From Gibson Girls to Photoshopped Perfection

In Gina Kolata's Rethinking Thin, I was reminded that the feminine ideal of the early 1900s was just as unreal as today's photoshopped magazine covers. The Gibson Girls were drawings of otherwise slender women with large breasts and lush hips and buttocks. Their waists were tightly cinched to form an hourglass figure, and they were tall, with bouffant updos that further increased their statuesque heights. Women did their best to emulate the Gibson Girls, despite the fact that they were drawings--idealized versions of a man's vision of feminine beauty. Kolata also claims that flapper girls were a similar invention of artists, leading to the teenage-proportioned body (small breasts and hips) being the new ideal for that era.

Here we are, a hundred years later, still being mocked with unreal images of beauty that we are expected to emulate. Even women who already conform to the ideal are photoshopped to remove the tiniest details, until their faces resemble porcelain dolls. Not only are blemishes, wrinkles and other "flaws" removed, the very proportions of a woman's body and face are altered--eyes made bigger and moved to a different position on the face, lips plumped, widened, and repositioned, waists whittled down, breasts pumped up and lifted. It's ridiculous.

Manufacturers of beauty products absolutely rely upon women's low self-image to sell their products. While I enjoy putting different colors on my face, as humans have done for millennia, the cosmetics industry goes far beyond that. If we are not panicking over every pimple, freaking out over each wrinkle, and becoming hysterical at the sight of a gray hair, they aren't making money. These "too perfect" magazine covers are absolutely designed to shame us, to make us hate ourselves. There is BIG money to be made on our self-hatred.

We bind ourselves in Spanx, strap ourselves into tight bras, slather eight kinds of goop on our faces, pay for the privilege of having someone tell us how and what to eat (and shame us when we haven't lost weight), run on human sized hamster wheels (big big bucks there), dye our hair so we don't look old (instead of for the fun of, say, having purple hair), and then continue to buy the magazines that make us feel like we HAVE to keep doing these things, because we still don't look like the photoshopped cover girl, even though the magazines never actually say anything new (and trust me folks, Cosmo never has any real new sex tips, no matter what the cover hype says).

Well, screw that. I'm sorry, but I don't have the money to support low self esteem. If I felt like I wasn't good enough to be seen in public without buying all of the stupid crap these companies are selling, I wouldn't be able to afford the "privilege" of leaving my house.

Throw those damn magazines out. Stop buying them--they are preying upon you; they are deliberately designed to make you feel bad. Who needs that nonsense? Unsubscribe, and either find a less damning periodical (Bon Appetit, Cat Fancy, Aquarium Fish), or invest your money in some good books instead. If you're a feminist, or at least have feminist leanings, I can highly recommend the works of Sheri S. Tepper, and many of her books can be found for super-cheap used on Amazon. Or, build up your FA library with Gina Kolata's Rethinking Thin, Paul Campos' The Obesity Myth, Roberta Pollack Seid's Never Too Thin (note: Get this one while you can; it's out of print, and only available used), and Barry Glassner's The Gospel of Food.

Fat as shorthand for evil in Dr. Who

My husband and I have recently become interested in Dr. Who, watching a season online via Netflix, and getting the other seasons sent to us on DVD. While the shows are well-written, with a surprisingly good special effects budget, I am disappointed in the frequent use of fat as a shorthand for "bad guys".

One show depicted aliens that took fat people, killed them, and inhabited their skins as a disguise. Their physiology was such that being in the skins made them horribly flatulent, so there were a lot of "hur hur fat people are gross and disgusting" scenes in that particular show. They needed fat peoples' skins in order to fit properly, according to the plot, but since their real bodies were several times the size of a human, that was a poor explanation--they could have used the same technology to enter a thinner body, in my opinion. It seemed that the show was more about how disgusting, evil, and greedy fat people are than about evil aliens. Oh, and I'm sure this will come as no surprise to anyone reading this, but I didn't see a whole lot of sadness for the fat humans who were killed for the use of their skins. After all, it was their own fault for being fat, right?

Another show had an "Absorbalov", which was a big, fat alien that absorbed people into its body by touching them. Another depiction, of course, of the greed and evil of nasty, icky fat people--this alien had a voice and gestures reminiscent of "Fat Bastard" from the Austin Powers movies. Obviously, the fashionably thin heroes killed the alien after he had absorbed several thin victims, but not after an expository scene that depicted the Absorbalov as not just greedy and evil, but stupid as well.

