Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

Item the first: Anti-donut signs can get you fired from your job as a county health director, but only if you name and piss off local businesses:

A 38-year-old former Army doctor who served in Iraq, Newsom returned home to Panama City a few years ago to run the Bay County Health Department and launched a one-man war on obesity by posting sardonic warnings on an electronic sign outside:

“Sweet Tea (equals) Liquid Sugar.”

“Hamburger (equals) Spare Tire.”

“French Fries (equals) Thunder Thighs.”

He also called out KFC by name to make people think twice about fried chicken.

Then he parodied “America Runs on Dunkin’,” the doughnut chain’s slogan, with: “America Dies on Dunkin’.”

Some power players in the Gulf Coast tourist town decided they had had their fill.

A county commissioner who owns a doughnut shop and two lawyers who own a new Dunkin’ Donuts on Panama City Beach turned against him, along with some of his own employees, Newsom says. After the lawyers threatened to sue, his bosses at the Florida Health Department made him remove the anti-fried dough rants and eventually forced him to resign, he says. . . .

In May, lawyers Bo Rivard and Michael Duncan, co-owners of a new Dunkin’ Donuts, asked Newsom to take down the “America Dies on Dunkin’” message. Newsom already had run other anti-doughnut warnings, including “Doughnuts (equals) Diabetes,” and “Dunkin’ Donuts (equals) Death.”

The businessmen had the backing of County Commissioner Mike Thomas, who owns a diner and a doughnut shop. Thomas called for Newsom’s ouster, saying the doctor shouldn’t have named businesses on the message board.

Note the two statements I’ve bolded. If that’s not conflation of health and thinness/aesthetics, I don’t know what is. But what I find a little disturbing is that his bosses were okay with this kind of hatefulness being funded by the taxpayers until the businesses he called out by name lawyered up.

Oh, Newsom also pissed off the staff of the county health department by banning donuts from meetings, throwing out food that people had brought in if it didn’t meet his standards, and replacing the candy in the vending machines with peanuts. Which, really, if you’re going to be an anti-fat crusader, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, since most vending-machine packs of peanuts actually have *more* fat and calories than a vending-machine candy bar, and are larger than the FDA-recommended one serving. Granted, they’re more nutritious than candy bars, but someone who is flashing signs about thunder thighs with public money might have thought that one through a bit more.

Newsom, who raises the “I’m just like that” and “I speak the truth” defenses beloved by asswipes the world over, now works in a prison, where despite his tough-guy talk, I’m sure he thinks twice about taking away the inmates’ baked goods. But he’s reapplied for the director job and considers his shame-and-blame methods a success:

“My method was a little provocative and controversial,” he says, “but there wasn’t a person in Bay County who wasn’t talking about health and healthy eating.”

I’m sure there wasn’t a person in Bay County who didn’t think you were an asshole ill-suited to deliver a message of health and healthy eating, either.

Item the second: You’ve all, no doubt, heard by now that Kelly Clarkson was chosen to be the cover model for Self’s “total body confidence” issue. Kelly, you see, has great body confidence in the face of an industry that relentlessly pressures her to be thin rather than fit. She chooses fit, and she chooses happiness.

Self’s editors chose thin:

As you can see from the video of the photo shoot (in which Clarkson is shown only from the waist up), someone got a little happy with the Photoshop there.

Well, Kelly Clarkson has a lot of fans who like her just as she is, and many of those fans read Self. And they weren’t happy about what the mag did to Kelly. So the mag’s editor-in-chief, Lucy Danziger, responded with a blog post in which she burbled about how great it was that she had her photo retouchers hack off large bits of Kelly’s body (emphasis mine):

Kelly has this amazing spirit, the kind of joie de vivre that certain people possess that makes you want to stand closer to them, hoping that you can learn what they know. In this case, you get the feeling Kelly has not let fame spoil her, but also that she was just born confident, with a generosity of spirit that is all about others and rarely about herself. She is, like her music, giving and strong and confident and full of gusto. Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her personal best. Did we publish an act of fiction? No. Not unless you think all photos are that. But in the sense that Kelly is the picture of confidence, and she truly is, then I think this photo is the truest we have ever put out there on the newsstand. I love her spirit and her music and her personality that comes through in our interview in SELF. She is happy in her own skin, and she is confident in her music, her writing, her singing, her performing. That is what we all relate to. Whether she is up or down in pounds is irrelevant (and to set the record straight, she works out and does boot-camp-style training, so she is as fit as anyone else we have featured in SELF). Kelly says she doesn’t care what people think of her weight. So we say: That is the role model for the rest of us.

You know, you make someone look “their” personal best by putting them in nice clothes, with professional hair and makeup styling, great lighting, and then you take hundreds of photos during the shoot so you can pick a few in which she looks HER best; you save the Photoshop for stray hairs, color balance and weird shadows. You don’t use it to create some mythical “personal best” that can only be achieved by using software to shave off the parts of her body that YOU don’t like. Though given the anecdote that Danziger uses to introduce the post and justify the Photoshopping, it’s not really surprising:

When I ran the marathon five years ago, I was so proud of myself for completing it in under five hours and not walking a single step. But my hips looked big in some of the photos (I was heavier then), so when I wanted to put one of them on the editor’s letter in SELF, I asked the art department to shave off a little. I am confident in my body, proud of what it can accomplish, but it just didn’t look the way I wanted in every picture.

So because she hates her own body enough to ask that photos of it be altered, it’s okay to do that to someone else because “total body confidence” means hating the body that just pulled you 26.2 miles.

Then there’s the bit about Kelly being as fit as anyone who’s ever been on the cover. If the magazine truly sells fitness, they’d have left well enough alone. But they sell the appearance of fitness.

Really, if Kelly wasn’t thin enough for them, why would they put her on the cover? Oh, right — they wanted to use her celebrity to move magazines. Well, the hack job they did on her just means that any fan of hers who sees her on the cover will wonder what the hell they did to her. The comments to Danziger’s post are filled, absolutely filled, with irate subscribers who are canceling, with only a small handful who don’t see what the big deal is.

See Jezebel for more, including a second blog post by another member of Self’s editorial team in which the concept that shaving off an ass is not the same thing as removing a stray hair or opening closed eyes in a group shot does not take hold. Yay, Photoshop!

Item the third: More “body positivity” FAIL. And apology FAIL. See also here and here. (ETA:  and here).