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This post was removed by request of the author.

This post was removed by request of the author.

In the comments of Pseudo-Adrienne’s post yesterday, Asher of Dreams into Lightning posted some quotes from other blogs about the situation for women in Iraq, which I liked so much that I’m totally swiping it and posting here.

A couple of recent items:

Mohammed at Iraq the Model

In spite of the heat and the dust that’s covering Baghdad for the 2nd day, more than a hundred Iraqi women representing NGOs and active groups gathered to declare their demands in equality and a civil family and personal affairs law.

The women set a large tent in Al-Firdows square which witnessed the fall of Saddam in April 2003. Under this icon of freedom the women held their signs and demands high.

I met some of the activists who talked enthusiastically about plans for more protests and conventions to show their disapproval of the constitution’s draft because they’re afraid that religion might hijack the constitution and deprive them of their rights.

I’ve also noticed that signs that required two to hold were held by a male and a female in a sign of equality; I liked the idea! …

Full post, with pictures, at the link.

Kat at The Middle Ground:

The Iraq Constitution is in the process of being written. Several drafts have been sent to the public for input in preparation for the referendum on August 15, 2005. As the negotiations continue, questions about the base of law and the role of Islam and Shari’ah continue to be points of contention. Many women in Iraq will be affected if Shari’ah is adopted as the sole source of law or if it is adopted as a major source of law and its implementation is left up to the different regions of Iraq.

Some regions are effectively controlled by major religious parties, both Sunni and Shia, which advocate traditional and restricted roles for women. The laws that would be enacted under Shari’ah would impact women negatively including such issues as custody of children (usually given to the men regardless of the reason for divorce or separation), divorce (which gives women limited if no rights in divorce, regardless of the condition of their union and allow men free reign to divorce at will for little if any reason and can impact her and her children’s financial situation), inheritance (depending on whose version of Shari’ah, widows could be left with less than 50% of their husbands property and wealth, regardless of the number of children she has to support while the remaining inheritance would be given to his brothers, father, uncles and cousins; for women already living in poverty, this could be devastating), and voting rights and representation within the government.

These are but a few of the issues facing women in the new Iraq. Other issues include laws to protect women from abuse, honor killings and unfair and inhumane punishment for the crime of “adultery” which includes pre-marital sex and rape. …

Follow Kat’s links to the American Islamic Congress and Women’s Alliance for a Democratic Iraq.

Plus, this post on how people can help, from Dreams Into Lightning. I’ve changed it a little, though, so blame the content on me, not on DIL:

1) Write your senator and representative asking them to support these organizations with additional funds or statements of support for women’s rights. (If you are not in the United States, please feel free to write your parliament member or other government representatives to give support to these organizations.)

2) Donate funds directly to any of the women’s organization’s listed below.

The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq
Women’s Alliance for a Democratic Iraq

3) If you work for a company or are a member of an organization, particularly any organizations for women within your country or region, ask them to provide assistance, either financially, materially (ie, donating time, media assistance, printing, supplies, etc) or politically.

Some may be concerned that this assistance will come too late. It is never too late. Changes to the constitution are being made as you read this and will be made up to the last moment before the referendum. Even after the constitution is written and the referendum passed, women’s rights in Iraq will still be an issue and these women will need our support.

(The original post on DIL also suggested donating money to the Independent Women’s Forum, an anti-feminist, pro-Republican think tank with no special Iraq expertise, and some other organizations that weren’t as appalling as the IWF but also didn’t seem very focused on women in Iraq. I deleted those links and stuck in a link to OWFI instead.)

Hey, folks, remember Hereville? It’s a comic I used to work on…

Anyhow, there’s now a website - www.hereville.com . It ain’t much - as usual, I’m having a terrible time trying to control the layout elements - but at least it’s there. And at least all of the pages will be available for free, for the forseeable future.

And how about new pages, you ask? Well… uh… soon, I hope.

In an earlier thread, trying to make the case that liberals are racist, Niels Jackson wrote:

If you think that liberals don’t use the term “race traitor,” you haven’t looked very hard. Try reading up on what some liberals say about Clarence Thomas. For example, Manning Marable explicitly says that Thomas (and other conservative blacks) are race traitors. So does a book edited by two Georgetown professors. Use Google, and you’ll find plenty more references. (Such as this Margaret Cho article about none other than Michelle Malkin, or this article about Condi Rice.)