I wouldn't mind so much, really, but I have not yet seen a positive fat character in the show thus far. I would welcome a correction from those who have seen more of the show, but my experiences with it have only been with negative depictions of fat people. No, let me correct myself--they have not been depictions of fat people, they have entirely denied the personhood of them, transforming them into inhuman monsters.

To be fair, I'm also seeing a lot of stereotyping with the Doctor's 2007 companion, who is black.

So, what media have you seen lately that uses fat as a shorthand for lazy, disgusting, evil, greedy, or stupid? What positive uses of fat have you seen?

Headless fat people, lazy journalists

So, I saw this article, and was struck by this photo:


Do the people in the photo look like preschoolers to you? Of course not! So what I glean from this is, if they were to show photos of "fat" preschoolers, we would probably see them as normal children, because little kids like that are supposed to have some baby fat on them. That's their reserve for the growing they are about to do.

There's a quote: “With 25 per cent of pre-school children now overweight, we’ve got to act to help parents get children to the correct weight for their age and height.”

I'd like an answer to the following questions:
1. Have kids gotten heavier, or have they become "overweight" by a change in definition?

2. So they're heavier--are they also taller? I think they probably are, which is typical for children that get adequate nutrition.

I'm also bothered that they're talking about BMI instead of discussing statistics that make more sense. I don't know what a four year old with a BMI of 15 or 18 or 34 looks like. How do we know that they're not higher because the kids are taller? Maybe that IS the case, and these people don't want us to know that part of the equation. And, how much difference in weight are we talking about anyway? Preschoolers are small--could one pound make the difference between "normal" and "overweight" for them?

Instead, we get a snow job article with a bunch of guys making statements that are NOT being backed up by anything. Shoddy reporting, with absolutely NO balance to the article. The claims aren't being questioned at ALL. Bullshit.

The fat reader's dilemma

I'm currently reading The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. I'm not all that far into the book, and I'm having a difficult time wanting to continue. His style isn't bad, and he tries pretty hard to bring us some facts, but I'm really, really growing tired of him harping on the OMGOBESITY "epidemic". He has bought the b.s. that we all eat too much, and THAT is why we are fat.

I want to finish this book, partly because I am interested in the rest of the material, but I have two problems:
1. It's just aggravating to read all of the fatphobic crap he's put into the book.

2. If he's regurgitating the "facts" he sucked directly from the teat of big pharma and the CDC (who's in the pocket of big pharma), then how can I trust the rest of what he's saying? How do I know he checked his other facts?

I am going to push onward, because I dislike leaving a book half-read, and because so many people are gushing about it, but I'm doing so in the face of being repelled, and not able to take the author's claims seriously.

Oh, and one other thing that I almost forgot: Does Eric Schlosser know that someone has plagiarized his book? While this book has a lot of details about corn processing and things like that, Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" did pretty much the same thing, did it better, and only gave a small amount of lip service to the o****** (I think it's a foul word) "epidemic". The Omnivore's Dilemma bitches about fat people in every chapter.

I agree with the ideas behind this book--that we need to return to sustainable agriculture and stop running farms like factories. Absolutely, I believe this. There are a lot of reasons that factory farming and the monoculture farming of corn (which requires a lot of petrochemicals to fertilize the soil, instead of crop rotation which does it naturally) are bad. We can say these things, though, without dragging fat people into the fray and beating them up. E. coli, toxic waste, and drug-resistant bacteria are all reasons besides animal welfare to stop the feedlot insanity. Unsustainability of using petrochemicals to fertilize corn and the glut of corn (which requires armies of "food scientists" to find a use for) are good reasons to return to crop rotation and diversification--and that's aside from the dwindling culture of the traditional American farmer.

But I suppose the author feels the only way to get people to listen is to latch onto the currently fashionable hype of EW FAT IS GROSS.

I'll write more after finishing the book (if I can manage to do so). I also have a review coming up of a wonderful book I read last month, but it's such a heavy topic that I want to be careful and do it right.

