Dear CNN, you suck. March 17, 2011

I don’t pay much attention to the news, mostly because I find it sensationalistic and misleading and depressing. In order to avoid complete oblivion to the world around me, I have two news feeds on my iGoogle page – CNN and the BBC. I find I generally prefer the BBC, mainly for its lack of bullshit and its balanced coverage of events worldwide, not just the US. Today I made the mistake of clicking on a linked headline called “The Moments That Make us Fat”, which took me to this story.

Warning: If you are going to click on that link, make sure you are well stocked on Sanity Watchers points. If you are going to read the comments, make sure you are also well stocked on rum and fat hate bingo cards. Better yet, don’t read the comments. You’ve been warned.

If we were to play a fat sterotype drinking game, everyone involved would be passed out before we even got past the picture that accompanies the article. (FTR, I refuse to refer to this as a news story, because it ain’t.) Hey, it’s a fat guy! And he’s watching TV! (drink) He’s got an unreasonably huge bowl of some snack food! (drink) He’s all slovenly! (drink) He’s in a recliner with a remote control! (drink) He’s all alone in a sad little bare apartment! (drink)

Ok, maybe not everyone would be in the floor at this point, but I would be. I’m a lightweight, pun intended.

If you can get past the picture to the text, you will soon discover that Elizabeth Cohen, Senior medical correspondent for CNN, has apparently been using exclusively ladymags from the past 50 years as source material, because she proceeds to trot out every dated diet “tip” that every person who has ever dieted, or been criticized for her weight, or has been, y’know, awake for the past 20 years has heard approximately 5.37 x 10⁵⁸ times. She suggests eating a snack before you go to a party, or using a small bowl if you are going to eat a snack in front of the TV, or getting a to-go box in a restaurant and dividing your entrée before you start eating. There’s a lot of babble about “willpower” and being “good”. She advises sitting with your back to the buffet, or better yet, not going to buffets at all, since we all know that us fatties can’t resist unlimited overcooked cheap meat and greasy green beans and iceberg lettuce. Pretty much the only folk advice for fatties she doesn’t mention is the bit about the best exercise being pushing yourself away from the table.

Seriously , did anyone read this article and think “Eureka! My problems are solved! I shall be fat no mooooooore!” ? I doubt it, given that there is nothing in this article that hasn’t been said a thousand times before, and these little jems of wisdom do not become less asinine upon retelling.

The theme of the piece, of course, is that fat people are fat because we have all somehow misunderstood the dubious truism that overeating (being “bad”), and only that is what makes you fat, an assumption that excludes individual biochemistry, genetics, and a thousand other factors that contribute to body composition. I am not sure if TBTB at CNN think this reductionism is necessary because they assume that their readership is profoundly stupid (another unfortunate fat people sterotype), or if it was just a slow news day and they asked Ms. Cohen, who I assume must have some level of journalistic skill to be employed by CNN, to throw something together and the product was this tripe. Either way, it’s a sad day for American journalism when this passes as news.

I haven’t deleted your feed yet, CNN, because you still annoy me less than every other news organization besides the BBC. But keep this up, and I might just have to find a new widget. On a side note, thanks to this post I learned how to code superscript in html, so go me!

A change in the beholder’s eye August 2, 2009

In February of 2007 I bought my first home. I love it. It was built in 1949 and it only had one owner before me. It is built like a fortress and is perched on top of a hill that gives me a fantastic view of the neighborhood and the trees beyond. I can see the fireworks from the city baseball stadium from my bedroom window. It is a tiny dollhouse of a place and it is perfect for me, in all but one way. Closet space.

I guess in the 40’s people didn’t have very many clothes, because the closets in this house are abysmally teeny. So, among the first things I did when I moved in was convert the office off the living room into a closet. I have no need of an office — my laptop lives mostly in my lap, and goodness knows I needed the closet space. I have a lot of clothes. Of 180 school days last year, I only repeated an outfit maybe 30 times, and that was mostly due to 6am-I-just-need-to-get-to-work-I-don’t-care-what-I-wear-this-early laziness. I have, on occasion, entertained a bit of guilt over the volume of clothes I own, but I figure that everyone has their thing — some people have dogs, some race cars, some produce offspring — I dance and play with clothes. Now I have a fantastic 10×6 closet.

