[Dumplin Spoilers]
Okay, I cannot concentrate on any of my work while DUMPLIN exists, so here we go. (I haven't read the book, so all I know about it is the previews, please don't give me ANY information at all, nothing, no thing, thank you.)
Showing posts with label deconstruction (fat). Show all posts
Showing posts with label deconstruction (fat). Show all posts
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Fat Acceptance: Dumplin |
Okay, I cannot concentrate on any of my work while DUMPLIN exists, so here we go. (I haven't read the book, so all I know about it is the previews, please don't give me ANY information at all, nothing, no thing, thank you.)
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Fat Acceptance: Let's Continue To Misuse Correlation and Causation In Order To Harm Fat People! |
[Ana's Note: Previously published at Shakesville, with love!
Content Note: Fat hatred, Fertility]
Here is a fun headline: "Being overweight may harm men's semen quality". Shockingly (read: not shockingly at all), the actual study under discussion tentatively found a correlation between (a) higher BMIs and lower ejaculate volume and (b) larger waists and lower sperm count. As best as I can tell from the article, no correlation whatsoever was mapped between high BMI and/or larger waists and an actual practical impact on fertility as measured by not being able to conceive when actually trying to conceive*:
About half of the men had already fathered children when the study took place and none of the couples were seeking help with infertility when they were recruited.So there might be some correlation between weight and semen production which might be statistically significant and which might affect male fertility in an as-yet unquantified way. Do you think this is prematurely being peddled as a FAT MEN ARE INFERTILE!!1! and LOSE WEIGHT TO SAVE YOUR SPERM!1!! by fat hating publications? Is water wet?
The researchers also did not follow up to see whether the men succeeded in having children later.
Because of course NBC headlined their article with a Scary Headless Fattie and the words "A man this heavy could be harming his sperm." He's harming his sperm by being fat, ya'll! But maybe he'll read this study and this will be the final straw to cause him to stop being fat for the sake of his sperm and then his sperm won't be harmed anymore!
NBC is accusing a random citizen on the street of causing harm to his own sperm count based on a cursory glance at his external appearance. That. Is. Bullshit.
#18: You can diagnose fat people's health issues by looking at them. No.
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* Without getting into a whole long thing on fertility, the bottom line is that fertility is not a binary On/Off switch in many (I would even hazard "most") cases. Having a low sperm count might make it more difficult to conceive a child, but many men with low sperm counts are able to father children without medical aid or intervention.
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Fat Acceptance: My Wife, the Dehumanized Hippo |
[Content Note: Fat Hatred, Mention of Cancer, Digestion Issues, Diet Talk, Cosmetic Surgery]
I joked on Twitter a week or so ago that I wanted to write an advice column that was "sex positive, basically Dan Savage, only not horrible and hateful". That idea has been kicking around in my head, and then Liss did a blogaround link to Cristy's awesome re-answer of this Dan Savage column, and you really should go read Cristy's re-answer first. Go on, I'll wait.
Then I'll quote the column after the cut, because it's pretty triggering and fat-hatred-y.
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Fat Acceptance: Plan Your Fat Hating Holiday Today! |
[Content Note: Fat Hatred]
So I got this email from Amazon Local this week:
It's a "deal" notice for four different 1-week stays at "The Biggest Loser Resort" in Malibu, Niagara, Utah, and Chicago. All four stays are available for approximately $1,800 dollars, and the advertisement claims that this is a 40% savings from the usual price. And just to make things very clear to everyone, two of the locations are further named Fitness Ridge (Malibu) and Fitness Way (Utah).
There are times, like when I was writing this post earlier in the year, when I wonder why The Biggest Loser even exists. Are there really that many people who want to watch the terrible, truly terrible*, treatment of fat people on this show? And the existence of these "resorts" seems to indicate that there are not only people willing to watch this show, but that there are people willing to pay extremely good money to go to a place where they hope to be treated similarly -- or, more chillingly to me, where they hope the fat spouse / relative / friend they've brought with them to the resort will be treated similarly.
