I think INDD has the best origin story of any holiday. From Wikipedia:

The concept of INDD originated at 1992, when British Feminist Mary Evans Young decided to fight the diet industry and to raise awareness of the dangers in anorexia and other eating disorders. In order to do that, Evans Young addressed the local media saying “Fat Woman Bites Back”. When she was interviewed on television, she “reminded” the audience to celebrate the International No Diet Day on May 6. This specific date had no specific reason other than its proximity to the television interview.

Followed that interview, feminist groups around UK celebrated the INDD, and as the years went by, groups in other countries around the globe started to celebrate this day, especially in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and Israel.

So whatever you do today, don’t diet. And maybe go enjoy a Chinese buffet.

Or celebrate the day by purchasing a copy of Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby’s new book, Lessons From The Fat-O-Sphere: Quit Dieting And Declare A Truce With Your Body (currently the #1 bestseller at Powell’s). Kate’s been asking people to plug it for INDD, and I don’t have any hesitation about plugging it unread, because both those writers’ blogs kick ass.

From an Associated Press story, reporting on the widespread objections among mom-bloggers to the “new Dora” doll planned for October:

Mattel and Nickelodeon both say there are two major misconceptions about the new Dora, which is not replacing the “Dora the Explorer” cartoon, but will be a new interactive doll aimed at the five-to eight-year-old, or tween market.

“People care so deeply about this brand and this character,” Leigh Anne Brodsky, president of Nickelodeon Viacom Consumer Products, says. “The Dora that we all know and love is not going away.”

“I think there was just a misconception in terms of where we were going with this,” Gina Sirard, vice president of marketing at Mattel, says. “Pretty much the moms who are petitioning aging Dora up certainly don’t understand. . . . I think they’re going to be pleasantly happy once this is available in October, and once they understand this certainly isn’t what they are conjuring up.”

Part of the confusion stemmed from the silhouette that was released, which made Dora look more like a Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan than a young girl. For the record, the doll does not wear a short dress, but a tunic and leggings. And while she looks older (she’s supposed to be about 10), with longer jewelry and longer hair, she doesn’t have makeup and seems pretty much like a 10-year-old girl.

Nickelodeon and Mattel say that as part of unrelated research, they found parents wanted a way to keep Dora in their children’s lives and have their daughters move on to a toy that was age appropriate.

“The idea is Dora for more girls,” Brodsky says. “The whole point was this was created because moms said help us.”

Oh, those silly, silly moms! When will they realize that Nickelodeon and Mattel only want to help?

But then again… compare and contrast:

(Also, it looks to me like maybe the image on the left is wearing a dress, which cuts off at knee-level, as opposed to the tunic on the right which cuts off much higher and is worn with leggings. Silhouette found here and here.)

Confusingly, there’s another silhouette illustration of the New Dora I’ve seen, which is just the non-silhouette illustration with the details blacked out. As far as I can tell, Mattel released two different teaser silhouette drawings, but I’m not sure of the timing.

Honestly, assuming the newer illustration reflects what the doll will look like, things could be much worse. The original Dora will still be on TV. Dora’s new outfit is funky and fashionable, without being overly sexualized as the Bratz outfits are. And I’m always happy to see a mainstream doll that’s not white. There’s still a ton wrong, but there are way worse dolls on the market.

But still — the original Dora was ever so much cooler.

More blogging about “New Dora”:

Womanist Musings: Dora The Explorer Matters To Boys
Sociological Images: Seeing Is Believing
Viva La Feminista: Why Mattel and Nick Have It Wrong (Highly recommended. Check out her Dora tag as well, for more Dora-themed posts.)
The Hand Mirror: Dora’s new silhouette announced
Embrace Your Age: Keep Dora Exploring!
The Mommy Files: Dora The New Sexy Explorer
Feministing: The New Dora
Shakesville: Sooo

Finally, let me link to my own post from 2007, to make the point that this isn’t the first time Dora’s owners have thought “boy, if we could only sell a thinner, more girly Dora doll, we’d make a killing!”

I’m getting sick of the-popular-kids-are-better-at-geek-stuff-than-the-geeks trope, which stinks of noblesse oblige. And there are a zillion other things wrong here. But I’ll still be giving this show a try, because I’m that much of a sucker for anything resembling a musical.

But about that preview: Note the unwritten rule in TV that it’s okay to cast a fat actress if she’s black (and especially if she’s black and sings). On the one hand, of course it’s great that some talented fat black actresses are getting work. On the other hand, these actresses are often typecast as sassy, strong-willed types.

I’d rather see fat black women cast in the wide variety of roles white thin men are cast in — when, for example, will we see a fat black female captain of a starship, playing gravitas instead of sass?

ETA: And also, what’s with the kid in the wheelchair? Is it even a speaking role? If it is, you’d never know it from this preview.

It seems to me I’ve seen this a few times — the character of the high school loser in a wheelchair, whose primary narrative purpose — other than being an icon of loserness — is to establish the evilness of the people who reject the kid in the wheelchair, and/or to establish the openminded goodness of the thin, good-looking protagonists who befriend wheelchair loser. (Examples: Heathers, Adams Family Values, Wicked.)¹

Diversity consists of real parts, not just tokenism. Given how very rare characters in wheelchairs are, it’s a shame that a high proportion are done badly.

And why are the thin, ablebodied, pretty, white people always the leads? It’s like, it’s okay to have a bit of diversity in a friend group, so long as we remember who’s really important.

(Via Roz Kaveney — congrats on the agent, Roz! — and a hip tip-with-a-quip ripped from the lip of Kip.)

