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Fat.

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04:07 / 24.08.01

Allow me to add my voice to the consensus that it's better to try and feel good about yourself, no matter what your weight is. Of course this is much harder to do than to suggest, but with constant effort it is possible to become a little happier.

Most of the problems of obesity and bulimia are extreme cases, and do require radical solutions to curb the life-threatening effect they have on people. I think that they are symptoms at best of society's collective distortions about body-image, and they would possibly be solved by getting a critical mass of individuals to feel good about the way they look, in a variety of weights and shapes.

I can't say that I've ever been overweight -- I just haven't the metabolism for it, and frankly I don't much care for eating. That's right, I'd give it up if I could, but I'm also not prepared to starve to death, so eat I do. My biggest concern is trying to gain some weight and strengthen my body so that I will live as long as possible, until they crack the immortality code if need be. At the same time, I'm not a thin freak, and I find full-figured women to be very sexually desirable. No, that's not a come-on, I'm just saying there's room for all tastes.

I think the tide is turning, as slow as it may be. More and more health articles point out how unhealthy it is to strive for Ally McBeal or Courtney Cox style thinness. And fashion designers are beginning to target women with wider hips, a fuller breast, and god forbid, some meat on their bones. It does take time, but we can help if we don't give in to the TV programming, and recognize it for the bullshit that it is. Obesity is a serious health problem. Being 10 to 15 pounds overweight is not a problem at all.

Whisky Priestess

04:07 / 24.08.01

I think the problem of the media's attitude to weight is that it's a)hypocritical and b) schizophrenic.

a) You are the editor of a men's magazine. Let's call it FHM. You have the choice of two people to put on your cover. One is a slender female popstar (say New Geri). One is a larger female popstar (say Alison Moyet, now starring in Chicago). Exclsuing age differences, which one do you choose because it will sell more magazines?

b) You are the editor of a women's fashion magazine criticised for promoting too-thin body images. You write an editorial condemning bulimia and celebrating Sophie Dahl. Twenty pages on is a fashion spread. You couldn;t get Sophie - and nor, perhaps did you want to. You are showing Armani clothes designed to look good on slender androgynous women. The model is thin. You eat a bagel for lunch and chuck it up in the toilet twenty minutes later. Then you do some coke.

Problem? Yes.

But is it just the fact that the media tells us fat people are unattractive that means we are less attracted to fat people, at least initially? "Chubby-chasing" is seen as a mild fetish, while chasing slender men/women is seen as totally normal. Is this entirely a result of our manipulation by the media? Generally speaking, obese people do look a lot better when they've lost weight, just as anorexics look better when they have put some on.

There may be no such thing as "normal" but there is a norm, which I believe we are genetically programmed to seek out, just as we often seek people similar to us (mentally and physically) as partners.

Just my view of it.

15:23 / 24.08.01

quote:Originally posted by Whisky Priestess:

But is it just the fact that the media tells us fat people are unattractive that means we are less attracted to fat people, at least initially? "Chubby-chasing" is seen as a mild fetish, while chasing slender men/women is seen as totally normal. Is this entirely a result of our manipulation by the media? Generally speaking, obese people do look a lot better when they've lost weight, just as anorexics look better when they have put some on.

There may be no such thing as "normal" but there is a norm, which I believe we are genetically programmed to seek out, just as we often seek people similar to us (mentally and physically) as partners.

I don't have exact documentation to quote here, but I think if you look at the problem from a genetic point of view then the woman with the large hips is more likely to successfully bear children, and someone with a spare tire is more likely to survive the lean months of winter. Our genetic coding hasn't changed much in about 100,000 years, so we're still programmed for a nomadic hunter/gatherer lifestyle, and our sedentary modern world with fast food on tap is a large part of the problem.

I'm won't say that the media control us completely, but there is definitely a peer pressure factor at hand. The people with the money create the images that bombard us constantly, and we're slowly brainwashed into thinking that wafer thin is the "norm." To bring up an over-used example of a different norm, why did the artist Rubens paint the women models that he chose? Was he being radical against the normal thin people of the time, or was the current fashion simply to be a little heavy?

With all issues of labelling, there is also an unhealthy semantic practice at work. We say that someone "is" fat, as though it is a statement of fact, and a value judgement at the same time. As many have experienced, living in a body that has some perceived extra mass does not have permanence, it changes; but the verb "is" implies something integral and unchanging.

