It’s on Seeworthy!

I’m a little hesitant to post this, because — although Campos never actually blames white women for the obsession with weight loss (in fact, Campos describes it as something done to white women — he describes anti-fat “neuroses” as something “middle- and upper-class American white women… are taught from a very early age”), he doesn’t do much to cut off that reading either.

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The Health Select Committee has just recommended extending paid parental leave to six months, to encourage breast feeding.

As a supporter of paid parental leave (or, more accurately, as someone who believes that paid parental leave doesn’t go nearly far enough and that parenting should be resourced as the work it is) I should be happy.

Here’s the reason the Health Select Committee has decided breastfeeding is important:

The promotion of breastfeeding for at least the first six months, and preferably for the first year, is widely recommended, as it has an important protective role against obesity during childhood and adolescence, and may also protect mothers against obesity and diabetes.

Apparently women are en-slimmening machines. The main value of our breast-feeding, indeed of parenting in the first six months, is preventing fat cells.

This is from the report into obesity and type 2 diabetes; I may write more later. Although what I actually want to do to the report is to batter it, deep fry it, and then slather it with icing.

While I write a bit about bodies, fat and ‘the obesity epidemic’ I don’t write that much about the health aspects of this. Mostly because I largely find them irrelevant. Other people can do very good jobs of proving that the causative relationship between having a high BMI and negative health outcomes remain unproven at best. I think that in many ways this gives too much ground. Even if, someone down the track, they managed to prove that there is a causative relationship between being fat and dying earlier, then my problems with the way people talk about ‘the obesity epidemic’ wouldn’t change. Partly this is empirical - we have a couple of generations of women (particularly white middle-class women) who have been (and are being) told that their value as a human being was dependent on not taking up space, that hasn’t made all middle-class white women skinny. But it’s also part of my wider analysis: I don’t believe that health issues are an individual problem (let alone an individual moral problem).

But sometimes I read something that makes me go ‘How can anyone believe the shit that gets promulgated?”

In this case I was listening to a radio interview and they were talking about the death rate among Pakeha and Maori.* In this discussion the interview mentioned part of this was because the death rate from cardio-vascular disease has decreased hugely (over 50% for some ethnicities). This was partly because cadio-vascular disease is decreasing, and partly because people with cardio-vascular disease are living longer.

So where’s this ‘obesity epidemic’ and how is it supposed to be killing people if death from cardio-vascular disease has halved?

* Apparently the gap has gotten smaller, which is great until you hear that the Maori death rate between the ages of 1-74 is still two to three times that of Euopean/Other. Also just because it can’t be repeated enough health disparities were widening in the 80s and 90s:

It seems likely widening social gaps during the 80s and 90s, including income and unemployment differences between ethnic groups, were at least partly responsible for the widening health inequalities, Prof Blakely said.

Project Runway has got everything you’d want in a reality show, interesting challenges, weird people and a look at a different world. In the most recent episode here in NZ the challenge was to design for another contestant’s mother or sister. There was a lot gross about the way things were done; the designers got to pick the relatives, which was a ‘we want skinny people’ version of picking teams at school. But the episode as a whole was fascinating, most of the designers were truly stumped by designing for people who weren’t models, particularly fat people who weren’t models.

I think it was Robert Best who said “I don’t understand these proportions”. His day job is to design for Barbie.

Jeffrey, who is a misogynist prick at the best of times, said “If I go then there’s nothing I could have done - I couldn’t have prepared for this challenge.”

It makes me want to read about the history of fashion to figure out how we got here. Where there is a whole occupation, models, to make women to fit its clothes. We’re so used to this ridiculous artifice that it’s absurdity is only brought home when barbies proportions make sense to a designer, and a woman’s, any woman’s, proportions do not.

I’ve decided New Zealand needs to export Maurice Williamson, one of our opposition politicians. Maurice Williamson recently joined the debate on the ‘obesity epidemic’:

If some people can’t lose weight no matter what. how come there were not fat people in the Nazi concentration camps?

Concentration camps? Of course that’s the solution to the ‘obesity epidemic’ why didn’t anyone think of it sooner. That’s the way to make my body socially acceptable.