1. At least the part in Wicked is a speaking, and singing, part, and there’s a bit more to the character. But I want to vomit every time I hear the able-bodied guy blow the wheelchair girl’s mind by suggesting that she can dance — it’s played as if she’s spent her entire life waiting for some able-bodied guy to legitimize her by finding her attractive. As if no one in a wheelchair ever knew that she could dance before the ablebodied came along to let them know. (back)

Sorry I’m fat. I mean, yeah, sure, I try to stay away from beef, and I’m raising my daughter vegetarian, and I drive a small car, and turn out the lights when I leave home, and okay, I’m supportive of plans to reduce greenhouse emissions. But I’m fat, so I’m destroying the world.

Again, I’m sorry.

I’m finding the story about Susan Boyle, a “Britain’s Got Talent” contestant whose audition video has been very popular on Youtube, interesting.

The video (which can be found here) is great fun to watch, because Susan Boyle herself is very appealing, her voice is great, and because it’s always satisfying watching a high point in someone’s life.

But primarily, the video’s fun because everyone likes watching the underdog kick ass.

But the weird thing is, why is she such an underdog? Partly it’s because she’s not TV-pretty (Boyle herself was apparently dismayed by how she looked on TV), and TV has taught us for years that only thin, pretty people have any talent. Partly it’s because she’s heavyset (at least by TV standards, which are harsher for women than men), and partly it’s because she’s nearly fifty. I agree with Crowfoot, who in Shakesville comments wrote:

This has made me bawl my eyes out. I’m also fat and in my forties and feel ugly and I know no one would take me seriously as a performer. I also gave up on acting because of the sexism and the lookism. So watching her up there blowing them all away in the face of their bigotry.. *sniff* The sexism/sizism/lookism displayed by the audience and the judges just breaks my heart. How dare they laugh at her because she isn’t skinny and young and beautiful. Douchebags. How many people’s lives are diminished by this crap? We are a stupid stupid stupid species.

Even more than that, however, I think people were shocked because of the class markers she carries — in her voice, her attitude, and her hair and clothes. Ms Boyle’s presentation fairly screams “working class,” and people don’t expect working class to do good work. Colette Douglas Home writes:

Susan [was] roundly patronised by such mega-talents as [Britain's Got Talent judges] Amanda Holden and the aforementioned Morgan, who told her: “Everyone laughed at you but no-one is laughing now. I’m reeling with shock.” Holden added: “It’s the biggest wake-up call ever.”

Again, why?

The answer is that only the pretty are expected to achieve. Not only do you have to be physically appealing to deserve fame; it seems you now have to be good-looking to merit everyday common respect. If, like Susan (and like millions more), you are plump, middle-aged and too poor or too unworldly to follow fashion or have a good hairdresser, you are a non-person. [...]

She lived with her parents in a four-bedroom council house and, when her father died a decade ago, she cared for her mother and sang in the church choir.

It was an unglamorous existence. She wasn’t the glamorous type - and being a carer isn’t a glamorous life, as the hundreds of thousands who do that most valuable of jobs will testify. [...]

Then, when a special occasion comes along, they might reach, as Susan did, for the frock they bought for a nephew’s wedding. They might, as she did, compound the felony of choosing a colour at odds with her skin tone and an unflattering shape with home-chopped hair, bushy eyebrows and a face without a hint of make-up.

I’m not above judging people by their presentation. Presentation is one of the ways we assure each other that we know what we’re doing. If someone hasn’t learned how to present themselves professionally, we assume that they also haven’t learned how to do their work professionally. And sometimes that’s justified.

The trouble is, a “professional presentation” is bound up in a lot of things — voice, grooming, body shape, clothing — which are in turn connected to class, to race, to body shape, to gender presentation, to disability status, etc.. None of these are hurdles that it’s impossible for (say) a fat Black person auditioning, or applying for a job, to overcome, if they have sufficient talent and drive. But these are hurdles that well-off, abled, gender-normed, thin white men don’t face.

And for the judges and audience to be so utterly shocked that a woman whose presentation isn’t “professional” sings beautifully… it’s says something pretty sad.

But that Ms Boyle was such a hit — and that millions of people have viewed her on YouTube — maybe that says something optimistic. Maybe it says that there are a hell of a lot of us who are sick of the sick, slick standards TV promotes. That would be nice.

Today the Standard had a guest post on ACC (ACC is NZ’s workers compensation scheme -a lthough it covers much more than workers compensation):

The investment losses have been a big part of it but there is also a rising accident rate stemming from our ageing population and climbing obesity rates, which has been foreseen by medical experts for some time. We cannot do much about an aging population really, but obesity is wholly avoidable with smart policy that has some guts behind it.

Why should we focus on obesity? Obese workers have a higher accident rate, take longer to recover, cost more treat and are out of work for a longer period of time. A 2007 Duke University study found that “obese workers filed twice the number of workers’ compensation claims, had seven times higher medical costs from those claims and lost 13 times more days of work from work injury or work illness than did nonobese workers”.

Although they don’t provide a link I’m going to assume the guest poster is quoting from the press release about the study. Here’s a link to the study itself for people who speak science article.

The numbers quoted are absolute numbers, they’re not controlled for anything. In particular, they’re not controlled for occupation.¹ I’m sorry to insult my readership by pointing this out, but the correlation between class and body size is pretty well established, as is the correlation between class and work-place accident rates.

