Archive for the 'I see fat people' Category

Why so angry?

Published at December 16, 2007 in work work work, I see fat people, Anxious masculinity and Woman-Hating. 8 Comments

So I’m reading this piece in Broadsheet the other day about a new paper on a study demonstrating that white women are most affected in terms of salary and promotion for being fat,* and against my better judgment, I looked in the comments. As you might expect, the usual suspects brought up the usual moral panic about fat people and healthcare (as do the commenters at a posting on the New Economist’s blog about the study, and their comments are even worse), but one person made an interesting observation:

In addition to the “you can if you really WANT to,” the “prove yourself” and all the other self-help that is more useful and more kindly meant, people have bought up the insensate, profane and semi-literate rage that is often expressed by men and women alike when the subject of obese white women is dragged into editorial columns yet again.

From the especially vitriolic women, I think it’s a way of women establishing superiority over other women while expressing fear of losing status in their subtext. “I’m not like that. I’m not fat. I’m not disgusting. I’m special — but, oh God, what happens if I gain weight? No, I’ve got to hate this so I won’t and can maintain my special perfect thinness.” Barf. And many of them do.

From the especially vitriolic men, it’s “how dare these THINGS not do everything they can to ‘prove themselves’ in our eyes, but instead OFFEND those eyes. They’re not LISTENING TO US.” These characters, especially the semi-literates, seem to think it’s the right of every man, regardless of how he looks, to have arm candy of his very own and to judge women who don’t meet that standard for whatever reasons. Thyroid, anyone? Water retention? How about pregnancy? Want a woman with a big belly to hide out lest your eyes be offended? Repeat after me, and without four-letter words, IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU.

I really wonder if this is the extent of it. The gibbering and incoherent rage that comes up when this subject is raised is really astonishing, especially that from men, and especially men who seem to think that they’ll be FORCED to find fat women attractive if fat somehow becomes acceptable.

Which I always think is rather revealing, because who’s to say fat women think you’re attractive, punkin?

But I do think this status thing ties into this terror of having to accept fat people, particularly fat women, and especially particularly fat white women. It’s like some kind of advance case of cooties or something, where the very idea of being seen as accepting a fat person as a human being might contaminate that person. And I’m sure a lot of it is simple social anxiety and far too much emphasis on status and the “market value” of one’s mate (which seems to be a big thing in libertarian circles these days). Because you might secretly be attracted to fat women, but you wouldn’t want anyone else to know about it, so you have to loudly proclaim how disgusting they are.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a significant feeling that fat women — you know, the kind of women who are supposed to be unattractive and unsuccessful at love — are getting away with something by having sex and relationships and being seen as attractive while not in possession of a body that shows proper conformity with the prevalent standards of beauty and the time, money and energy required to achieve them.

Thoughts? Why do you think there’s so very, very much anger and seething rage directed towards fat people, and especially fat women?

________

* There was no effect on the wages of white men, and black men actually benefited from gaining weight (probably because they were seen as less sexually threatening or something). Black women had an interesting wage progression: the thinnest black women made less than average-sized black women, but wages declined if they got heavier (though not as significantly as they did for white women). One commenter suggested that part of the disparity could be explained by white women getting a premium for being thin.

Bounce

Published at November 26, 2007 in Sports and I see fat people. 6 Comments

I ran across this column about unwanted bouncing during exercise. And not just of breasts:

For many overweight exercisers, every step of a workout comes with an unintended cascade of motion — breasts bounce, belly fat shakes and thighs rub. The added jiggle and friction of moving body fat is more than just bothersome. It can alter people’s gait and make them more prone to injuries and joint problems. The discomfort prevents many overweight people from exercising altogether.

“Almost all of my clients end up expressing this, how uncomfortable the bouncing around feels,” said Kelly Bliss, a fitness instructor and author in Lansdowne, Pa., who works with overweight people. “They say, ‘I turn right and part of me is still going left.’”