This is what breaks my heart about fat hatred in our society: that spending huge sums of money in the hopes of escaping the widespread prejudice against fat people is a thing that exists, and is a thing that is popular. And I understand why it is popular. If I could write the universe a check for $1,800 to avoid fat-shaming for the rest of my life and to receive better, non-fat-shaming healthcare, I would consider that a good deal. That makes me so sad, when I weigh the prejudice I experience as a fat person against a dollar amount I would spend for a Get Out Of Prejudice Free card.
And it makes me sad that vultures like The Biggest Loser (and really, I feel, the bulk of the for-profit diet industry) are happy to peddle that impossible dream to people desperate for some peace and quiet and decent health care.
* I noted this in my previous Biggest Loser post, but for people who have joined us since then, the show has a harmful history of deeply unhealthy behavior, such as encouraging contestants to become dangerously dehydrated in order to lose weight.
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Fat Acceptance: Seven Scenes with Doctors |
[Content Note: Fat Hatred, Diet Talk, Doctor Indifference, Thoughts of Self-Harm]
[Much credit to Melissa McEwan for her excellent Seven Scenes, for a Reason and the format which inspired this post.]
Ana's Note: This spans a couple of years of events in my life, just to be clear.
Scene 1: Sitting my doctor's office, the doctor my parents had been bringing me to since childhood. I'm telling him that I don't feel well, that I'm frequently tired to the point where I can't do my job at work. I'm also nearly constantly cold, even in the warm Texas summer. I've been this way for months, and I think maybe there's something wrong with me. I've started having heart palpitations at night, and am wondering if I need an EKG.
He tells me that I need to lose weight and all this stuff will clear up. I tell him I'm already on a very restrictive diet. I show him my phone app, where I record all my food intake. Once I hit a set caloric intake per day, I don't eat any more for the day. But I don't fast, I assure him. I've gotten very good at stringing out my intake the way I'm supposed to. He doesn't notice that I started the diet a not-very-long time before my symptoms started. I don't notice it either. Diets don't make you sick, I think. Diets make you healthy. He doesn't notice that despite the fact that I'm doing everything right, everything I'm supposed to, I haven't lost more than two pounds in over six months. He doesn't tell me that those two pounds could (and probably are) normal weight fluctuations, even possibly dehydration in a particularly hot summer.
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Letters: From A Fat Star Wars Fan |
[Content Note: Fat Hatred; Link probably NSFW thanks to Gold Bikini]
Dear Universe,
I really believe -- with all my heart -- that you can make a catchy Star Wars parody song with Jabba the Hut without hauling out the fat jokes about diabetes and cholesterol.
Sincerely,
a Fat Star Wars fan with perfect cholesterol and no diabetes. (We're not actually that rare!)
[Original song here, with no fat jokes, even! Also NSFW, though.]
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Fat Acceptance: Touching on Costs |
[Content Note: Hospitals, Medical Practitioners, Fat Hatred]
Some of you may remember in early September when I was rushed to the emergency room with an unidentified illness that felt an awful lot like dying.
I've learned since then that our health insurance -- which is from a reputable insurance company and provided by an even more reputable engineering firm -- doesn't have a flat-rate on E.R. visits anymore; everything is charged to me on a percentage basis until I hit the ludicrously-high "catastrophe" point for the year, at which point the insurance graciously agrees to step in and cover everything because if my medical debt gets too crushing, then I might quit my job and inconvenience my employer.
Anyway. I have so far received separate bills from this one visit, totaling to over $1,000. That's one thousand dollars for a visit where, if you'll recall, the hospital did jack-shit and refused to diagnose me with the thing I was suffering from (and which was later cleared up immediately with antibiotics issued by a nurse practitioner). And the big reason why the hospital (and the follow-up specialist) refused to diagnose me with it, was because despite having a massive family history of X (with at least two cases in recent memory, one of which was suffered through by my mother), is that (a) I'm slightly younger than when X usually manifests and (b) unlike my mother, I'm visibly fat and therefore it's easier to blame all my medical conditions on Chronic Fat.
And since the specialist cost $400 to go to so that he could inform me that I am Fat, that means I've spent $1,500 this year alone on a preventable-and-treatable condition because far too many doctors can't look past the fact that I'm Fat in order to treat me properly. They literally tell me to come back when I don't weigh so much. I am denied affordable care because I am Fat and forced into unaffordable emergency care when a preventable-and-treatable condition flares up.