Screw Pay-Per-Post

I gave Pay-Per-Post a try, and I really wanted it to work out. I thought it would be great to earn money for my writing, and I love being "assigned" a topic.

What I discovered, however, is that Pay-Per-Post is like a lot of insurance companies: They're looking for every possible reason to deny payment. If there is a minor issue with an article that could be fixed within seconds, it is rejected, and you are told not to re-submit it. One article was rejected over three weeks after submission over a one-word problem that was absolutely petty.

I've also heard many complaints from people that it's very difficult to get an assignment; you have to refresh over and over to see if one has become available. Since so many people are fighting for them, they are almost impossible to get, and you are only allowed to write two per day--if you are lucky enough to get that many in the first place.

From what I have seen, quality of writing does not seem to make any difference in approval. I would have thought that part of an advertiser's benefit of going with PPP is getting some clever and innovative articles written about them. Instead, some of the ones I've seen get approved are pretty dull, no more interesting than what you'd find in a newspaper (no offense to those who wrote them; apparently that's what you have to do for approval, and your other writings have been far superior to the PPP articles).

I knew it sounded too good to be true, and it was. If anyone feels the urge to support this blog, purchasing items from my Etsy shop (look in the right column) would be the way to go. I won't be wasting any more of my time or anyone else's with PPP, though.

Fat mamas and birth defects

Sandy at Junk Food Science did a fantastic job of taking the "omg fat wimmins are gonna have deformed baaaaaaaaybees" press release to task. What I'd like to do here is break that down into a bite-size information nugget to be cut and pasted when we're faced with that particular bit of hysteria:

Actually, if you look closely, the study found that there was only an association between fat mothers and neural tube defects (like spina bifida), not with any other defects--and, this was a correlation, which does not mean the defects were necessarily CAUSED by the mother being fat. It's well known that neural tube defects have a strong genetic component as well as being directly linked to folic acid deficiency; they can be mostly prevented by folic acid supplementation before and during pregnancy.

Interestingly enough, dieters tend to avoid foods rich in folic acid because they think they're fattening; a lot of our folic acid comes from enriched grain products like pasta, cereal, and bread, which are regarded as eeeeevil carbohydrates. So, a fat woman, who's more likely to be dieting, could be more likely to have folic acid deficiency, leading to neural tube defects. In that case, her FAT wouldn't be the problem; DIETING would be. Imagine that.

Exercise, or I'll beat you up and kill your daughter!

Man arrested for assaulting neighbor for not joining exercise session
KANDA, Fukuoka -- A man was arrested Monday after assaulting a neighbor who refused to participate in a gymnastic exercise event organized by the neighborhood association, police said.

Katsuya Mori, 34, a company employee of Kanda, stands accused of inflicting bodily injury and damaging property.

The incident occurred on Aug. 1 this year. Mori visited a 35-year-old self-employed man's home in Kanda when he was drunk, and hit him, investigators said. Mori then hurled a concrete chunk at the victim's 5-year-old daughter and threatened to kill her.

At the time, Mori criticized the neighbor for refusing to participate in a radio gymnastic exercise session for summer vacation organized by the neighborhood association. Mori serves as vice president of the organization.

"Come to the exercise session," Mori was quoted as shouting at the victim's home. "You never cooperate even though I'm enthusiastically organizing the event."

Mori then summoned the victim to his own home and hit him with a golf club, leaving him with injuries that took seven days to heal. (Mainichi)

Original Japanese article here.

Wow. Given today's fat-hate climate, though, I'm amazed that they arrested him instead of giving him a medal--and a badge to enforce it everywhere.

What are we to expect when exercise and athleticism are regarded as the highest possible virtues? When those who decline to participate in them are derided as slothful degenerates who are entirely responsible for the moral and economic decline of society? When we cannot even schedule time to read to our children or sit down to a meal with them, but manage to fit in a daily workout and take Susie and Johnny to soccer practice?

Yet, this guy was beaten, and his kid's life was threatened, because he dared to have priorities other than engaging in an exercise program. His and his child's lives were declared worthless because he wasn't exercising. Apparently, you don't deserve personal safety if you aren't a fitness fanatic.

When the scientists get it wrong

When I was going to school from K-12, I had faith in science. Yes, I know, the fundies are going to have my head for that line, but bear with me.

