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The Victoria University staff club is strange in many ways. It is tucked away in the library, undergrads aren’t supposed to go there, and know very little about it. But, despite the secrecy, it is very unexciting - except the alcohol is quite cheap, and sometimes the food is nicer and less over-priced than the rest of the university.
The staff club also has a mission, and that mission is to tell the people who eat there how to eat. As you go down the corridor every side is telling you to eat Blueberries! Low fat! Omega-3 Oil! and so on. Then they usually have little plastic triangle display things on every table - the sort that some restaurants put wine or specials on, but the staff club puts advice on how not to eat too much. Including one that said: “Eat like an Eskimo” followed by lots of praise of fish. Where do you even start?
1. Eskimo? For reals? After that shall we play Cowboys and Indians with any natives we can find on campus?
2. Advice about food is so fucking ridiculous. Why on earth should we eat like we lived somewhere where almost nothing grows? The fact that human beings have been able to subsist on large parts of the planet shows how resilient we are, and what a wide range of foods (as a species) we can survive on. The fact that historically people living in some areas have eaten predominantly fish, while people living in other areas have had very limited access to fish, is a reason to shut up about the one true way of eating.
3. These are workers at the university and post-graduate students. Are we somehow expected not to be able to feed ourselves? Are we in imminent danger of death from a blueberry deficiency? Is there a special section on the health deprivation index about how badly off staff and post-graduate students at the university are?
The Fat Nutritionist has a great post about how the vast majority people on weight-watchers are based on their socio-economic-gender-ethnicity profile are already going to live FOR-EVER. The same is true for the majority of people who work at university or those with post-graduate degrees.*
I’m not suggesting that this information would be anymore productive in, say, a meatworks tea-room. But given that you can’t get more urban-liberal-middle-class than the staff club at a university, and the behaviours that are described as ‘healthy eating’ are the behaviours of urban-liberal-middle-class women more than any other socio-economic group. What is the purpose of bombarding those most likely to be already aware, and following, the behaviours that have been designated ‘healthy’ with?
I would suggest that the purpose is self-satisfaction - the purpose is rewarding the virtuousness, as much as it’s about compelling compliance in those who eat there (they are after all only posters - the staff club doesn’t even sell that much fish). I want to explore this some more, and look at the impact that a moral model of food has on those who do not follow it. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that eating-places are most likely to push these messages among those who are presumed to be already following htem.
* And this in itself is telling. As PhD Comics can tell us post-grad students subsist on instant noodles and free food that can be scavenged around campus. While this stereotype isn’t entirely true, it does have a basis in reality, as post-grad students are lacking in both money and time - which makes acquiring nutritious food you want to eat tricky. And yet, post-grad students generally survive the experience, and go on to live to ages that befit their socio-economic position.
Historiann makes the most interesting comment I’ve seen on Michelle Obama’s dreadful anti-fat “Let’s Move” campaign, pointing out parallels to 18th century cleanliness campaigns:
…nineteenth-century bourgeois reformers identified the clean body as a site of virtuous citizenship. But of course clean clothing and clean bodies, and the means and ability to achieve them, were above all a marker of one’s class status, since it was only the middle-class who could afford to do laundry weekly (and/or have a “hired girl” in to do it), and only the wealthy who had running water, bathtubs, and the means to travel to fashionable spas for soaking in and drinking up healing mineral waters. Brown also tracks the convergence in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century between discourses on spiritual or moral cleanliness, and bodily and household cleanliness. Early in the nineteenth century particular attention was paid first to children’s bodies as an index of their mother’s moral worth, and then later in the century as the bodies of poor and/or immigrant children came into contact on a regular basis with the bodies of middle-class and even elite children in public schools.
If we replace the words “unclean” with “fat,” and “cleanliness” with “thinness,” we’ll come very close to the rhetoric and language of the “Let’s Move” campaign.
