feminist blogs

I've been meaning for awhile to sit down and write a review of Pattie Thomas's new book, Taking up Space. It actually came out in October, and I wrote a little bit on my livejournal at the time (here), but here's a full review... This book rocked. End of review! Really. It is, I hope, seminal in the way that Paul Campos's 'Obesity Myth' (or should I say 'Diet Myth') has turned out to be. If you go to Amazon these days and look up his book, there are at least 20 others related to it, telling essentially the same story with a different angle or newer facts. I want Pattie's book to do the same thing, because it's the sort of book I've been waiting for. It's an Official Fat Chick Book that has something serious and smart to say - equal parts memoir and sociological study, as promised, but also a guide to living in and changing a world that really hates fat people. That last bit is what makes it extraordinary and rocksome. I wouldn't argue that we don't need Paul Campos and others writing all those other books critiquing the 'science' behind the Obesity Crisis! Egads! - because we undoubtedly do need that kind of writing to debunk all the ridiculous legend-making about fat done by much of the mainstream media and the diet industry. Someone's got to point out that there's a problem with what we're hearing - and probably a lot of someones, if we're going to get anywhere near balanced, rational thinking on the subject. But. Equally necessary are the people living fat and speaking out about it, particularly the folk like Pattie who can help connect both other fat and non-fat people to their experience. It's a weapon against hearts, not just against minds and science. It's a weapon for hearts, too - fat people's stories get told so rarely, except as the 'success story' of not being fat anymore. Those stories make it sound like the real person was the Skinny Chick Inside, and not the fat one afterall. Pattie's story is absolutely nothing like that. Read the book. I truly enjoyed it, and not just for what it represents - the writing is frank and thought-provoking, too.

And this Salon article about Torrid (whether it 'promotes obesity', I kid you not - someone actually went to the trouble of writing about this topic) was going so well. It was tracking nicely towards the conclusion that its own premise was absurd - which, well, it is. Until the last page. On the other hand, there's only so much that cool plus-size clothing can do. After all, it's not as if a teen who scores a killer corset is going to forget -- or not care -- that she's fat. "It's very painful to be an overweight teen, and clothes do not change that," says Janet R. Laubgross, a clinical psychologist in Fairfax, Va., who specializes in weight management. To some degree, no matter what they're wearing -- and no matter what "I'm big and beautiful!" banners they're waving -- they're still suffering. "I think they're trying to convince themselves," Laubgross says of some teens who say they feel 150 percent fine about how they look. "I'm glad they're being acknowledged as real people who deserve to dress nicely, that they're feeling like they do matter. And it's great that they can say, 'Well, this looks nice.' But it's still 'nice' from the fat-girl store." Once, just once, I would have liked the article to mention that it's entirely possible that fat people are hot. Even hotter than not-fat people. Particularly when you consider that Torrid's line starts with average-ish women's sizes [12 aka "0" - reimagining the world into a place where 0 is the baseline and everything above or below is counted forward or back from average, I guess], and average-ish women, their fat and thin counterparts are all getting some. Clearly actual human beings think actual human beings of a wide range of sizes are hot. I mean. This is not the cause of fat activism. The cause of fat activism is, among other things, that you have to go to a Fat Girl Store in the first place (although, if every store had a specific size range, that might uncomplicate things nicely). This is simple reality talking. Beauty standards are bollocks when you look at what real people are attracted to, and it is not - I repeat NOT - inherently less-good to be fat. Honestly, given some recent LJ conversations, I think it may be more-good to be fat [I don't know why I'm suddenly all 1984 with my adjectives here.], as fat people sometimes seem to have a better or at least more visceral grasp on the gaping chasm between "beauty standard" and reality. Of course, the woman in that quote is a "weight management" expert, who counsels people into feeling like shit and losing weight. In other words, she makes a living on the false promise that it is in fact ungood to be fat, no matter what. And hey, it might work for the people who come to her. Maybe their lives are better after losing weight, or maybe their lives would have been just fine if they'd seen a plain old therapist. I don't know. But. I'd just like it mentioned ONCE. I'd like such articles to accept the possibility for even a milisecond that fat teenage girls might have no worse self-image than teenage girls who aren't fat. It could even be dismissed, if it were just said. Even said really apologetically, like the "being fat might not be unhealthy" comment the author snuck in: To be sure, weight itself is not universally toxic; many plus sizers are quite healthy -- possibly more so, in fact, than the skinnies who live on Whoppers "because they can." But being overweight has been linked to all manner of serious problems... I'd like a media outlet to briefly stop delegitimizing girls' [and women's and everyone's] experiences in general, honestly. It drives me insane that media coverage of such things never gets the reality or breadthof people's experience. Cause the more we saw that some folks' experience of being [insert "other"-branded trait here], the more that would spread. It would just take an effing sentence.