David of the admirable blog The Debate Link (which currently has a good post, quoting an anonymous comment-writer, criticizing left-wing racism) seemed to endorse Niels’ links, as well.

I have to wonder if Niels and David even read the links in question. For instance, as the Daily Howler link Niels provided explained, the book edited by two Georgetown professors (Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment) didn’t call Thomas or anyone else a “race traitor”; it objected to that sort of attack. As the Daily Howler - again, in the link Niels himself provided - points out, a Lexis-Nexis search found only one example of Thomas being called a “race traitor” in any mainstream news outlet; clearly, the term was not commonly used.

Although it’s true that Margaret Cho used the term “race traitor,” in context she used it ironically; her point is that it’s a positive thing that Asians and people of color are free to be right-wingers nowadays, even though she finds Malkin’s view odious. Cho writes:

I feel kind of proud, that racial politics have progressed to the point where we can have a young Asian American woman who doesn’t have to live within the constraints of a minority identity, which presumes liberal bias just by nature of the fact that if you are oppressed by the majority, you would want to place yourself against the majority.

Cho’s essay, along with other links Niels provided, shows that what’s going on is more subtle than right-wingers admit. There are liberals who call right-wing blacks “race traitors,” but the liberals in question are disproportionately people of color. More specifically (although Cho is an exception), they’re usually Black. “Race traitor” is not the typical vocabulary used by liberals when talking about non-white conservatives; but it’s sometimes part of the vocabulary used by Blacks when having debates that take place within the Black community.

I don’t find Blacks using the term “race traitor” objectionable the way I’d find the same term used by whites (liberal or not) objectionable. It’s a little like when Chris Rock uses the word “nigger.” I don’t think it’s acceptable for whites to say “nigger,” by and large. But at the same time, it’s not my place, as a white guy, to police the language Blacks use when having debates about Black identity politics within the Black community. That’s none of my business.

Returning to the point, as far as I can tell, Black lefties are the only lefties to use the term “race traitor” with any regularity. It’s ridiculous for conservatives to imply that this is proof of widespread racism among lefties.

Context - that is, what race the speaker is - does matter. It’s clear that when blacks use the word “nigger” or its derivatives, they’re not using it in the anti-black way it’s typically been used by white racists. Similarly, the analogy between right-wing racists who have used “race traitor” (for whites who favored civil rights), and anti-racist Blacks who use the same term, doesn’t hold much water. Read this Manning Marable essay Niels linked to, for example:

This conservative wing of the black middle class during the 1980s and 1990s, in effect, committed “racial suicide,” in the sense that it disavowed any sense of obligation, or “linked fates,” with what happens to the masses of disadvantaged African Americans. There is no sense of personal responsibility or accountability to a political project that is race-based. They wish to be judged as “individuals,” not as part of the larger “black community.” They explicitly reject any notions of the concept that their career advancement was largely a product of a mass, democratic movement to challenge structural racism. So in this limited sense, the reactionary wing of the black political elite has stopped being “black” in terms of its historical function as an oppositional group against racism. They are essentially “race traitors”: dedicated to the destruction of all racial categories, or even for some the collection of data indicating racial discrimination; critical of the liberal integrationist establishment; and enthusiastic boosters of capitalism as we know it.

Would anyone seriously argue that this is no different from a KKK rant?

The bottom line is, blacks who argue about if Clarence Thomas is a “race traitor” are making an argument about solidarity, and trying to hold the line against racism. It’s not our place, as whites against racism, to tell Blacks what language they should or shouldn’t use; whether or not I like the term “race traitor,” in this context, is irrelevant. In contrast, whites who complain about white “race traitors” are hoping to protect the racist status quo (or return to an even more racist past). To claim that the two uses of “race traitor” are equal is to ignore the substance of the two positions, and reduces anti-racism to a fuss about vocabulary. No, thank you.

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Liberal blog Fables of the Reconstruction provides a “conservative blog taxomony.” Some of it made me chuckle (”Dean Esmay is popular among right-wingers as one of those centrists who just happen to hate liberals and Democrats”) , but his description of Michelle Malkin is pretty deplorable:

Far-right affirmative action hire who is so bigoted she’d arrest herself for trying to cross a border. Famously published a book praising internment of Japanese-Americans that was (a) incoherent and (b) probably not written by her. If she didn’t have tits, she’d be stuck writing at Townhall.com.