I sincerely believed that scientists were altruistic researchers who wanted to add to the body of knowledge in the world, and maybe get a little scientific glory for themselves. Once in college, I learned that I was very wrong. While there are some of those starry-eyed researchers out there who want to find real truth, many of them are primarily seeking a particular outcome, no matter what the facts say.

Data is massaged and manipulated. Studies are well-crafted to ensure a particular outcome. Experimental results that do not benefit the desired outcome are often tossed out completely. Basically, most of these guys want to be able to prove their point at all costs, often because the money's flowing from someone who says, "Give us THESE results."

There are no video cameras in the lab to ensure that the correct numbers are written down. There is no way to check and see if mice with undesirable results were quietly discarded. If I'm in a laboratory, and I count X number of bad results, I can write down Y results instead. In my last job, I was actually encouraged to alter data so as to avoid having to do something about products that were out of spec.

When you're selling an idea, the real motives are often hidden. For example, U.S. citizens were informed that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction, and that Iraq was directly tied to the events of September 11, 2001. We now know that this was not the case, and the true motives behind selling the idea of invading Iraq were probably something quite different from protecting U.S. citizens from terrorism.

Those selling the idea that fat is bad and unhealthy are not motivated by an altruistic concern for people's health. If you find that a study is funded by the diet industry, you will probably find that its results are quite beneficial to the industry. This allows the industry to continue selling products and services that do not work, especially ones that work in the short term, but eventually fail. Built-in repeat customers are quite profitable, after all.

This makes me wonder how many other ways we are kept "sick" by the pharmaceutical and other industries that fund medical research. I remember when they changed a number, and suddenly a lot more people had high blood pressure. I had just gone to my (former) doctor in an extreme amount of pain from an infection, and my blood pressure of 140/90--higher than I'd ever had it since one awful night of agony in the ER*. My history of low-side-of-average readings and current stressful state didn't matter to him; he saw an opportunity to prescribe, thanks to the drug reps that pepper every available surface of doctors' offices with free gifts. I dug in my heels and refused to be put on blood pressure medication at the age of 28. Amazingly, I was fine at my next visit, since my pain was relieved, and I've been fine since. Had I been put on the medication, I would have suffered all kinds of side effects, and would have derived no benefit.

I think what aggravated me the most about it was that, instead of treating the cause, which was my pain and infection, he wanted to treat only the symptom. Artificially lowering high blood pressure is not necessarily a useful thing to do, and if a cause can be identified, it makes far more sense to fix THAT problem instead. Remember the old joke, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this"? Doctors today say, "Oh, here's some pain medication," when they should be saying, "Stop doing that!"

Of course, scientists have been getting it wrong all on their own for hundreds of years without the help of pharmaceutical grants. Every time I read about the medicine practiced even a hundred years ago, I get the feeling that they just made stuff up and declared it to be true. "Vapors", "humors", and "hysteria" are just a few of the ridiculous ideas that took way too long to overcome, and at the cost of many people's health, freedom, and lives.

People have been resisting change in scientific thinking for as long as science has existed, too. If you grew up thinking that a bat was a bird, you're going to fight pretty hard against someone who says it's actually a mammal. Add to that someone's financial stake in keeping the status quo, and you have our current situation of making sure that fat continues to be thought of as an illness. Ill people need medicine, surgery, treatment. If they realize that they can forgo these things, a lot of interested parties are going to lose a lot of revenue.

Follow the money, and remember that science is ALWAYS to be questioned. Learn to critically examine new studies--not just their abstracts, but their methods and data as well. If you're not comfortable doing these things, then at least have a look at others' interpretations of them; try to find the other side of the story. Sandy of Junkfood Science does a good job of doing this for us, and there are plenty of other authors out there doing it too.

*It turned out that my gallbladder was acute. I'd never even had an attack, so this was quite the surprise. They scheduled surgery asap, then rescheduled it even sooner after the bloodwork came back. Yikes. That was the worst physical pain of my life.

For those who just don't get it

One of my most recent jobs was working for a man who felt that anything that he did not understand or know much about was of no value. He could occasionally be convinced otherwise with some education, if you could find him in a patient enough mood to listen, but those moments were few and far between. If a customer inquired about a product that was unfamiliar to him, he would try to convince the customer that the product was no good, eventually berating them if they persisted in asking about it.