Surprise! When the authors control for occupation (although not income, and managers appear to be treated as the same occupation as workers) the numbers look rather different.² These numbers are expressed in risk ratios, whereby a control group is set at 1, and 2 means something is twice as likely when all the variables that are mentioned have been controlled for (full disclaimer, I could be lying, I don’t understand statistics that well). The risk ratios for number of claims for people who have a BMI of over 25 range from 1.09 to 1.45. To understand how insignificant a risk ratio of that size is here are some of the risk ratios for occupational groups:

Laundry Staff: 7.35
Housekeeper: 6.44
Laboratory Animal Technician: 17.36
Inpatient Nurse: 4.01

The guest posts asks ‘why is ACC costing so much?’ And answers ‘workers’ bodies’. Even though its evidence is a study that demonstrates that the nature of work plays a far bigger role in the numberof workplace accidents than the nature of workers.

I’m a ‘which side are you on’ kind of a girl, and this post makes it very clear which side it’s on. It blames workers and their bodies for workplace accidents. It chooses policing workers bodies, over fighting for workers bodies.

1. There are two other problems with those numbers. First that when it says ‘obese’ and ‘non-obese’ it appears to be comparing people with a BMI of between 18.5-24.9 and a BMI of 40+. In the article obese is defined as a BMI of 30+, so the terms used in the press release are not the same as those in the article, or the common medical use of those terms. I’m not going to dwell on that because I have less than no time for the BMI in the first place.

   The other problem is that all the numbers apart from the numbers of claims made appear to be based on guesses at what the numbers might be rather than actual numbers:

   Lost workday rates (days per 100 FTEs) were calculated by multiplying these stratum-specific claims rates by their corresponding mean number of lost workdays per claim. Similarly, multiplying the claims rate by the stratum-specific mean costs (including the amount already paid and the amount reserved) allowed calculation of cost rates (dollars per 100 FTEs) separately for medical and indemnity claims costs. Confidence intervals were calculated assuming that the number of events followed a Poisson distribution.

   I’m not going to comment any more than that, because I don’t speak science article, but will concentrate on the ‘claims made’ figure when explaining why this research doesn’t prove what the standard thinks it proves. (back)

2. I don’t actually like debunking scientific research about fat, it seems to me to be conceding too much. Even if everything they said about the dangers of fat were true it wouldn’t change my political analysis of fat at all. (back)

I’ve really enjoyed the Buffy comics, even though I stopped reviewing them. After a while there are so many ways you can say “It’s great that Buffy had sex with someone that I don’t hate so much I would like to pickle them in brine, but do they have to draw all the women looking the same?”

What draws me back to talking about the Buffy comics isn’t the series itself (although it’s getting really interesting and exciting), but the letters column at the back of last month’s issue (the Harmony issue for those who subscribe). The last letter in the column said:

I’m not loving the way the characters are drawn. I know they’re comics and that’s how men typically draw women in comics, but why does Buffy have such a tiny waist and such large breasts? Seeing the way she was drawn in #10 was a real let down; Buffy looked more like Heidi Montag of Jenna Jameson than Buffy. I don’t have anything against a tiny Waist (I have one myself!) or large breasts (okay, those I don’t have, as most women with tiny waists don’t have naturally. But it was disappointing to see Buffy have an unrealistic, unattainable, Barbie-esque body type. I don’t understand why Buffy’s looks are clearly modeled after Sarah Michelle Gellar, but someone decided to inflate her chest.

I wish I had a scanner so I could show you the image she was talking about, but I’m sure you can imagine it. [I'm guessing this is the panel you would have inserted --Amp.]

I want to draw attention to how specific the author’s point is. You could write, but all she is saying that in the comics female character’s waists have got smaller and their breasts have got larger.

You can tell the reply is going to be full of weaseling because Scott Allie immediately turns over the reply to one of the few women who work on the comics.¹ Sierra Huhn an assistant editor spends the first few sentences blathering on about how Buffy is much better than other comics, because the women don’t have big breasts and itty-bitty waists (she clearly didn’t look at the first frame of #10 before she wrote that).

She ends with the mealy mouthed “The last thing we want is for anyone who reads this comic, or works on this comic, to feel like we’re in the business of exploiting women” (actually the last thing she says is ‘yay Buffy means more women read comics,’ which is so irrelevant that I’m ignoring it). Which is nice side-stepping what was actually brought up (the original letter didn’t mention exploitative). It’s also an interesting rhetorical technique when the facts are against you (the way women look in the comics is limited and emphasizes extreme hour glass figures) you say “I don’t mean to make people feel that way” - shifting the topic from what exists to other people’s feelings.

But it’s in the middle that she gets really offensive:

It’s true most of the characters are attractive (have you seen the show?), and thin (Slayers have to follow a pretty strenuous exercise program…just sayin’…), and sometimes Buffy may be more buxom from one issue to the next. It happens. But not unrealistically so, and not all the time.

Because we all know training regimes give women large breasts and small waists (you think slayers spend hours doing the “I must, I must, I must, increase my bust arm thrusts?). It’s a ridiculous and insulting answer to a serious question.

That’s not even what I object most to what she says. It’s that she’s stepping on the greatest moment of the history of TV.

Those of you who watched the show will remember Buffy’s last speech. For those who don’t Buffy is talking about doing a spell to share her slayer power, with all the potentials all around the world (it’s way cooler than I can make it sound in a sentence). And as she was doing this there is a series of images of girls becoming slayers, at school, at home, and on a baseball diamond. It means a lot more if you’ve watched the show, but you get the idea.

One of the slayers is fat. She isn’t not-skinny, she isn’t Hollywood fat, she isn’t a size twelve, she takes up space. And she stands up and uses her body and her strength to stop stops the man who is trying to hurt her. Meanwhile we hear Buffy’s voice saying “Everyone who can stand up; will stand up.”²

Why haven’t we seen her in the Season 8 comics yet? Don’t tell me that she started a strenuous exercise programme and now she’s got a tiny waist (her boobs would presumably be the same size) and is one of the many identical looking slayers you see in the background, because I will hurt you.