Oh, boy, is that familiar. Body-fat management is one of my personal bugaboos. For instance, while the biggest jiggly bits I have right now are my breasts, properly supporting them during exercise (or, let’s face it, just during the workday) creates other issues — particularly with back fat,* which does not sit comfortably on either side of the bra band. I can have the band above the back fat and sacrifice some support, or I can tug down the band, which keeps the breasts up better but pushes the fat up into my armpits and causes rather irritating rolldown on one side. But there are other issues as well, notably my thighs and hips, which start to remind me that they’re jiggling after a while, particularly when I’m retaining water before my period.

Not surprisingly, there hasn’t been a whole hell of a lot of research done on the way body fat moves — even the way breasts move, which you’d think someone might have noted before now since they’re right there on the fronts of female athletes:

But the jiggle factor, familiar to the overweight and the large-breasted, has been largely ignored by exercise researchers and most sports-gear makers. Only a handful of studies have tried to document the challenges and strain endured by large bodies in motion.

“There’s very little research on the biomechanics and locomotion of obesity,” said Ray Browning, research instructor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, who has conducted several exercise studies of the overweight and obese….

Recently, British exercise researchers found that breasts of all sizes move far more during exercise than previously realized. Joanna Scurr, a scientist at the University of Portsmouth, studied breast biomechanics in 70 women for two years, using cameras and light beams to measure breast movement during various activities, including standing up from a chair, climbing stairs and jogging. Her research, presented in September to the British Association of Sports and Exercise Sciences, found that women experienced an average of about four inches of total breast movement, and some experienced more than double that amount.

And while most breast research has focused on vertical movement during exercise, Dr. Scurr’s study showed that breasts moved in three dimensions: up and down, side to side, and even in and out as breasts compressed against the chest and heaved outward during movement.

I say “not surprisingly” because even as fat people are harangued ever more shrilly to get off their asses and exercise, the model of a person who exercises is an already-fit, thin, most likely male athlete, and nobody bothers to accommodate anyone else with research dollars or gear. About the *only* sports gear I can buy from mainstream suppliers are socks and sports bras, which for some reason I can buy in more-or-less my size (almost nobody makes an actual G cup, so I just go up a band size and down a couple of cup sizes, which *really* does not help with the armpit situation) from, say, Title 9, even though they don’t sell a single shirt that will then fit over the bra they just sold me. Athleta is a bit better, but they still don’t have much of anything that will actually fit me (their sizes stop around 20). Which leaves Junonia, and I’ve found their order-fulfillment less than optimal (I’ve ordered from them twice now, and each time at least one item that was listed as in-stock mysteriously winds up being on backorder).

But, hey, if you can’t work out because it physically hurts, you must just be a lazy fuck who doesn’t want to exercise because you’re too morally weak, right?

I will say this: one thing this column misses is that, as bad as the jiggle factor can be when you’re fat, it can be much worse when you’ve lost significant amounts of weight. I lost about 130 pounds during college and was left with sagging, hanging skin that was much, much worse in terms of motion and jiggle than fat-filled skin was. There was a lot more slack, so it could whip around a lot more. I’ve since had a good deal of it trimmed off, but certain areas — such as my hips and thighs — didn’t get done because I just didn’t have the money. I kept that weight off for something like 15 years before I regained a bunch of it in a depression-trauma-injury-and-alcohol-fueled downward spiral in the past few years, and I’ve definitely noticed that my now-fuller thighs are less of an issue while I’m running than they were the last time I did much running, about 70 pounds ago. Even in the water, that felt weird, because it would ripple around as it met the resistance of the water. I always sort of wondered if I was doing damage to myself; it hurt too much to think that I wasn’t, but not enough to stop.

____________

* There’s a tagger in my neighborhood whose nom du Krylon is “Back Fat.” Every time I see one of his tags, I mentally check my bra.