One comment-writer at Fables, Disputo, wrote in response: “I could do without the sexist language. Isn’t Malkin’s writings enough fodder for complaint? Must you also denigrate her for being a woman?” As far as I can tell (and it’s very possible I’ve missed a bunch), Disputo is the one and only lefty to object to the sexism - even though, as David Bernstein at Volokh points out, plenty of lefties have provided admiring comments or links.

Before anyone tells me “it was just a joke, you can’t object to jokes,” how would you have reacted if he wrote “if she wasn’t a slant-eyes….”?

Not the first time Malkin has received bigoted criticisms, and far from the grossest. Still, it would be nice if the allegedly anti-sexist and anti-racist half of the political spectrum was more, y’know, consistently anti-sexist and anti-racist.

UPDATE: See also Sivacracy and The Debate Link. From The Debate Link:

…Under this view, Malkin’s popularity is partially premised on her position as someone conservatives can point to and say: “Look! We’re not racist–some minorities agree with us!”–a status that is interwoven with her status as a woman and minority. And one could then extrapolate that if Malkin didn’t provide that particular service to conservatives (IE, being a conservative minority woman), she’d be a non-entity.

That argument is sophisticated, controversial, and debatable (I make no comment on whether or not it is correct as applied to Malkin). It is not, however, conveyed in a crude posting that marks Malkin’s success as solely attributable to her “tits.” Make the latter argument, but the former should be an anathema to true liberals.

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Yay!

It looks like it might be a decent adaptation - they’re using 6 of the original 8 main cast members, which is a good sign. According to what I’ve read, they’ve added some new dialog and cut a few songs (no clue which ones), which is too bad but probably inevitable. As part of updating it from the mid-1990s to the present day, they’ve added gay marriage to the show’s litany of issues, which makes sense.

Maybe if Rent is a hit, the Sweeny Todd movie will finally happen. Or better yet, an Assassins movie. (I can dream, can’t I?)

An interesting new study from a researcher at Cornell. The researcher had men and women take a gender identity survey. The test subjects were then told that the survey showed that they were “masculine” or “feminine.”In fact, what they were told had nothing to do with their survey answers - whether they were told that their answers were “masculine” or “feminine” was random.

The subjects were then surveyed regarding various issues and also regarding car-buying preferences. The men who had had their masculinity “threatened” became more likely to support the Iraq war; more likely to oppose same-sex marriage; and more likely to want to buy an S.U.V. The researcher calls this phenomenon “masculine overcompensation”; Media Girl calls it the Fragile Male Ego.

The researcher, Robb Willer, says he’s planning a follow-up study to see if men are also more likely to favor violence against women if their masculinity is questioned.

Via Volsunga, an interview with Iraqi women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed:

The first priority is to survive. The moment you step onto the street, you are an immediate target just because you are female. If a woman goes out, she may be assaulted, she may be kidnapped. The gangsters are very organised. Ransom is becoming an everyday thing. A gang kidnaps a woman and they contact her family to ask for a fat ransom. Unfortunately, some families will ask whether anything sexual has happened to the woman. If it has, they won’t want her back.

Even apart from this the streets are not women-friendly. Many professional women who drive to and from work get insulted by men travelling around in pick-up trucks holding machine guns and wearing black from head to foot. Going out in the streets is scary. Many females have stopped going to school.

In many mosques they preach that a female should leave school in Grade 6, because otherwise she will be mixing with males and evil will happen.[…]

If you travel from the north down through Iraq to the south, it is like being in a time machine. You travel from the 21st century in Sulamaniya, through Kirkuk to Baghdad, where you see a city which is in ruins. There is dust everywhere, and people are wearing very old clothes. Then in the south you are in the Dark Ages. In the areas dominated by the Sunni Islamists, in Fallujah or in Mosul, women’s situation is even worse than in Basra. You have something there which is new to us in Iraq. It comes from Wahhabism, from al Qaeda, from Saudi Arabia.

In that culture women are just a tool for production of children and sexual entertainment of men. Young females are promised by their families to other males in the tribe, in a very inhumane way. On top of that, women are considered to be sources of evil, and that is why we need to be covered from top to toe.

The entire interview is worth reading.