Now for the shameful confession portion of this post — I moved 30 months ago and I still have unpacked boxes. A lot of them, actually. I am ridiculously lazy, and I have wondrous don’t wanna do it skills. Tonight I got inspired to unpack some boxes, namely the ones full of clothes still sitting in my closet. If I haven’t worn it in 2 1/2 years, I probably need to rid myself of it, right?

Mostly right, as it turns out. I now have a huge pile of clothes to give away, but I did manage to find a few things that I had been looking for or wondering about, and a few more things I had completely forgotten about but fell back in love with as soon as I saw them.

The past few years have involved some pretty profound changes for me, not the least of which are a major shift in how I see myself and how I feel about my body. There were quite a few things I tried on tonight that didn’t fit, and quite a lot that I can remember buying as “motivation” items — that thing so many of us do where we buy something too small as an incentive to lose weight, as if we aren’t good enough for pretty clothes as we are right now, but we can earn that right by being thinner. Such disordered, destructive behavior, that. There were also, sadly, quite a few things I bought because I loved them but never wore because of shame — not shame about the clothes, but shame about the body wearing them.

The whole unpacking-sorting-clothes process involved quite a bit of trying on, which any woman, fat or thin, can tell you can be a harrowing experience. We are all so disposed to blame our bodies when clothes don’t fit, instead of just moving on to another item. That’s why I was surprised to find that this evening’s clothes-fest was not only remarkably sane (no crying, no self-recrimination, no shame), it was actually fun. I have some awesome clothes y’all, and the whole process made me excited at the prospect of a new school year and a new 180 days to try and not repeat an outfit. I looked at myself in some of those things I was so ashamed about long ago and thought, “damn, that looks awesome!” Here’s the kicker — I am fatter now than I was when I bought a lot of that stuff. Not a lot fatter, they still fit, but fatter nonetheless. Sane, happy clothes trying-on. Who knew such a thing existed?

There is one discouraging thing though. Now I have to go put all my re-found beautiful clothes away. Wonder how I can put that off?

But is there really more to love? August 1, 2009

I just got around to watching More to Love — yes, I realize it has been a few days since it aired, I’ve been busy, plus, I was not so sure I wanted to watch it. I haven’t been so thrilled with some of the snippets from the teasers. I don’t like the term “normal women” being used to describe fat women, as if thinner women aren’t normal. I despise the forced us vs. them mentality of fat and thin women, when the reality is that women exist in a whole continuum of sizes and shapes and body types, and the ad campaign’s size 4 vs. size 14 shtick played on that artificial division. There were lots of reasons I didn’t want to watch, but after hearing the comments of some friends and reading Lesley’s recap on Fatshionista, I sucked it up and watched.

I will confess I was a little afraid. I am a fat single woman, and for about 20 years of my life I suffered under crushing self-hatred, not just because of my size, but that was a factor. The thought that “no one will ever love me because I’m fat” is one with which I am well familiar. Although I did go to a couple of formal dances in high school, I didn’t go to my prom (I have been to 6 since then, it’s so much more fun as a chaperone), and of course I was sure it was because I was fat. Then again, if I were to catalog and post all the things I have blamed on my fat, the sheer volume would crash these here interwebz. Fat is such a handy scapegoat. I have actually sometimes wondered what thin girls irrationally blame their problems on. Come to think of it, they probably blame their bodies too, since American women are conditioned from birth to believe they aren’t thin/pretty/sexy/otherwise attractive enough. So I was a little nervous about watching because, despite the fact that I no longer suffer with self-hatred, and I have called bullshit in my own life on so many of the lies about being a fat woman, there is always the possibility that something will take me back to that time. When a friend asked me if I was going to watch, my response was “I’ll probably cry a lot”.

My fears were unfounded.

