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.

Douchehound of the day January 29, 2009

John, a lovely, gracious, and talented individual who I am sure has no issues whatsoever with self-confidence and is not at all afraid of  women, decided to drop by a send a few comments my way.  None of them made it out of the moderation queue, but I thought this one was particularly tasty.   Regarding this post, John says:

Yeah, so what? What is the problem with that? Next life, stay home and bake those cookies. Just shut up and don’t be fat.

As trolls go, John is, at least, concise.  And everything is spelled correctly!  Go John!

I wonder if John is a real, actual 9 year old boy raised by wolves under a rock, or if he has simply chosen to behave that way as an adult.

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.

This is your wake up call. Avoid the white puffy coat. January 27, 2009

Picture this:  A mom and her small daughter are playing in the snow.  They are laughing and throwing snowballs and having a fantastic time.  The mom stops for a moment to stand next to the snowman they have built, and the daughter, who is all of five years old, says “look mommy, you’re twins!”  The wah-wah music of doom starts up, and suddenly the mom realizes  “ZOMG!  I was so busy enjoying my life that I forgot to hate myself and I caught TEH FATZ and now I look like a snowman!  I am sure that’s what my tiny daughter meant and the resemblance she observed has nothing to do with the long puffy coat and red scarf and hat I am wearing jus like the snowman’s!”

So OF COURSE, the HEALTHY thing to do is eat lots of overprocessed food for the next two weeks!  Don’t worry, if you get too hungry, you can drink some water with artificial flavor and processed protein powder for a snack!

This message brought to you today by Special K, proud sponsor of eating disorders everywhere.

In which I identify with someone from THAT show. January 13, 2009

Thanks to the miracle of DVR, tonight I was watching last night’s Superstars of Dance (it’s nice that way, you can skip some of the prattle).  Usually I fast forward over commercials, but I got distracted and let them run.  I happened to catch an ad for The Biggest Loser.

Understand, I am not a fan.  I’ve never watched, I’ve never wanted to.   I think its premise is inherently flawed in a thousand different ways.  As a fat acceptance activist, I abhor the message it sends, I abhor its focus on pounds lost vs measurement of actual improvement or decline in health, I abhor the way it is marketed, reinforcing every fat person sterotype and misconception in the fat hater book.  I resent the whole “saving their lives” bullshit.  But this particular commercial caught my attention, because the girl in it…

well…

she was ME.

Obviously she is not really me, I am at home watching Superstars of Dance, not hanging out on the Biggest Loser Fatfarm O’ Doom ™.  But the similarities were striking.  She looked about my age, maybe a little younger.  Her face was shaped like mine.  I’ve had her haircut, and her hair color.  And when the commercial cut to the weigh-in shot and I saw her in the requisite BLFfO’D sports bra and spandex shorts, the starting weight was pretty damn close to what I weighed the last time I was placed on a doctor’s scale, and her body looked eerily familiar.  Her belly and mine share the same curves.  Her breasts were shaped like mine.  Her hips and thighs would have fit beautifully into the pants I wore to work today, and although I did not see her behind, I am guessing that she too could rock a good booty shake.

It was, to say the least, shocking.

This is the point in the post where I am supposed to start talking about what a wake-up call it was to see something like that, and how now I am all inspired to work really hard to drop all that weight, because OMG I can’t believe I really look like that.  But I am not going to.

I was inspired by seeing her.  I was inspired, because I looked at her and thought “wow, she’s beautiful“.  And that, my friends, is revolutionary.

She made me sad, sitting there crying about how no guy has asked for her number in 3 years.  While I can definitely sympathize with how she is feeling, more than anything I wanted to tell her that if that’s the case, then getting thin is maybe not the answer.  Maybe she’s hanging around the wrong kind of guy, the kind that is more concerned with the size of your ass than the light in your eyes.  Maybe now is a good time to learn how to be alone, and be happy.  Maybe it’s just not the right time.

Thanks to her, I am inspired.  I am now inspired to bare my belly when I bellydance.  I am inspired to continue on with my life the way I am right now, being alone and happy, refusing to worry about my singleness, and leaving my future up to a Power greater than myself.  I am inspired to embrace every ounce of my body, to love the curve of my belly, and the heft of my breasts, and even that beautiful booty.  I am inspired to save my life by living my life, and not spending one more damn second worrying about my weight.  I think that makes me the biggest winner.

Is it nice and warm there in the sand? January 11, 2009

I’ve been aware of the fat acceptance movement for a few years now, and involved for a bit less.  I’ve been fat, really fat, for  lot longer than that.  In the past 20 years I have vacillated between a size 14 and a size 28.  I grew up with a certain amount of privilege.  While I can sympathize with other people’s lives and struggles, I don’t really know what it is like to be a different race or sexual orientation or socioeconomic class.  I don’t really expect people who have always been thin, or even those who carry a little more weight than they would like, to fully understand what it is like to be this big. There is quite a difference between 20 pounds and 150, and until you have failed to fit into a seat at the movie theatre or been forced to buy an extra plane ticket, you can’t really know what it is like.  If you are able to buy clothes at “normal” stores, it is hard to understand the limitations of plus size.  I get this.

I also understand that not everyone is passionate about the same stuff I am.  Frankly, there are plenty of people who are really into causes that I don’t understand, and just like I don’t necessarily jump onto their bandwagons, I don’t expect them to jump onto mine.