I kind of feel like we should have a national conversation about this, rather than harping on about how much fatties supposedly cost (Spoiler Alert: Not so much as you might think!). If, simply because I am fat, I am forced-by-fat-hating-doctors to use more expensive medical treatments than their thin patients, then the resulting driving up of the costs isn't because I'm fat, but because my doctors are prejudiced.
Maybe we could talk about how much fat prejudice is costing the country?
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Fat Acceptance: Michelle Obama's Guest Appearance on The Biggest Loser |
[Content Note: Fat Hatred]
So this landed in my inbox this week:
First Lady Michelle Obama is set to make her second appearance on NBC’s weight-loss reality show The Biggest Loser.The campaign (and possibly the guest appearance itself; I'm not clear on the nuances involved) is backed by Brita, a company which specializes in water filtration products which probably wouldn't be nearly so popular in the United States if our government were actually enforcing the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Act that it is theoretically supposed to enforce in order to protect its citizens.
Obama, who has spent much of her husband’s presidency promoting exercise and healthy eating, will be promoting her “Drink Up” campaign, which encourages Americans to drink more water, in an episode that will air in November.
[O]ne in ten Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals, [...] [T]he laws intended to protect our water supplies, the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, are not being enforced. In fact, researchers found, barely 3 percent of violations resulted in fines or other significant penalties by state officials responsible for enforcing the law.And it's especially delicious irony that the television show which Michelle Obama has chosen to appear on in order to promote her campaign of drinking more water is a television show where the contestants are encouraged to dangerously dehydrate themselves in order to lose weight long enough to stay on the show.
An example of this comes from contestant Kai Hibbard who lost 118 pounds on the show. She later blogged that she ate only asparagus, endured colonics and went through 6-hour stretches in a sauna to dehydrate herself enough to lose 19 pounds for the season finale.Everything about this seems perfect.
But my favorite part of having a representative of the government go on a show which encourages fat people to dehydrate themselves in order to conform to social prejudice and which encourages thin people to hate fat people, all in order to promote buying expensive water filters because our government has chosen not to do its job of protecting citizens in favor of corporate interests, is that this will be Michelle Obama's second appearance on The Biggest Loser. Because one endorsement of a show that tells its viewers to hate fat people if they refuse to engage in self-harming behaviors at the behest of social prejudice just wasn't enough.
And I sincerely hope that this appearance will be just as awesome as when Michelle Obama's Senior Policy Advisor For Healthy Food Initiatives Sam Kass appeared as a guest judge on Chopped so that he could criticize "lunch ladies" for their too-too-big portion sizes (because we don't want FAT CHILDREN, do we?) after the women had shared heart-breaking stories about needing to make Monday meals bigger because many-if-not-most of their students were too impoverished to eat outside of school and were starving over the weekends. It was really delightful seeing it so starkly portrayed that our national initiative right now is not about Feeding Hungry Children (Because It's The Right Thing To Do) and is instead about Depriving Fat Children (Because They're Ugly).
Which is why the choice of The Biggest Loser for Michelle Obama to appear on in order to promote her campaign is an even better choice than you might have previously thought, because they've semi-recently decided to add fat hatred of children into the mix by including fat kids as contestants! And the fact that fat children are likely to be bullied by their peers isn't a reason for Michelle Obama and other people who care about children to, say, de-stigmatize fatness! NO! It's a reason to bully fat children even more so that they'll finally get it through their fat heads that they need to stop being fat! It's just a shame that it's taking so long to get the message out.
*lolsob*
The thing that wounds me the deepest about all this is that I genuinely like Michelle Obama. I voted for her husband, and I think they seem like absolutely wonderful people. I'd love to attend a dinner party with them; I think we'd have a lot to talk about. I'm certain I would like them, and I like to think they'd find my company not intolerable.
Nor do I believe Michelle Obama hates fat people; I do believe she genuinely thinks she is helping fat people and advocating for fat children. I honestly, completely, 100% think that she's coming from a good place on this. I think her intentions are good.
But... the thing is, intentions don't magically prevent harm. There is a very real, very serious problem in trying to "help" a stigmatized group by "encouraging" (and in many cases, strongly pressuring) the people in that group to change in response to the stigma. Telling me that you want to help me avoid fat shaming by making me Not Fat Anymore is hugely problematic. It is, very literally, an eliminationist approach: an approach which seeks to erase fat hatred by erasing all the fat people.