And how fat is fat? How thin is thin? I'm not talking obese or anorexic, but just normal person weight levels. When does your customary weight and shape become a personal issue, when we all really know that whatever form we manifest contains the perfection of the entire universe?

wembley can change in 28 days

17:16 / 24.08.01

The weirdest thing I find about the whole issue is that just as dogs can supposedly smell fear, humans can tell if you're comfortable being looked at or not, and seem to judge you accordingly - am I mad, or does anyone else notice this? I've seen so many women who are heavier than myself (and I'm about the right size to take on six firefighters in armwrestling), and you can tell who's worried about herself and who's not. If you project your own lack of self-confidence, it gets amplified, and if you have confidence, people do look again and wonder what secret you know. Tres bizarre. I notice when tiny girls fix their shirts over their stomachs as a nervous habit during conversation. I believe that most people, given the chance, are too busy worrying about their own physical shortcomings to notice those of other people.

I'm just joining the club here, too. I'm in the process of losing a lot of weight that I attribute to beer and nervous overeating for about a decade, but even when I'm slim, I'll be much bigger than most girls. I'm 5'8", I'm a rugby prop - and I look it. I'd love once - just once - to look breakable. But no, I'm supposed to be in the fields in Karelia, pulling alongside the oxen.

ONLY NICE THINGS

10:58 / 17.07.02

Bump, to tie in with Deva's feminist slimming thread.

12:15 / 17.07.02

didn't see this thread when it first appeared, so it's good to have a chance to join in.

i've certainly found a different attitude towards fat in the lesbian community, generally speaking, than in the hetero one. 'big' can often equal strong/powerful, in a spiritual/goddess sense. i was pretty fucked up about body image until i went to a fat issues workshop in san francisco - i came face to face with my own prejudice - i'd dismissed a woman as not worth talking to because she was big, and found out, before it was too late luckily for me, that she fucking great. after that, i had to dismantle a lot of things. i bought some dykey zines written by fat women that quite frankly kicked arse. the further i've drifted from mainstream society, the freer i've become, i think, and the more aware i am of how horrendous the whole issue is to a lot of people.

when i was in a relationship with a man, he spent the last few years of it telling me how i needed to lose weight, all the while being able to stuff his face with whatever food he wanted and not put on a pound. i have photos from those days - i was really thin. it was a control thing, of course. one of his attempts to get me to stay with him was to tell me i'd put on weight if i left him. well, i did put on weight, but i feel more natural this way. sometimes i do wish i was thinner, mostly because i'd like to have more choice in the clothes i buy but i'm pretty happy with my body as it is. in terms of health, i've worked on what i eat for years and years - what fucks my crohn's up is far more important to me than anything else, as long as it's veggie, of course. thin does not automatically equal healthy. or happy. i do feel strong, i feel confident. and if you wanna be crude, i don't have too many problems getting laid!

12:32 / 17.07.02

this is a cross post from conversation but i'd like to say it here, too:

i have just come out of therapy, which i had for a year, and it was there that i realised that my eating disorder was all down to other issues. these other issues had made me feel so gross and out of control that i used my body as something that i could control and it got way out of hand.
i still have an incredibly fucked up body image, and i have self-esteem issues, but working on them is totally helping me stop taking it all out on my body.
so often i focus on bad things about my body -- it's gross etc instead of remembering that it took me hiking in the himalayas and stuff.

also, i want to point out that the women who sometimes make me feel bad about my body are also making themselves ill. sarah michelle gellar, tara reid and christina ricci have all admitted to also having eating disorders. and that's fucked up.

oh yeah, and whoever was talking about sophie dahl --- she is waaaaaay skinny now. she used to be a role model of mine and now she isn't. all the celebrities i used to admire for being curvy and cute (christina ricci, thora birch) etc are all of a sudden fucking ill looking.

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:44 / 17.07.02

Hmmm...it occurs to me that we may bve shading into "Callista Flockhart makes women feel bad about their bodies, the scrawny bitch!" territory here. If we assume that people have a "natural" weight, and that being significantly above or below that natural weight is a bad thing, then to describe somebody who is starving themselves as "sickly" would seem to make perfect sense. But it also means "I think these people are no longer attractive because they no longer look as I want them to. Furthermore, I intend to suggest that there is something pathological or medical in my dislike of their new look, so that it is identified as not a judgement based on simple aesthetics but something more concrete". In what sense is that better than describing somebody as "looking unhealthily obese", f'r example?

12:47 / 17.07.02

i don't think i'm moving into that territory. what i was trying to point out, and maybe i did so poorly, haus, is that women who are famous are developing eating disorders. they are ill, ok? an eating disorder is an illness.

ONLY NICE THINGS

13:20 / 17.07.02

Yes, but people who are not famous also get eating disorders, and people who are famous do not get eating disorders, and some people are just skinny, presumably...