I’ve never watched dating “reality” shows, with the exception of some Bachelor/Bachelorette viewing parties hosted by friends, and I mostly attended those for the same reasons I go to playdates despite having no children — to hang out with people I enjoy and drink wine. Ok, so there’s no wine at playdates, more’s the pity. The point, though, is that I don’t watch dating shows. They are not my style. My DVR is filled with teen soaps like Gossip Girl and old episodes of Star Trek. I don’t do reality TV. This was my first foray, and so I have no idea of my observations about MtL are standard on this sort of show or not. Feel free to enlighten me.

I’ll start with what I liked. The dresses. Oh, the dresses. I want them, I want them all. I actually looked on Fox’s website to see if they had any info on the dresses. They don’t. The girls were all beautiful, and they were portrayed in a pretty positive light, particularly for TV.

I started with what I liked because it was shorter. Now for the stuff I didn’t like.

From the beginning I was struck by how silly all the women seemed to be. I understand that they may have just been edited to look that way, but I saw very little of substance. The way I see it, they all had the opportunity to meet 19 other potentially fabulous women. Obviously you don’t spill your guts to strangers, and yeah, yeah, let’s meet the guy too, but I seriously would have been putting together an email list and talking about where to buy clothes. For most fat women, connecting with other fat women is hard, and so I would hate to pass up the chance to have so many on one room. Once again, I know they could have been doing that too and it just wasn’t shown, but it mostly looked like they were talking about how desperate they were to be picked and swooning over “his eyes!” giggle giggle.

That brings me to another observation — the desperation. In so many of the interviews, the girls talked about how this was their only chance, how they just wanted to find love, how they couldn’t believe he was being nice to them, how great it was that he was willing to “look past” their appearance, etc, etc, ad nauseum. The whole ring thing blew my mind too — they all seemed to act as if it were an engagement ring or something. I know we all love sparkly jewelry, but it’s the same ring he gave to 19 other women, and I am pretty sure the show’s producers picked up the tab.

Look ladies, desperation is nobody’s friend, except for maybe the skeezy guys who are looking to take advantage of you. It’s fine, and normal, to want to find love, but in the meantime, have some self-respect. This guy is not the only one on the planet, this isn’t your “last chance”, and really, do you want to be with someone who just “looks past” your appearance? A good relationship is one in which a guy loves all of you, including your body, and dismissing appearance altogether is just as bad as dating someone just because of how they look.

Here’s another fact to remember: Yeah, dating sucks for fat girls, but dating sucks for everyone. For every fat girl crying about being alone, there is a thin girl crying about the same thing, and 3 medium sized girls. Attraction and love are about so much more than the way you look, and have a heck of a lot to do with luck, and being alone doesn’t mean there is something fundamentally wrong with you — maybe it means you should enjoy the perks of being alone.

Remember the skeezy guy I mentioned earlier? The one taking advantage of desperation? Well, as sweet-sparkly-eyed-cuddly-teddy-bear-y as he may be, I am greatly afeared that Mr. Luke is one of ’em. I actually liked the guy until he used the whole “you know, I have to cut five people tonight” tactic to get one of the girls to kiss him. After that I pretty much wanted to kick him in his neck. We’ll see how it goes, but I predict a lot more of those sort of tactics in the future, just like the guy in high school who told you he would dump you if you didn’t do whatever it was he wanted you to do that you knew you weren’t ready for. That guy wasn’t worth your time then, and he still isn’t.

I didn’t cry the way I feared I might. I yelled at the TV a few times though, and there were some things that made me sad, not for myself, but for the women on the show who seem so fragile. I want to have them all over and hug them and tell them that it will all be ok, and that the key to being happier is to love and accept themselves as they are, man or no man.

So the jury is still out on this one. I am going to keep watching, if for no other reason, to see if my predictions about Mr. Sparkly Eyes are true. I am also curious about some of the women — Bonnie, for instance, with the rockin’ hair and tattoo — I think we could be bffs. We’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, if anyone wants to get me those dresses, I will love you forever.

Right this minute, hell is freezing over. March 29, 2009

Today I went on a search for brown capri pants. I did not find any.

However.