I am fat. I deserve to not be hated for it, in much the same way that I deserve to not be hated for the color of my eyes, or the curl of my hair, or the tilt of my nose, or any of the other facets of my body. The answer to fat hatred as a social problem is to demand that those with prejudice change their prejudices; not to demand that the victims of prejudice just stop being fat. That doesn't work, and it wouldn't be a moral solution even if it did.
And, more to the point, a very great lot of fat people have explained this very patiently over and over again. The people running these "health initiative" campaigns have refused to listen. And that hurts me, too; the fact that the people claiming to want to help me care so little about me that they won't listen when I say that their "help" is causing me harm. It hurts a lot.
There is a petition here asking Michelle Obama to please not endorse The Biggest Loser with a second appearance. And this is me begging her to please listen to fat advocates and please stop advocating for the elimination of a very real part of myself.
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Fat Acceptance: Diagnosis FAT |
[Content Note: Fat Hatred, Medical Malpractice]
So I'm really glad that I spent $128 dollars to go to the gastroenterologist specialist today to speak to him about my daily problems with nausea and stomach upset for over a year, because he was able to take one look at me and diagnose that the problem is FAT!
WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED THAT?!? Well, I mean, I did, obviously, which is why I basically don't go to doctors anymore unless I feel like I'm dying. (And that worked out super-well!) And why I get discouraged when people encourage me to, hey, just go find some other gastroenterologist because if you spend $128 dollars often enough, eventually you're bound to find someone who won't stop at Diagnosis: Fat! And that's totally not an invisible tax on being fat in our society and it's totally not a horrible irony when people complain about fat folks dragging down the healthcare system with their fatty bad health.
Ahem.
Also by way of updates: That uneducated upstart nurse practitioner who gave me antibiotics because all symptoms pointed to X and copious family history pointed to X and the Magic 8 Ball said it was very likely X just probably diagnosed me wrong because the Hospital Diagnose-a-tron 5000 is never wrong and also I'm statistically too young to get X and that's totally how statistics work. So the fact that the antibiotics cleared everything up in a couple of hours was probably just a coincidence or a placebo effect. Because when you've been on medications all your life and in-and-out of hospitals for years, you totally expect New Medications to fix you instantly. Total Belief In The Power Of Medication To Fix Things Instantly is definitely a phrase that should be mentally applied whenever you see my name.
I think the gastroenterologist maybe could have ordered some tests to check to see if maybe my problems might be caused by something other than fat, but I guess that seemed hard because he didn't. He told me to lose weight, and then scheduled a follow-up visit for two months down the road to check on the whole not-being-fat thing. I'm sure that won't be a total waste of everyone's time and money! (The best part about that is that they didn't let me schedule it myself which I can weasel out of by saying "I have to go home to check my calendar, I'll call you" and then never calling. No, they handed me an appointment card saying when my visit is and now I have to work up a good lie for when I cancel that over the phone and don't reschedule.)
In conclusion: Everything about this week's foray into the American Medical Establishment has made me almost as miserable as my initial condition.
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Fat Acceptance: In Totally Not Surprising News |
[Content Note: Fat Hatred, Reproductive Health, Economic Disparity]
In a move that comes completely as a surprise to everyone who hasn't been paying attention to the national discourse about employment, healthcare, and Evul Fatties!!1!, employer Pennsylvania State University is imposing a $100 monthly surcharge on employees who don't meet new health [sic] requirements:
...instead of offering “carrots” to its employees for seeking preventive care, Pennsylvania State University starting this fall is opting for the “stick,” imposing a $100 monthly surcharge on those who don’t meet new health requirements.
[...] By November, faculty and their spouses or domestic partners covered by university health care must complete an online wellness profile and physical exam. They’re also required to complete a more invasive biometric screening, including a “full lipid profile” and glucose, body mass index and waist circumference measurements.
Hey, that sounds awesome and not horrifyingly invasive in an Orwellian corporate dystopia sense! I am only sorry that Penn State didn't opt for the full Republican healthcare package of mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasounds once a month to see if their "pre-pregnant" employees really are pregnant! I am sure that is a healthcare package that ALEC lobbyists are pitching right now somewhere and I cannot wait for that day!