Did this mean that the things that he did not understand or know about actually were worthless? Of course not. The man cost himself quite a few sales by driving formerly loyal customers to purchase the items they wanted elsewhere. Instead of acknowledging this as a failure on his part to give his customers appropriate service and care, he would wildly rant about their disloyalty, and demand of his employees an explanation as to why the customer would do such a thing.

One man's belief that something is valueless because he does not understand it does not make it so. How often have size-positive writers heard, "I just don't get people who think it's okay to be fat"? How often do vegetarians hear, "I just don't understand vegetarians"? What follows, but is unspoken, is usually the idea that, "And because I don't understand it, it's stupid and worthless."

It's easy to despair. It's also easy to say, "Well, they're just closed-minded jerks, so I'll pretend it doesn't matter." My opinion, however, is that their lack of understanding underscores the necessity of education and simplification. Turning the tide on these wrongheaded notions and fighting against the cultural indoctrination of misguided lore is going to take a lot of effort. It might not even be successful for many years; look at how many stupid urban myths get passed around for years after snopes.com reveals them as false.

A more solid plan is needed if we are going to get results. I can tell people to read Campos' and Kolata's books until I'm blue in the face, but I know damn well that people are not willing to invest that kind of effort into educating themselves--especially when it might prove them wrong. The best success I have had is to take the knowledge and condense it into dense little bites of facts, small but rich paragraphs that can be easily cut and pasted into an online discussion, or memorized to be said out loud.

Well-cited nuggets of real science can be invaluable; it's one thing to say, "Go and read this book," and quite another to say, "The Minnesota starvation study indicates that our brains protect a set point of weight by changing metabolism to match lower or higher food intake, and by changing our behavior to focus on obtaining adequate levels of nourishment".

If we had a number of these little responses ready, then the "I don't understand it" crowd would no longer have an excuse for their bigotry. They would be forced to admit that they are either too stupid to comprehend basic facts, or that their treatment of fat people is based entirely on aesthetic preferences--and therefore just as bad as treating people badly based on other physical characteristics. If we take away the, "Well, it's unhealthy, because I know it is, because everybody knows it" excuse, they have nothing left to excuse their behavior.

There are a number of useful things in life that are too complex for the average person to understand. Would it be wise for me to say, "Doctor, I don't understand the physiological processes that make my medication work, so therefore it's just a bunch of crap," when the medication is one that keeps me functional, or alive? Would it make sense for me to deny the value of using good food safety practices because I don't understand the life cycle of E. coli or salmonella bacteria? Of course not.

So I'd like to prepare some very simple, well-cited bites of knowledge to deftly counter the "I don't get it" crowd who don't have anything besides their own lack of knowledge to back their side. Many people need simple blocks of information and lots of repetition to help them wrap their brains around a difficult subject, so let's give them what they need.

In the next entry, I'll expand on the idea of what we can do when scientists have gotten things wrong. Science is an ever-changing tapestry, but sometimes we just have to drag the flat-earth crowd out of the stone age, kicking and screaming.

Fish behavior and good ole boys

I read an article that was complaining about PETA's stance on fishing. I'm not going to go into my opinion of PETA, fishing itself or aquaculture, because it isn't relevant. The author annoyed me, however, by acting like an idiot.

PETA contends that fish “are intelligent animals who observe, learn, use tools, and form sophisticated social structures” and “talk to each other with squeaks, squeals...Some fish even woo their potential partners by singing to them!” They also contend that “Some fish tend well-kept gardens, build nests, and collect rocks for building hiding places where they can rest.”

I can imagine this guy chortling at the ridiculousness of fish behaving in these ways, as if PETA made them up out of whole cloth. "Contends"? Well, ol' boy, I'd like to point out that all of these behaviors are well-documented by aquatic biologists.

Anyone who's kept cichlids in aquariums can attest to their masonry skills, which for some fish borders on an obsession. Many other fish move rocks for nesting and shelter as well. This is so widespread and well-documented that I don't need to provide details.

