Fat Acceptance is KILLING US!

CNN Health asks "Is the fat acceptance movement bad for our health?"

No.








Oh, I'm sorry, they kept going. I thought it was odd that they'd have a one word article.

Look, here is the essential folly of such articles. Fat acceptance is profoundly marginalized. I'd love for the movement to be at a place where that was a question that could at least meet the basic requirements of plausability with fat acceptance having some kind of significant influence on our society, but that's not remotely the truth. Until then, this strikes me as just as meaningless a question as the dieters who whine about how fat acceptance is infringing on their "right" to diet. I'd LOVE for us to have the kind of power and influence necessary to justify such fears, but we aren't there. Not even close.

Which makes this kind of "concern mongering" something very different. Its not about what fat acceptance actually does but rather the fever dreams of the most ardent fat bashers. They see fat people who've failed to respond to the constant yelling at and they are in search of answers. While some conclude they simply must not have yelled loud enough, others are convinced of vast support for fat acceptance warping the minds of vulnerable fatties telling them its okay to give up on being healthy.

Here in the real world, its a concern that can't really be taken seriously. Yet read the CNN article closely. The author repeatedly employs hypothetical critics. Only at the very end does she quote someone very directly fretting about fat acceptance's dangerous influence. And to be fair, even that person doesn't actually call out fat acceptance so much as a fantasy of about a culture that just happens to be more accepting of fat people. Again, please let me know when that exists, but that's also not really an attack on fat acceptance.

Is it because no one would come out and demagogue against fat acceptance? Please. I'm sure there is no shortage of people eager to do so. Our so-called allies at Yale do it all of the time, for one. So, why didn't the author back up these hypothetical critics with actual ones?

Because in our society, that's just not necessary. Criticizing fat people is just accepted. Why waste words on what everyone "knows", right? Define fat acceptance and people will just implicitly believe it to be foolish and dangerous. But its these kinds of short cuts in the media that simply ordain this view point and insulate it from genuine criticism. Note that the article concludes with fat bashing. Can you imagine an article on dieting that gave the last word to a fat liberation activist? Of course not. But suggesting fat acceptance is menace? Heck, the author can just do that themselves and still pretend to be unbiased. The deck is stacked against at every turn and yet the media can still seriously entertain the question of whether our influence is TOO great.

XFAT seems too obvious

News came out a couple weeks ago that Microsoft was trying to get in on the fat shaming video game business than Nintendo has occupied with WiiFit. They recently filed a patent for a system to allow avatars to reflect real-world health data about the gamer.

Its not really clear what they want to do with it just yet. The patent talks about gathering other third-party data as well to help gamers connect with similar individuals. In the case of fatties, you can bet that means dieters. The numbers game sadly would suggest little else. The big attention is the way their system would mimic WiiFit's mechanism of making a person's Mii gain weight to reflect their actual weight. If you are fat, so is your avatar.

Now, I am fat and so is my avatar. At least, as fat as it'd let me make it. That kind of puzzles me about these sorts of systems. They are trading off the real world disgust with fat people but most video game character creators already reflect this by prohibiting creations that are undesirably fat. My XBox Avatar is at least a fairly round, but this is as big as it gets. In the scheme of things, there are plenty of fat people bigger than me. Are they going to adjust the system to allow those people to be reflected?

I've been meaning to write a post about virtual representations of fat. Its interesting to me how often our bodies are shut out of virtual spaces just as we are real ones. My XBox Avatar can be maybe 250lbs, but don't ask it to be 300. Mii's can be round, but only so far. (and the WiiFit balance board is NOT rated for many fat people). Sims 3 has suddenly embraced fat Sims after previously allowing barely there bellies. Still, its something and impacts both genders.

A lot of games reflect gender inequality in their virtual creations. Wrestling games have been radically reducing the opportunities for fat characters in the last decade, but most severely for women. Guitar Hero: World Tour allows a stocky male character but the female equivalent is considerably slimmer. Rock Band is curious to me in that its almost the opposite. While no really fat people appear in the game, the highest weight female character seems more recognizably fat to me than with males.

I'll try to review at least some fat character creations in video games in an upcoming post. Its sad, though not entirely surprising, that often the times our bodies are deemed appropriate for virtual representation is for the purpose of shaming us and not actually representing us.

Fat? No diploma for you.

Seriously?!?

Seems the new "trend" in higher education is denying diplomas to fat students. At least that's what Lincoln University is doing. Students who matriculate with a BMI of 30 aren't allowed to graduate without losing weight or taking a semester in fat shaming 101. Oh, I'm sorry. "Fitness for Life".

What am I supposed to say to this? Honestly, this is just scary. SO much is wrong with this that I hardly know where to begin.