I found a bathing suit. It fits me, it contains the rack of doom without the use of an evil underwire, and it is neither black nor brown nor blue — the holy trinity of fat girl bathing suits — in fact, it is all sorts of fun swirly colors. Top, bottom, and little skirt (cuz I love the little miniskirt bathing suit look), all for $60. On top of that, they had lots of stuff on ridiculous clearance. It was a good day to be a Target shopper.

Reason number 2 –I cooked. I tell you, right now it is very chilly in the underworld.

Read, and heard, and thought today. March 25, 2009

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
-Maryanne Williamson
Used by Nelson Mandela in his 1994 inaugural speech (maybe)

“Don’t be too fat, or too thin, or too dark, or too light; don’t be too sexual, or too chaste, or too smart, or too dumb. Be yourself. But make sure you fit in.”
Anna, One Tree Hill, Truth, Bitter Truth

It is easy to believe that we are not enough. Not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough or talented enough. Our houses aren’t clean enough, our clothes aren’t right, our earring are too big or too small or not expensive enough, our teeth are funny looking. Our dreams and desires and the secret hopes of our hearts can’t possibly come true, why would they, as inadequate as we are.

There are those in the world whose whole existence is devoted to keeping the rest of us bound in our own insecurities and fears, and, just in case our own aren’t enough, they pile on more we never thought of.

This is, of course, all lies.

If you read this post, this is my challenge to you: today, if only for one minute of your day, defy the lies. Live the truth. Be yourself, and be enough.

Then if you want to, tell your story. I want to hear it.

Feast of the Annunciation

Ave Maria, gratia plena,
Dominus tecum,
benedicta tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui Iesus.
Sancta Maria mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.
Amen

Apparently, even losers can’t win. February 17, 2009

Tonight I was at a friend’s house hanging out with her 8 month old son. After he went to bed I started flipping channels and found a show on one of those entertainment/ music channels about “skinniest celebs”. I found it a little ironic, how the same people who dish out criticism of the Jennifer Love Hewitts and Kate Winsletts of the world for being too fat were now talking about how unhealthy all these celebrities are for being too thin, and how all the media coverage was about people being concerned for their health, blah, blah blah. There were even a few people who they talked about on the show who had been “overweight” (in Hollywood terms, of course) who decided to be “healthy” and then “took healthy too far”.

What the bloody hell?

So, let me get this straight, oh great music/ entertainment peoples. This person was somehow not ok before, because they didn’t have what you deem a perfect body, and then in their quest to get that so-called perfect body they went too far and now they don’t again? Did they ever meet with your approval? Was there a magic five minutes where no one was “concerned” about these celebrities?

Um, no.

This is the problem when a culture decides that bodies, anyone’s bodies, are public domain. If it is ok to dehumanize fatties by putting their headless torsos above stories on the OMG OBEEEZITY EPUHDEMIC, then it is ok to dehumanize anyone whose body does not meet with public approval. NEver mind that no one ever really does, because there is a multi-billion dollar industry out there that exists solely to convince people they are unacceptable. Nevermind that the root of the issue lies in the pressure to have that perfect, culturally acceptable body. Not thin enough? The media, the diet and cosmetic companies, even random people in the grocery store will harass you about it, so you do crazy things to defy your own body and force it to bend to someone else’s standards, at which point those same people criticize you for doing they very thing they wanted you to do in the first place. It’s a crazy carousel of death, and there is only one way off. Ready for this? Have the courage to accept your body the way it is. Have the courage to be yourself and do what YOU want to do, anyone else’s opinion be damned. Recognize all those media messages for the bullshit that they are, and remember that it isn’t ok to dehumanize anyone, no matter the color of their skin or their physical abilities or the size of their ass or how many wrinkles they have. Get off the carousel. It’s nice out here.

Thoughts on love. February 13, 2009

So, it’s Valentine’s Day.   I spent most of my high school years wearing black and being passionately anti-valentine, all the while desperately secretly hoping that the next year I would be one of the ones getting flowers and big hideous teddy bears.  In college I wore less black, but I was no less disdainful and fervent and secret.  There was one memorable Valentine’s day when I helped the man I was desperately, hopelessly infatuated with, the man I would have dropped everything, including all morals and standards for, plan the perfect Valentine’s day for his girlfriend.  Even worse were the weeks afterward when I had to hear her gush about all the wonderful things he had done, all those wonderful things I had come up with and could not take credit for.   What can I say, I was pretty bloody stupid, particularly when it came to boys.

