Rotundity Revealed!
2007 September 27
And I made a graph of all the wrong answers!
More on this at The Rotund and Shakesville.
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This work by Kate Harding is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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Wow, I don’t know how to interpret this chart at all, but it’s pretty!
As I said elsewhere, the white dot is the correct answer. Everything that’s not on the white dot? Is wrong.
Thinking about it beyond that is a really bad idea.
Yeah, I commented here before going “oh, she said MORE on The Rotund and Shakesville, probably something MORE about the graph there.” Your explanation on Shakesville is good — although “don’t think about it beyond the white dot” is also perfectly sufficient.
Kate, here is a blog posting for you:
I just tried watching Ugly Betty just a few minutes ago a
nd not only was one of the lead actresses in a fat suit
but she was binging and everyone was making jokes about
how fat she was. Do I smell a boycott? Maybe Madonna
is right–Television is trash! My thinner mother (whose
still a size 18 and still longs to be thin) and my
thin brother didn’t have a problem with it but I found
it disturbing on some many levels! Why does the
fascist American media (and I mean that in a nice
way) insist upon forcing their opinions down our throats?
The answer is totally shocking. No way can this woman be under 5′5″, I thought. She must be a towering figure! She must weigh no more than 250 pounds too, I thought too. I’m really surpised, but this is so cool! La Rotund is also a cutie patootie.
I guessed 5′4″ and 300. Close, but no cigar….
Julie, I saw that Ugly Betty episode too. The weirdest thing was that that episode only took place 3 weeks after the previous one, so we’re supposed to believe she gained, what, 50+ pounds in 3 weeks? And that would be funny instead of a serious problem? Ugh. I usually like Ugly Betty but this season’s premiere started out pretty terrible.
Jon B, it was really interesting to me that you, as a guy, got so close. The lowest weight guesses were almost all from men. The two highest weight guesses were also from men but one is a fat guy himself and one was going high because he knew I wasn’t going to be insulted and everyone else was going low! I’d have to double check but I think you are the male who guessed most closely.
Here’s what’s sad, TR… your actual weight is approximately what I would have guessed. But I didn’t want to ‘insult’ you by going too high. Now I know full well that a higher number is not intrinsically an insult; that is the point of this entire discussion/ excercise/ activism! But I stopped myself.
Doesn’t mean I don’t still think you’re a knockout.
The lowest weight guesses were almost all from men.
Yeah, after reading a bunch of the answers, I really wished I knew the gender of the guessers. Because I would see really low numbers and think, “OK, obviously a man,” but I couldn’t really tell how much of that was selection bias.
But what a neat project!
Roberta, a lot of people had the same train of thought, and The Rotund has promised to post on it — I can’t wait.
There were VERY few guesses that were too high, and the majority of those came from men. Interesting.
Also, when making the graph, I rounded up any number ending in 5, ’cause it would have gotten too unwieldy otherwise. Below 300, that wasn’t much of a problem — the vast majority guessed a number divisible by 10. But above 300? There were a BUNCH of “305″ guesses. People didn’t want to risk going 5 lbs. over, apparently.
It’s so interesting, all of it. Asking people to guess a fat woman’s weight is so confrontive; on par with asking a fat woman to reveal her weight.
And the high-end guesses from men? Very surprising. True FA’s who know their shit?
Roberta, I was thinking that the men just didn’t have the same baggage about possibly being insulting by going over. (One of the ones who did was Paul from BFB. :) ) But Jon B. also got pretty close, as TR said above. So maybe.
“(One of the ones who did was Paul from BFB. :) )”
Well, being married to a fat girl helped me make a bit of a better guess, I’d say. But I’m still Really Bad at guessing this stuff in general.
That is a wicked bitchin’ chart you’ve got there.
So all of this guessing suddenly made me remember today that I once had a doctor doubt my HEIGHT. She asked me how tall I was, and I said 5′7″, and she said “are you sure?” Then she actually measured me with the height attachment on the big doctor’s scale! I was 5′7″. (I think I look taller, but jesus, when’s the last time you were MEASURED at the doctor’s, even if you look a bit taller or shorter than you are? This is the same doctor who later sent me a note telling me to LOOSE WEIGHT, AVOID FRIED FOODS.)