Although rest assured Maurice Williamson doesn’t actually want to put us in concentration camps:

When Sainsbury asked Mr Williamson on air if it was wise to use such an analogy, the MP replied: “Maybe it wasn’t”.

But he said it was a good example of people getting a very low level of nutrients and working hard.

“No one’s saying put them in a concentration camp but it is important to know that if you are working hard burning calories and not taking them into your mouth you won’t put on weight.”

He does understand that people died from having a low level of nutrients and working hard doesn’t he?

While looking for something else, I ran into Why can’t the United States stop circumcising boys?, an interesting essay by Robert Darby. Widespread male circumcision is a phenomenon that, in wealthy countries, has happened almost exclusively¹ in English-speaking countries, and that has faded in every English-speaking country but the USA, where the majority of boys are still circumcised.

So why the American exceptionalism? Despite the title of Darby’s essay, he doesn’t provide a convincing answer, and some of the possibilities brought up seem unlikely to explain the distinction. (For example, I’m sure that the profit motive is important to circumcision — did you know that hospitals make huge profits selling cut-off foreskins?² — but I don’t see any reason to expect that to be more the case in the US than in other countries).

Darby does suggest a legislative approach to reducing male circumcision, short of an outright ban, which is to stop having the government pay for it. In California, the circumcision rate plummeted once Medicaid coverage ended.

Two things annoyed me about Darby’s essay. First off, the seemingly obligatory passage³ , in any essay objecting to male circumcision, comparing the practice to female circumcision:

The claims of culture are taken very seriously in this age of globalization, but the problem with this particular claim is that it is applied inconsistently. First, there is discrimination based on gender. No matter how important circumcision of girls may be to the cultural/ethnic/religious groups that practise it, American opinion has determined that girls’ bodies are more important than tradition, and that any cutting of the female genitals is Female Genital Mutilation, now banned by law. Secondly, the cultural argument seems to be a one-way street. When faced by parents from circumcising cultures, doctors say they must respect their traditions and accede to their wishes, at least in relation to boys. But when it comes to non-circumcising cultures (the great majority) the argument is suddenly reversed: instead of enjoying automatic respect for their traditions, parents from non-circumcising cultures are pressured to conform to the American norm and to consent to have their sons circumcised, so that they will be “like other boys”.

A more likely explanation than gender-based discrimination is discrimination based on culture (otherwise known as xenophobia); of course we venerate our own cultural acts of child abuse even while correctly disliking the child abuse practiced by other cultures. It’s also the case that, bad as male circumcision is, FGM is in many ways worse; the implicit assumption that the two circumcisions are equivalent (and therefore there is no reason other than sexism that anyone might find FGM more objectionable) doesn’t hold water.

That said, regardless of what US circumcision practice is based on, the effect is a form of child abuse practiced nearly exclusively on boys, and that’s objectionable from a feminist point of view.

Darby also writes:

No matter how many statistics-laden articles get published in medical journals, circumcision cannot shake off the traces of its Victorian origins. It remains the last surviving example of a once respectable proposition that disease could be prevented by the pre-emptive removal of normal body parts which, though healthy, were thought to be a weak link in the body’s defences. In its heyday this medical breakthrough, described by Ann Dally as “fantasy surgery”, enjoyed wide esteem and included excisions of other supposed foci or portals of infection, such as the adenoids, tonsils, teeth, appendix and large intestine.

But circumcision is not “the last surviving” example of such a widespread practice in the US; weight loss surgery is skyrocketing in popularity, justified by unproven long-term preventative effects.

P.S. Also interesting: Darby’s review of the book Madhouse – about Henry Cotton, administrator of a New Jersey asylum, who for decades forcibly removed teeth and other body parts from unwilling patients “for their own good,” and was much admired for this practice.

Cotton was not just a fanatic applying the physicalist procedures of mainstream medicine to the new field of psychiatry, but the embodiment of a deep-seated trend in the medical profession itself: the assumption that if these wise experts think some sort of treatment or procedure is good for you, it is your duty to submit to it, and even that they are entitled–by virtue of their scientific understanding and promise of benefit–to force it on you, with or without informed consent. Throughout his career, Cotton insisted that he was at the forefront of scientific rationality and that his therapies must be enforced because they flowed inexorably, as a matter of mere logic, from the facts of disease as established by the science of which he was the anointed interpreter. He claimed that his approach was based on “scientific medicine,” the germ theory of disease, and “scientific evidence and proof.” His published articles are peppered with terms like “progressive medical men,” “indisputable facts,” “modern medical knowledge”; it hardly needs to be said that they were totally innocent of any ethical awareness.