Case in point. A woman of my acquaintance used to maintain, and to the best of my knowledge still does, that thin women were jealous of her because she was a real woman, not a stick figure, and that all the boys really fancied real women, and not stick figures, because real women had butts and boobs and all the other things that men liked.

Which, as a "hips tits power" piece of positive thinking is great, except of course that a) it is not about self, but about who the boys fancy more, and b) the assertion relies on a polarity where the skinny girls are placed in a position of inferiority. It's an inversion, not an equalisation.

If somebody has an eating disorder, they have an eating disorder, and they are sick. If somebody does not have an eating disorder (Thora Birch? Vanessa Feltz? Nigel Lawson) but loses weight or changes body-shape, to describe them in terms of being sick is presumably as unhelpful as describing a large person as "obese" when they are not clinically obese (and what does *that* mean, anyway?), because it just focuses attention back on constantly holding up the body, and in particular the female body, against an idealised form, however that form looks, and finding it wanting.

None of which excuses the pressure that celebrities are placed under to conform to the ideal...except that I suspect it's a bit more complex than that. Sophie Dahl, for example; her whole schtick was being 3 sizes larger than a "normal" model (and thus, to nick Deva's phrase, "normal-sized"), that was what made her bankable and unique. So what induced her to battle down to waifishness, when there are so many other models with far more experience at being a waif?

It's curious and rather unsettling.

To change tack a little, does any desire to reduce (or for that matter increase) body weight indicate an unhappy relationship with one's body?

The Planet of Sound

14:20 / 17.07.02

Well, in most cases, one would think. As a teenager I got fat because I was unhappy, and then I got thin because I was unhappy with being fat. One of those crazy cycle thangs?

14:33 / 17.07.02

Yes, the idea of clinical obesity is a strange one... in fact some medics' relationship with their patients' body sizes can be a bit weird. F'rexample, I went to the doctor's for a prescription a month or so ago, and as is usual I was weighed; and when I told the doctor the result, she looked at me and asked whether I was trying to lose weight, in a manner which implied that if I wasn't, I should be. Now the thing is that, given my height and everything, I do actually come out at the upper end of the 'overweight' category (at least, the ones we used in biology lessons). The 'normal' category compasses about two stone, and anything outside that is over- or underweight. But I don't think I'm unhealthily overweight (unhealthy, yes, but that's nothing to do with my weight). I don't think I even look unhealthily overweight. So why do I get classified as being unhealthily overweight?

Makes very little sense.

The Planet of Sound

14:36 / 17.07.02

And on a semantic tangent; have we noticed that The Kids nowadays say 'Phat' and 'Sweet' instead of the 'cool' that we oldsters rather archaically employ? Possible (group) subconscious endorsement of chunkiness and chocolate eating in a rather more weighty society? Note increased use of baggy clothing, compared to the drainpipes and closely fitted clothes of not so long ago.

(Zoot suits (40's) - also baggy, due to social demonstration of ability to obtain extra cloth on the black market. I know.)

15:21 / 17.07.02

haus: i have an eating disorder, i've been in therapy for it. i know that not just famous women have eating disorders!

Regrettable Juvenilia

16:02 / 17.07.02

I can't help but think Haus' point was a little more complicated than that - and something else that occurs to me, suds, is that you admitted in the other thread that two of the examples of "famous women with eating disorders" that you gave rely on second-hand rumours as evidence of their suffering from such diseases... Not that I'm denying the problems with the way that an idealised body shape is presented by the media, just agreeing with Haus' point that making assumptions about individuals' mental/physical state may not be the best tack to take in critiquing this.

One aspect of the whole health/diet/body thang that bothers me is this: it seems that people who are reasonably switched on about politics, self-image, society, yada yada - %you know, "switched on" people, not like the MINDLESS HERD MASSES% - acknowledge that it's generally a Bad Thing to make people, especially women*, feel bad about the shape of their bodies.

Yet conversely, it's perfectly acceptable, even admirable, for these people to make others feel bad and self-conscious about their actual diet* and the amount of exercise they take - up to the point of actual paternalistic dictats: "LOOK - do THIS. It will make you feel BETTER - TRUST ME."

What's up with that?

*I'm talking on a health basis here, not an ethical one.