I'm sure that will be stage 2, after we take care of surcharging all the fatties in an economic punishment model that will certainly not leave them with less money to allot to their monthly healthcare which might have the unfortunate side-effect of reinforcing the false impression that fat people simply are unhealthier than thin people by virtue of their fat as opposed to by virtue of the constant social and economic pressures levied on them by others! Because fairy dust, or something!
Meanwhile, Mark Pauly, professor of smarty-ness, is baffled by this move by Penn State:
Mark Pauly, a professor of health care management and business economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said he’d heard of a few other employers using the “stick” approach, but not for so “daunting” a menu of exams.
“The evidence does not really support the idea that this forced wellness helps, but employers these days are afraid to try anything else,” he said in an e-mail. “It is a mystery to me why Penn State would start irritating their workers.”
Why, it's almost like employers are confident that there are more workers than there are jobs in this economy and that they can therefore pass the cost of healthcare to their employees with impunity, because what are the noisy cattle going to do about it, huh? And perhaps they've also realized that a divide-and-conquer strategy that plays into the prejudices of the privileged in order to marginalize the oppressed tends to go over a little better with the populace! You know what they say: a spoonful of privilege helps the corporate dystopia go down!
Moving on to another Privileged Man Who Says Things, professor Jonathan Levin inadvertently admits that these healthcare "incentive" programs are all functionally identical across the board and that the only real difference between voluntary "carrots" and mandatory "sticks" is wishful thinking crossed with magical unicorn farts:
Although not immediately clear, Levin suggested that Penn State’s plan could still fall into the first category if “framed” differently.
“The upshot of incentive programs is that people end up with different financial rewards,” he said. “If you think of the people who get less as the baseline, those who get more are getting a ‘bonus.’ If you think of the people who get more as the baseline, those who get less are getting a ‘penalty.’ ”
Ha ha, which is totally not news to the fat people who have been economically disadvantaged by these programs and the fat hatred that they breed and reinforce in our coworkers since day one. Which is why the Penn State decision is actually not shocking at all to most fat people, most allies of fat people, and the corporate overlords hell-bent on oppressing fat people! This news is only a surprise to privileged people who choose not to deal with this shit on a daily basis! Yay!
(Hat tip to Shaker Kathy_A.)
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Fat Acceptance: Drawing Anime |
[Content Note: Fat Hatred]
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Fat Acceptance: Regency Romance |
[Content Note: Fat Hatred, Disordered Eating]
[Cross-posted from a comment on Shakesville.]
The other day on Twitter, I asked for a Regency romance with a fat model on the cover -- not just a fat character, but a corresponding fat cover model. Not one person could find me one, even though we really did look.
And the thought occurred that this is a major reason why I never got into romance novels, because I felt like the covers were a hurdle to clear, in the same way that you have to meet physical requirements at the fair to ride the rides. "You must be this thin to experience True Love."
I will note that there is Big Beautiful Women erotica, and that is a good thing, but romance novels are harder to find, and "historical" romance novels are even harder. And it frustrates me that every cover and every internal illustration of, for example, every Jane Austen re-published book has the women all stick-thin forever *unless* the character is comedic and borderline unlikable like Charlotte Palmer*.
These are public domain books! There are versions that have ZOMBIES in them. But ones with fat cover models and fat illustrations, with no need to change but maybe a couple of lines of text, tops? NOWHERE TO BE FOUND.
Fucking frustrating, is what it is.
Is there a Regency romance novel where consent is treated as paramount and the lady model on the front is appreciably fat? #wondering
— Ana Mardoll (@anamardoll) May 25, 2013
(TW) I imagine I could get into romance movies/books more if the cover models didn't trigger my memories of E.D. like whoa.
— Ana Mardoll (@anamardoll) May 25, 2013
"You must be this slender to ride the True Love ride." ~ every Romance novel cover ever, apparently.
— Ana Mardoll (@anamardoll) May 25, 2013
You must also be white, cis, and straight if you want to have a fighting chance in a Regency setting. Because historical accuracy!