She’s careful to point out that problems for women’s rights existed under Hussain’s rule as well; The invasion and occupation have made things much worse for Iraqi women, but what existed before wasn’t utopian.

I wish I knew of a solution. That the Republican idea that freedom can be created through invasion has been discredited doesn’t provide much comfort for women in Iraq who have had their rights taken away. We’ve squandered away any shred of moral credibility we had in the region, and we don’t have enough soldiers to remake entire cultures at gunpoint. Frankly, I doubt there is anything substantial the US can do to clean up the enourmous mess we’ve made.

At the very least, we should establish, as much as security concerns allow, an “open door” immigration policy for any Iraqi woman who wants to move to the US in order to avoid the tyranny of radical fundimentalist Islamic law. Since we can’t offer them freedom in their own land from tyrants we’ve empowered, we should at least offer an escape route.

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This post was removed by request of the author.

Big Fat Blog - one of my favorite blogs, by the way - has an occasional feature called Three Quick Questions, which is billed as “the world’s shortest interview.” (I’m tempted to start a feature called “One Yes or No Question,” in an attempt to steal the title.) I’m the subject of the most recent “Three Quick Questions.”

I yak on a lot about fat people in the media, and whether or not fat-acceptance and left-wing politics go together. If that sounds interesting to you, please check it out.

From Elizabeth Anderson on Left2Right:

There are many public accommodations that secure a superior package of freedoms under a common carrier rule than under a rule that permits arbitrary discrimination on the grounds of individual conscience, or other arbitrary grounds. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, barring discrimination in access to public accommodations such as buses, restaurants, and hotels on grounds of race, is based on the claim that the package [I am free from discrimination to use any public accomodation; I am not free to use my ownership of a public accommodation to advance a racial caste system] secures a superior set of freedoms than the package [others are free to try to make me an untouchable in civil society; I am free to use my ownership of a public accommodation to advance a caste system]. Note here that considerations of non-domination are important over and above opportunity. Even if someone else is willing to offer me a room at a hotel without regard to my race (so I don’t lack the opportunity to stay overnight in some city), this does not remove the subjection inherent in anyone trying to make me a subordinate caste, by depriving me of a hotel room on account of my race.

This argument generalizes. The operators of a private telephone system should not be able to claim a right of religious conscience to eavesdrop on telephone conversations, so they can cut off blasphemous phone calls. The operator of an ambulance service that takes public calls, who is a Christian Scientist, may not claim a right of religious conscience to refuse to transport any emergency case to the hospital, unless it is for the treatments permitted to a Christian Scientist (bone setting, pulling an infected tooth). A Talibanesque taxi driver may not conscientiously refuse to serve women unaccompanied by male relatives, on the ground that he might thereby be facilitating their sinful consorting with the opposite sex. And similarly, a pharmacist may not claim a right of religious conscience to refuse to fill a prescription for birth control to women, or to single women, on the ground that he might thereby be facilitating the sin of fornication.

Read the whole thing.

These are quotes from various (mostly) blog posts I found interesting - follow the links to read the whole posts.

Jacob Sullem on Meth Babies: The “crack baby” scare of the late 1980s and early ’90s, debunked by research showing that that the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure had been grossly exaggerated, is now being recycled as a “meth baby” scare. It features the same sort of careful reporting that made crack babies such a media hit, including third-hand rumors, nonsensical descriptions of “addicted” babies, and medical pronouncements by cops.

Majikthise on vanity license plates: A judge has ruled that the state of Utah can’t prevent Elizabeth Solomon from obtaining custom license plates that read GAYSROK and GAYRYTS, respectively.

Julian Sanchez on anti-trans discrimination at the Library of Congress: “Imagine an employer says that men can’t wear dresses,” suggests Post. “That seems like a pretty clear-cut case of gender discrimination: Men can’t do something women can.” But, says Post, few courts would count such a rule as gender descrimination, and judges tend to find ways to rationalize restrictions that reflect conventional notions of feminine or masculine behavior. Legal categories such as “discrimination on the basis of gender,” says Post, end up being treated not as objective standards but “vehicles for social meaning” that depend on judicial determination of which gender stereotypes may be enforced.

