told me that they come off the truck that way. “You mean opened like this?” I asked. “Yep. It’s all there. Do you want me to show it to you?” I wanted to punch him in his gut. I know what a goddamned weedeater should look like. I just looked at Piig and told her we’d buy something else as I walked away.

I might not work at a hardware store and, thankfully, I don’t have a cock, but I know damn well that boxes don’t come from the factory already ripped open. They might be banged up, but they don’t seal the boxes and then tear open the tape and cardboard for the hell of it.

I decided we should get the cheap one, use it within the 30 day return policy and then take it back before it has time to break. I mean seriously, it isn’t as if a weedeater that cheap is going to work for long anyway, if at all. And if your morality meter just went off, if you think I’m a horrible person for hatching such a scheme or that I’m “part of what’s wrong with this world” then kindly dismiss yourself from this blog because there is no room for you here. Part of what is truly wrong with this world is that our landlords can jack up the rent and still expect us to be able to maintain an acceptable looking yard.

Later, I couldn’t find any cable ties, so I asked two (the first one told me the wrong aisle) guys where I’d find them. BOTH of them corrected me. First guy: ”You mean zip ties?” Second guy: “Zip strips?” When I finally found them, EVERY SINGLE BOX said CABLE TIES. The word zip wasn’t on ANY of them.

We harvested a disgustingly phallic cucumber the other day. Maybe I should shellac it, put a string through, tie it around my waist, and let it swing between my knees the next time I need something hardware related.

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.

You Scratch My Dick and I’ll Scratch Yours

scrappybadger May 8th, 2007

If I were a rhetorician, I’d have had a field day a couple of weekends ago. Piig works in the Art Department at the university where I teach. At the end of every year someone holds a party and invites her entire department, and almost every year we go. This year the location was an unfortunate one — a tiny backyard that was full of wildflowers and bushes. It’s a lovely yard, but not one conducive to a party with 20 or 30 people. The setup made it difficult to talk to everyone, but that didn’t matter much anyway since the hostess and the wife of one of the faculty members were the only ones to make any effort to talk to us. No one else really acknowledged our existence or even bothered to turn around, so Piig and I admired the flowers and talked to one another for the most part.

The elitist behavior of a bunch of too-cool-for-youers who don’t have time to talk to an administrator and her partner was annoying, but it couldn’t even compare to the one conversation we were somewhat involved in. We were near the entrance to the backyard, and in order to talk to a new arrival, one of the professors ended up in a brief exchange with us. It was mostly just chit chat, but after a minute and a half or so he completely shut us out. The four of us — Piig, myself, the new guy, and the asshole Art instructor — were all still standing in a circle as if we were talking like normal people but aAi suffered from sudden hearing loss. It was either that or Piig and I started talking in dog whistles or something. He refused to look at us or hear us, and before long the other guy took his cue. Then, to top that bullshit off, the other guy started making sexist jokes! It went something like this:

aAi: “blah, blah, I’m so cool, and this is why”

Piig: “dog whistle, dog whistle”

aAi: “We couldn’t host the party because my wife was studying for her comps, and the house is a wreck.”

sB: Thinking to self: yeah, and you couldn’t get off your lazy ass and clean it.

other guy: “What’s she studying?”

aAi: “Oh, I don’t know. She’s told me a million times, but I can never remember.”

Piig: “dog whistle, dog whistle”

sB: Thinking to self: You’re a dick, a big, major, lazy dick. Your wife should’ve been born a lesbian.

other guy: “Ha, ha, ha. Yeah, you just come home and say ‘What’s for dinner?’” Thinking to self: and then you do her!

sB: Thinking to self: Did I fucking hear that shit right? Am I in the goddamned Twilight Zone again? Can I punch them both in the nuts and get away without falling over all these plants?

Piig: “Dog whistle, dog whistle. Dog whistle, DOG WHISTLE!”

aAi: “Yeah! Hahaha!”

Piig to sB: “Let’s go.”

sB: “Seriously.”

Piig: Thinking to self: Sheesh, I’m glad she speaks Dog Whistle.

Assholes.

More Medicalizing of the Female Body

scrappybadger May 1st, 2007

If the incredibly bad acting and even worse writing doesn’t instantly jiggle the mute button under your forefinger when the newest Yaz commercials come on, then you will have the opportunity to witness the medical industry’s latest attempts to regulate women’s feelings about their bodies. Doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and medical researchers have a long history of bullying women. They have successfully convinced most people in the U.S. that babies can only be born safely in hospitals, that menstruation should occur at the same time in the same way for every woman, and that, in many cases, women neither understand nor correctly interpret physical reactions in their own bodies.

My favorite part of the Yaz commercial is when the robot-Doctor, adept at reciting prescription inserts, differentiates between PMS and PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder) by saying something along the lines of, “unlike PMS, PMDD can interfere with your everyday life.” Those few words say a lot. They say that only the medical profession can tell a woman when her pain or level of discomfort is enough to interfere with other things in her life. Only a doctor or a pharmacist or a lab-coated researcher can determine how severe is severe enough. Left to our own devices, women are incapable of quantifying our own pain. Well, thank goodness someone is there to do it for us. Luckily for us, there are a select few who can tell us when our pain, emotional or physical, is mild, severe, or simply not there at all. And even better, they’ve named those stages for us. So women, I urge you, run to your doctor. Get an official diagnosis because for crying out loud, you are in no way qualified to determine what you are feeling.