— Ana Mardoll (@anamardoll) May 25, 2013
(Even though historical accuracy will be treated to every sex technique known to mankind, and only result in babies when the plot demands.)
— Ana Mardoll (@anamardoll) May 25, 2013
As if everything ELSE in most "historical" novels were deeply and thoroughly accurate. #ConvenientPrejudice @colorlessblue
— Ana Mardoll (@anamardoll) May 25, 2013
* Tru Fax: Husband and I are totally Mr. and Mrs. Palmer. I showed him the 1995 version with Hugh Laurie as Mr. Palmer and he completely agreed.
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Fat Acceptance: Publishers and Fat Hatred |
[Content Note: Fat Hatred, Disordered Eating, WWII Imagery]
I'm signed up for email notifications, courtesy of Barnes & Noble, of new books coming out as eBooks that I might be interested in. And because I've bought books like Paul Campos' "The Obesity Myth", I'm now 'helpfully' flagged as interested in anything involving obesity in the title or publisher-provided synopsis. But now I'm getting ahead of myself. (More under the cut.)
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Fat Acceptance: Compliments and Accusations |
[Content Note: Fat Bias, Disability, Disordered Eating]
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| Small Cookies by Petr Kratochvil |
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Fat Acceptance: Launder That Fat Away, Ladies! |
[Content Note: Fat Hatred, Racism, Classism]
[Repost Note: This is a repost of an article that previously appeared on Shakesville.]
So, there is a study going around the internet which makes the totally-fresh and completely-new claim that American women are fat because we spend all day working at desk jobs and all night watching television to unwind, as opposed to fifty years ago when life was just like Leave It To Beaver and women never worked outside the home and spent all day wrestling with forty-pound vacuum cleaners:
One reason so many American women are overweight may be that we are vacuuming and doing laundry less often, according to a new study that, while scrupulously even-handed, is likely to stir controversy and emotions.
..."Fifty years ago, a majority of women did not work outside of the home," said Edward Archer, a research fellow with the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, and lead author of the new study.
So, in collaboration with many of the authors of the earlier study of occupational physical activity, Dr. Archer set out to find data about how women had once spent their hours at home and whether and how their patterns of movement had changed over the years.
Right off the bat, I'm just going to set aside the whole problematic aspect of using the words "a majority of women" when what was actually meant is "a portion of the population, composed predominantly of upper-class, wealthy, married, white women" when discussing what kind of work women did or didn't do in the 1960s. I'm just going to put a little pin labeled "racist and classist assumptions" and set that to the side over there.
I'm additionally going to set aside the ridiculously terrible science of measuring one tiny aspect of the differences in the lives of American Women Of The 1960s versus American Women Of The 2010s -- specifically, how much time they report doing housework -- and using that one tiny aspect to try to explain a supposed trend of weight gain as though a correlation between the two implies any sort of causation and as though there cannot possibly be any other difference between these two groups of people, and as though controlling for those differences (which totes don't exist anyway!) is so much optional nonsense. And additionally as though self-reporting surveys are the epitome of accurate scientific measurement. I'm just going to stick a little pin labeled "horrifically soft science" in that bundle of awful and set it off to the side with the other.
And I'm also going to set aside the laughable choice of meticulously measuring how much time a selection of women spent on "housework" while deliberately choosing to ignore time spent doing childcare activities, as though the work done by women homemakers consists entirely of "cleaning, cooking, and doing laundry" and nothing else and as though the time that modern women save as a result of technological advances in laundry methods isn't and couldn't possibly be reinvested into other types of active housework beyond "cleaning, cooking, and doing laundry". That one is getting a little pin called "mendacious bullshit" and set off to the side with its cousins.
So, okay? I'm just going to put all that to the side for just a moment.