Reading that reminded me of this quote about the politics of disgust from Martha Nussbaum (last quoted on this blog in 2004):
Thus throughout history certain disgust properties — sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness — have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with, indeed projected onto, people by reference to whom privileged groups seek to define their superior human status. The stock image of the Jew, in anti-Semitic propaganda, was that of a being with a disgustingly soft and porous body, womanlike in its oozy sliminess, a foul parasite inside the clean German male self. Hitler described the Jew as a maggot in a festering abscess, hidden away inside the apparently clean and healthy body of the nation.
Similar disgusting properties are traditionally associated with women. In more or less all societies, women have been vehicles for the expression of male loathing of the physical and the potentially decaying. Taboos surrounding sex, birth, menstruation — all express the desire to ward off something that is too physical, that partakes too much of the secretions of the body.
(Thanks to Maia for pointing out the Historiann article on her google reader feed!)
I’m not really interested in writing much about American politics. Partly because if I’m going to do day-to-day political stuff there’s so much to write about in New Zealand.* But mostly because I find it even more alienating than I ever did before. To comment on healthcare, or the escalating war on Afganistan, or even the budget freeze, with outrage implies that you expected anything different. And I didn’t. Obama was always going to act like president’s of the united states do and act in the interest of the rich and powerful, not of everyone else. I think the important political work that needs to be done in America at the moment, which is responding to Obama’s inability to meet expectations not with despair, but with organised opposition, is not something that can be helped from a blog. So I write about dollhouse.
But then it becomes the small things that rouse me to fury and writing - in particular Michelle Obama’s crusade against childhood obesity. My favourite response to this was from a feminist historian. But I’m not even capable of that sort of rational analysis, because there’s only one part in all of this that can I respond to. Michelle Obama frames her entire programme by discussing her daughters’ bodies, what they were eating, when she got concerned about their weight, and what she did about it (out of general principle I’m not being specific about what she said - it shouldn’t have been said and I’m not going to repeat it).
It is not fucking acceptable to use your daughters’ bodies to make political points. It is a betrayal of your role as their parent to use your child’s body in this way. It will fuck them up. It’ll fuck them up even more if it’s going to be syndicated on every news feed in every part of the world, until someone in New Zealand is offering their opinion on it.
Another woman, whose mother took similar actions when she was a child wrote about it in this fantastic article, she lays the damage her mother did right out there (I got the article from a truly amazing post on fatshionista).
I wish that someone would say “You must stop using your children like this” to the Obama parents, before the kids have to say it themselves.
Yes, the writer and director who regularly has his on-screen alter ego Silent Bob described as tubby, was already seated, with armrests down and seatbelt buckled, when Southwest decided that he was the wrong size to fly.
Smith announced his defenestration via his (warning, at times incredibly NSFW — which goes without saying; this is Kevin Smith we’re taking about) Twitter feed. Kate Harding was kind enough to stitch a few of Smith’s tweets together:
@SouthwestAir, go fuck yourself. I broke no regulation, offered no “safety risk” (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?). I was wrongly ejected from the flight (even [attendant] Suzanne eventually agreed). And fuck your apologetic $100 voucher, @SouthwestAir. Thank God I don’t embarrass easily (bless you, JERSEY GIRL training). But I don’t sulk off either: so everyday, some new fuck-you Tweets for @SouthwestAir.
Right on. Smith has no reason to be embarrassed — Southwest does. They’ve been actively trying to dehumanize fat people for some time now, and you just knew eventually they’d dehumanize the wrong one; here’s hoping that Smith’s very vocal and justified outrage over this will lead the airline to remember that fat people are, in fact, people. We shall see.
No matter what, it’s got Smith angry — and not just for his own situation. His last twotweets, condensed:
Hey @SouthwestAir? Fuck making it right for me just ’cause I have a platform. I sat next to a big girl who was chastised for not buying an extra ticket because “all passengers deserve their space.” Fucking flight wasn’t even full! Fuck your size-ist policy. Rude…
Word.
Incidentally, the title of this post is a play on a line from one of the great films in cinematic history.
So it’s the time of New Year’s resolutions (and if you live in Wellington grumbling about the weather).* The newspapers didn’t have much copy over the last couple of weeks, so they were full of: “50 ways to be healthier in 2010.”