What I cannot understand are the people who ignore what’s right in front of them, affecting their lives.  The people who see blatant fat hatred and ignore it, or even perpetuate it.  The ones who continue to let themselves be manipulated, even after they know what’s happening.  The Dorothys who continue to fear the wizard, even after they have seen the man behind the curtain, or even choose to ignore the evidence, and keep telling the rest of us that the big floating head is real and that the man behind the curtain is a figment of our crazed imagination.

If I had never learned that paper was made from trees and had never heard of recylcling, then no one could really hold me responsible to do it.  But since I do know that, even if I don’t go all gung-ho about it, it would be pretty silly of me to throw paper in the trash if there is a recycling bin 3 feet away.

I get that paradigm-shifting is hard, and I am not asking anyone to jump head first into FA.  But I have to say, I am getting tired of all of the people playing ostrich.  Ignoring the problem isn’t going to make it go away, and embracing your illusions in the face of contrary information just makes you look stuid in the end.

Hey, it’s a troll! January 3, 2009

So, when Diane left a comment on my last post, I contemplated how to handle it.  I considered disapproving the comment (since, y’know, it’s my blog and all and I can do that if I want to).  I considered replying in another comment on that post.  But I decided, instead, to give Diane the attention she was asking for with her little snip of a remark, and reply in a new post, because I have some things I would like to say to Diane.

Diane’s comment:

Obese, stop complaining. Lose weight before you sit next to me.

It seems that Diane is of the opinion that I, as a fat person, do not have the right to voice my opinion on matters of popular culture.  Hey Diane, it’s the interwebz.  Anyone with a computer and a phone line, or even a public library, can have a blog and spew whatever they want on it, fat, thin, green, purple, beautiful, ugly, or somewhere in between.  Heck, you managed to spew a little right here.  If the hateful and bigoted get to share their thoughts, the fat sure as hell have the same right.

The comment doesn’t really make much sense.  Diane, let me help you.  I wasn’t complaining that I am fat.  I am fat, it’s true, but I am pretty content with my body.  I was criticizing media that is promulgating untrue and damaging messages to the TV watching populace.  I would have the same objection to a commercial that said blonde people can’t fly to Paris or take karate.  It’s social commentary, not OMG I’M SO FAT whining, as you seem to think.

I can’t imagine why Diane would be so opposed to me, a fat person, sitting next to her.  I smell delightful.  I am a good conversationalist (although I really don’t like bigots, so we might not have much to say to one another), I’m funny, and I offer gum.  Fat is not catching.  I have no intention of rubbing my fat up against her, since such action is generally frowned upon in polite company, no matter the size of the person rubbing.  I suppose Diane’s objection must be based in some unthinking hatred of fat people.  So sad.  One misses out on so much when one unthinkingly hates other people.

Diane, I wish you all the best, and I hope some day you can get past this irrationality and hate.  I promise, when you do, you will lead a richer life and be a  happier individual.

Maybe I need new channels. January 2, 2009

I don’t watch that much TV, but lately, when I do, it seems that every. single. commercial. is about weight loss, dieting, workout equipment, or some other related drivel.  It’s starting to piss me off, and I pity anyone who is DVR-deprived.  Today I saw one for some ab exerciser thingy, and a woman in the commercial said that “it made my waist smaller — and that’s what every woman wants!”  No honey, not every woman wants a smaller waist.  Some women *gasp* wish they could gain weight.  Some women want to have babies.  Some women want a PhD.  Some women want world peace, or more sleep, or peanut butter.  And some women…DUN DUN DUN…are happy with their bodies the way they are.

There’s another one for WLS that involves a couple listing thing they want to do that made them decide to get a surgically induced eating disorder lap band.  Things like “I want to do karate with my son” and “I want to fly to Paris with my husband”  That one makes me want to throw things at the TV and scream YOU CAN DO ALL THAT RIGHT THE HELL NOW!!!!!!  But the fat-hating powers that be are veryvery invested in all of us believing that if we have TEH FATZ we are doomed to live miserable lives doing nothing we want to do, so we must be told that fat people cannot possibly do karate or fly to Paris, we are all doomed to a pathetic non-existence unless we allow the magic doctors to permanently damage our digestive tract.

My current favorite is the one with the little furry monster that is supposed to represent hunger, the commercial that equates eating when you are bored with eating when you are hungry.  First of all, hunger is not a bad thing, it’s a beautiful little way our bodies tell us we need food, that stuff that supplies energy to our cells so we can, y’know, live and think and breathe and stuff.  Eating out of boredom and hunger are two quite different furry little creatures.  Unfortunately, 99.87%* of women have spent so much of their lives on diets that they have completely disabled the hunger mechanism, so they don’t know when they are hungry or not.  The cure for eating when you aren’t hungry?  STOP DIETING SO YOU CAN LEARN TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE!  The cure for eating while you are bored?   Step one:  STOP WATCHING STUPID DIET COMMERCIALS, THEY ARE BORING. AND STUPID.  AND THEY LIE.  Step two:  do something.  Take a walk, or play a game, or go see a movie, or go shopping, or take a nap, or dance around your living room, or learn a language, or take karate or fly to Paris!  You are allowed.  The fat-hating powers that be are wrong.

*A very scientific number I made up