Everyone knows I didn't care for Supersize Me and its general wrongheadedness (and if you don't, by all means go back to last fall's blog and read up). But as I was reading some random other thing on the admittedly quite biased consumerfreedom.com, I came across this: MTV viewers may remember Spurlock's short-lived show ''I Bet You Will,'' whose motto was ''stupidity pays.'' With cameras rolling, Spurlock paid a man to gulp down an entire 24-ounce jar of mayonnaise... Not surprisingly, the show featured an ''Official Puke Bucket.'' from ''Super Size Me' Is Just Another Sick Reality Show' - which, well, it kinda is The op-ed piece is obviously not a factual circus of fun, but I at least assume it wouldn't use totally made up information. I didn't know that (about the bucket of puke show). And it explains so much about the presentation of that movie: it's all geared to the shocktainment of the "money shot" of some dude puking in a bucket (or, you know, on the street - the location is immaterial). Sorry for making you read the word "puke" so many times there, kids. But it intrigues me that, as I was going back through some of my fat/health posts to bring you my scintillating commentary on Super Size Me, the image of people vomiting is a big part of the media representation of fat. I think it's not-so-subliminal messaging. Every kid knows vomit is gross, right? And fat people are gross, too! So bring on the puke bucket! What I was originally reading, by the way, is a news bit on that largely unsupportable theory that kids getting fat means they're going to die younger than their parents. The truth? No, they're not. Even the CDC says kids born last year can expect to live longer than mom and dad. But you'd be better off reading Paul's summary of the whole thing than bothering with the Consumer Freedom peeps. They're entertaining, but well, it's a little "pot? this is kettle... you're black!" when they call the Everyone's Dying! study peeps scare mongerers.

On the Today Show this morning and on MSNBC, there's coverage of recent studies that question whether dieting is any good or not: they basically say Weight Watchers is the only viable plan, but the NY Times article on essentially the same topic comes pretty close to condemning dieting as a practice and goes a little further into examining the reasons people diet - like the fact that just going on a weightloss diet often makes people instantly feel like happier, better people, without any results at all. I started watching the Today Show three years ago after the whole terrorism thing shocked me out of my liberal news-bubble of NPR and into watching CNN, which totally disabused me of the idea that the media is liberal. Cause, whoa. It's not. I don't know if it's me too far to the left or the conservative talk radio phenomenon being too far to the right, but CNN? Disturbingly hawkish, in my view. NBC's morning news is much lighter fare, and widely watched in a way that makes me feel I'm Being America by tuning in. I'm sure y'all don't care what morning television I watch and why, but seeing this covered by the Today Show felt pretty significant to me - as if America in a large, capital-lettery way were finally starting to get the message about fat. Just barely, but starting. That's something! The Times article, even though it was more thought-provoking, feels less significant because the Times has already covered some kinda radical perspectives on fat and food and stuff. To hear "well, maybe diet programs aren't the swellest; we don't know" from Today, bastion of weight loss surgery (if you don't know the show, the weatherdude's WLS was very highly publicized and praised), feels like major progress - even if it is heavily qualified as "commercial" programs "other than Weight Watchers".