Tool use in fish IS fairly simple, because they do not have fancy limbs like we do, but it happens, mostly consisting of using rocks to crush hard-shelled prey and spitting water (water is the tool). Archerfish (Toxotes jaculator) spit water onto insects that hang out above the water, knocking them down so they can be snarfed. Puffers and other fish spit as well, usually spitting water onto the substrate to reveal prey hidden just below the sand; this behavior frequently manifests in captivity as they spit to get a keeper's attention when begging for food.

The well-tended gardens of Garibaldi, the largest damselfish species, are cultivated for the purpose of getting babes. Male Garibaldi cultivate a patch of algae on a rock; the females come along to inspect the gardens and, on the basis of who's the best available gardener, choose their mate. Herbivores such as surgeonfishes and damsels will tend and protect a patch of algae.

Sound production in fish is a BIG field of study these days; cod, haddock, toadfish, damsels, cichlids, and many, many other species use sound for a variety of communication purposes. Studying these sounds may help fisheries scientists figure out better ways to protect collapsing fisheries, especially since they are so often associated with mating behaviors.

Finally, the sophisticated social structures are very real. One of my favorites to talk about is the cichlid species that has effeminate males that pretend to be girls for the purposes of getting some sperm into the egg pile while a masculine male is mating with a female. Trannsexual sperm-sneaking fish--does it get any weirder than that? (Yes, it probably does, actually!)

So, if this guy wants to make the point that PETA is full of crap, he should maybe not be mocking information that is actually true. Maybe he just thinks a fish is a mindless creature that does nothing but swim, eat, and squirt out gametes, but as far as I can tell, he's projecting a bit there.

And this:

If you are a fisherman and see the whole thing as a crackpot scheme, don't laugh. Our side doesn't have any grassroots support like this and regulations can be swayed these days by the correct voter turn-out for ballot initiatives.

Yes, absolutely, there are no such organizations as Trout Unlimited, Rod & Gun Club, Bassmasters, or the other 140+ organizations that unite anglers socially and politically. Nope. Doesn't exist. And state governments do absolutely nothing to support the recreational fishing industry.

Get real.

Livejournal Feed now available!

Livejournal users:
You can subscribe to my blog here:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/rioiririfeed/profile

That's entertainment?!

My husband was watching a video posted on YouTube, some Japanese comedy skit with subtitles. It showed a fat man who happens to be seated next to a famous woman in a restaurant. The woman is being interviewed by someone who asks what kind of men she likes. She states that nice men are good, bad men are okay, but fatties are just disgusting. The interviewer agrees with her, and the fat guy almost cries right there.

Afterwards she apologizes, and gives the guy her autograph. Unbeknownst to her, she signed a magic book; if a person's name is written in the book, they almost instantly become fat.

Cue freshly fat woman breaking furniture as she balloons into approximately 275lbs. First the table explodes due to her expanding belly. Then her chair breaks, because that's what all chairs do when fat people are sitting on them. The fat guy then stumbles and breaks his own table into pieces by falling on it. The laugh track plays as both fat people fall over, legs in the air, because being fat makes you clumsy and unable to stand upright for more than five seconds.

My husband said, "That was just STUPID." He's a good man.

Now, I know this is going to come as a surprise to everyone, but I have never broken a table by bumping against it. I have never broken a chair with my gargantuan girth. I can actually stand upright for many minutes at a time without falling over such that my legs stick up in the air, and I am also capable of walking around without bumping into and breaking every stick of furniture in the place.

You might also be surprised to know that I eat only vegetarian food, usually with utensils and plates, instead of gobbling Big Macs by the dozen from a trough. When I am finished with a meal, and I am offered a tiny after-dinner mint, I do not actually explode in a disgusting mess of partially digested food. And, believe it or not, I have never crushed a thin person by sitting on them.

Imagine that.

Some thoughts on the profitabiity of dieting

I'm very skeptical about a lot of things. One of the first questions I ask myself when reading about a subject, especially a medical one, is, "Who financially benefits from this?" About four years ago, I learned that the lower limit for "high" blood pressure had been ratcheted downwards a notch. I was immediately skeptical of this, and did a ton of reading. It turns out, I wasn't the only skeptical one; there were plenty of articles pointing out that, by changing a number, hundreds of thousands of patients were magically created, patients that would be prescribed extremely profitable medication.