I’ve spent my life hearing variations on “just wait, it will happen when…” In the residential summer Governers’ school before my junior year of High School (yeah, I was that kid) I had a conversation about my frustration at being the perpetual singleton and was told to “just wait until your junior year, everything happens in your junior year”  Then there was just wait until you are a senior/start college/finish college/ get a job/ blah blah bitty blah.

Here’s the truth — I am 32 years old and I have never kissed anyone.  I have never dated.  And I am happy about it.

I won’t lie and say I have always been happy about it.  Sitting in my best friend’s bedroom in high school while she counted the guys she had made out with (the number wasn’t small) or in the bathroom lounge at church on Sunday morning discussing my friends’ exploits the night before (in code, no less) caused no small jealousy on my part.  It hasn’t been easy over the past several years watching my friends get married, and I have on more than one occasion struggled to force smiles at showers and rehearsal dinners and weddings and parties, and I would be lying if I denied coming home from those events and crying alone in my house.  Hell, sometimes I didn’t even make it home.  A few times I didn’t even make it to the car.

Here’s the thing — we are all taught from preschool on up that we can have anything we want if we just work hard enough.  It’s not true, but it is an integral part of the puritans, pilgrims, and pioneers pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality that is so present in our culture.  So it is natural to think that you can find love the same way — by working at it, and it’s easy to think that if it doesn’t happen you just aren’t working hard enough, and then if it still doesn’t work, then there must clearly be something wrong with you to make you inherently unloveable, you big hideous freak.   It’s worse when you are fat, since you have a whole cultural norm telling you that you are, in fact, a hideous freak, and it’s OMG all your fault and you just need to eat less andexercisemoreandthenyou’dbeperfectandyouhaveSUCHaprettyface!

I would like to celebrate this Valentine’s Day by calling bullshit.

Being thin and/ or conventionally beautiful is no more a guarantee to finding real love than anything else.  In fact, I would venture to say it might be a little but of a hindrance, because there are plenty of guys who want to date hot girls just to date hot girls and aren’t at all interested in the girl herself, just her body.

Today I reread Kate’s brilliant post on finding love and dumb luck.  I think this is my favorite bit:

Single folks, here’s what I know: you are exactly what someone is looking for, and that someone is exactly what you’re looking for. You just don’t have a damned bit of control over when or where you’ll stumble across each other. That sucks a hundred kinds of ass. But you don’t have to be prettier. You don’t have to be better. You don’t even have to be patient, if you don’t feel like it. You just have to be.

I’m 32.  I can’t do one damn thing about whether I ever date, get married, have kids, whatever.  I can’t make anyone be attracted to me, and I am not willing to try and change myself into something I am not in an attempt to attain those things, because if I get them but lose myself, what’s the point?

The other day I ran into a friend I had not seen in a while and she asked if I was ever going to get married, and asked if I was dating anyone.  I was a little shocked at my reaction, which was pretty much”hunh, I hadn’t really thought about it”.  It was in the moment that I realized that all my angst was a thig of the past, and I have reached a place where I am genuinely content where I am and could not care less about “finding someone”.  If it happens, it happens, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, and either way my life is good. It’s a pretty damn brilliant place to be.

In which I learn a vital, if painful, lesson. February 1, 2009

I recently spent some time engaged in what I will politely call a discussion in the comment thread for an article in a British Magazine.   The article was about a recent finding in obesity research, and the comment thread was, to quote Motormouth Maybelle, “a whole lotta ugly comin’ at you from a never-ending parade of stupid”.

Actually, it was more than that.  It was raw, undiluted hate.  And it made me sick.

I guess I have lived in a bubble.  I am white, middle class, and college educated.  I have lived a life of privilege, and I can’t pretend that it has been anything else.  I have encountered my fair share of people who dislike me, and endured the same asshattery as any other person on the planet, plus I live in the South, so I have seen more than my share of racism, but I had never experienced anything quite like this.