1. I say “almost exclusively” because I suspect circumcision of boys is widespread in Israel. (back)
2. From Darby’s essay: “In the age of biotechnology and tissue engineering, human body parts have a high market value, and baby foreskins are especially prized as the raw material for many biomedical products, from skin grafts to anti-wrinkle cream. The strongest pressure for the continuation of circumcision may not be from doctors at all, but from the hospitals which harvest the foreskins and sell them to commercial partners. This would explain why so many mothers are still pressured to sign consent forms when they arrive for their delivery.” (back)
3. Although Amanda points out an exception to this rule. (back)

Jill at Feministe points out this Salon article arguing that big “rumps” are endangering black women’s health. The article is offensive in any number of ways. But it’s this paragraph in particular which struck me:

Recent press reports show why black women should be alarmed: More than half of us are obese — 78 percent are considered overweight. And, according to the American Obesity Association, the pounds are not coming off easily, due to “cultural factors related to diet, exercise and weight among African-Americans.”

Newsflash: There’s no such thing as a culture in which pounds do come off easily (at least, not in the long term). “Cultural factors” don’t make weight-loss diets hard; weight loss-diets are hard, for the vast majority of fat people in any culture.

The Centers for Disease Control finds that rates of […] premature death¹ are higher among black women, and when we get these diseases, we’re sicker than white women.

It’s true that black women live less long than white women, on average. (”Life expectancy for white women is 79.8 years; for black women, 74.7 years.”)² But it’s simply a lie to claim that black women are dying younger because they’re overweight.

Here’s a table showing relative risk of death, by sex and by race. This table, which I’ve posted before, comes from a study³ which is frequently cited by those arguing that fat is deadly.

But if we look at the details, we see that only for the very fattest black women — the outliers — is being overweight associated with higher mortality. What the statistics actually show is that black women, more than anyone else, have an elevated risk of death if they’re in the “normal weight” category, and live longest if they’re in the “overweight” category.

The “fat equals death” hysteria in the media is dubious for anyone, but black women above all shouldn’t be taking it at face value. In fact, black women who manage to become “normal” weight may be damaging their life expectancy. The knee-jerk belief in weight loss as the cure for most ills is bad advice for almost everyone, but it’s probably worse advice for black women than for any other demographic group.

But here’s the kicker: Womenshealth.gov reports that “compared with overweight white Americans, overweight black Americans are two to three times more likely to say their weight is average — even after they’ve been told they are overweight or obese by a doctor (emphasis added).

That’s her “kicker”? This author is completely ignorant of even the basic meanings of terms like “average” and “overweight.” Being “average” and being “overweight” are not mutually exclusive.

“Overweight,” as most doctors now use the term, means having a BMI⁴ between 25 and 30. As it happens, according to the most recent NHAMES survey — the most accurate survey of American’s weight and height yet done — the average American woman has a BMI of 28.2.⁵ So being overweight is average; the people this author sneers at for being ignorant have a firmer grasp of the facts than she does.

Finally, even according to the mainstream medical establishment, what matters about fat is not only how much you have, but where the fat is located on your body. The least health place to have fat, according to mainstream medical thinking, is around your waist. Fat on the ass and thighs is, even according to mainstream medicine, relatively healthy.