It's true that I'm especially wary of the pharmaceutical industry, and with good reason: Just take a look at fen-phen, Vioxx, and other medicines that have been pulled due to the harm they caused the general public. In many cases, the manufacturer's research revealed these problems during testing, but covered them up or fudged the results. This isn't an opinion here, folks, the facts are out there.

So, you'll have to excuse me for looking at the thindustry with a critical eye. Who makes money from fat hysteria?
1. Magazines - What women's magazine doesn't have a weight-loss strategy advertised on every issue's cover? Usually right next to either a thin, airbrushed female model (magazines with sexy men on the cover are generally geared towards gay men) or a rich dessert.

2. The clothing industry - Whether they sell you a new wardrobe after you diet yourself thin, or they're profiting when you regain that weight, the fashion industry in general does NOT like fat women. They express their disdain with limited selection, hideous clothing, and cocaine-addicted skeletal models. Think about it: We're encouraged to "buy clothing a size or two too small" as incentive to diet. So they want us to essentially keep two wardrobes--the one that actually fits, and the one that shames us. Tell me THAT isn't profitable.

3. The diet industry - This is a no-brainer. What other companies can get away with selling a product that either doesn't work, or fails long-term, thus chaining its customers to their programs for life. Best of all, when diets fail, WW or JC do not take the blame--the customers blame themselves for the failure, which makes them go back and try harder!

4. The athletic industry - We're encouraged to buy a gym membership, which tend to be pretty nasty little contracts that are very difficult to get out of. If we go to the gym, we get nasty glares, rude comments, and snide laughs from the "beautiful people" who don't feel we belong there. So, we become afraid to return to the gym, but are still obligated to pay for the year or two or twenty that the contract specifies. What other industry can get away with forcing people to pay a monthly fee for something that they've been shamed out of using?! Of course, the only place I ever felt comfortable getting exercise is a certain women's-only circular workout center--and they've become so diet-oriented these days that many fat & fit women get disgusted and quit (not to mention the political goals of the founder can be difficult for some to justify supporting with their dollars).

5. Doctors - They're making money by telling us that our adipose tissue is a disease that needs to be cured. We get weight-loss drugs pushed on us, and there are more ads for bariatric surgery every time I turn around. Billboards, spam emails, banner ads on websites, you name it. Bariatric surgery is become a HUGE moneymaker right now, and I'm guessing that its practitioners are trying to cash in on the phenomenon as much as possible before it comes crashing down a la fen-phen or Vioxx. Please note: I am not saying that all doctors are bad people trying to keep us sick for their own profit. There are many, many good doctors out there, mine included--but there are also a lot of hacks out there amputating stomachs when they don't have the experience to do it well, and the complication and death rate for even skilled bariatric surgeons is, in my opinion, unacceptably high.

6. The food industry - Our food supply is controlled by a relatively small number of enormous corporations like ConAgra. Do you think it's a mistake that they put less product in a package, then charge twice as much for it when they slap a "100 calorie pack" label on it? Or when they use cheaper ingredients to make a soy product instead of beef patties, and tell us it's healthy, so we pay more? As a vegetarian (for animal welfare reasons), I'll be honest and say that I like my soy burgers. But, I remember when they used soy protein as filler in school lunch hamburgers to save money. So when I'm paying a lot more money for soy burgers than I would for real dead animal parts, I'm not terribly happy about it. After all, it's cheaper to take the soybeans and make them into a burger than to feed the soybeans to a cow, let the cow process ~10% of it into cowflesh, then make the cow into burgers.

There are many more organizations and people that profit from weight-loss culture, including therapists, thin celebrities, and snake-oil manufacturers. So, you'll have to excuse me if I'm mistrustful of their motives, especially in the face of studies that indicate that being fat is generally not a cause of major illness or premature death.

How to become a famous scientist

Step One: Create a ridiculous hypothesis and treat it as if it were a law set in stone. You're guaranteed success if you somehow include the word "obesity" and plays on people's fear of becoming fat.

Step Two: Don't bother to do any actual scientific work; borrow data from someone else's study.

Step Three: Take the data and manipulate the living hell out of it until it somewhat resembles your goal.

Step Four: Create a computer animation of your twisted data that doesn't actually resemble the hypothesis, but have a voice-over that claims it does. People will just see a bunch of dots and take your word for it as long as you're heavy on the fat scaremongering.