**We could also discuss whether there's a double standard at play in the minds of a lot of liberally progressivey feministy types - and whilst I normally hate people banging on about double standards in a fashion which usually suggests that PC has, yes, gone mad/too far, I think there is one... In an off-the-board conversation with a couple of keen Head Shop devotees, we all agreed that like it or not, we tended to err towards body fascism where the male body was concerned. Or look at it this way - how many people here would pull someone up for using the term "fat bastard" in the Conversation. I'll admit I probably wouldn't - and yet I probably, almost certainly, would feel like administering an online smacking to anyone who used the term "fat bitch". What's up with *that*?

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:38 / 18.07.02

Hoom. It could be argued that *all* such advice is on some level necessarily paternalistic, or at least didactic. And why does one offer didactic advice? To prevent people from *making mistakes*. Perhaps Flyboy is right and we are substituting a hatred of "the fat" to a hatred of "the unhealthy". Hoom.

But let's recap. Another thread, a page or so down in the Head Shop, entitled "Don't touch this thread, you'll get it all fat", tried to look at some of the reasons why fat is such a locus of jeering and animosity. I think it would be interesting to work that back in.

So, why do people who would never think of abusing black people for being black, or women for being women still feel able to declare open season on our larger brethren and sistren?

Some possibles:

The "tribal" (*ahem*) solution: The fat person has eaten all the food in the village, thus leaving none for others.

The "poor" solution: Cheap food is full of sugars and starches, so being fat denotes poverty. See also the "lazy" solution.

The "lazy" solution: Fat people are clearly lazy, or else they would not be fat, and therefore bring mockery upon themselves through a correctible personal failing. Subdivisions of this include the "convenience" solution (taking up too much space, moving too slowly) and the "aesthetic" solution (people should not have to look upon such portliness), both of which presuppose that being fat is somebody's *fault* - it's reasonably rare, for example, for anyone to use the same sort of thinking on people with Spina Bifida, no matter how slow-moving or "unattractive" they may be...

Are these, or other arguments, why fat is so stigmatised?

10:55 / 18.07.02

So, why do people who would never think of abusing black people for being black, or women for being women still feel able to declare open season on our larger brethren and sistren Haus...

Possibly because being black/female is involuntary, whereas being fat is seen as being something you can change? And, increasingly, being black/female is recognised as nothing bad, just (one presumes) different, whereas being fat is considered bad on the grounds of:
(i) Aesthetics (never can remember if that's how you spell it) and sex appeal - who doesn't feel more positive towards somebody they fancy?
(ii) Health - particularly when people feel they are paying for the overweight's additional costs
(iii) Lack of will power / weakness - a lot of people feel that there is some sort of hierarchy in terms of 'worthiness' or 'value' determined by how 'successful' you are, and weakness is seen as reducing success/value.

10:57 / 18.07.02

POSSIBLE NEW THREAD?

I would like to see a discussion on the ethics of discrimination against overweight people in employment and/or charging the overweight more for health care / plane tickets. I don't think it quite fits into this thread and in any event this thread is getting a bit big (with, I hasten to add, no pejorative sense in the use of that word).

Another thread, or keep it here?

13:25 / 18.07.02

Speaking of new threads, I was thinking of one about terminology, along the lines of the "cunt" thread. Don't know if it's worth it though. I don't particularly mind keeping it all in one place, for easy reference if nothing else, since all these issues are pretty cloely related. They all basically deal with the perception of weight.

Should we set out some sort of clear definition of terms like "fat", "overweight", "obese"? Is overweight a polite way of calling someone fat? Should "fat" be reclaimed as a positive word? I find it very hard to use any of these terms without a niggling concern that I'm putting people in unfair categories. Even to call someone "large" sounds like a copout. Suggestions?

17:18 / 18.07.02

Actually, I think some folks are for reclaiming "fat" not as a matter of pride but as a frank descriptive term. A friend of mine involved in another discussion board related bland discussions of weight and body shape. These folks use the discussion space not for tips and support, but as a normalizing ground.

Fat's probably stigmatized more because it's out of step with the thousands of images of ideal bodies we see every week. So we internalize a norm and everything that falls outside it is abnormal. You know, you get both the "too skinny" and "too fat" responses. casting about in the past or the social milieu is a nice exercise in "deep thought" I suppose, but it avoids the obvious.

16:56 / 19.07.02

The US food industry produces 3800 calories per day of food for every man woman and child in the US today. That was 3,000 calories only in the 1970s. There's also a huge "dieting" industry. Of course people choose to eat what they eat, but there's a lot of money being made making it easy for us to get fat and then hounding us to want to be super thin.

And we're experiencing serious drought in much of the country, here, at the same time, so that level of food production and the levels of natural resources it takes to produce it (smtg like 10,000 gal of water for every pound o' beef) are obscene.