[Image curtsy: Screencap Paradise.]

1. There have been eleven men and one women involved in producing the art of the comics (that’s pencils inks colours and letters) and five men and one woman have written scripts. Jo Chen does most of the covers, and the designer has always been female. Listed in the front is three editorial staff and a publisher. The Publisher and Editor are both male, but usually one of the editorial staff is female. I say this not because I necessarily think the comics would look any different if they had more women involved in their creation, but to point out that given how few women are involved in producing the comics to put one forward to justify the way women’s bodies are drawn is tokenism of the worst sort. (back)
2. Random piece of Buffy trivia - that was the last shot of Buffy Joss ever shot. (back)

I’m a longtime fan of Carol Lay’s cartoons, so when I saw a big new graphic novel by her at Powell’s, I was thrilled. I picked up Lay’s book and read a caption — “the ultimate anti-diet book” — and thought “yay!”

Imagine my disappointment to discover that the ultimate anti-diet book is just another goddamn exploitative diet book.

After reading the sample chapter on Amazon (pdf link), I slipped from being unhappy to being horrified. Carol Lay is 5 feet nine inches, and she says her weight stabilized around 160 pounds. By combining regular exercise with a very strict calorie-counting program, she’s been able to maintain her goal weight of 125 pounds for the last six or seven years.

I’m glad she’s happy. What pisses me off is that Lay claims this all has something to do with health. Maybe it does for her — every body is different — but there’s absolutely no evidence that a BMI of 24 (which is where Lay was at before she began dieting) is unhealthy. Even the official standards (which I consider to be nonsensical) consider a 24 BMI to be the upper limit of the “normal” or “healthy” weight category

18.5, Lay’s new BMI, is the lower limit of the “normal” or “healthy” weight category. But if you pay attention to mortality charts, it’s actually a less healthy BMI than 24 — and in fact, less healthy than all “overweight” BMIs and most “obese” BMIs. You have to have a BMI of 40 or above — in Lay’s case, that means she’d have to weigh 270 pounds — to have a relative risk of death higher than that of a person with an 18.5 BMI.

Here’s a table of some of the relative risks reported (it comes from a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine;¹ if you have trouble reading it, click on the image for a larger version):

The yellow column indicates the relative risk of death for “normal weight” people (the heaviest set of “normal” weight people are used as the baseline; all other risk ratios on this table are in comparison to those folks). The red outlines indicate the areas where the relative risk of death is as low or lower for “overweight” people as it is for “normal weight” people.

My point isn’t to say that Carol Lay is going to die younger because she lost 35 pounds; there’s far more to health than BMI, and you can’t predict what’ll happen to a single individual based on an average for large groups. I certainly don’t want naturally thin people to freak out — if you’re meant to be thin, then it’s not unhealthy. My point is just that there is no reason at all to think that Lay is now healthier because she moved from borderline “overweight” to borderline “underweight.”

Yet Lay refers to “health” to justify her weight loss.

It’s not about health. It’s about pushing bodies to fit into an insane aesthetic that says that to be fleshy is to be bad.

What makes it worse is that Lay lays (sorry) out a course of action for her readers to follow:

The stories and information in these pages may help you to find the courage to lose old habits and make new, healthy ones. Then maybe you, too [can lose weight].

But Lay has no idea if her diet plan will work for folks in general; study after study has shown that most people aren’t able to lose large amounts of weight over the long term. And the consequences of failing to keep off weight can be dire, both mentally and physically. Just because Carol’s diet plan worked for Carol Lay doesn’t mean that it won’t fail the vast majority of people, like all diet plans do.

The real problem here isn’t that Lay weighed a shocking 160 pounds. It’s that she’s been taught to hate herself at 160 pounds, and to describe herself as “zaftig” at 140 (a BMI of 21). It’s that a major book publisher thinks that a memoir which endorses self-hatred at 160 pounds, and starving down to the very borderline of underweight, is worth publishing not as a cautionary tale, but as a self-help manual. It’s that our society has colonized our minds. It’s the same insanity that has the press criticizing Jessica Simpson for gaining eight pounds.

It’s not Lay’s fault that she thinks this way; she’s perpetuating the bullshit, but she perpetuates because of what’s been perpetuated upon her. But still… dammit. I really liked her cartoons.

1. 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.; I blogged about this study, and criticized it, here. (back)

I’ve complained that studies of weight loss diets have extremely forgiving definitions of “success.” Fatfu, in a terrific post that I only just now read (although it’s almost a year old), has a similar complaint. But she also whips out her calculator and tries to deduce one of Weight Watcher’s best-kept secrets — how many Weight Watchers clients lose weight over the long term?

38,000 people who reached goal weight per year sounds like a lot. But actually it turns out to be a really small number. I found a business article from back then that stated that Weight Watchers had 600,000 attendees in the U.S. in 1993. Divide 38,000 lifetime members per year into 600,000 and my calculator says that each year only about 6% of Weight Watchers members (give or take) reached their goal weight (presumably 94% failed).

Now before you get all impressed with Weight Watcher’s 6% success rate, let’s step back. For one thing, the successful 6% weren’t so fat in the first place. The 2001 study says that most were between a BMI of 25-30 (i.e. “overweight” but not “obese” - to use definitions I find silly). The 2007 abstract says the average starting BMI for that study was 27 - which is well below the average Weight Watchers participant. So in order to achieve goal weight the average lifetime member probably had to lose less than 10 lbs and would have to include a lot of people who had even less to lose. [...]