How does denying a fat person a diploma do ANYTHING constructive? Even if you have "good intentions" just what the fuck is this supposed to accomplish? Its bad enough to insist on the illusion of doing something with the insane "Hate your body" course, but the penalty is absurd. Unless, of course, you think fat is such a moral failure that the person doesn't deserve to graduate. Which is surely what people in the college administration think. I don't expect a press release to that effect, but their attitudes are clearly steeped in irrational hatred that justifies a fundamentally unjust act.

And since when is it the professional obligation of my school to tell me I'm fat? What does my body size have to do with my ability to learn?

Ah, but there we get to heart of the problem. Those who tout fat stigmatization really have no respect for us. Because ultimately, they DO think we're stupid. That's all I can deduce from the attitude of the man running the program who says:

No student should ever be able to leave Lincoln and not know the risks of obesity. They could never say, "I wish I knew this was going to happen to me, I wish someone would have told me."

Here again we see the maddening notion that the problem with fat people, is that no one has bothered to tell us not to be fat. Or we've been too stupid to learn, thus forfeiting our right to a diploma. For what I'm sure will not be the last time, let me say to all fat stigmatizers:

FAT PEOPLE KNOW THEY ARE FAT. FAT PEOPLE KNOW THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO LOSE WEIGHT.

I'm so sick and tired of this absurd "eureka" moments everyone has to justify denying rights, respect, and dignity to fat people. All these geniuses who declare one day, "I got it! Lets just tell them they are fat!" They wrap their hatred in good intention, but their message and approach is no different than a grade school bully.

We get told we're fat. Like every day. We get told to lose weight. Multiple times each day. Instead of continuing to blame us, maybe you could stop and wonder why a country that hates itself for being fat and which pours billions into chasing weight loss hasn't actually lost weight. Golly, maybe constant berating and discrimination don't work because the underlying "treatment" doesn't work. Because for all your hatred of fat people, there is no reliable, safe, or sane way to make a fat person into a not fat person. And even in the rare cases that it does, no proof it makes them healthier.

They always defend bigotry by professing to care too much about our health and well-being. Well, if our health is that important, why does no one seem to care to pursue approaches that can improve the health of fat people without weight loss? Weight loss isn't working and what fat people need is for the medical establishment to stop telling us to lose weight and start treating us. If this really was about health, why hasn't that happened yet?

Behold the amplitude of Beth Ditto

Look, its not like I think every article about Beth Ditto needs to be all-fat, all-of-the-time. Heck, I don't even trust the notion of a fat accepting celebrity role model given how many have abandoned size acceptance in the past. But it still seems to me that an interview with an unapologetic fat icon should still treat her size with more respect that to reduce it to some weird indirect parenthetical: "Ditto's fabulous amplitude (in every sense)".

Hey, I'm all for coming up with fun and irreverent ways to reference our fat, its just this seems less like a smirking reclamation than dancing around Ditto's size instead of actually talking about it. Its not the first time I've seen a writer pull this trick when talking about Ditto, introducing her weight with some sort of very "kind" way of pointing it out without actually saying anything. I'm so over these kind of decoder-ring-on-the-cheap method of saying "(get it? cuz she's fat)".

She's fat. She uses the word. So can you. Crafting some "clever" method of obliquely pointing it out frankly strikes me as disrespectful given how "out" she is about her body. I'd have hoped a writer focusing on her unapologetically out stance on her sexuality might have figured that out.

Check out "Round is a Shape"

At the risk of seeming like a fan boy, I've got another link from the fabulous Jaclyn Friedman to share. Over at Amplify, she shares her story as a 9 year old on a diet. As I've come to expect from Ms. Friedman it is bracingly and fearlessly earnest and I highly recommend checking it out.

Cook Food at Salon

Jaclyn Friedman offers an interesting interview with Lisa Jervis over at Salon. Jervis is the co-founder of Bitch Magazine and author of "Cook Food". Its a sort-of "how-to" guide for being a part of the local food movement. Its an interesting an article and especially worth a note to fat activists in that Jervis calls on the pro-food movement to show more skepticism for anti-fat claims from the medical industry.

"What really saddens me about the state of the pro-food discourse about obesity right now is that when Monsanto says genetically modified soybeans are not an environmental problem or a health problem, the pro-food movement is extremely skeptical, and they call that out as total bullshit. Whereas when the medical industry says "fat kills," they're not like: Actually, no, diabetes may kill, but the cause and effect relationship between the two is not as uncomplicated as you'd have us believe."

You will not be surprised that these couple of sentences in a long article are generating disproportionate push-back in the letters section, so feel free to push-back some yourselves.