The Debate Link has some very interesting comments, inspired by Jonathan H. Adler’s libertarian reinterpretation of The Lorax: The Once-ler has no incentive to conserve the truffula trees for, as he notes to himself, if he doesn’t cut them down someone else will. He’s responding to the incentives created by a lack of property rights in the trees, and the inevitable tragedy results. Had the Once-ler owned the trees, his incentives would have been quite different…

Snapdragon’s Journal on the Federal crack down on legitimate pain medicine: America’s obsession with drugs has been costly - in money, lives, and liberty. I don’t think any rational person can dispute that. One relatively new cost is that the War on Drugs has also become the War on Pain Medication, cutting off chronic pain sufferers from the medication that they need. Sick people and their doctors are being treated like criminals.

Elizabeth Marquardt on Fertility Treatments and Women’s Deaths: Alina, coming from a similar socio economic background as Raluca, agreed to OHS as a way to harvest and sell her eggs because she needed money for her upcoming wedding. In January 2005, 20 of her eggs were harvested for which she received $250. Soon after the extraction, she developed OHSS and was hospitalized for 14 days. The clinic where the original procedure took place offered no assistance. Her attending doctor in the hospital made it clear that she would have died had she not sought immediate treatment

Peter Svensson (via Family Scholars) on Paid Maternity Leave: To put it another way, out of 168 nations in a Harvard University study last year, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave, leaving the United States in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

Dean Baker on Pork Spending: While the budget wonk types who frequent MaxSpeak may know the unimportance of this sort of pork in the whole budget, less nerdy types are likely to believe that we are talking about real money. Most people are likely to think that $230 million is a big deal. They may even think that $3 million is a big deal. Of course they are right when talking about the finances of anyone not named “Bill Gates,” but in the context of the whole federal budget, this pork really doesn’t matter.

I’ve been thinking about rape prevention advice lately. Not the transparently nonsensical stuff, like “don’t dress slutty” and “don’t be alone with dodgy men”, but the superficially reasonable advice like “stay aware of your surroundings” and “act as if you’re nobody’s fool”. It won’t stop someone who’s decided to rape you personally as payback for some imagined slight, but it might make you slightly safer overall.

It reminds me of the advice we got during Freshers’ Week at university. I went to university in Liverpool, which has a reputation for all manner of crimes. Although I was living in an all-female hall of residence, I don’t remember any advice specifically about avoiding rape. There were some tips about not getting mugged, and advice about buying drugs (”You might have bought drugs safely in your hometown, but it really isn’t worth the risk round here”), but what sticks best in my mind is the bicycle theft paranoia they managed to instill in me.

We were told stories of bicycle thieves who roamed Liverpool with bolt-cutters and vans, sweeping up any bikes that were left unlocked, or secured with only a flimsy chain, or locked wheel-to-frame. It made such a deep impression on me that I never leave my bike unless the frame is secured to a fixed object with a solid lock.

These precautions don’t make my bike impossible to steal. The lock can still be picked or cut through, by someone who’s set his heart on stealing my bike. But as a theft-prevention strategy, it works because most bicycle thieves aren’t after my bike specifically. They want any bike they can get, and it’s easier to take that one over there that isn’t locked, or that one by the wall that’s only locked wheel-to-frame. Some poor sod is going to get his bike stolen, but with a bit of care I can make sure it isn’t me.

I don’t know how much of that analysis applies to rape, how many rapists choose their victim based on who she is and how many choose based on the fact that she looks like an easy target. But even if the fit is perfect, if the majority of rapists are just looking for an easy target and making yourself look less of a target is a way to keep yourself safe, it’s a depressing way to see the world.

Some poor girl is going to get raped, but with a bit of care you can make sure it isn’t you.

Being raped is a good deal more traumatic than having your bike stolen. That’s why I can accept that my bike lock relies for its effectiveness on someone else being an easier target but can’t do the same for rape risk. If walking tall and staying alert can keep me from being raped, it’s only because someone else who didn’t walk tall enough or stay alert enough gets to suffer instead. That’s not a solution I’m comfortable with; it’s not a world I want to live in.

Walking tall and staying alert is good advice, but we need more than that. I don’t have all the answers, but it would be nice to see a justice system that punished rapists effectively and protected their victims from painful intrusion into their private lives. It would be nice to see a culture that didn’t treat rape as a suitable subject for humour, a slightly off-colour subset of sex.

And it would be nice to walk tall without wondering who is making an easy target to buy my safety tonight.

