Shapely Prose

I’m going out of town tonight and won’t be back until Wednesday, so posting will be light from me, if there’s any at all. I don’t know what FJ and SM might have planned, but if you’re bored, feel free to use this as an open thread until things get going around here again. Have fun, everybody!

I had my first belly dance performance last weekend. Let me tell you, nothing tests your body-positivity more than having your belly out on stage alongside 14 identically-dressed women, all of whom are smaller than you. I wanted to come through that with flying colors and then post right afterwards about how size acceptance had allowed me to sail through the performance with nary a negative thought.

Observe that it’s now Thursday and I’m just now writing the post. It took me that long to process what really did happen — because I had a great time, and I did happily shake my gut all around on stage, but I felt very aware all weekend of the role that fat plays in dance and performance. I couldn’t banish it; I was always noticing whether I was the first fat person to go on stage, whether I was the fattest person performing, whether the fat women were sent to the back in the choreography. I noticed that one of the student companies, the tribal one, had plenty of fat women, but the cabaret group — which is supposed to be more feminine and pretty — had none. There were thicker women, but they were still fairly slender, with smooth tummies and no real rolls. And (here’s the embarrassing part) I was painfully aware of the way that some moves only looked good on these women — women whose tummies were smooth, whose every muscle twitch was evident, and whose body movements were more classically graceful. (In my particular association, and probably that of a lot of people, “more classically graceful” means “closer to a ballerina.”)

So I came out of the performance fired up about doing some tribal for next year’s show — I love their costumes, too. But I also came out feeling like my fat, or more to the point my body shape and the fact that I rock the double bubble (i.e. I have a distinct upper belly roll when standing), would hinder my progression in dance. I came out thinking “maybe if I were just a little fat all over, these moves would look right on me, and I could get into any student company I wanted… but with the way I’m shaped, how far can I really go?”

Thus, you can imagine that I had no idea how to write about the experience for the blog. I figured I would just not mention it at all, and in fact I felt like enough of a hypocrite that I avoided the movement entirely for most of this week. But eventually I realized that even this self-consciousness represented an enormous improvement over where I would have been even a couple of years ago. Not only was I willing to have my belly out on stage without once apologizing in the first place, but even the way I got down on myself was a total coup. I came out of the performance worried about maybe 15 cubic inches of belly and whether they would have a genuine effect on my dance abilities — not about the “fact” that I was a generally fat lazy clumsy slob who couldn’t possibly be any good until she was thin. (I mean, I am very aware of being lazy and a bit of a slob, but that’s got nothing to do with fat.) A few years ago, a challenge like this might have sent me completely off the rails, if I undertook it in the first place. Being secure enough about my body to wonder, more or less objectively, whether a single part of it would pose a hindrance — while simultaneously wiggling it unconcernedly in public? That’s a really, really big deal.

It’s important that we give ourselves credit for small improvements, the little strides we make in liking ourselves. You can’t expect to be Kate right off the bat, because not even Kate is Kate; she’s got moments of being down on her body just like anyone. When you notice yourself backsliding into negative body talk and thought, ask yourself: Am I better at liking and forgiving and not being judgmental about myself than I used to be? Isn’t it already better that I notice the negativity in the first place, instead of accepting it as my due as fat woman? Am I giving myself enough credit for how far I’ve come, or am I making positivity into a new club to beat myself with?

Nobody likes every part of herself every day, but isn’t it enough not to hate every part of yourself every day? I know I did that for a long time, and you probably did too, and we’re all getting constant messages saying that’s how we’re supposed to live, and I think we deserve credit for every day we resist.

(Oh, and as a fat-positive dancer friend pointed out, the tummy roll probably won’t hinder me unless I’m only trying to dance well in the same way that a thin dancer dances well. Some moves don’t look as good with fat, and others look better with it. Trying on dance is like trying on pants; you just have to find the one that looks right on your body. So don’t let my brief negativity discourage those of you who are interested in belly dance!)

Well, sort of. How cool is this? Lucian Freud’s portrait of a nude, sleeping Sue Tilley has just sold for $33.6 million dollars–a record high for work by a living artist.

And Sue Tilley? Is fat. Not merely Rubenesque, even, but pretty dang fat.

From CNN:

Tilley, 51, said she was initially embarrassed to pose naked for the artist, but they soon grew comfortable in the studio — so comfortable, in fact, that she confessed to falling asleep while posing.