1. In addition to premature death, she also mentions higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and cancer in black women. These are legitimate concerns, but there are better ways to help women with these problems than by saying that “overweight” women should become “normal” weight, a course of treatment that will in practice not be possible for the vast majority of “overweight” people. (back)
2. ”…for white men, 74.3 years; and for black men, 67.3 years.” Source. (back)
3. Adams, K., et al., Overweight, Obesity, and Mortality in a Large Prospective Cohort of Persons 50 to 71 Years Old. New England Journal of Medicine, 2006. 355(8): p. 763-8. (Pdf link.) (back)
4. Body Mass Index — Wikipedia has an explanation of what this is, if you don’t already know. (back)
5. The average American man has a BMI of 27.6. Source. (back)

This is what happens when ‘your employer owns your body and soul’ cross-breeds with ‘nothing is more dangerous than fat.’ A treadmill desk designed by the Mayo clinic. Don’t mock because they were seriously scientific about their research:

“If obese individuals were to replace time spent sitting at the computer with walking computer time by 2 to 3 hours a day, and if other components of energy balance were constant, a weight loss of 20 to 30kg a year could occur,”

It’s none of our employer’s business whether or not we lose 20 to 30 kg, or gain 20 or 30 kg. Our bodies and our lives should belong to us, that’s the basic meaning of freedom.

Update: I almost forgot to give a shout out to Big Fat Blog, which got a mention in the article. 

The New York Times featured a story on Leonard Nimoy’s fat nudes exhibit in Northhampton, MA.  Here is an extended quote from the article:

He knows that he is an unlikely champion for the size-acceptance movement; body image is a topic he never really thought about before. But for the last eight years, Mr. Nimoy, who is 76 and an established photographer, has been snapping pictures of plus-size women in all their naked glory.

He has a show of photographs of obese women on view at the R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, Mass., through June; a larger show at the gallery is scheduled to coincide with the November publication of his book on the subject, “The Full Body Project,” from Five Ties Publishing. The Louis Stern Fine Arts gallery in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston have acquired a few images from the project. A few hang at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York. (Their explicitness prevents the images from being reprinted here.)

These women are not hiding beneath muumuus or waving from the bottom of the Grand Canyon à la Carnie Wilson in early Wilson Phillips videos. They are fleshy and proud, celebrating their girth, reveling in it. It is, Mr. Nimoy says, a direct response to the pressure women face to conform to a Size 2.

“The average American woman, according to articles I’ve read, weighs 25 percent more than the models who are showing the clothes they are being sold,” Mr. Nimoy said, his breathing slightly labored by allergies and a mild case of emphysema. “So, most women will not be able to look like those models. But they’re being presented with clothes, cosmetics, surgery, diet pills, diet programs, therapy, with the idea that they can aspire to look like those people. It’s a big, big industry. Billions of dollars. And the cruelest part of it is that these women are being told, ‘You don’t look right.’ ”

If you want to read the whole piece go here.

On a personal note, I have been thinking about generational differences (or in sociology speak cohort effects) in attitudes towards fatness.  While I remember my grandparents making comments about how fat people were, I don’t remember the ire associated with it that you see for so many younger people.  It also seemed to me that their definition of fatness was different. 

I started thinking about this after reading this piece because I’m not so surprised that this is coming from an older man of my grandparents generation.  I would have been much more surprised to see a younger male actor or artists come out for fat acceptance/rights. 

I’m just speculating, but what do you think about this?  Do you think there are generational differences around attitudes toward fatness?  If so, what do you think they are?

From CNN’s political ticker:

CHOCOLATE, SODA, CIGARS AMONG CANDIDATE BAD HABITS: When The Associated Press asked the presidential candidates about their bad habits, they did not fess up to anything that would sink the republic. John Edwards drinks his bad habit out of a can or bottle - he is a voracious consumer of orange soda. Barack Obama is chewing nicotine gum these days to beat his bad habit and chose something else to mention here. […]

Bill Richardson acknowledged what has been obvious at various campaign functions: He has been eating what’s in front of him, breaking from his regimen of protein shakes.

It’s difficult to imagine that eating at a campaign dinner would be considered a “bad habit” in a non-fat candidate.

(And what does “what’s in front of him” mean? Most people eat from the plates set in front of them. Should Richardson have eaten from the plates of the people sitting to either side, instead?)

It’s on YouTube, and it’s awesome.

Curtsy: Cool Beans. As Bean says, Joy Nash, I love you!