Rejecting the frames

Published at November 18, 2007 in Misbegotten health care, I see fat people and Dipshittery. 10 Comments

Jill recently wrote a terrific post taking feminist fat-haters to task. She was responding to the comments at this post at Feministing, in which the point of Jessica’s post — that the fat-shaming and abusive behavior depicted in a commercial for a Denver gym is unacceptable and the kind of thing nobody would accept if it were directed at (almost) any other group — got lost very quickly as soon as someone calling herself “raginfem” showed up, and she WAS JUST CONCERNED about the HEALTH of all those UNHEALTHY FAT PEOPLE who MUST NOT KNOW THEY’RE FAT and therefore CAN’T KNOW that they’re UNHEALTHY, and they MUST BE ADVISED that they’re FAT and UNHEALTHY because FAT IS UNHEALTHY and raginfem is CONCERNED. Concerned, I say. IT’S JUST that she’s CONCERNED ABOUT THEIR HEALTH. Especially THE HEALTH OF THE CHILDREN. Who have NOBODY WHO WILL TELL THEM THE TRUTH, THAT THEY’RE FAT.

And, of course, it’s not like nobody’s ever heard that one before, and we were off to the races. Continue reading ‘Rejecting the frames’

Gosh, I’m sorry you don’t feel special anymore

Published at November 3, 2007 in Sports, I see fat people, Woman-Hating and Dipshittery. 10 Comments

From the “Everything can be blamed on a woman” files: Oprah Winfrey is single-handedly responsible for ruining the marathon.

The piece is an extended, and dishonest, whine about how they let just anybody run marathons nowadays, instead of special, dedicated men who did it for the thrill of competition and the frisson of self-denial — oh, and Americans aren’t winning marathons like they used to, which is Oprah’s fault.

The American runners of that era were propelled by a “double wave” of self-abnegating philosophies, theorizes Tom Derderian, who trained with Rodgers and Salazar at the Greater Boston Track Club. They were “heirs both to the warrior mentality of their World War II fathers and the new consciousness of the 60s and 70s,” he told author John Brant for the book “Duel in the Sun,” an account of the 1982 Boston Marathon, considered the last great American distance race.

And did I mention the generous helping of fat-shaming?

I had to give up marathoning just as everyone else was getting into it. Not just the rest of the running world. Everyone. The mid-1990s gave us two new long-distance heroes. The first was Oprah Winfrey. If Frank Shorter inspired the first running boom, Oprah inspired the second, by running the Marine Corps Marathon. And it was a much bigger boom. This was not a spindly 24-year-old Yalie gliding through Old World Munich. This was a middle-aged woman hauling her flab around the District of Columbia. If Oprah could run a marathon, shame on anyone who couldn’t. . . .

Once the supreme test for hardened runners, the marathon became a gateway into the sport. Soon, gravel paths were crowded with 5-mile-an-hour joggers out to check “26.2 miles” off their life lists. Team in Training, which raises money for leukemia research, promised to turn loafers into marathoners in 20 weeks. I met a lawyer who started running because, “They say if you can run a marathon, you can do anything!” The marathon was no longer a competition. It was a self-improvement exercise. . . .

Like Oprah, Bingham deserves praise for luring insecure, overweight novices off their couches and into running shoes.

God forbid those flabby, overweight loafers everybody’s always after to exercise might just do so, and do it in public. I mean, don’t they know that *real* runners are trying to get past their fat asses on those gravel paths in public parks?

In the last 15 years, the Chicago Marathon field has increased tenfold, to 45,000. But with this change in the running culture, the average finishing time for men has dropped from 3:32 to 4:15 — not far from the Oprah Line, or my own performance.