There’s a visual illustration of the same idea at the food for thought pyramid. I disagree with the proportions, but I think it’s kind of beautiful. I particularly appreciate the large space given over to luck.
Oh and if you obsess over what you eat and exercise and still get cancer - it must be your attitude. “Healthy living” has to be a goal that is always out of reach, a set of behaviours that can always be added to.
The endless health tips and New Year’s advice are about policing, and making people feel bad so they will buy products (if you stop drinking one soda a day I will gratitously link to a Sarah Haskins Video). But that’s not the only purpose they serve.
The reason for repeating over and over again that we can individually control our own health, is to hide the fact that we can’t. It is to hide the fact that collectively, societally we could do heaps to improve people’s longevity and quality of life and we don’t.
I’d make a New Year’s resolution to write more about that, but I probably wouldn’t keep it.2
It’s a great, but obviously incomplete list - don’t have ancestors who were colonised, be selective about the country you were born in… we could go on and on.
For the record my New Year’s resolution is to keep up with what Joss Whedon is doing. I’m setting myself up for success.
Shorter Naomi Seligman: “Fashion magazines, designers, and talk show hosts are too supportive of fat people, and should do more to make fat people feel like crap.”
More goodness in her post: A funny fat pun in the post title. Because that hasn’t been done a zillion times before. I bet that if she wrote a post about comics, it would be called “pow! Zing! Comics!” or something like that.
And the idea that people who are fat-positive are making money off fat people. It’s true, in the sense that anyone who appears on TV or in a magazine, and is paid for it, is making money. But the money to be made telling fat people that they suck is exponentially larger.
2. Jokes that portray women are mannish aren’t funny.
3. A site that claims to be “liberal” would understand that.
Yeah, you can steer clear of them. They aren’t liberal in any meaningful sense of the word.
UPDATE: I guess we can at least be glad they pulled the part making fun of Paul Wellstone’s death — which they used to attack Minnesota State Rep. and gubernatorial candidate Tom Rukavina, DFL-Virginia, Minn. Incidentally, where were Paul and Sheila going again when their plane crashed?
On October 25, 2002, Wellstone died, along with seven others, in a plane crash in northern Minnesota, at approximately 10:22 a.m. He was 58 years old. The other victims were his wife, Sheila; one of his three children, Marcia; the two pilots Richard Conry and Michael Guess, his driver, Will McLaughlin, and campaign staffers Tom Lapic and Mary McEvoy. The plane was en route to Eveleth, where Wellstone was to attend the funeral of Martin Rukavina, a steelworker whose son Tom Rukavina serves in the Minnesota House of Representatives. Wellstone decided to go to the funeral instead of a rally and fundraiser in Minneapolis attended by Mondale and fellow Senator Ted Kennedy
I haven’t paid much attention to the New Jersey governor’s race. Oh, it looks kind of close, and that might be marginally interesting, but the choice for residents of the Garden State appears to be the classic one between the evil of two lessers. Fighting from the blue corner is the incumbent Democrat, Gov. Jon Corzine, who is the kind of stalwart progressive one would expect the former head of Goldman Sachs to be. His challenger in the red corner, Chris Christie, is a former Rove bobo and U.S. Attorney who has the kind of ethics one would expect from a guy with that resumé. It’s a classic battle between the movable object and the resistible force, and while I suppose I’m predisposed to hope the Democrat wins, I certainly wouldn’t be dancing merrily to the polls to pull the lever for four more years of Corzine.
Now, as noted, the race between Corzine and Christie is close, and the campaign has turned relentlessly negative. And Corzine has launched a brand-new add hitting Christie on his driving record. And, unfortunately, something else:
Did you catch it? Maybe not. Frankly, it isn’t surprising if you didn’t; the message is so culturally ingrained that you’ve probably saw similar images a dozen times today. Still, think about what you just saw, and consider the words that the Corzine campaign used in the ad. Need a hint? They said Christie “threw his weight around” to get out of a ticket.
Interesting choice of words, that.