Also, check out the term paper on “Fat and Oppression” she wrote a few years ago. There’s some especially interesting stuff in light of the discussions of “oppression” we’ve been having here recently. And also this factoid:

FAT!SO? author, Wann, cites a study reported in the International Journal of Obesity stating that “a whopping 95 percent of the people who lose weight on diets gain back every pound within three years… Other researchers have found failure rates for diets as high as 98 percent.”  But what’s really astonishing is that, as Poulton explains, “we blame the 95-98 percent failure rate of diets on dieters instead of applying basic cause-and-effect logic” (84). Success is practically a freak occurrence, and yet we still see dieting as a plausible option for losing weight and “changing lives.”

The national office of Delta Zeta Sorority was disappointed with its chapter at DePauw University, so they decided to come in and conduct a review, which resulted in them purging the sorority of all of the women of color and the overweight women.  The New York Times reported on the story.  Here is a quote:

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

“Virtually everyone who didn’t fit a certain sorority member archetype was told to leave,” said Kate Holloway, a senior who withdrew from the chapter during its reorganization.

The article also suggests that one of the “problems” with the sorority was that it had a reputation for attracting brainy women, who were in math and science.  In order to revamp their image the national office of the organization tried to remake the sorority in a way that would make them more attractive to white fraternity guys, which apparently in their view meant that the women had to be skinny, white, and dumb.

This is not the first time the sorority engaged in discriminatory behavior.

This is not the first time that the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta has stirred controversy. In 1982, it attracted national attention when a black student was not allowed to join, provoking accusations of racial discrimination.

Earlier this month, an Alabama lawyer and several other DePauw alumni who graduated in 1970 described in a letter to The DePauw, the student newspaper, how Delta Zeta’s national leadership had tried unsuccessfully to block a young woman with a black father and a white mother from joining its DePauw chapter in 1967.

Despite those incidents, the chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted brainy women, including many science and math majors, as well as talented disabled women, without focusing as exclusively as some sororities on potential recruits’ sex appeal, former sorority members said.

It sounds like the sorority was doing just fine.  If they needed to get their numbers up, they should have no problem attracting other intelligent women.

Unfortunately, this story supports all of the worst stereotypes of fraternities and sororities–they’re bigoted, party animals, who don’t care about school. 

Thanks to Rory for the link!

I’ve just read two very irritating articles in the guardian. Both purport to be about feminism and dieting - but both make Linda Hirschman’s version of feminism look like it belongs in ‘Notes from the First Year.’ Zoe Williams article is called You’re Vain and Stupid and the first sentance says: “Women who fixate on their weight should relinquish their right to be taken seriously.” I don’t even know where to start with this - when did women even win the right to be taken seriously? But the real reason Zoe Williams argument is not feminist is because it asks the question ‘why do women fixate about their weight’ and answers it ‘because they’re stupid’.

Feminism’s most basic tenet is women’s problems are structural and political, not individual. “Because women are stupid” is rarely a feminist answer to any question.

Even more annoying was India Knight’s reply to Zoe Williams (who are these people? I don’t know either - apparently they’re people that guardian readers would have heard of) titled It’s not anti-feminist to go on a diet (thanks to Big Fat Blog for the link). This is a misleading start, because India Knight didn’t just go on a diet, she wrote a diet book. At least part of her living now comes in telling other women how to lose weight. If this article is anything to go by she drums up business by making fat women feel worse about themselves (she asks “Why is it good to be pleased that you look like a pig?”)

What is so awful, so anti-feminist, about her article, is the narrative she tells about being fat:

You may occupy a great deal of physical space if you’re very fat, but in everyday life, it’s as though you weren’t there. Sales assistants stare blankly through you. Men pretend you don’t exist, or start calling you “mate”. You wonder whether your children are embarrassed to be seen with you in public (the answer to that one is yes, probably). You wish you could go for a bike ride with them, but you’re too self-conscious, because you look like a potato balanced on an ant. You can only buy clothes in specialist shops, and these clothes are as undesirable as you have started to feel. Your self-esteem - well, I was going to say “plummets”, but it’s hard to plummet when you’ve reached rock bottom.

She’s right - it sucks to be a fat woman in our society, it really fucking sucks. But every single example she gives isn’t directly about being fat, it’s about how people react to fat people. Her argument appears to be that men treat fat women like shit, so the solution is to stop being fat. That doesn’t resemble any kind of feminism I know.