Step Five: Toss out "correlation is not causation", because it doesn't benefit your conclusions. Directly blame fat people for something, and spread it on thick.

Step Six: When someone challenges you, make up some b.s. that counters it. Even if your b.s. directly contradicts the b.s. you used to answer the last question

Step Seven: Profit! Fame! And, as an added bonus, people start shunning their fat friends all because of you, perpetuating fat hatred--that'll teach those fatties to stop eating! You just cured "obesity"! Aren't you awesome?

Self-portraiture

I've been doing some drawing lately. I've never been any good at it, and I'm probably not going to be, but it's fun to pick up the colored pencils and create something. A lot of this work has been self-portraits.

For the fat girls out there, I have a challenge for you: Get out a pencil and blank sheet of paper and draw a sketch of yourself, focusing on the body. I find it's easier to draw my back than my front, because it's less complicated, but whichever view you like is great. Side, back, front, whatever. It doesn't have to be good, detailed, or even realistic. Abstract curves are just fine.

Then, I want you to imagine a thin runway model or emaciated celebrity. Try drawing that person on another sheet of paper. It's hard, isn't it? You want to draw comfortable curves, rounded hips, generous thighs--but drawing someone who is very thin is difficult. Your drawing probably won't look quite as good as the self-portrait.

This isn't to upset the thin folks out there, by the way--it is simply to show that we can perceive ourselves in ways other than mirrors and photographs.

Ad decision

I recently made the decision to put a tiny adsense box in my sidebar. I am currently not working, having been laid off after reporting a work injury (THAT'S a long story), and I'm having trouble finding work that will accommodate my physical limitations. Going on disability is a pretty difficult and lengthy process, but I will be talking to my doctor about its feasibility. I'm also looking into starting a small aquarium maintenance business. I don't need to be wealthy; I just want enough to keep my head above water.

The tiny amount of revenue the ads will generate might help with that. I was going to just have my Etsy store link, but I haven't sold anything out of it yet, so it's not working. I was also pleased with how unobtrusive Google's ads are. I guess they understand that obnoxious, unpleasant ads are repellent to people. I especially hate the "paymybills.com" ads with their horrible graphics and tendency to make my computer vomit!

So, I hope my adsense doesn't offend anyone. I'm very poor right now, and I need all the help I can get.

Art Appreciation

I picked up a print at the Pike Place Market when we visited Seattle a while back. My husband Brian framed it and gave it to me for my birthday this year. He is REALLY good at framing pictures, so I was thrilled. This is the artist's site:
http://www.lizaphoenix.com/

This is the print we picked up in Seattle:
Voice Of the Voiceless

We received another Liza print as a wedding gift, titled Dragonfly Mermaid Fairy

I love mermaids, and we have a lot of mermaid art here. Liza Phoenix has a lot of mermaid, fairy, and fish art, among other stuff. I highly recommend checking it out.

This is another artist's work that is also on our wall. I think that the piece really reflects who I am!

Be glad for your rape! Fat girls should be grateful for any sex they get!

In defending a client accused of being part of a gang rape of young teenage girls, a barrister actually argued that one of the young victims may have been glad for the attention since she was fat.

The barrister said in her closing speech: “She was 12st 6lb - not quite the swan she may turn into. She may well have been glad of the attention."

P.S. That's 174lbs for us Americans. 1 stone = 14 pounds.

It's bad enough that we "ask for it" by wearing skirts, being polite to men, having an alcoholic drink, or possessing a vagina.

I don't know if the evidence (the real evidence, not the "omg they had on sexy clothes") is indicating that they did it or not, but I am hoping that they aren't let off just because the girls were dressed "provocatively" and were fat.

----

As a fat girl who's never had problems finding people who offer me nookie, I would like to create a pornographic movie of myself and my spouse and show it to people like this barrister. "Look, my husband does not have a disgusted or pained look on his face--he is enjoying what he is doing! He isn't doing this just for my pleasure, he's doing it for his own, too!"

Here we are; doesn't he just look disgusted and grossed out by my fatness?


(click the thumb for a larger picture)

The Futility of Vanity

Doll Face, by Andy Huang

This is an amazing animation about what we will do to attain the ideals that are continually being programmed into us by media. It might make you cry.