Oh, joy! Another pat solution to the Crisis of Obesity, Egads! You just need to sleep more! [I apologize in advance for the oversimplifications and impossibly immature language that appears throughout this post. I'm rubber, and you're glue. Also, bonus points for those who recognize the title's origin.] This is actually a month old, but it's been re-circulating via email and various websites for whatever reason. The study itself isn't compelling (really, couldn't people whose whole job is to study fat find ANYTHING else to talk about?), but I find the language used in reporting it just plain stupid. For example:The study, presented at the meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity, analyzed data from 18,000 adults and found that those who slept less than the recommended seven hours a night had an increased risk of obesity. People who slept for less than four hours per night were 73 percent more likely to be obese than those who slept for seven to nine hours. Getting five hours of sleep or less decreased that risk to 50 percent, and getting six hours or less decreased it even more to 23 percent. ---from the text of the study, as quoted in nearly every press-release spouting article that covered it I may be cynical here, but I expect the story would have read quite the opposite if the study had found a connection between more sleep and fatness. That story, I imagine, would have run something like: "Proven: fat ass fatty fatpantses really are lazy snoozebutts" - or possibly something ever so slightly more mature-sounding. But the language must still be all about causation, don't you know! The language turns it into "if you only sleep 5 hours, you are going to be fat, Mr. Fatty Fatpants!", doesn't it? It seems like 73 percent more likely to be obese is likely to be read by the average layperson (i.e. me) as 73 percent more likely to get fat and dieeeeeeee. Why can't the reporting spell out what they found more clearly? As in, "We looked at a big old data dump [They used one of the NHANES data sets] and found that being fat and not sleeping very much seem to be related. We don't know why, because we never know why." - okay, maybe leaving off that last snarky bit for serious new venues. I joked a while back that I'd like to have my very own huge set of data that I could manipulate and infer from, and it turns out that I could probably do that with a combination of the NHANES stuff and census data. But I was joking, people. I don't expect serious science to be all about the data dredge. The Obesity Crisis, Egads!, however is all about the data dredge. There's a good article at Tech Central Station about why the data dredge is totally uncool - if, you know, a good time - which you should read if you're intrigued by the Obesity Crisis, Egads!'s scientific backup. I look at this stuff as progress, though. The more useless the science gets, the less the average person's going to pay attention to it. Right? Right?

Last week a story about taking diet pills being linked to having gay kids circulated around the net quite a bit. The articles annoyingly never seem to highlight any biological reason why the study's hypothesis would even be considered [Presumably there must have been some - was it just too complex for the press to grasp?], which leaves you with just a vague idea that not having "control" over your weight might be somehow linked to not having "control" over your kids' queerness. Sigh. But improved by Ampersand's couple of posts relating the bias against fatness to the bias against gayness (though I would substitute "queerness", as the same questions apply to bisexual and genderqueer folk). It's not a new comparison to make - both are characteristics for which a person may face discrimination; both are also subject to a lot of inconclusive research as to their cause. But Amp starts by presenting research showing why fat isn't as simple as calories in/calories out (a good summary of the research, and important, given that his audience seems to be completely unfamiliar with the subject) and continues on to analogize fat and gay (intriguingly, he doesn't have to present research about the "why" of gay - which implies that his more "mainstream", largely liberal, audience is much more familiar with the debate over the root of homosexuality than with the debate over what makes a person fat). It's clear when I read these discussions elsewhere that I am shockingly radical. Much more radical than I ever think of myself as being. So, Amp's presentation of the research is - as always - tremendously useful. But he wades too far into the idea that one's discrimination-inducing characteristics must be unchallengeable and inalienable in order to be defended against discrimination. Not true! I believe the queer community made a pretty stupid political mistake when it took the route of saying gayness is something one is born to (although this remains a key point in individual queer identities - it's not a useless idea, just a bad political gambit). What if it isn't? What if gayness is as much about behavior as identity? What if identity is mutable? What if one can choose to be queer? Does that make it okay to hate queer folk? The people who answer "yes" to my rhetorical question are going to think that way no matter what the community argues about the cause(s) of queerness. Positioning gay as the new black (racially) made the debate less about civil rights and more about whether a group deserves civil rights on the same grounds as racial identity. What the fat movement could bring to this debate is to fight from a whole different angle. Prove that simply being fat doesn't make you a drag on the economy, maybe - because that undermines the favorite argument for anti-fat politics. But don't get bogged down in the "how did we get here?" science. It doesn't matter. If people get fat by choice, and being fat doesn't hurt others (and maybe even if it does - asshats of any size still get rights, and they hurt everyone), then there is no reason to discriminate against fat folk. Really, the most effective argument in favor of any minority group's rights is more analogous to the right to religious freedom than anything else - one chooses one's religion, and that's a defended choice. Period. No "are people born Catholic, or do they choose it?" debate needed. On a personal level, I almost can't handle reading the damned comments on posts like this. When people argue that I'm flat-out lying about how much I eat and exercise (and that any fat person who stays fat is doing the same), the urge to verbally gouge out their eyes is too great. But it would accomplish nothing - these are people who wouldn't believe me if they lived in my house for a month; they'd assume I was bingeing undercover or something, because they mysteriously have some part of their identities caught up in the idea that fat people are morally inferior. Arghhhhhhhhh.