Interesting choice of video, too. Yes, we’re all aware that negative ads try to use unflattering images of opponents. But this was something else — not just a weird picture, but a classic fat-guy image, the guy slowly, awkwardly getting out of the car.
Yes, Jon Corzine has gone after Chris Christie because Chris Christie is fat.
Now, it wasn’t an overt smear. It wasn’t Corzine standing up and saying, “My opponent mainlines chocolate shakes and eats 23 Big Macs a day.” It was a dog-whistle. But it was a pretty freakin’ loud one. And pretty blindingly obvious to anyone not wanting to will away that fact, or excuse the behavior. Heck, the New York Timesclued right in to meaning of the ad, and their description is pretty accurate for those without YouTube:
It is about as subtle as a playground taunt: a television ad for Gov. Jon S. Corzine shows his challenger, Christopher J. Christie, stepping out of an S.U.V. in extreme slow motion, his extra girth moving, just as slowly, in several different directions at once.
In case viewers missed the point, a narrator snidely intones that Mr. Christie “threw his weight around” to avoid getting traffic tickets.
In the ugly New Jersey contest for governor, Mr. Corzine and Mr. Christie have traded all sorts of shots, over mothers and mammograms, loans and lying. But now, Mr. Corzine’s campaign is calling attention to his rival’s corpulence in increasingly overt ways.
Mr. Corzine’s television commercials and Web videos feature unattractive images of Mr. Christie, sometimes shot from the side or backside, highlighting his heft, jowls and double chin.
Meanwhile, Mr. Corzine, 62, is conspicuously running in 5- and 10-kilometer races almost every weekend, as he did last Saturday and Sunday, underscoring his athleticism and readiness for the physical demands of another term — and raising doubts about Mr. Christie’s.
Next, he and a fellow fitness buff, Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark, will run through the streets of that city together next Tuesday.
Yes, Corzine is super-fit. Why, I hear he might swim in the Yangtze River next week, he’s so fit. Not like that fat Chris Christie, who probably has to use a Segway to go to the bathroom, the fat fatty.
But as much as I want to lampoon this, let’s face it, it probably will work, because it plays on the sort of ingrained stereotypes about fat people that already exist among the electorate:
In a recent survey conducted by Monmouth University, voters were asked to say the first thing that came to mind about Mr. Christie. “Fat” was one of the most frequent responses, said Patrick Murray, the director of the poll, who attributed the results to the Corzine ads.
And in focus group sessions conducted for the governor’s campaign over the summer, voters called attention to Mr. Christie’s size without being prompted, and those who were themselves overweight expressed the same concerns, said a Democrat who was briefed on the sessions.
I’m not surprised. Nobody hates a fat person like a fat person. We can never get away from fat — it’s covering us. If we’re lucky, we at some point stumbled on Shapely Prose and started to figure out that we weren’t horrible people, but even then the sense of personal shame remains, because it’s overwhelming in our society.
Now, some on the left have tried to preempt any complaining about these tactics by noting the old standby that “politics ain’t beanbag.” Big Tent Democrat over at TalkLeft makes the basic argument:
For some wonks, Republicans, who have called Dems, traitors, godless, gay, race baited, lied, stolen and cheated in elections, are to be treated with kid gloves. But NJ Dems don’t play that sh*t. Corzine has ripped the bark off of Chris Christie and now is in position to maybe win this thing. Matt Yglesias thinks the Corzine campaign is too mean and there will be a “backlash.” Yeah, right. The GOP is going to whine about Corzine picking on Christie? Really? Yeah, that’ll work. The good news is I am confident that Corzine’s people know what to do down the stretch - continue to rip Christie a new one right up to election day. The political arena is not for the meek. Look at Creigh Deeds.
Look, politics isn’t for the meek. But that doesn’t mean that anything goes. And it especially doesn’t mean it for Democrats.