She reaches a low point when she suggests weight loss as a solution for an abusive relationship:

just as I cheer for the woman whose husband puts her and her weight down every single day. One of these days, he’s going to have to stop. One of these days, she and her new-found confidence aren’t going to take it any more.

On first glance this is relatively trivial issue, which reminds me about everything that irritates me about the Guardian. But it’s actually about a much more fundamental issue, which is how we define feminism. This is what happens when we suggest individual solutions for collective problems. We all need to find ways to live as best we can with the problems that living in a misogynist world creates and I’d never criticise anyone else for feeling the need to lose weight or obsess about food. These sorts of survival mechanisms are neither feminist nor anti-feminist, they’re what you’ve got to do. It’s when your survival mechanisms make life harder for other women, for example if you denigrate fat women and reinforce society’s idea about the relationship between morality and food, then that’s anti-feminism. I think Emma Thompson summed up this dilema brilliantly:

As an artist, you can choose not to sell women down the river. When I decide, for instance, not to diet myself into a starved condition to play someone like Dora Carrington, then that’s a political act. And I was being lampooned by male journalists, saying: Who would want to sleep with her? She’s not that kind of shape. So I paid the price, but I would never betray other women in that way. I just wouldn’t do it and I’ve never done it. She pauses…. God, I’ve gone on every single diet under the sun, but I’ve never got slender in a very particular way for any role.

No being a feminist doesn’t give us magic powers to exit from a world that’s obsessed with our bodies. But it does mean, at a minimum, that we have a responsibility not to add to that pressure. For Emma Thompson that means she didn’t lose weight to play Carrington, for most of the rest of us it’s simpler, but possibly incredibly different, we have to stop talking about food and our bodies in any way that reinforces the hatred other women have for their bodies.

That certainly includes writing a diet book or saying that fat women look like pigs.

Thanks to Bean for making me watch this: The Tyra Banks Show in which she responded to the tabloids complaining that she’s gotten fat. I’m not sure I even knew who Tyra Banks was two weeks ago, but now I’m a fan.

Bank’s opening speech — which she delivered in front of a monitor displaying the “unflattering” swimsuit photo the tabloids all published, wearing the same swimsuit she wore in the photo — is stunning, smart, and justifiably angry. (And also displays a degree of body confidence I simply cannot imagine possessing).

Here’s a link to the youtube video of her speech, and here’s a transcript of an interview Banks gave to Larry King.

Amy at Feminist Reprise has a really interesting post about shopping while fat when she was trying to buy clothes for an interview. Even with the help of readers she couldn’t get anything suitable for less than $300:

Add to that the cost of my time (and Rebecca’s, and Heidi’s, and Pony’s) to do all this research. That’s for one outfit, for one interview. All of you who, if you had to, could trot down to Ross Dress for Less, TJ Maxx, Old Navy, The Gap, or best of all, a Goodwill in a ritzy neighborhood**, and find clothes in your size that would tell an employer that you’re a responsible, socially acceptable, employable adult–how much do you think you’d spend on an interview outfit? Anything close to $300? No? That’s thin privilege.

I think Amy has misnamed the problem. I’ve written in different ways why I find the term thin privilege problematic. But actually it’s not the way Amy uses privilege I disagree with as much as the ‘thin’ part.

Being able to easily buy clothes (and even more so op-shops) is something that many people take for granted. I can wear clothes from enough mainstream stores to make shopping for clothes reasonably easy, but there are lots of places I know I shouldn’t even bother looking in, and so I understand how much harder life would be if I was just a bit larger.

But my friend Betsy, she has real problems buying clothes. She’s small, and her body is an unusual shape. When she had an office job finding appropriate clothes was an expensive nightmare. She couldn’t buy a single pair of work quality trousers, she had to get them made up (luckily WINZ paid¹ ). She never found a suitable pair of formal work shoes — they probably don’t exist, and couldn’t be made. Despite this, despite the effort and expense, her manager told her several times that she needed a more professional image. Presumably it never occurred to the manager that this actually involved more than popping down to a ridiculously expensive store and buying more clothes. It never occurred to this manager that the standards she preached wouldn’t be available.