And what about the number we’re really looking for - how many people actually become “normal” weight long-term using Weight Watchers? It turns out only 3.9% of the golden 6% were still at or below goal weight after 5 years. By my calculations that means 3.9%*6.3% = 0.24% or about two out of a thousand Weight Watchers participants who reached goal weight stayed there for more than five years.

More recent numbers from Weight Watchers indicate that the rate might even be as high as 1 in a hundred. But that’s only after five years — and virtually all research on weight loss shows that “success” rates drop year after year. Just how low would the numbers be after seven years, or ten years? As Traci Mann wrote in an excellent American Psychologist article (pdf link) reviewing the evidence on dieting (hat tip to Fatfu):

Second, these losses are not maintained. As noted in one review, “It is only the rate of weight regain, not the fact of weight regain, that appears open to debate” (Garner & Wooley, 1991, p. 740). The more time that elapses between the end of a diet and the follow-up, the more weight is regained. [...]

Even in the studies with the longest follow-up times (of four or five years postdiet), the weight regain trajectories did not typically appear to level off (e.g., Hensrud, Weinsier, Darnell, & Hunter, 1994; Kramer, Jeffery, Forster, & Snell, 1989), suggesting that if participants were followed for even longer, their weight would continue to increase. It is important for policymakers to remember that weight regain does not necessarily end when researchers stop following study participants.

Dieting, for 99% or more of the people who try it, does not lead to long-term weight loss. Even the 1% who do lose weight, don’t typically lose enough weight to turn a fat person, into a person of average weight. So why is weight-loss dieting the advice given nearly all fat patients by their doctors?

Here’s something doctors don’t tell their patients: 41% of people who go on diets weigh more a few years after the diet, then they did before they began dieting.¹ Since I’m a blogger, not a scientist, I’ll go ahead and make the irresponsible comparison: Dieting is significantly more likely to cause long-term weight gain than weight loss. That’s a Surgeon General’s warning that should appear on every diet program and product on the market.

1. See page 224 of this article (pdf file). “Eight of the studies reported (or made it possible to compute) the percentage of participants who weighed more at follow-up than before they went on the diet. These rates averaged 41% and ranged from 29%… to 64%…” A few pages later: “From one third to two thirds of participants in diets will weigh more four to five years after the diet ends than they did before the diet began. This conclusion comes from studies that are biased toward showing successful weight loss… The true number may well be significantly higher.” (back)

Ezra Klein is one of my favorite bloggers, but when it comes to fat politics, he’s a reactionary. So it’s no surprise that Ezra favors Governor Patterson’s tax on non-diet soda (often referred to as an “obesity tax,” although Ezra didn’t use that term).

Quoting Nick Kristof, Ezra suggests that we’ll see a public health benefit from the tax on non-diet soda, similar to the benefits of taxing cigarettes. “If we can save lives while we raise revenue, why not give that a try?”

I’d suggest three reasons: First, snack taxes don’t work. Second, this particular tax will discourage thin people and people who drink diet soda from considering the health implications of their own diets. And finally, far from saving lives, fat-obsessed public health measures may actually make fat people’s health worse.

Reason why not #1: Snack taxes don’t work.

Meowser quotes from the book Fat Politics:

The reason why snack taxes don’t work is that the demand for food is relatively insensitive to price; economists generally predict that a 10 percent increase in food prices would only reduce food consumption by less than 1 percent. That means that if you want to reduce soda consumption by just 10 percent, you would have to impose a 100 percent tax; if you wanted to reduce soda consumption by half, you would have to make a can of coke cost about four dollars. Not only do such taxes do little to deter demand, but they would take more money out of the pockets of the poor.

According to Meowser, cigarette prices are now 10 times as high as they were three decades ago. Does anyone believe that we’re going to raise soda prices that high?

Reason why not #2: The Obesity Tax implicitly suggests that diet soda is healthy, which will discourage healthy diets.

There’s no strong empirical case for soda being worse for health than diet soda. Even if you accept the “fat is always bad! Thin is always good!” mentality, there is no evidence that switching from regular to diet soda will cause any fat people to experience significant long-term weight loss.

But by exempting diet soda from the tax, the obesity tax will encourage people to think of diet soda as healthy, and discourage critical thinking about the health effects of drinking (other than obesity). As Liss writes, “thin-but-unhealthy people are discouraged from thinking about whether regular soda is something they should cut out of their diets for any reason other than it now costs too much thanks to those damn fatties, and the simplistic associations between fat/unhealthy and thin/healthy are reinforced yet again.”

In Ezra’s comments, North writes:

I’m all for taxing soda, but I just want to remind you/everyone that diet soda is linked to ‘metabolic syndrome’ - which doesn’t necessarily include obesity, but does include major risk factors for heart disease and diabetes. So we really ought to tax diet soda, and the reason that’s not on the table has more to do with the stupidity of obesity politics than anything.

In the rush to be mean to fat people, we’ve forgotten that for most people, weight is genetic;¹ that there’s no reliable way to make a skinny person fat or a fat person skinny; and that eating quality food and getting healthy exercise are what’s actually linked to good health outcomes. (Being overweight actually exercises a protective effect against a large variety of illnesses.) Instead, we have a national moralistic crusade against obesity which leads us to an obsession with reducing the number of calories people take in. Which in turn leads policy-makers to the mistaken conclusion that sugar sodas, but not diet sodas, ought to be taxed.

The choice to tax regular soda but exempt diet soda — as well as the choice to refer to this as an “obesity tax” — is a choice to focus, not on improving health, but on fighting fat (and soda’s alleged connections to fat). This law doesn’t address making people live longer, or feel better; it addresses an aesthetic preference for thin bodies over fat bodies.