Note that he’s conflating a few things in the piece: the lack of American men winning marathons and the average time of American men running marathons. Yeah, if you get a bigger field, with more first-time runners, you’re going to get slower average times, for a couple of reasons: one, more first-time runners means more slower runners, which will bring down the average; and two, in a gigantic field, it’s very hard to run at any sort of pace until the field starts breaking up; it could take you half an hour just to reach the starting line. If you’re in the back of the pack, you’re not going to be setting any world records. However, that’s why they start the elite runners up front — and those elite runners continue to set world records, course records and personal records even as the average finish times of the overall field get slower. That more American men aren’t at the top of the heap of elite runners has a lot less to do with the democratization of the marathon in America and a lot more to do with the quality of international runners, particularly the Africans. Who, after all, weren’t running the Boston Marathon much in the 70s.

By the way, did you happen to notice that there’s a sizable gap between 1982, when the “last great American distance race” happened, and the mid-90s, when Oprah supposedly ruined marathoning by making it accessible to middle-aged flabsters? Yeah, I thought you would. In a case of burying the lede, McClelland acknowledges that maybe Oprah and the Penguin Brigade aren’t actually primarily responsible for the decline in American (men’s) marathon times that began long before they got involved:

You can’t just blame the Penguin Brigade for messing up the curve. The last year an American-born man won a major marathon? 1983. (We have produced one first-class female marathoner — Deena Kastor has won in Chicago and London — although we’re still waiting for another Joan Benoit Samuelson, gold medalist at the first Olympic women’s marathon, in 1984.) The running bum — that post-collegiate dropout who works in a shoe store so he can train 100 miles a week — has almost disappeared. Despite the fact that marathon fields are the size of Sauron’s host, more guys broke two and a half hours in the 1980s.

It could just be that the running bum has moved onto other sports, or has figured out that if just anybody can run a marathon, why not up the ante and get into triathalons, particularly the Ironman, which has not just a marathon, but challenging swimming and biking components? Or it could be that, what with the professionalization of the sport, those running bums have sponsors. Plus, it ain’t as easy to live on a shop clerk’s salary anymore, what with the cost of proper equipment, travel and race fees.

Oh, and McClellan shows his ignorance in another way: his assumption that last month’s Chicago Marathon was stopped because of novice runners:

Last month’s Chicago Marathon had to be shut down mid-race, because undertrained five- and six-hour marathoners couldn’t handle that much time in the 85-degree heat.

Actually, that kind of heat is a danger to *any* runner, no matter how well-trained, as Frank Shorter discussed in this piece (and since McClelland mentioned the 1984 Olympic Women’s marathon, he can’t possibly have forgotten Gabriela Andersen-Schiess, who staggered into Olympic Stadium, dehydrated and suffering from heat exhaustion, and literally fell across the finish line. I’m still a little traumatized by that). The issue with Chicago was not that novice runners couldn’t handle the heat because they were untrained; it was that they were still on the course after the temperature began to climb. The elite runners finished well before it became 85 degrees.

Defining your terms

Published at September 9, 2007 in I see fat people. 101 Comments

I’ve never really been on board the Fat Acceptance, capital letters, train. For one thing, its goals are unclear to me: sometimes they seem to be about Acceptance of Fat People (i.e., nondiscrimination in accommodations and jobs; the right to be treated with dignity by health care providers; the recognition that there has never been any good scientific evidence of fat as a cause of various conditions; fighting the whole “obesity crisis,” etc.), and sometimes they seem to be about Acceptance of Fat (i.e., body acceptance). I am completely and totally down with the Acceptance of Fat People part of it. The reason I can’t get on board the train is the Acceptance of Fat aspect of it, and how it’s being used by some of the people in the movement as a litmus test, particularly in regard to weight loss being seen as a “betrayal” of the movement. Continue reading ‘Defining your terms’

Fat-phobic sports news

Published at September 1, 2007 in I see fat people and Dipshittery. 15 Comments

I’d really like to know how Serena Williams got onto a list of the 10 worst-conditioned pro athletes.

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In fact, other than David Wells (come on, the guy is famously hard-living and developed gout, of all things, while playing) and John Daly, a golfer who disdains exercise and smokes and drinks heavily, I’m not sure there’s any reason for any of these people to be on this list other than weight. And weight is not synonymous with conditioning.