“I didn’t mind if he noticed,” she said.

Rawk.

I’m less certain of how I feel about Freud’s description of the sittings, though.

With Tilley, Freud said he was “very aware of all kinds of spectacular things to do with her size, like amazing craters and things one’s never seen before,” according to the 2002 interview with the Tate. He added, “I have perhaps a predilection towards people of unusual or strange proportions, which I don’t want to over-indulge.”

“Amazing craters?” Really? And psst, it’s hardly something no one’s ever seen before; millions of fat women and their partners get a view like that every damned day. Still, I’ll grant that fat women do seem to be rare in the contemporary art world, and the most important thing is that the painting itself is clearly not mocking its subject. Well done, Freud. 

I hope all you Shapelings who see yourselves in Sue Tilley will walk around today feeling like 33.6 million bucks.

Please go check out Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer’s Slate article on conflicts of interest among medical “experts” appearing all over the damn media–up to and including public radio. Then go reread point 10 here.

I’m gonna quote liberally, ’cause there’s just too much here to narrow it down.

How frequently are journalists glossing over such conflicts? Gary Schwitzer, a professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota, is the publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, a Web site that reviews health care news for balance, accuracy, and completeness. Schwitzer and his team of reviewers have looked at 544 stories from top outlets over the two-year period from April 2006 to April 2008. Journalists had to meet several criteria in order to receive a satisfactory score, among them: They had to quote an independent expert—someone not involved in the relevant research—and they had to make some attempt to report potential conflicts of interest. Half the stories failed to meet these two requirements, Schwitzer says.

Conflicts of interest abound even in unexpected places. A recent survey of academic medical centers published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 60 percent of academic department chairs have personal ties to industry—serving as consultants, board members, or paid speakers, while two-thirds of the academic departments had institutional ties to industry. Such ties can be extremely lucrative. And according to these articles in the medical literature, researchers who receive funding from drug and medical-device manufacturers are up to 3.5 times as likely to conclude their study drug or medical device works than are researchers without such funding.

An equally clever way for companies to get out their marketing messages is to go through a consumer group. Drug companies often seed “pharm teams,” consumer groups that start out as legitimate advocacy organizations and are subtly manipulated by funding from pharmaceutical companies to convey the desired talking points. Unless reporters ask where groups and individual researchers get their money, they have no idea that their sources may be biased—and neither do their readers, viewers, and listeners.

Emphasis mine.

So, I kinda hate Mother’s Day since my mom died, but my dad just found this picture tucked inside the old family bible, and it amused the hell out of me for the following reasons:

1) The shirt.
2) Just try and tell me body type’s not genetic.

Mom, 39, and me, 8 10 monthsish, 1975 (I just checked and learned that the original photo says Nov. 1975 on the back, which means I was actually 10 months old then. Damn, I was small. And bald.)

Happy Mother’s Day, everybody.

Open thread!

What’s on your mind? Got any plans for this weekend? Have you seen Iron Man yet? (My opinion: fun, but Robert Downey Jr’s facial hair is tragic. Speaking of which: should Mr Machine attempt to grow a Mustache of the 19th Century?) Which is cuter: teensy bunny, or kitties in love?

Have at it, Shapelings! It’s been a long week.

All right, all right, they’re actually talking about birds. (The kind that fly.) But even so, as a commenter over at Shakesville (whence I stole this) said, the real question is, how are the boobies faring?

I just spent a good ten minutes walking back and forth across the apartment, into the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, and my office about three times each, looking for my sunglasses. When I was on the brink of tears because there was nowhere I hadn’t fucking looked, meaning my expensive prescription sunglasses were gone forever–and, more immediately, it would be no fun to go take a walk in the bright daylight–it occurred to me to check my head. Literally. And there they were, perched atop it like a headband, which is where they live about 75% of the time. (That in itself could be another entry in the Becoming My Mother Watch.)

If this is what it’s like at 33, I don’t even want to know how it’s gonna be in another 20 years.

So, the other day I was talking to a reporter who asked–in the role of devil’s advocate–whether it’s appropriate for me to be a fat acceptance activist, when I’m only a size or two bigger than the average American woman. Can I really speak for someone 100 or 200 lbs. heavier than me, or more?

