Thanks to Shapely Prose and Jezebel, I've come across a couple of posts recently about plus-size models. These models, of course, are not the people we'd consider plus-size in real life: sometimes they're as small as a size 8. And they're still models: nicely proportioned, with beautiful faces and skin and all the rest.
But I'm emerging from my blogging hibernation to register just how powerful these images are. As I look at them, I think: she is really sexy! And then I think: wait, is it possible that I could look that sexy, too? Even though I have a belly pooch, flesh on my hips and thighs, and slightly unwieldy breasts?
Click 'em and weep.
This photo in Glamour magazine made a huge splash because it shows the model's little belly pooch. The same model also has much more generous thighs than most of her colleagues.
This photo shoot from Harper's Bazaar Australia did not airbrush away the cellulite on Crystal Renn's thighs.
I'd never heard of plus-size model Kate Dillon before, had you?
In all these comment threads, I think women are truly moved to see a female body that looks "real" to them: one they can identify with, one that rings true with their own experience of having a body. (Even if, as so many women are, they're larger than these supposedly plus-sized women.)
And these are beautiful, able-bodied white women who are making such a splash. I can only imagine how much women with disabilities, women of color, and unusual-looking women may be longing (perhaps unknowingly, as I was) to see images of themselves -- somewhere, anywhere -- in our media.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Pictures of fat(ter) women? Revolutionary.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Please Don't Ask Me if I've Lost Weight
For one thing, I don't know if I have. On my best days, I could say I really don't care if I did lose weight. Other days, I can at least be honest and tell you I don't keep a scale around so that I can't obsess about weight, and honestly, I don't know. On my worst days I could at least say I'm not sure because knowing things like that becomes too consuming and I don't want to be consumed by it.
For another thing, while I know you think you're making me feel good, you're really just letting my sick mind know that you thought I looked fat before, enough so that now you think I look different enough that it bears pointing out. It feels like a back handed compliment, whether you wanted it to or not.
For another thing, you say it with this proud grin on your face, which immediately reminds me how much you value thinness, and how hard it is for me to make myself not care about it, when I've grown up around people like you and in a culture that makes you seem so normal. And, no matter how strong I was feeling that day, it immediately makes me question whether I should be valuing thinness just a little bit more.
For another thing, you have that proud grin on your face when you don't even know how I've lost the weight (if I even have lost any). One time my cousin went to a family Christmas party where everyone, so impressed by her drastic weight loss, inquired repeatedly about how she got to "look so good." Each time she'd say, "Oh, I got really really sick this Fall. Honestly, didn't know if I'd make it. But I couldn't keep anything down. I had to be hooked up to a feeding tube. Dropped like 20 pounds in a month. I've never been so miserable." And the relative would walk away, embarrassed to have been so happy about something so awful, to have celebrated what was tragic and unhealthy, to have called something sickly, "looking good," to have betrayed that they might consider someone happy, healthy and curvy to be, on first glance at least, less adequate than someone sick and malnourished and miserable.
I always wondered if one of the millions of women with eating disorders were so honest when asked how they manage to look so good, if people would feel the same shame. "I haven't been eating. What I do eat, I purge later on. I also exercise obsessively, to the point I throw up. I spend more time counting calories than I do doing my homework. It consumes my whole life, and I'll never be satisfied with my weight, even as my tactics get more and more extreme." So why do you assume this isn't how I've been losing weight? It isn't. But how would you know? It is how a great percentage of young women lose the weight. So why assume it's okay to act impressed by default, when something so ugly could be behind it?
But most of all, don't ask me if I've lost weight while my younger sister is standing nearby. When she hears you pay me this compliment, how can she not want to seek the same reward?
She doesn't eat breakfast before school. And she refuses to take a lunch with her, or even take money so she can buy something there. If she leaves the house with no means to a meal, it's that much easier for her to resist eating when she gets there. When she comes home she might be forced to nibble at a plate of dinner that was prepared for her, and this can only be enforced occasionally through guilt and constant harassment from concerned people like me.
And she's only 14. And her body is growing. And she needs nourishment. But at school she knows thin is in, and then when she sees you, it gets set in stone.
Why would she want to stop that, when she gets such frequent reminders that you admire discipline and ambition to be thin? And how can I ever possibly convince her that weight is not important, health is important, when you and the rest of the world keep praising weight loss? And how can I ever convince her that weight is not important, health is important, when I myself have trouble believing that, every time I see that proud grin on your face?
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
A fat tax for flights?
Apparently, United Airlines received more than 700 complaints last year from passengers whose overweight neighbor "spilled over" into their seat space. So now, according to today's Chicago Tribune, United has a new policy. If you don't fit into one seat -- with the armrests down -- the flight attendants will try to find you 2 seats in a row.
But if the flight attendants can't find 2 seats in a row for you, you'll be bumped from the flight.
I always fly Southwest -- which, as the article points out, has a similar policy -- and I can hardly remember a flight that wasn't completely full. Two seats in a row can be mighty hard to come by during busy travel times. It seems to me that really overweight people are going to be shit out of luck during Thanksgiving, unless they purchase two seats. Which is the point.
For me, this definitely raises some serious concerns about discrimination and disability, but I'm no expert. I've gathered that the whole "fat people riding airplanes" thing is a much-discussed topic in the fat blogosphere.
Big Fat Blog has a few posts on the issue: one which questions whether thin passengers should get a $250 voucher because they had to sit next to a fat person, and another describing a "one person, one fare" policy law recently passed in Canada.
Kate Harding has written about the issue of weighing passengers, which is a big fucking can of worms. But it's not THAT different from eyeballing people and trying to decide whether they'll fit in one seat or not. Will the attendants check the airplane for any human flesh spilling over into space they didn't purchase? How can any such policy be enforced without serious embarrassment and inconvenience?
One thing's for certain: in virtually every story, the comments section is a horror show. People ask rhetorical questions like "Why should I have to sit next to a fat ass?" and "Must we bear the consequences because that person has eaten too much pizza and fast food?" There is a lot of vitriolic hatred of fat people, and it's deeply disturbing. We all know someone who's tiny and eats a lot of fast food; we all know someone who's NOT tiny and who eats healthfully and exercises a lot. The contempt and hatred on these threads is pretty ridiculous.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
On the Street: Calorie Counting Edition
Surprise! A Valentine's Day cupcake to give you pleasure, guilt, and social anxiety.
So, here's a question. Should be it be socially acceptable to, in the middle of a work gathering at which everyone is eating food, whip out your iPhone and start recording your food consumption in an application called Lose It!? In front of one co-worker who struggles seriously with her weight, and myriad others who may or may not have a history of eating disorders, body image issues, food-related guilt, and other human phenomena?
I'm going to go with no. I guess it's an example of thin privilege that you can publicly discuss your new calorie-counting, exercise-recording, weight-loss software, but you'd better not overeat in public if you're fat.
Delicious image courtesty of clarescupcakes.co.uk