The experience of being able to find clothes that fit reasonably easily and affordably is something that many people take for granted.² To call this ability ‘thin privilege’ ignores the other reasons clothes don’t fit people’s bodies. I think it is really unproductive to divide these experiences — so if Amy is writing the story the reader can buy clothes because of thin privilege, whereas if Betsy was writing the clothes the reader can buy clothes because of able-bodied privilege.

I think it’s really important to name our problems right - and there are plenty of thin people who can’t find clothes that fit them. Those people (and their supporters) should demand that clothes are made for the people who wear them, rather than for profit,³ and we can all demand that our ability to do work is not judged by an appearance standard that some people will never be able to meet.

1. New Zealand’s social welfare system offers grants to people who are entering employment to buy suitable clothes. (back)
2. Of course there are other people who could theoretically buy clothes at mainstream stores or op-shops but can’t afford to buy clothes at all. (back)
3. My banner at that protest would all be about cup-sized shirts and togs. (back)

Today I was at a community house for local activists/radicals/anarchists and found this sticker posted underneath by the water dispenser:

Surgeon General’s Warning:
Consumption of soft drink bevarages may result in
Rotten teeth, diabetes, obesity, malnutrition, osteoporosis, & Cancer

Well it wasn’t exactly like that, because it was all in caps.

I took it down, and tomorrow I’m going to leave this in its place:

To the person who put up that sticker, and everyone else who couldn’t be bothered to take it down.

I have gotten tired of taking down messages that reinforce mainstream ideas about food and bodies. Rather than just removing that sticker, I am going to explain why I find it problematic - in the hope that one day people will stop putting such messages up - or at least other people will take them down before I see them.

1. I have no idea why you thought this message is necessary. Presumably you believe that there are people out there who have been deprived of the information that soft-drinks can lead to rotten teeth, and there only way of accessing this information is through alternative channels. We obviously live in very different worlds.

2. Telling people that they shouldn’t eat a particular food because they might get fat, is about as un-radical message as you can find. I’m not even going to go there, you should know better.

3. As activists we should be focusing on health collectively rather than individually. We challenge the system of unemployment rather than blaming people for not getting a job. Surely we should challenge the system of food production rather than blaming people for getting sick

4. Think for a second about people who have the diseases listed - would you really be ok with someone with rotten teeth reading that? Are you even aware about the link between rotten teeth and poverty? Is this just another way of making sure that only middle-class alternative types feel comfortable in this space?

So lets stop with the moralistic bullshit around food. Let’s treat food politically or ignore it. Repeating mainstream messages is not an option.

PS: Surgeon General? Can we please stick to the bureaucrats we are actually inflicted with, without borrowing other people’s?

I think it was a New Year’s Day party that my parents were holding; I would have been thirteen or fourteen. It was near the end of the party and all my mothers’ closest friends were talking, trying to get up the energy to round up their kids and leave. One of the women started explaining this great diet she was about to go on and even though it was fifteen years ago I can still remember the details she described. But what I remember more was noticing other people’s reactions. None of the men cared about the conversation, and my little sisters and their friends just kept on playing, but every single woman in the room was treating this as important information that deserved respect. Then I noticed that I was paying attention to the conversation - did this mean I was a woman?

Jill from Feministe wrote a really good post on the proposal to print children’s BMI on their report cards. It’s not her argument that I want to respond to (although I agreed with 99% of it), but the position from which she wrote. She starts: “When I was in elementary school, we had annual weigh-ins. I dreaded weigh-in day more than just about any other day of the year,” and continues:

From there, I spent most of my life engaging in restrictive eating behaviors, and volleying back and forth between extremes of “being skinny will make me happy and so therefore I’m only going to consume 800 calories a day” and “this is ridiculous, I’m a feminist and I’m not going to buy into this shit, so I’m going to eat whatever I want, even if that means binging and gaining 10 pounds in a single month” (that’s where I was at last month, and now I’m miserable). Even at 23, I still feel completely out of control when it comes to my weight, and I still go back and forth between a desire to be thin and an ideology which conflicts with that desire.

What I think is so important in what Jill wrote is that for many women feminism does not solve our relationship between food and our bodies, it just helps name the problems. It’s also a lot easier to talk about food and body politics in the abstract, which can leave everyone feeling that they’re a bad feminist for not figuring out this stuff by themselves.