(By the way, North — who blogs at To The Lighthouse — did a great job arguing in Ezra’s comments. As did Jasper. Yay North and Jasper!)

Reason why not #3: Public health measures which focus on fat may make fat people less healthy.

Kate writes:²

….Calling this an “obesity” tax, as opposed to yet another “vice” tax, makes it quite literally about the punishment of fat bodies, rather than of “bad” habits that could be held by anyone. Not only are they once again conflating “fat” with “unhealthy,” they’re conflating “fat” with “vice” — reinforcing the message that fatness automatically equals a conscious decision to engage in (arguably) self-destructive behavior.

That the obesity tax will encourage prejudice against fat people is, in and of itself, reason enough to oppose the tax. But a recent study³ suggests that worrying about being fat is actually more damaging to good health than fat itself is. (Curtsy to The Fatfacts Wiki.)

Researchers who looked at a nationally representative group of more than 170,000 US adults found the difference actual weight and perceived ideal weight was a better indicator of mental and physical health than body mass index (BMI).

“The obesity ‘epidemic’ might have a lot more to do with our collective preoccupation with obesity than obesity itself,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Peter Muennig of Columbia University in New York City, told Reuters Health. “We still need to focus on healthy diet and exercise as public health officials, but we need to take fatness out of the equation. Were we to stop looking at body fat as a problem, the problem may well disappear.”

Some researchers have suggested that stress due to stigmatization could be a factor in the health problems obese people have, such as high blood pressure and diabetes, he and his colleagues note in the March issue of the American Journal of Public Health. [...]

“There needs to be a realization among public health officials and medical professionals that the messages we are giving the public could be doing more harm than good,” Muennig said.

There are all sorts of public health measures that Ezra and I can agree on: measures to make vegetables more affordable and measures to make cities more walkable, for instance. But laws like this one, which add to the stigmatization of fat people, are harmful and shouldn’t be supported.

1. North’s use of the word “genetic” was the subject of some discussion. I agreed with Jasper that while genetics isn’t the only cause of fatness or thinness, “an individual’s propensity to get fat (or remain thin) given the nutritional and exercise environment of modern society is mostly genetic.” (back)
2. Kate also wrote “Being fat is not behavioral; it’s existential.” Someone in her comments suggested making that a t-shirt, an idea I really like. (back)
3. Muennig, Peter et al, “I Think Therefore I Am: Perceived Ideal Weight as a Determinant of Health,” in American Journal of Public Health; March 2008, Volume 98 Issue 3, pages 501-506. PDF file (3MB). (back)

I never smoked. Oh, I puffed on probably three cigarettes over the course of my life, and in my callow youth I would occasionally light up a cigar. But I was always very leery of getting hooked. This was due in no small part to my dad, who was a smoker until about eight or nine years ago; during my childhood, he told me repeatedly that he didn’t want to smoke, but that he was addicted, and that he wished he’d never started. That left an impression on me, and since I didn’t want all of the health risks of smoking, like lung cancer and heart disease, I figured it was a bad idea to start.

Alas, not all kids are like me. Some actually start smoking, and some continue to smoke into adulthood. How to scare kids into not smoking is a perennial topic, never mind that we’ve pretty much won that battle. Now, Finnish researchers have a new weapon in the war on smoking: shame.

No, not shame of smoking — silly! No, the researchers suggest fat shaming! Because no matter the behavior, it’s always a good idea to threaten that it will make you fat in the end:

Telling teenage would-be smokers that lighting up may make them fat down the road may be a more effective deterrent than harping on the risks of heart disease and cancer from smoking, hints research published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

Well, this must be a study of teens’ attitudes about smoking and fat, right? Of course not — the study doesn’t appear to say anything about whether telling teens they’ll gain weight if they smoke is a more effective deterrent than telling teens they’ll die of lung cancer. I suspect that’s because it isn’t a bigger deterrent.

But at least the study shows that there’s a serious weight gain involved, right?

In a study, Finnish researchers found that smoking during adolescence strongly predicted the development of abdominal obesity in adulthood, among both men and women.

In particular, they found that girls who smoked at least 10 cigarettes daily during adolescence had a 3.4-centimeter larger waistline as young adults, on average, than did girls who had never smoked.

3.4 whole centimeters? Shocking! That’s almost one and one-third inches! Why, ex-smokers must weigh five or six pounds more than non-smokers!

[...]

“And most interesting,” said Saarni, the apparent link between smoking during adolescence and being heavy later on was independent of the young person’s own body weight — meaning that those who were heavy smokers had greater waist circumference even within the same body mass index (BMI) levels as their non-smokers peers.

Oh, crikey, can we just stop now? Guess what — ex-smokers have a tendency to gain some weight. That’s due to a lot of things — nicotine is a mild stimulant, ex-smokers often eat a bit more to replace the behavior of sucking on a cigarette, whatever — but it’s not exactly a news flash. My dad gained some weight when he quit smoking; so what? He also avoided going down the path of my grandpa, who died of lung cancer. I think he made the right choice.

At any rate, ex-smokers tend to be slightly heavier than people who never smoked. Are there health risks involved in this? Or, you know, anything that anyone should be concerned about?

This research, Saarni added, “gives a tool” to highlight the risks of smoking to adolescents and young adults “by showing the unhealthy effect on the body shape.” This can be an important deterrent, “because usually young people find cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes or even cancer so distant risks that they have very little impact on ones smoking behavior.”