It's very hard, in such a context, to make choices that aren't likely to be fucked up, and to have a kind of happy attitude towards food-related issues.

(Kit-Kat--I sympathize; even in my thinnest days I would come out on some fat charts as "morbidly obese"--and I was like 5'7" and 145 lbs, which is what, a little over 10 stone, no? I weigh more than that now, alas . . .

BTW I find it interesting how easy it seems to be for most men to publicly announce their weight, and how most women I know feel like it's the equivalent of sharing their bank account PIN.)

11:40 / 22.07.02

urban75 currently has a hilarious thread titled 'fat bastards' in it and i want to try and educate a few people there. i've tried explaining that the 'fat/greedy businessman' thing is at the very least out of date and that junk food, aimed at low income folk, is a lot to blame, but it's still being insisted that fat people 'get in the way' (i assume this to mean take up too much space), are greedy, etc. this is supposed to be the counterculture, fer chrissakes! it all sounds so mainstream. i'll go back there in a bit and try again, but last time i visited u75 i found a homophobic thread. it's incredibly depressing.

12:04 / 22.07.02

A few interesting things to throw out there:

1) In the US biker subculture, stereotypically populated by the manliest of manly men, larger women are prized over smaller women.

2) I'm sure I could look up the statistics, but aren't more than half of all Americans considered overweight? If so, couldn't one make the argument that the culture has already shifted its appraisal of weight to the point where magazines/culture are no longer prescriptive but in fact behind the cultural shift?

3) It's worth remembering that skinny kids get picked on in school for being thin. I don't think the under- and over-sized are all that far apart, actually.

16:02 / 22.07.02

we're fat but those skinny people on ads are not at all behind the curve, so to speak, they're designed to help us remain miserable about even slightly overweight, imperfect bodies and to keep us buying BOTH deep-fat fried crispy cremes and billions of $ worth of diet aids and useless expensive bulky exercize equiment to help us get rid of the fat. And to reify the class distinction that's increasingly being created here: to have the appearance of being beautiful and fit, most of us have to have more and more money, because most of those models have not only to spend most of their lives working out and eating expensive nothings, but also getting plastic surgery and liposuction, and still need their pictures digitally enhanced and any remaining flaws airbrushed away.

16:08 / 22.07.02

Can I just add some inverted commas to those flaws, please?

16:13 / 22.07.02

The problem with the "media made me do it" attitude that seems prevalant here is that most people generally wind up getting on with their lives, living comfortably in bodies that don't conform to magazine spreads, marrying people who wouldn't be called on to star in a body lotion commercial. This majority rather defeats the "pervasive body images" argument.

While there's certainly some element of truth to the beauty myth, I think it's misleading to overstate the case as "they want us to buy donuts and workout gear!" The facts simply don't seem to bear this out (at least in the US), with weight and even obesity on the rise, and suggest some bizarre X-Files conspiracy involving Bally's and Krispy Kreme.

I'm not saying there aren't social influences or that we're in some utopia of body-type equity, but it's all too easy to fall into the victimology game of blaming "Hollywood" or whatever today's choice is. There's a nasty implication that develops from building such models - presumably we can all identify this fiendish plot but none of us fall victim to it. A bit elitist?

And to toss another idea into the pot - to what degree is it okay to assign blame for a person's preferred body type (e.g. should we rag on the poster above who admitted not being attracted to short men)?

18:50 / 22.07.02

I was looking more for a reasoning behind attitudes toward "other" fat folks rather than assigning responsibility toward or away from media or the individual.

I'm wondering though, do skinny girls get picked in equal proportion to fat girls? Or is that a predominantly male behavior?

19:12 / 22.07.02

My experience suggests that skinny guys get picked on, skinny girls get gossiped about. I'm not sure which is worse, or why there's a differential in behavior. The point I suppose is that we should steer the discussion away from "overweight" and more toward "distance from average size" as underweight people appear to suffer much of the same attention as overweight people. This new language also sheds some light on why there may be negative reactions to excessively large or small people - at such distances from average or "normal" size they become an easily identifiable "other."

BTW I would also suggest that no, the media is not selling us Calista Flockhart as an ideal body type, and that the pop culture wags and supermarket tabloids tend to treat her in the same light as Oprah's on/off dieting, only smaller.

19:18 / 22.07.02

Another thread, a page or so down in the Head Shop, entitled "Don't touch this thread, you'll get it all fat", tried to look at some of the reasons why fat is such a locus of jeering and animosity. I think it would be interesting to work that back in.

Personally, I would prefer that it remain buried and forgotten deep within the ocean of threads that is the Head Shop.

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