And obviously, if they’re pro athletes (and oh, how Jeff Gordon likes to use the scare quotes around “athlete” when he’s talking about fat folks or people in non-traditional sports), their weight didn’t keep them from performing at a high enough level that somebody’s going to pay for them to play.

Gordon blames weight for injuries, but did I not just read that David Beckham, lean as they come, was injured again?

And he has one guy, Sean May, who’s on the list because of bad knees at 23 and for being overweight. And how much is he overweight? 10 pounds. AND HE’S A BASKETBALL PLAYER.

Let’s just take a look at the kinds of quotes he pulls of athletes on his list “defending” their weight:

This summer, ABC aired “Shaq’s Big Challenge” — a series designed to help kids beat childhood obesity. NBA fans saw irony in this, since O’Neal has struggled with his own weight during the latter stages of his career. Those extra pounds have created nagging injury problems.

Perhaps Shaq will try to practice what he preached. O’Neal, 35, claims his body fat is down to 12 percent. He is trying to lay off club sandwiches and soft drinks. And, he insists, he has never been that fat.

“I’ve been a freak of nature when it comes to basketball,” O’Neal said this summer. “They’ve never seen a specimen of my sort. But of course, you don’t know me, and you say, ‘How much does he weigh, 350?’

“In this world that we live in, anything about 300 is considered fat, but you know, when they considered me big and heavy, that was when I was most dominant, winning championships. I’ve never been overweight. I’ve always had less than 14 percent body fat, (which) for guys my size is considered excellent.”

Shaq, as we know, is well over 7 feet tall. And he’s muscular in a way that most basketball players are not. The man is naturally huge, and you’re after him because he’s huge? You do realize that weight should rise with height?

Gordon, of course, just sees the number, and it’s clear he doesn’t believe Shaq about his body fat percentage. And why shouldn’t he encourage kids to exercise when he’s been plagued with criticism about his weight? The kids might just relate to him because of that.

And then there’s Williams, whose sin in some people’s eyes is that she must be fat because she has an ass:

Is she too big? The Australian media certainly believed so. While winning the Australian Open earlier this year, Williams, 25, fielded pointed questions about her weight.

“It was outrageous,” she said at the time. “I mean, I was looking in the mirror today and it was just, like, my waist is still 28 inches and I think it’s all because I have a large bosom and I have a large arse, excuse me.

“I have a large arse and it always just looks like I’m bigger than the rest of the girls, but I have been the same weight for I don’t know how long. If I lost 20 pounds, I’m still going to have these knockers, forgive me, and I’m still going to have this arse. It’s just the way it is.”

(For more on Serena’s arse, check out her mostly exposed backside in the latest Jane magazine.)

Injuries have limited Serena and sister Venus Williams for years. After she won the Australian Open, Serena withdrew from two matches. She won the Sony Ericsson Open, then pulled a groin muscle at the Family Circle Cup. A knee injury forced her out of the Fed Cup. She suffered calf and thumb injuries at Wimbledon.

Note how he blames the “extra” weight for Serena’s injuries, even as he gives passing mention to Venus, who has smaller breasts and so doesn’t “read” as fat, and her being injury-prone. Could be that Venus and Serena, being sisters, share some genetic predisposition to injury. In any event, please explain how Serena’s massive girth had anything to do with her thumb injury.

How will fat people know they’re fat unless their doctors tell them?

Published at August 30, 2007 in Misbegotten health care, Catch-22 and I see fat people. 11 Comments

Such is the concern of Dr. Sanjay Gupta,* in this article in Time.

If there’s one place where it’s a good idea to come clean, it’s the doctor’s office. Patients with an ache, a symptom or a bad habit like smoking do no one any good if they keep it to themselves. Yet there’s one time doctors are often less than forthcoming: when they have to tell patients they need to lose weight.