Yeah, because the kid who thinks she’s invulnerable to a heart attack is going to worry that smoking can make her weigh up to ten pounds more than she otherwise would.

I mean, really, is this going to sell? “If you start smoking, you’re at risk for cancer and heart disease, and you’ll die early — oh, and if you quit, you might gain a few pounds.”

That won’t work. What I just did was convince my hypothetical teen smoker never to quit smoking, because, you know, he might gain a few pounds, which is terrible because there is nothing worse than being fat. Because, you know, there just isn’t. It’s enough to make me want to start smoking.

Via Rachel and Meowser, I learned of a study, “Eating Behavior and Obesity at Chinese Buffets,” published by the academic journal Obesity. The nice folks at Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab emailed me a copy of the study.

In a nutshell, they sent “trained observers” to various Chinese buffet restaurants. 213 patrons were spied upon for behaviors such as sitting in a booth or at a table, using chopsticks or forks, placement of napkin, how much was left on the plate, how many times each bite was chewed, etc.. The study authors theorized that these behaviors caused higher weights, but admitted that they couldn’t establish the direction of causality.

Personally, I don’t mind creepy spy studies like this one; a restaurant is a public place, and I like my science creepy. (If the researchers could indulge me with an occasional “bah hah hah!” laugh and gigantic goggles, so much the better.) But the methodology and thinking behind this particular study are jaw-droppingly awful.

The post is going to be very long, so I’ll first list some highlights:

1) There’s no reason to think visual assessments of weight by secret observers are accurate — and the citations the study used to support this methodology are, when you look them up, inapplicable.

2) Nothing in the study protects against the observations being tainted by bias and stereotypes about fat people.

3) Their sample of “normal” weight people included underweight, and even severely underweight, people.

4) A theory they describe on page one — that fat people go to the buffet more often — is not only not tested for by the study, the study is designed to exclude buffet trips from the study’s results.

5) Some causal connections speculated about in this study incorporate ridiculous anti-fat stereotypes. For instance, the study assumes that chopstick users “probably always eat with smaller utensils” when at home, and that people who don’t put their napkins on their laps lack “table manners” and therefore lack “careful consumption monitoring.”

Details after the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

The dance scene really begins two minutes into this video (after a really odd bit of abled-characters-pretending-to-be-disabled-for-comic-effect which falls completely flat). In the scene, Steve Carrel, playing Maxwell Smart, asks a fat woman to dance. The audience presumably expects a routine making fun of how clumsy a fat woman dancing is; the twist is that she dances wonderfully.

(In “Get Smart,” there are also a few brief fat suit gags — flashbacks to Steve Carrel’s character before he lost weight. Those uninspired gags, where were another instance of The Absent Fatso, aren’t the subject of this post.)

The fat woman is played by the wonderful Lindsay Hollister, an actress with a fat-positive attitude who I’m always glad to see in a role. Hollister enjoyed the part:

Especially being, obviously, a big girl and a character actress, these kinds of roles don’t come up often, especially in such a huge film.

To have it be fun and positive and not degrading was like a dream come true.

I was thrilled by the scene the first time I watched it. But, on rewatching, I began to wonder.

Much as I liked seeing Hollister, she’s not a dancer. (She moves through the choreography, but she doesn’t shine in it.) There are fat women dancers who have spent years working at dancing (I’ve seen fat dancing troupes a few times), who would have been physically much more impressive in the role.¹ Combined with the reliance on special effects to provide the big lift at the end of the dance, the scene seems to me to be saying “look, fat people can dance,” but at the same time saying “only in a movie, which is why this is funny, this could never happen in real life.”

There are also a couple of fat gags in the scene — the big sight gag of Max lifting the fat woman over his head, and the two men rushing in from the side to push her up from the dip. I’m not sure what I think of this, either. The anti-fat humor that bothers me most, is anti-fat humor that says “fat people are disgusting” or “fat people are slobs” or “fat people are gluttons” — humor that seems to me to be based on unfair stereotypes.

I’m more comfortable with fat gags which say “fat people are heavy” or “fat people are physically wider,” because these premises are true. We should be able to laugh at genuine differences — if the gags aren’t meanspirited.

In the end, I’m starving for positive images of fat people — and even more, for positive images of fat people’s bodies. I loved this scene, despite its flaws, because it is so physical. I love that they put Hollister in a sleeveless dress. And I loved that, in a current, crass comedy, there was a fat character gag that wasn’t based on degrading the character or finding her gross. But in a saner, fat-positive culture, I don’t think the scene would seem so great.

1. Of course, could those women have handled the acting parts as well as Hollister did? Probably not. (back)

Kevin Moore criticizes a slew of hacktacular cartoons about obesity and health. Needless to say, I agree with Kevin — and would even if he hadn’t quoted me extensively. (ahem).

(You should go read the whole post, if only to check out the incredibly awful Batman cartoon. Base-jumping? What the heck does that mean? And how long did it take most readers to recognize that the thing he’s standing on is a scale?)

But I do have one minor objection — a nit-pick, really, nothing more. Kevin writes:

As my friend and political cartoonist Barry Deutsch has pointed out many times, fat people are easy targets, perhaps the last “safe” target (along with the mentally ill and poor Southern whites) for comedians and other humorists to treat as an “other”, that slightly less-than-human category of people who deviate from The Norm and thus deserve mockery and marginalization.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never said that fat people are “the last safe target,” because I loathe that phrase.

Everyone thinks they’re the last safe target.

Just last week, I read MRA Glenn Sacks saying that “males are the only politically acceptable target.”¹ This right-wing blogger claims that white people are the last “safe target.” That one² thinks Sarah Palin, as a white conservative woman, was the “safe target.” No, wait — “the only safe target is the straight male”!