The answer–as I’ve said here before–is yes and no. Can I speak to the experience of living in a much larger body? No. Am I fat enough to have faced discrimination and hatred, and to be motivated to fight against those things on behalf of all fat people? Hell, yes.

Exhibit A. I’m walking home from Pilates this afternoon, and I stop for a red light. Light turns green, I start walking across the intersection, and some asshole barrels around the corner, clearly not seeing me. I stop walking and he hits his brakes–with a resounding skreeee–at approximately the same time. We exchange dirty looks, and I take another step–just as asshole hits the gas again, intending to blow past me.

Me: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? IT’S A CROSSWALK!

Asshole: WELL THEN WHY DON’T YOU FUCKING WALK, YOU FUCKING WHALE?

Woman sitting at outdoor cafe across the street: WHAT THE–?

No kidding, lady.

Let’s review. This asshole didn’t look where he was going and nearly hit a pedestrian. Therefore, I deserve to be shamed for the size of my body.

Of course. That’s how it works.

Assholes like that do not look at me and think, “Hmm, she looks only slightly bigger than the average woman.” They do not yell, “YOU FUCKING MILD TO MODERATE CHUB!” They think, “fat chick.” And they yell, “YOU FUCKING WHALE!”

And if I have this particular asshole pegged right–which I’m pretty sure I do, however brief our encounter–he is the kind of guy who would also look at someone smaller than the average American woman and think the same thing. It doesn’t matter how often you trot out that statistic, or how many idiot columnists claim that since a majority of the population is categorized as overweight, fat has clearly become “socially acceptable.” In many people’s minds, a woman who is not thin is fat, period, and that is not okay.

Furthermore, the average American woman, for all her averageness, is well into “fat” territory. She teeters on the brink of plus sizes, probably has some flesh that isn’t rock solid, will find herself standing next to much thinner women almost everywhere she goes, and will almost never see a woman her size on television or in a magazine who isn’t A) depicted as lonely, clueless, and a compulsive overeater for “comedic” value, or B) there to talk about the beginning of her weight loss journey. It really doesn’t take any more than that to make a woman think her body is abnormally large–and we all know that the larger your body is, the more shameful it is. So, while the average American woman (or the woman a little smaller or a little bigger) doesn’t face anywhere near the volume of discrimination and hatred that much bigger people do, she probably thinks she’s fat and hates herself for it–and plenty of strangers definitely think she’s fat and hate her for it.

Meanwhile, people both fatter and thinner than she is will repeatedly tell her she’s not fat, in an effort to be “polite,” and/or get her to quit whining. But they’re not there when her boyfriend pinches her belly and says she should do some sit-ups. They’re not there when she orders a whole milk latte, and the barista looks at her like she asked for two shots of dead baby in it. They’re not there when her mother berates her thirty-year-old ass for ordering dessert, and goes on to insinuate that that’s why she’s single. They’re not there when her thinner co-workers make self-deprecating remarks about the size of their thighs, assuming she’ll relate, ’cause… well, obviously. They’re not there when a brand spankin’ newbie at the gym she’s been going to for two years comes up to her and says, “Good job! Keep it up!” They’re not there when her doctor tries to put her on Weight Watchers when she’s come in barfing up blood. They’re not there when she watches TV and sees only much thinner women presented as attractive. They’re not there when she looks at a “plus-size” model and realizes that woman, too, is smaller than her–and has long, relatively thin legs and a practically “perfect” hourglass figure, to boot. And they’re not there when some asshole yells, “You fucking whale!”–or “Fat bitch!” “Fat cunt!” “Lardass!” “Fatass!” “Cow!”–at her from a passing car.

‘Cause guess what–that happened when I was the size of the average American woman, too.

Now, some of you are probably striking up the world’s smallest violin right now, so let me make it clear that I am not whining that in-betweenies have it just as bad as fatter fatties here. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not even close. But this “the average American woman wears a size 14!” shit is utterly meaningless in terms of defining what’s “fat” and what’s “normal” in this culture. Might I remind you that according to doctors, this woman is normal, this woman is overweight, and this woman is obese. Yes, the whole point of the BMI project is to illustrate how fucked those categories are, but it’s one of the metrics for determining fatness that haunts the average American woman–along with images in the media, clothing sizes, and the judgments of both family and strangers. So the next time some barely chubby friend or partner or sister or daughter of yours complains about feeling fat, and your kneejerk response is to tell her she’s not, as if she’s being utterly ridiculous? Take a moment to consider that maybe she’s not. Maybe, just maybe, she’s heard from about 1,000 other sources that she is, in fact, fatty fat fat fat, no matter what you happen to think. Maybe just this afternoon some dickhead called her a fucking whale because she had the temerity to cross the street in front of his car, and she felt too ashamed to tell you about it.