If you have a top hat around, and a small child, sooner or later you’ll put the one on top of the other. It’s irresistable.

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Samhita on Feministing recently wrote about a study which found that fat women, but not fat men, are discriminated against:

The researcher found that body mass does not effect men in work or in marriage and divorce. Of course not, it is a woman that is judged not by her ability to do a job, but by her height to weight ratio.

This is hardly a new result; many studies of fat discrimination have found minimal, or nonexistent, evidence of discrimination against fat men, although nearly all of them find evidence of discrimination against fat women.

I’m not convinced these findings are accurate. I don’t deny, of course, that fat women are discriminated against more than fat men are; it’s obvious that women are judged more often and more harshly for carrying “extra” weight. But it’s also evident, in my day to day life, that discrimination against fat men does exist and sometimes matters. All fat people - including men - are more likely to be seen as weak-willed, disgusting, and slobby than their otherwise-similar thin counterparts. Why would employment be an exception?

Consider these quotes from hiring managers at various companies (via Big Fat Blog):

Says Scott, a vice president at a sports marketing firm. “If you’re fat - and I don’t mean you need to lose a few pounds like most of us - if you’re huge, you aren’t getting the job. Period.”

“I think fat people are weak people,” says Tom who works for a major bank. “…I don’t want real fat people around me. Whether it’s fair or not, and I know it’s not, I can’t get past that… So, I go with another candidate.”

“So many of the people I work with are fat,” says Anne who works for city government in the northeast. “…The fat people just don’t work as hard or produce as much. I’ll never hire a fat person, and I’ll never say that for attribution. Whether true or not for the overweight population as a whole, I can’t say, but it sure is my experience, and I hire based on my experience.”

None of these folks are saying “I’d hire a fat man, but never a fat women.” Big Fat Blog also quoted an online poll which found that “25% of human resource execs admitted weight had a role in their hiring decisions. Another 35% suggested it might, on a subconscious level.”

With so many hiring managers willing to admit that they discriminate against fat people (and probably more still who discriminate, but who aren’t willing to fess up to it), it seems strange that study after study finds no discrimination against fat men.

So why can’t the studies see discrimination against fat men? Our society’s sexist double-standard, which judges women much more harshly than men for being just a little bit fat, also has the effect of masking discrimination against fat men in these studies.

The study Samhita linked to used BMI as their measurement of who is fat; a BMI of 25 or above makes a person “overweight.” But, as has often been noted, even some ultra-fit but bulky men - Brad Pitt is the usual example - have BMIs that qualify them as being “overweight” or even “obese,” by government standards. But not even the most bigoted anti-fat employer is going to practice anti-fat discrimination against someone who looks like Brad Pitt.

Ultra-fit actors aside, it’s simply more socially acceptable for men to be a little chubby than women. A man with a small “spare tire” - Jay Leno, say - is considered “normal” and not discriminated against; a woman who is objectively carrying around the same amount of “extra” weight around her hips or tummy is considered fat, and will be discriminated against.

Of course, this double-standard benefits men - men are given far more latitude to be “fat” without experiencing anti-fat discrimination. But for those men who do qualify as “fat,” even by the more relaxed standards men are held to, anti-fat discrimination is real. It would be nice if studies of discrimination reflected this reality.

Studies show that “overweight” women - even those who are only slightly “overweight” - are discriminated against for their weight. On the other hand, men who are (by the government’s BMI standards) slightly “overweight” probably don’t experience anti-fat discrimination at all. So when all men with BMIs of 25 or above are averaged together - the Brad Pitts and the Jay Lenos treated as if they’re in the same category as men who look like John Goodman - the discrimination experienced by the genuinely fat men is averaged out with the more numerous experiences of “overweight” men who aren’t considered fat at all. The result is the probably incorrect finding that fat men experience no discrimination at all.

To compound the problem, many studies “excluded extreme values” from their samples. For example, the study Feministing discussed simply dropped all people who weigh over 400 pounds - most of whom were probably men - from consideration. But that seems dubious; is there any reason to suppose that a man (or woman) who weighs 405 pounds is less likely to experience fat discrimination?

My guess is that a study of men who weigh 300 pounds or more - or that used a much higher BMI cutoff (say 35 or above) - would find quite a lot of anti-fat discrimination against men that current studies are ignoring.