A lot of women on this heartbreaking, rage-inducing, thread that piny started, talked about the conflict between feminism and their feelings about their body. Or going further, that feminist analysis just adds a level of guilt to what they’re doing, that they should be strong enough and smart enough not to let this society get to us.

Which is bullshit, we do the best that we can, but none of us are strong enough and smart enough to deal with all of this on our own. (I say “all of this” deliberately, because I think body and food issues are about society’s image of women, but they’re also about so much more. They’re about control and losing control. They’re a way of conforming with what women should be, and a way of resisting.)

If we’re going to do anything that allows us to take up space, we’re going to have to do it together.

As a feminist, that much is clear. I’m just not sure what I do with this analysis; what it means for the way I talk to other women. I am reaching the breaking point in terms of listening to the female dialog around food and our bodies that exists among the women I know. If I never again hear someone insult her body, or what I’m eating, it’ll be way too soon. I don’t want to listen anymore for me, and I don’t want that to be around for other women to hear.

That doesn’t get me anywhere much. Being comparatively noisy about the fact that I think the common discourse about food and our bodies is really fucked up makes that noise a little quieter when I’m around. Which is great for me, but it doesn’t help build anything new.

But I’m not sure we can build anything new within this environment. I’ve seen how activists can make mainstream diet advice look alternative. It’s a hegemony so perfect that we can’t say anything about food and our bodies that doesn’t reinforce the status quo.

More than that, I don’t know how to have this conversation without hurting other women, without hurting myself. I’ve been told that the reason I hold the views I do is because of my size, so challenging a woman who is smaller than me on what she says feels really risky. Food and our bodies are systems that are left to women to police, which works only too well to give us extraordinary power over each other.

I write about collective action, but I don’t know how to get there on this issue. I don’t even know how to get from where we are now to a point where we can have the conversation that would help us take the next step.

I’m still angry with the women who were at the party that day (feminists all). I’m angry that their feminism didn’t even stop them hating their bodies in front of us. I want the generation of feminists I am part of to at least recognize the harm we could do to our daughters (and each other). But I want to go further than that, I want to find a way to stop the harm we do to ourselves, and I don’t know how to do that. I’m worried that if we start by asking that women stop degrading themselves and the foods that nurture us, we’ll never get any further, because we’ll just drive those thoughts underground.

* From a commenter on feministe.

From Shakespeare’s Sister:

It remains a radical act to be fat and happy in America, especially if you’re a woman (for whom “jolly” fatness isn’t an option). If you’re fat, you’re not only meant to be unhappy, but deeply ashamed of yourself, projecting at all times an apologetic nature, indicative of your everlasting remorse for having wrought your monstrous self upon the world. You are certainly not meant to be bold, or assertive, or confident—and should you manage to overcome the constant drumbeat of messages that you are ugly and unsexy and have earned equally society’s disdain and your own self-hatred, should you forget your place and walk into the world one day with your head held high, you are to be reminded by the cow-calls and contemptuous looks of perfect strangers that you are not supposed to have self-esteem; you don’t deserve it. Being publicly fat and happy is hard; being publicly, shamelessly, unshakably fat and happy is an act of both will and bravery.

I quite agree. There’s more at SS’s place.

An AP article reports on a new study, published in this month’s Pediatrics. The study found that teen girls who “frequently read magazine articles about dieting” five years ago, are two to three times more likely to use means such as fasting, laxatives, induced vomiting and cigarette smoking to lose weight, compared to girls who don’t read such articles as often.

It didn’t seem to matter whether the girls were overweight when they started reading about weight loss, nor whether they considered their weight important. After taking those factors into account, researchers still found reading articles about dieting predicted later unhealthy weight loss behavior.

44% of girls reported reading such articles, compared to 14% of boys. The study didn’t find any effects of the articles on boys.

There’s a sort of “duh!” response to articles like this - I mean, of course girls who read lots of articles about weight loss are more likely to be sticking fingers down their throats or fasting or whatever. What’s surprising to me is that no such effect was found among boys, since I’ve read several articles suggesting that boys are becoming more body-conscious and fat-phobic.

So here’s a thought: If we can ban trans fats in restaurants to protect health, can we also ban diet articles from teen girl magazines to protect health?