You’re right, of course, to want to get the message across to this woman that there is nothing wrong with her body. She could probably stand to hear that. But telling her she’s not fat is not the same thing. It denies her the anguish she feels about having a body that deviates from the ideal, however slightly–and believe me, deviating even slightly is plenty to cause legitimate anguish–and worse yet, it reinforces the message that her being fat by some other standard would mean there was something wrong with her body.

That’s the underlying problem here–not whether the woman is officially “fat,” but that so many of us automatically equate fat with a host of other negative characteristics, with there indeed being something wrong with your body. The hilarious thing is that just before this wankstain yelled at me, my Pilates instructor–a student teacher who’s not used to me yet, let alone to how all sorts of different bodies work–had been falling all over herself telling me how amazingly strong and flexible I am. (Thank you, yoga.) In the space of ten minutes, I went from being praised up and down for what my body can do to being cruelly insulted because it’s not a socially acceptable size. And if that doesn’t drive home the point that the real problem is not anybody’s fucking fat but a culture that insists fat bodies are intrinsically worthless, I don’t know what will.

Another question that reporter asked me was, “Does it still hurt when people say mean things about your body?” I told her honestly that it mostly doesn’t anymore–but that I only got here because it hurt like hell for almost twenty years, until I finally got fucking sick to death of internalizing all the nasty things people said, directly or indirectly, about my body. Trolls, especially, just crack me up these days; they’re so bloody ridiculous and predictable, it doesn’t even occur to me to do anything but laugh. But sometimes? Yeah, it still stings. Today was one of those times. There I was, walking home on a beautiful afternoon, high from a good workout and the praise of my instructor, and out of nowhere, there it was: YOU FUCKING WHALE.

For a moment, I’d almost forgotten that no matter how much I like my own body, other people will always be happy to hate it for me. For a moment, I’d almost forgotten that’s how it works.

Update: Ha! Fillyjonk and I posted at the same time.

Duh, I completely forgot it was International No Diet Day until I saw the other fatosphere posts about it. (Which is especially stupid because, if all goes well, The Rotund, our editor, and I are hoping to bring our book out on International No Diet Day, 2009.)

Founded by Mary Evans Young in 1992, International No Diet Day is a day to “declare a personal one-day moratorium on dieting.”

If you need some extra motivation to reject the dieting culture and the pressure to be thin, check out the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination’s facts and figures page, including these gems:

Seventy percent of normal weight girls in high school feel fat and are on a diet. Ferron, C. “Body Image in adolescence in cross-cultural research” Adolescence 32 (1997), pp. 735-745.

Over half of the females studied between ages eighteen and twenty-five would prefer to be run over by a truck than to be fat, and two-thirds would choose to be mean or stupid rather than fat. Gaesser, Glenn A., PhD. Big Fat Lies: The truth about your weight and your health. Gurze Books, 2001.

A survey of college students found that they would prefer to marry an embezzler, drug user, shoplifter, or blind person than someone who is fat.* Gaesser, Glenn A., PhD. Big Fat Lies: The truth about your weight and your health. Gurze Books, 2001.

Up to thirty-five percent of normal dieters will progress to pathological dieting and, of those, twenty to twenty-five percent will progress to partial or full-blown eating disorders. Shisslak, C.M., Crago, M., and Estes, L.S., “The spectrum of eating disturbances,” Intl Journal of Eating Disorders 18 (3) (1995) pp. 209-219.

So just for today, if not for always, take Sweet Machine’s advice and

remind yourself, even if you know it already: your body is not a sign of failure. Your body is not a punishment for your moral character. You are not lazy because you are fat. (And if you are lazy, that’s nobody’s business but your own!)

Then eat when you’re hungry. It’s okay, really.

*Note: I don’t see why marrying a blind person would be an unappealing option–except for certain practical difficulties which one assumes would be non-issues if you were in love–and I certainly don’t like the implied equivalence of a partner with disabilities and one who’s a freakin’ criminal. I’m just quoting over here.