Straw Fatties

The Philadelphia Daily News brings us the inspiring and unique story of a woman who is trying to lose weight because her husband told her she was too fat. Except, of course, that's not inspiring. Nor is it remotely unique. Men are pressuring their spouses to lose weight all across America right now. Its sad and wrong and something I hope fat acceptance can change.

In this story, though, fat acceptance is the villain because the woman meeting her husband's demands happens to be a celebrity who was fat accepting for pay. So the story makes a lot of fuss over how fat acceptance activists are all flustered.

Give me a break.

Sorry, but sometime around Camryn Manheim's diet I stopped thinking fat celebrities would ever be fat accepting role models. The pressures in our culture already makes fat acceptance an extraordinarily unlikely event. In the entertainment industry its just much worse. Its too easy for people to fall into bland fat stigmatization feelings. And most fat activists I know feel pretty much the same way. Where are these people "angrily abuzz" that the article mentions? I've tried to search for Fat-o-sphere articles that bring it up and I'm finding nothing.

The truth is, the author of the love letter to sexist fat stigmatization is just making this up because she wants to make a point of denying fat acceptance a right to exist. Kimberly Garrison is a professional fat stigmatizer, after all, as a trainer and "fitness journalist". Its all about the enforcement of thin privilege. Or in this case, the privilege of fat hatred. All this hand-wringing and bafflement that fat acceptance has something against fat stigmatization! Don't we know we're not supposed to be fat? Its all well and good that we're for fat acceptance, but surely we can't actually be suggesting that its acceptable to be fat.

Straw fatties are created to try to keep us in our place. To distort our positions so as to lay out the boundaries of acceptable beliefs so we're excluded. I am genuinely saddened at people trying to lose weight. I don't hate them. I just find myself deeply distraught when I hear of what any person is doing to themselves because they think fat is intolerable. I'd love for my first reaction to be anger. Not at the dieters, but at the system. Sometimes I even wish it was ambivalence, but its not. Its sadness. Because I'm not interesting in "knowing my place". I'm fat accepting, but not accepting of fat hatred, too. People like Kimberly Garrison don't expect us to mean what they say. To them, its inconceivable that we ACTUALLY are demanding respect for our bodies and for the bodies of our fellow fat men and women. When confronted with a reminder of that, they sputter and fume. We're not being realistic! We're not being honest! Don't we know the "tramau" we're putting our bodies through? They'll only tolerate the notion that we want fat acceptance for ourselves. They can write us off individually as lost causes. But when they are reminded that we actually want this for other people too, out comes the "but don't you know fat is bad". It shows they were never really listening or caring in the first place. Not that most of us were fooled.

I'm not angry at Mo'Nique for dieting at the behest of her husband. I'm sad about it, just as I am for everyone woman made to feel like this true lost cause is something they must spend their whole life chasing. I'll spare my anger for people like Kimberly Garrison who profit off the promotion of fat hatred.

Fat Hate on Fox News

WTF?

I don't even know what to say about this. FoxNews has decided to explore the meme about how Obama's Surgeon General nominee is too fat for the job. How? By giving national TV time to a professional fat hater who comes on wearing a "No Chubbies" T-shirt.

Seriously.

Cavuto is relatively incredulous, but why is this Karolchyk idiot even being given this kind of platform in the first place? He claims to be the head of the "Anti-Gym", but his gym was closed in January because he owes nearly $200,000 in back taxes. He then got dinged for leaving personal records from his failed gym in an unsecured dumpster. Supposedly, he's now being groomed for a reality TV gig. Inspite of his massive personal failures, he's lately been a regular guest with Neal Cavuto on FoxNews. Hence the chummy attitude from Cavuto even while scolding Karolchyk. This dates back to at least last year, before his IRS troubles, when Cavuto had him on to attack Santa Claus. Actually, google suggests Karolchyk's been a popular guest on Fox, showing up regularly and always saying about the same thing.

He's a clown. And he knows it. He plays up his fat hatred to cartoonish degrees to attract attention. He plays "edgy" for the sake of cameras and dollars. He stages fake fat acceptance protest to use as a foil. He's the kind of guy who trolls FA sites. I frankly would be shoked if he hasn't. He isn't worth caring about. To pretend anything he has to say is worth caring about would be a grave mistake.

So why the hell does FoxNews do just that? He's the news version of comic relief, but his clowning is in support of bigotry and hatred. He isn't standing up for prejudice under some guise of respectability. Heck, he makes Me!Me! look positively reserved. And make no mistake, while this guy is FoxNews' clown, this is a problem throughout the mainstream media. Any of those who are the objects of such hatred are right to look at the news outlets lavishing him with attention and demand answers. The clown is meaningless compared to the person shining a spotlight on them.

Dance fatty! Dance!