Of course, it’s not just anti-feminists and right-wingers who use the phrase — plenty of my allies use it too. Fat people are safe targets; the poor are safe targets; trans women are safe targets; undocumented immigrants are safe targets; black women are safe targets; and so on.

And let’s not forget the “last acceptable prejudice” — a distinction shared by Mormons, suburbanites, children with Down syndrome, Catholics, women, homosexuals, elderly people, rednecks, and probably a hundred others.

I completely agree with the general points made by many of these folks (pretty much all the ones on the left), but can we please stop using the “only safe target” and “last acceptable prejudice” framings? Taken literally, these phrases positively scream “oppression olympics!”, and they’re virtually never accurate.

1. By the way, referring to men and boys as “males” is something that, according to some MRAs, is a sign of misandry, when feminists do it. (back)
2. Phrase (c) 2008 John McCain. (back)

The creators of the forthcoming Watchmen movie have been emphasizing that it’s faithful, faithful, faithful to the graphic novel, even going to the trouble of releasing teaser posters recreating the comic book’s teaser ads from decades ago.

Judging from those posters — and from the trailer — the movie seems, in a missing-forest-for-trees way, faithful to Watchmen’s surface elements and story, although I think the comic’s strengths are fundamentally unadaptable.¹ But I couldn’t help but notice one glaring change: Dan — aka Nite Owl’s — waistline. In the original comic, Dan (pictured above) was fat.

The actor who plays Dan — Patrick Wilson — is claiming that Dan wasn’t at all fat, just soft. Uh-huh.

I don’t want to make too big a deal of this; it’s just a movie based on a superhero comic. It’s just…. irritating, another straw on a (not yet broken) back. Pudgy Dan is an un-person. Pudgy Dan will do for an experimental comic, but for a movie with millions on the line, we can’t have it — not even when the director is spending months publicity patting himself on the back for being so darned faithful.

1. From Wikipedia: Moore and Gibbons designed Watchmen to showcase the unique qualities of the comics medium and to highlight its particular strengths. In a 1986 interview, Moore said, “What I’d like to explore is the areas that comics succeed in where no other media is capable of operating”, and emphasized this by stressing the differences between comics and film. Moore said that Watchmen was designed to be read “four or five times,” with some links and allusions only becoming apparent to the reader after several readings. Gibbons described the series as “a comic about comics”. (back)

Several people have requested a poster version of “Fat Monologue.” I’m terribly pleased people want such a poster. So I’ve set up a page for it on Zazzle.

Please be warned, I honestly don’t know how these posters will look; I’ve never had one printed at Zazzle. So this is an experiment. Zazzle lets you choose for yourself the paper stock, and also the size you’d like it in. My advice is to get the least expensive paper stock, unless you’re a big spender, but avoid the 11″x16″; at that size, I think the text would be hard to read once the poster was hung on a wall. Either the 15″x22″ or the 23″x34″ should be fine.

I chose Zazzle, by the way, because they have a rep for somewhat higher quality printing than Cafepress (at least on their shirts), and because they do have one line of t-shirts which goes up to 5x or 6x. If all goes well with this poster, I may add other products (probably prints of selected political cartoons, or a t-shirt of some of the “Alas” bighead figures — let me know if you have suggestions.)

This is a comic I did many months ago (or was it over a year ago?), for a gallery show. Because it was designed to be viewed on a wall, it’s kind of hard to look at online — the panels kind of spiral around rather than going in straight, easy-to-scroll through rows.

I don’t do comics playing around with weird layouts often enough. Thanks to Mandolin for her help with this one.

Anyhow, you can look at the very large pdf file (which is maybe the easiest way to view it, because you can use the little hand tool to move around), or if you prefer look at the large jpg file.

UPDATE: You can now buy a poster of this, if you’d like.

Nice to see this short piece in the Sunday Magazine:

This is a core argument of fat acceptance: that it’s possible to be healthy no matter how fat you are and that weight loss as a goal is futile, unnecessary and counterproductive — and that fatness is nobody’s business but your own.

Many fat-acceptance activists prefer a new approach to dieting that focuses on nutrition, exercise and body image. A new book out this fall, “Health at Every Size,” by Linda Bacon, a nutritionist and physiologist at the University of California at Davis, outlines this approach, which is less about dieting than a lifestyle change that emphasizes “intuitive eating”: listening to hunger signals, eating when you’re hungry, choosing nutritious food over junk. It encourages exercise, but for its emotional and physical benefits, not as a way to lose weight. It advocates tossing out the bathroom scale and loving your body no matter what it weighs. [...]

Several studies suggest that if the aim is getting healthier rather than slimmer, then in the long run the “Health at Every Size” approach works better than dieting. In 2005, Bacon led the only randomized control trial to date that tested this hypothesis physiologically. She randomly assigned half of the 78 subjects, all women, to a “Health at Every Size” group; while they lost no weight, their healthier behavior led to lower blood-pressure and cholesterol levels, which stayed low even two years later. In the weight-loss group, more than 40 percent dropped out before the six-month low-calorie diet ended, and at the two-year follow-up, the average dieter had regained all her lost weight, and the only measurement that dropped was one for self-esteem.

Scientists who study obesity at the cellular level say genetics determines people’s natural weight range, right down to the type and amount of food they crave, how much they move and where they accumulate fat. Asking how someone got to be so fat is as meaningless as asking how he got to be so tall.

Another thing I liked about this piece: the illustration that went with it was not a photo of headless fatties. What next, an article about comics that doesn’t use “Pow! Bam!” in the headline? (Is that even legal?)