Reading the Tech Central article on Ancel Keys actually made me laugh, aloud, at work. It's not so much funny ha-ha as funny strange, or even maybe funny sad. Keys, you see, did the Minnesota Starvation Study during WWII [He's also the k-rations dude, if you're interested.]. That study continues to stand as evidence of what semi-starvation (dieting) does to the body, basically turning you into a food-obsessed binger who regains weight and loses strength with each starvation (diet) episode. Which any lifetime dieter could tell you about, anyhow. And you become completely uninterested in pretty much anything else, which any actual starving person - and, you know, Maslow - could probably tell you. If they were interested in being that political, which they probably wouldn't be. And you end up with physical problems that you never fully recover from. So far, you're just seeing the sad and not the funny, right? The funny is that Keys, whose research condemns dieting, still thought fat people were disgusting and lacked willpower. So, he figures out that dieting is bad and makes you fatter and that fat had no independent health effects, but he still attributes fatness exclusively to overeating and finds it very, very icky. What's not funny about that? And, you know - sad. It's basically our cultural concept of fat. Despite whatever evidence may exist to the contrary, we want to believe that fatness deserves punishment and is unhealthy and that we can buy our way out of it with diets. Because it's just so much eeeeasier if that's true. And it's just so perfect that an article on Keys, of all people, should point that out so clearly.

I usually don't (won't) watch any reality television. Television is better if it either collects something, information or art or whatever, or just appeals to my fantasy. But last week I watched the "Loser" weightloss show (and blogged it), and this week I found myself watching it again. I want to draw some connection between this show and Kathleen LeBesco's latest. I was disappointed in the book a bit - it doesn't have a lot that seems new and drastic to say, and I loved the transgressiveness and inversion of Bodies out of Bounds. And really, how much did I need to re-hear the point that Judith Butler's insights on queerness and gender apply to fat, too? Seems obvious. But LeBesco's perspective on fat "apologism" is a good one. It doesn't matter politically if you contextualize it as a genetic fact or a choice, as long as you step away from thinking of fat as a disease and a debilitation in and of itself. I said that a couple of years ago, and I'm pretty sure the others I've learned from have been saying it for much longer. Some things bear repeating. This television show is strangely compelling. I think anyone who can watch it without revulsion is hoping for a transformation. Probably most people aren't thinking of the transformation I'm thinking of, though. Last night, everyone lost a lot less weight than the first week. Yeah, I've seen that cycle before. I bet all the fat people on the show did. They voted off a woman who weighed maybe 175 lbs (pretty tall, too) and didn't lose weight; they decided that small people had less weight to lose. That's the barometer they go with when they vote off team members, who they think has the most capability to lose more, based entirely on what they weigh. They cry a lot, which makes sense - they're in the worst sort of boot camp, and it's not like they can really rely on their team members for support. I suppose the show is aiming for sniping and such. It's pretty revolting. It intentionally plays the emotions. It wants to be revolting. So, the first week they leech all the water out of their bodies, and the second week they lose a little weight. Exercising most of each day, eating a lot less than normal, basically giving up all sense of normal routine and their own community; it's no surprise that they're pissed they don't lose more. It doesn't seem like anyone notices that these results say a lot about the complexities of people's response to food reduction and exercise. We're not calorie-processing machines. That's what I would want people to take away. It's more complicated than that. People build muscle, too. Muscle is heavier. I wanted to grab and shake someone and say "IF YOU FEEL HEALTHIER, MAYBE YOU ARE" when she started crying about how she felt so good but she was just bad because she wasn't losing 20lbs every week. The women they voted off this week and last get shown at the end of the episode with how much weight they lost or kept off. I wonder if they think 10 lbs is failure or success, you know? If they think that 10 lbs is worth handing weeks of your life over to someone else? We must feel so badly about the body. As a culture, I mean, we must feel terrible and hateful things to want so badly to change this little quantifiable number. To make it smaller; to make making it smaller this overarching focus. It seems like something's fundamentally broken. I don't think that combatting the science of the Obesity Crisis! Egads! is really about apologism. I think Kathleen's wrong about that one. The audience is different. The science is our olive branch to the people on the "Loser" show and the people who are thinking the same things but not on television. People who haven't had the realization that weight gain or loss isn't all about willpower, but might be happier if they did. Maybe you need to have that before you can start to wonder whether fat is really all that bad or not. I started to care about these people, about the things they represent in the rest of us. That's why I keep watching this show. I want them to feel better. I want to understand better how they came to conclude that this was the thing to do. I want - I want more people to look up and look around them and wonder why they have to waste all this time and maybe, well - revolt. And I kinda want the big quiet black man to win or to stand up and walk out.