So, there is a new fat themed dance show on TV. A reality series about Big Moves and their brand of politically subvercive musical theater? Maybe a profile of China's "Fat and Cool" dance troupe or Cuba's Danza Voluminosa? A visit to one of the hundreds of fat social clubs around the country where fat women can be found dacing and flirting (just like real people!)? A follow-up on former America's Got Talent contestants The Glamazons? Or an insufferable mash-up of "The Biggest Loser" and "Dancing with the Stars"?

Yeah, its "Dancing with Fat Stigmatization".

I knew it was too good to be true when YouTube was promoting a video with what appeared to be scantily attired fat men and women on a TV show. Had to be a catch. Sure enough, YouTube is quickly yelling at me about how I'm going to die if I don't dance myself thin. I heard about this show coming a year ago but I hoped it died in development, but no such luck. The promo video was a cavelcade of fat hate cliche's (where the winner is a loser, DEATH FAT, no one likes fatties, blah blah blah). Its all so boring, but naturally gets dressed up as inspirational and moving. The "sexy" clothing in a show like this takes on a different meaning, because the purpose is not to celebrate one's body but to demean it. Thus, the intention is not to acknowledge the sexuality of fat people, but to mock the notion of a fat person as sexual. At the most, the contestants are only afforded toleration so long as they acknowledge the wrongness of their bodies.

I'm so sick of these shows. Its demeaning and dehumanizing. The only time you see a fat body is when its being paraded about for catcalls and scorn. Screw that. I used to think that the total lack of fat flesh in our popular culture served to turn fat people into an "other", something literally unfathomable for most people because our culture catagorically withheld any pressence of an undressed fat body. Even the fleeting appearances of unclothed fat men for comedic purpose might counteract that, something fat women never saw. They weren't even allowed to be laughed at. Merely pitied and ignored. Well, suffice to say, this BS is not what I was hoping for. There is no context for seeing a fat woman in any state of undress on TV that is not about explicitly and unflinchingly about stigmatizing them. Fat men aren't far behind at this point, either. This isn't humanizing fat people. Its just further entrenching the idea that we are desexualized monsters fit for the disgust of pity of a crowd. I know this is a lot of complaining with little constructive, but right now I feel like the complaint just needs to be aired. Since gosh knows anything that makes fun of fat people has no trouble getting aired.

And don't get me started on the Fat Bachelor (with Fat Bachelorettes). As an FA (Fat Admirer), I'm dreading the inevitable "twist" where the show pretty much disrespects my identity as prefering a fat partner. You know its coming. I hope I'm wrong. Its bad enough that it seems to imply that fat people can only hope to be with fat people, though the promo does suggest that the Fatchelor is an FA. I just don't expect the show to respect that. I think it'll downplay it in favor of a more simplistic notion of fat ghettoization and then dangle out the prospect of doing "better" than a fat partner to either the female suitors our the male bachelor. I just don't trust TV to deal with fat people with any respect. Would love to be proven wrong, but its not like our popular culture doesn't have a VERY consistant track record.

Fat Justice

Okay, maybe not fat so much as identifiably not exceptionally thin, but President Obama today announced his intention to nominate the relatively average sized Sonia Sotomayor to be a Justice on the United States Supreme Court. You may recall a couple weeks ago Judge Sotomayor, widely rumored to be up for the nomination, was smeared on the Letters page at Salon for being to fat for consideration. The notion being that nominating a fat person is a waste of a nomination since fatties are just going to die on you.

The writer was actually providing a glimpse into a short-hand attack on Sotomayor. Not content to just call her fat, the writer also calls her diabetic. I suspect her diabetes status will get brought up a lot in the coming weeks as a proxy for her weight. It'll be a useful short-hand given the way diabetes is regarded as a moral failure by much of our society. It will be used to conjure up not just the image of a fat woman, but as a reminder of Sotomayor's lower-class upbringing. Her story is genuinely inspiring, but we've already seen efforts to paint her as a stereotype. Smears are out that she isn't really very bright, even though she was a top student at Princeton and Yale Law at a time Latinos from the Bronx weren't even treated equally, much less the imagined preferential treatment that is a bogeyman for white conservative males. She gets accidentally labeled a "Latina single mother" in spite of her not having any children, a none-to-subtle effort to talk in code linking to other frequent cultural targets of the Right. Her being diabetic is already being trotted out for much the same reason. Its meant to feed into a stereotype.

The ironic thing is, she has Type I Diabetes. Which not only is nor correlated with being fat, is actually correlated with being thin. Not that you'll ever hear it called that way. If something is correlated to fat, then fat causes it. If something is correlated to thinness, then its just not correlated to being fat. Not that it should matter, mind you. What we're seeing here is an effort to concern troll about diabetes as a proxy for criticizing her for her not quite thin body. Its an effort to trade of social judgment of fat as a moral failing to make a political hit.