In 1988, the Republicans ran an ad hitting Michael Dukakis on his furlough of William Horton, a criminal who while out of jail committed armed robbery, assault, and rape. Not a nice guy, Horton, and the program perhaps could be criticized. That said, you don’t know Horton as William, which was the name he used; you know him as Willie. Why? Because Republicans weren’t concerned about making a point on furlough programs, they were arguing that Dukakis wouldn’t keep African-American criminals from hurting good, God-fearing white folk. And William Horton doesn’t sound as scary as “Willie,” the hypothetical black criminal that GOP consultant Larry McCarthy called “every suburban mother’s greatest fear.”
The ad worked. Why? Because it fit into the GOP narrative. Minorities aren’t true Americans, they’re criminals who want to rape your white daughters and steal jobs from hard-working white American men. Who cares if an ad reinforces that idea? That only benefits the Republicans, only reinforces the Southern Strategy-approved message that all black men, everywhere are criminals, leeching off good white people.
Democrats do not believe in marginalizing people. We do not believe in creating an “us against them” America. When Democrats use appeals to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or other bigotry to win elections, we undermine the very principles our party is founded on, and do long-term damage to our party in the long run. Every argument that a woman is unqualified because she’s a woman hurts women, and hurts the Democratic message that women and men should be equal. Every argument that an African-American is unqualified hurts African-Americans, and hurts the Democratic message that people of all racial backgrounds should be equal. Every argument against any person’s qualifications simply because of who they are undermine the bedrock principle of civil rights, that one’s genetic code and familial heritage is not a basis for judgment — one’s actions and principles are.
So yes, politics is messy and tough, and by all means, Corzine can pip Christie for any one of a zillion offenses. But when Corzine argues, even obliquely, that Christie’s weight disqualifies him from serving as a governor, he’s saying by that argument that everyone who carries extra weight is ipso facto incompetent. There’s a word for that: bigotry. And Democrats should not countenance it for a second, even if it originates on our own side of the aisle.
This post uses Dollhouse as a way of looking examining some ideas. If you haven’t watched Dollhouse, but want to, then I recommend avoiding it, since it has some significant spoilers, and the show really will be better if you don’t know. But if you’re never going to watch Dollhouse then read ahead, you don’t need to know anything about the show to understand the post.
I can’t remember when the character descriptions for Dollhouse first leaked. I was surprised, and happy to read November’s:
20’s, any ethnicity, beautiful and heavy. Another Doll, a hopeful child in the house and everyone else you need her to be outside. A comforting, radiant presence, who tends to get fewer of the criminal gigs and more of the personal ones. Recurring.
Later, when the casting was announced and I saw Miracle Laurie, I was disappointed, more than surprised. Like Amp, I assumed that ‘heavy’ had turned out to be an optional part of the character description.
Miracle Laurie is only a recurring character, and her media appearances appear to be arranged by her saying yes when people ask her, rather than by any publicity department. She’s given several, reasonably in depth interviews with fans of Dollhouse, and I’ve realised that I was wrong. Heavy wasn’t, in the end, treated as an optional part of the character description. The truth is far more disturbing.
In two recent interviews Miracle Laurie talked about being cast as November. She says that she read the cast break-down and thought: “This is it – this character is perfect for me. If I don’t get this part it’ll be my fault for not working hard enough.” In one of her interviews she even recites the character description. When I read the character description, I had no idea of how limited “beautiful and heavy” really was. Miracle Laurie may only have one other credit to her name, but she understands Hollywood better than I can.
But there was more to it than that, because Dollhouse had quite a complicated development process. Fox didn’t like Joss’s original plan for November,1 so pretty much on the fly (as Miracle Laurie describes it) the writers came up with a new idea for November as Mellie, as Paul Ballard’s next-door neighbour.
Miracle Laurie has said that Joss had to fight to keep her in the role, to keep his vision of November. To take a small step and there conclusions are, Fox wanted to recast November when it was decided that the character would have sex with Tahmoh Penikett, and that this would be the only on-going sexual relationship in the first season
I want to tease why I think Fox wanted to recast November. I don’t think it was as simple as her not being ‘attractive’ enough, or at least not in the sense of being sexually attractive. Dollhouse is not short of scenes designed to appeal to those attracted to women, the dress that is actually a shirt, or the dominatrix outfit are only the most obvious. Fox has plenty of material that is geared to what it thinks its 18-34 year old male viewers want to watch.