Because I want to share this anecdote from Barbara Ehrenreich (who I want to acknowledge is totally problematic in places, although that's not on-topic for this thread), who actually worked as a professional housekeeper as part of her research for her book Nickel and Dimed, and who specifically noted how painful and physically damaging housework can be:
So ours is a world of pain—managed by Excedrin and Advil, compensated for with cigarettes and, in one or two cases and then only on weekends, with booze. Do the owners have any idea of the misery that goes into rendering their homes motel-perfect? Would they be bothered if they did know, or would they take a sadistic pride in what they have purchased—boasting to dinner guests, for example, that their floors are cleaned only with the purest of fresh human tears? In one of my few exchanges with an owner, a pert muscular woman whose desk reveals that she works part-time as a personal trainer, I am vacuuming and she notices the sweat. “That’s a real workout, isn’t it?” she observes, not unkindly, and actually offers me a glass of water, the only such offer I ever encounter. Flouting the rule against the ingestion of anything while inside a house, I take it, leaving an inch undrunk to avoid the awkwardness of a possible refill offer. “I tell all my clients,” the trainer informs me, “‘If you want to be fit, just fire your cleaning lady and do it yourself.’” “Ho ho,” is all I say, since we’re not just chatting in the gym together and I can’t explain that this form of exercise is totally asymmetrical, brutally repetitive, and as likely to destroy the musculoskeletal structure as to strengthen it.
And I want to take a moment to note how truly contemptible I find the suggestion that activities which can destroy womens' bodies and which have been traditionally used by a misogynist society as a tool to oppress women and prevent them from gaining financial independence, social support networks, and meaningful work -- You can't hold a job, honey, because then how would the house get clean? -- should be held up to the reader as something that women have a responsibility to do in order to become more attractive and more healthy and above all more socially acceptable to the larger community.
That is some contemptible garbage.
(Hat tip to Shakesville Shaker Danielle.)
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Fat Acceptance: Fat Shaming and Playstation Portables |
[Content Note: Surgery, Fat Shaming, Medical Malpractice]
Some of you may remember that I had a spinal fusion surgery last May. Today was my six-month followup for x-rays and discussion with my surgical doctor.
I'm in pain constantly. It's actually gotten worse since my surgery, and I deeply regret getting it at all, at least in part because Things Be Worse, but also because now that the surgery is over and done I no longer have any real hope of ever getting any better. I knew, going into the surgery, that if things didn't get better like I hoped then I would be emotionally crushed, and ... here we are. Sigh.
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Fat Acceptance: Today In Fat Hatred |
[Content Note: Fat Hatred]
Hat-tip from NAAFA: The APA Monitor, the official magazine of the American Psychology Association, has a cover story on childhood obesity which they have decided to illustrate with two pictures (one the front cover for the issue) of fat children looking ashamed and guilty and sad for being the obvious blight on humanity that they clearly are because, you know, icky fat:
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Fat Acceptance: White, Thin, Hairless, Naked |
[Content Note: Body Modification, Fat Phobia, Hair Removal, Beauty Expectations]
I use Groupon and, for the most part, I like the service. I've had a chance to eat at restaurants I otherwise couldn't afford, I've been able to go to IMAX shows that I otherwise might not have seen, and I recently got a National Geographic Blu-ray movie for free which is obviously a major score. What I'm saying is, the service has added value to my life.
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Fat: Attractive Women |
[Content Note: Fat Hatred, Ableism]
This drawing guide for comic characters made me sad.
With male characters, you can mold their bodies into many different shapes, producing a range of cool characters. It's not so easy with women. Women in comics are, by and large, attractive, even the villainesses - especially the villainesses! [...] You can't draw women brutish, or you lose the attractiveness.
Sometimes I forget that I live in a happy feminist blog bubble. Sometimes I leave my blog bubble, go out into the big wide world, look around me with my wide naive eyes, and then scuttle back into my bubble to safely play in my safe-space sandboxes.
Bring on the brutish women. Bring on the women with disabled bodies. Bring on women who are fat, who are asymmetrical, whose breasts are too big or too small but never "just right" (however the industry defines that). They may not be mainstream-sexy, but I think their bodies are wonderful.
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Fat Acceptance: Callous Helpfulness |
[Content Note: Medical Issues, Surgery, Fat Hatred, Dieting]
Ana's Note: This is a Fat Acceptance 202 post, not a 101 post. If you need a 101 course on Fat Acceptance, please refer to Kate Harding's excellent archive; there are about 10 linked posts in that archive and they are all awesome and admirably cover most FA 101.
Please also note that this post is going up the week I'm in hospital. That means moderation will be done on a smartphone whilst I am under heavy medication. Comments which are not FA-friendly will be removed without notice, warning, or apology.