I am not going to go into details, and I am not going to link to the article, because I would hate for any of my readers to get a concussion banging their head against their desk.  I will just tell you that people said, over and over again, in a variety of words that all mean the same thing, that fat people are stupid.  ALL fat people are stupid.  And they are liars.  ALL liars.  That they are delusional, that they are lazy, that they are a plague on society.  One guy said that if he ever had kids he would not allow them to play with fat kids.  One guy said twice that the person who wrote the article could not be believed because “she’s on of the obese” and that no matter what one of “the obese” writes about or what she says, it is wrong.  Once I actually got involved in the conversation those insults went from the general to the specific.   Strangers, people who have never met me or spoken to me, told me over and over and over that I was stupid, and deluded, and lying, simply because I am fat.   When it became clear that I refused to buy into their bullshit and that I was not a good little self-hating fatty, things got even more vicious.  I won’t lie, I was not always pleasant myself, I can throw around some serious sarcasm when I want to.  But I was responding to individual asshats — they had judged me to be inferior before I even stepped on the scene.

Hate is a strange thing.  It’s so completely irrational.  It is a waste of time to try to reason with it, and yet that very fact makes me want to try.  I can’t understand its blindness.  I can’t understand how some one can look at an individual and see only one characteristic about them and hate them for it.  The ratio of adipose to muscle tissue in my body has no bearing whatsoever on my intelligence, or my ability to reason, or on my value as a human being, but to those people, it didn’t matter who I was orwhat I did, all that mattered was that particular characteristic.

I don’t regret the experience I had.  It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t fun, but it was important.  I learned that I am stronger and more resilient than I thought I was.  I learned that what I claim to believe really is what I believe, even in the face of violent opposition.  I gained some empathy for those who have to deal with this irrational hate every day, directed at skin color or sexual orientation or religion or any of the million other things people find to blindly despise.  But I  have to grieve a little for lost innocence.  Naivete is never a good thing, but it’s loss is painful.

So thanks, all you who participated in that thread.  I have taken your hate and turned it into good, and I will pray that sometime you can do the same.

Disgusted. January 28, 2009

I’ve been watching Superstars of Dance.  It been…well, not bad, but not as good as I had expected.  The dancers are beautiful, but the camera work is all weird, and half the time you can’t see the dancers, either because the shot is way too wide or because they are showing audience footage instead of the dancers.  I was pretty disappointed, because I am a big fan of So You Think You Can Dance, and I expected more of Nigel Lithgoe.

Anyway.

Tonight I was watching the finals form Monday, thanks to the wonder of DVR  (which, by the way, I can’t imagine living without).  They started off talking about Michael Flatley (he’s the host) selling out stadiums and such, and how he was going to dance on the show.  It was cheesy TV host patter, but I was vaguely psyched that he was going to dance.  Then he started talking about how his parents immgrated, how hard they worked, etc, and that this dance was a tribute to the United States.  It was sort of touching.  I thought I might enjoy his performance.  Music started up — a redition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on some flute-like instrument, maybe a fife?  Anyway, a little predictable, but I still thought it might be interesting, until  a girl walked on the stage, playing the fluty-thing.

In a bikini.

That’s right, she was wearing an effing BIKINI.  With American flag patterns on it, and high heels.  Not only that, she didn’t dance, just walked around the stage playing the fluty-thing and showing off her body.  All that was missing was a pole in the middle of the stage and guys waving dollar bills.  She walked offstage after a while and the other dancers came on stage, and I am sure they were lovely, but I couldn’t even pay attention, I was so pissed off about that damn bikini.

THIS is his tribute to the US?  A chick in flag-striped underwear strutting around the stage?   This is the tribute to a country where women have fought so hard to be respected, to have equal rights, to have a voice and be seen as human beings, not just sex objects or servants?

If that is what represents the United States, then we have failed.  Every woman who has been part of the feminist movement might as well have stayed home and baked cookies, for all the good it has apparently done.  I feel sick.