The casting description made it clear that November would be having sexual scenes. There is no reason that November being Mellie would change the extent to which Miracle Laurie would be in scenes that were sexual. (I’m deliberately ignoring the fact that I find the idea that Miracle Laurie would be considered ‘not attractive’ enough for, well anything, patently ridiculous.)
What changed, when November became Mellie, wasn’t the way her body would be seen on the show, but the meaning of those scenes. Fox didn’t want to re-cast November because Mellie was going to have sex scenes, they wanted to re-cast November because she was going to have a sexual relationship with the male lead character.
It’s not about what Fox thinks its male viewers want, it’s about want Fox thinks its female viewers need - in order to buy whatever is being advertised. Ratings may be king in TV-land, but the raison d’etre of TV isn’t actually to get viewers, but to get viewers to watch advertisements. Or, more precisely, get viewers to watch advertisements and for those advertisements to work.
Which is where Sarah Haskins comes in. For those who don’t know her, Sarah Haskins is the genius feminist comedian who focuses on the way media targets women (really if you haven’t seen her stuff – just go and spend a couple of hours on youtube and come back – its that good). She shows how inane and ridiculous media targeted at women is. Here is her segment on yoghurt:
Here is her segment on chocolate:
Everyone who watches those ads knows that 150 calorie warm delight minis aren’t going to be that good (Whittakers Dark Almond chocolate isn’t as good as they make warm delight minis look, and it has sugar and cocoa butter in it), and calling yoghurt key lime pie doesn’t make it key lime pie rather than yoghurt.
But the advertisements make more sense if you think about the programs that contain them.
The women screaming and rioting in the 100 calorie oreo advertisement will only resonate with a woman who believes she should take up no space. Comparing yoplait to a private island makes sense only if you think you should be denying yourself the sustenance and pleasure that comes from food and yoghurt is as good as it gets.
And all these ideas fit better after watching a sex scene between Tahmoh Penikett and (hypothetically) Amy Acker than they do after watching a sex scene between Tahmoh Penikett and Miracle Laurie.
For most women, looking like Miracle Laurie is just as much as an unattainable beauty standard than looking like Amy Acker (who is an awesome actress, and I’m just using as an example because she’s also in Dollhouse). Miracle Laurie is somewhere round the bottom 15% of American women when it comes to height and weight ratio and her body is of a particular type (plus her hair looks like shampoo commercial).
But Miracle Laurie as Mellie, given her story arc, does disrupt an idea that advertisers rely on. I think any single image of what is attractive is damaging (particularly for women, given how we are taught to view our attractiveness as a primary factor in our value). But one of the things that I think is particularly damaging about the standard of beauty in our society is that there is no end, there is no ‘thin enough.’ Our society has an anorexic vision of women – where any flesh, any fat, any space is too much.
And it’s a profitable vision. Advertisers, and therefore executives, don’t want it disrupted.
This may sounds conspiratorial, clearly television works that way, at least in part, but is it conscious I it designed? What justification do the Fox executives themselves give when they want to recast November? Obviously I have no idea, I live in New Zealand. But I think it’s important to understand that such profitable ideas don’t just exist, they have to be created and maintained.
I think the easiest ways to understand this is to turn to an earlier way of selling women things. The Feminine Mystique is an incredibly strong exploration of one of the problems women faced in the post-war period (it’s much weaker as a total explanation of women’s situation at the time). Betty Friedan’s famous book outlines the ‘problem with no name’, a situation where women who are trying to be what women are told they should want, are in fact miserable, even if they succeed. Of particular relevance to this discussion, she asks “How did this happen? How didso many women get persuaded that they needed to be something that would never make them happy.”
In the second chapter, Betty Friedan outlines how, in the 1940s, the parameters of what a heroine was allowed to be changed in fiction aimed towards women. She talks in some details about how women with jobs, careers, education, or a desire for any of these things, were slowly written out of the fiction that ran in the women’s magazines. Then in Chapter 9 she starts to ask some of the bigger questions:
Some months ago, as I began to fit together the puzzle of women’s retreat to home, I had the feeling I was missing something. I, despite the nameless desperation of so many American housewives, despite the opportunities open to all women now, so few have any purpose in life other than to be a wife and mother, somebody, something pretty powerful must be at work.
There are certain fats of life so obvious and mundane that one never talks about them. […]Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role tat women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house In all the talk of femininity and woman’s role, one forgets that the real business of America is business. But the perpetuation of housewifery, the growth of the feminine mystique, makes sense (and dollars) when one realizes are the chief customers of American business. Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of-sate of being housewives.
She doesn’t just state this as a theory; she explores how this happened. She talks to advertisers’ researchers and survey takers. They tell her how important it is that women are persuaded of the validity of roles that they actually find unsatisfying in order that the advertisers can sell products. They describe the research they do to measure how women respond to different ideas. How they use the research that they have, and the media that they have access to maintain the image of women that will allow them to sell the most stuff. She ties it all together, by going back to the magazines that changed the sorts of stories they carry, and showing the connections between them and the advertisers.
The Fox executives probably didn’t say “If November’s sleeping with Ballard we want her re-cast, because otherwise she won’t make women feel bad enough about themselves.” The process has probably got more complicated sine the 1950s, but the process will have remained the same. Researchers and marketers will tell the networks what the advertisers want them to hear.
The range of bodies that get shown on TV is so narrow, that Miracle Laurie has been trumpeted as exceptional. She was asked what it felt to look different from other women on set – as if the difference between a size zero or two and a size six or eight or whatever was a rubicon between the normal and the great unknown and unaccepted. She answered:
Let me start by saying thank you to those of you who have said ridiculously kind and sweet things about my work on the show, but also about my figure. It’s a very satisfying feeling to have one of the most influential creators, producers and writers in the industry fight to have “normal-sized women” on his shows. To have Joss Whedon say, “You’re beautiful, sexy, strong and normal and there should be more women like you on TV and I don’t know why there aren’t” feels incredible, as you could imagine. I think everyone wants to be skinnier than they are, it’s just the way it is
That Miracle Laurie is an exception when it comes to the amount of space women are allowed to take up on screen is ridiculous. That this is how far Joss Whedon can get when he fights is an indictment on the industry. Television will allow a lot – but
******
At comicon Joss was asked why he was fascinated by the idea of The Dollhouse:
Have you been in America? I mean I like to consider myself a great documentarian. The entire structure is designed to mess with your mind, to combine selling you things with entertaining you. To keep you in line, to think that you need the things they want you to need, and to stay away from the things they want you to stay away from. To keep them in power, to share none of it. This is all happening. There are lights in the darkness. The art that we get to create because the powerful patrons let us is one of them. But sometimes, yeah, it’s like running the daycare on the death-star.
I love Joss; I love the television he creates. I’m convinced his politics have got more radical and outspoken since the writers strike, which is awesome. And if this speech is a tad self-indulgent, I’d be self-indulgent too if I got treated the way Joss gets treated at Comic-con.
But sometimes it’s not the daycare.
I’m really curious about what the original plan for November was, but there’s been no leaking in that department. I can’t imagine it’d be cooler than what they ended up doing with Mellie, but I could be wrong
…nineteenth-century bourgeois reformers identified the clean body as a site of virtuous citizenship. But of course clean clothing and clean bodies, and the means and ability to achieve them, were above all a marker of one’s class status, since it was only the middle-class who could afford to do laundry weekly (and/or have a “hired girl” in to do it), and only the wealthy who had running water, bathtubs, and the means to travel to fashionable spas for soaking in and drinking up healing mineral waters. Brown also tracks the convergence in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century between discourses on spiritual or moral cleanliness, and bodily and household cleanliness. Early in the nineteenth century particular attention was paid first to children’s bodies as an index of their mother’s moral worth, and then later in the century as the bodies of poor and/or immigrant children came into contact on a regular basis with the bodies of middle-class and even elite children in public schools. 