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., recently released the results of a survey of more than 2,500 obese patients who went to their doctor for a regular checkup over the course of a year. The investigators found that the charts of only 1 in 5 of those people listed them as obese. What isn’t on the charts is probably not communicated between doctor and patient either, and that means trouble. Those in the study who got the diagnosis were more than twice as likely to have developed a weight-management plan with their doctor than were the other obese patients.

“If you don’t have a plan, you’re not going to lose weight,” says the study’s author, preventive-medicine specialist Dr. Warren Thompson, whose research was published in August’s Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Oh, let’s just count the problems with these paragraphs, shall we?

First off, notice that the concern is not that the patient’s height and weight are not noted in the chart, but that the doctors often did not make a notation that the patient was obese. “Obese,” as a notation on a chart, is tantamount to a diagnosis. And yet I fail to see the problem when the patient’s height and weight — the very measures used to calculate BMI and thus come up with a label like “obese” — are noted on the chart. I mean, presumably they didn’t call all those patients in to be weighed again, they just went off the charts. And how would they know if an obese patient slipped through without having The Scarlet O slapped upon him or her? I BETCHA THE INFORMATION IS ON THE CHART.

Second, there’s plenty that’s communicated between doctor and patient that’s not necessarily on the chart. In fact, doctors regularly will discuss the problem you came in for, but note another one on the chart because the insurance company will accept the faux problem, but not the one you came in for.

And, indeed, that’s what I suspect is behind the notational behavior of doctors that Gupta is tut-tutting here. Insurance companies are more than eager to drop people who might cost them money from their rolls, and a doctor slapping a label like “obese” on a patient — because, hey! it’s a medical diagnosis! — could very well result in that patient being dropped from their current plan and unable to obtain other coverage.

BTW, that’s not a new concern — about 30 years ago, I had a mysterious bout of weakness, swelling and unusual heart rhythm. It wasn’t quite rheumatic fever, but looked enough like maybe I’d had it that the pediatrician told my mother that he would keep an eye on me, but didn’t want to put anything like “rheumatic heart” on my chart, lest I have trouble getting insurance as an adult.

Finally, the whole “You can’t lose weight without a weight-management plan.” I realize that doctors think the sun and moon revolves around them, but perhaps they have not noticed the multi-billion-dollar diet industry? Seems I can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone who’s ready to sell me one one diet plan or another (and gosh, is that Valerie Bertinelli on my TV just now?), so I’m gonna guess — without even mentioning the pressure I’ve had from my mother, grandmother or other relatives to follow a weight-management plan — that it just doesn’t require a doctor to smack one’s forehead and exclaim “I coulda had a weight management plan!”

The interesting part of the article to me is the part where real, live, practicing doctors say that they don’t want to stigmatize their patients with a diagnosis of obesity (because, sadly, fat hatred kills) and Sanjay Gupta gets his knickers in a twist about that,or about the fact that patients who haven’t been diagnosed with obesity need to let their poor, dumb doctors know that such a thing exists:

None of this absolves patients or parents from stepping forward and bringing up weight on their own. But whoever raises the topic, it’s important for patients and doctors alike to remember that modest amounts of weight loss can disproportionately benefit overall health, even if the loss doesn’t feel or look like much. That fact may be the best reason for everyone to show a little courage and say what needs to be said—-even if it hurts a bit.

Ooh, Sanjay — are you offering absolution? How very . . . priestlike of you.

_____

* I had sent the article off to Kate Harding because I was still not feeling all that well and figured she could do a great job with it. I had forgotten that she was on vacation, but she sent it along to Fillyjonk anyway. It wasn’t until I’d read Fillyjonk’s post that I realized that it was authored by Sanjay Gupta, master of the “let me give you a conclusion that doesn’t at all fit the piece I’m about to introduce but which reinforces a lot of cultural stereotypes that my paymasters want reinforced, and btw, have I mentioned I hate fat people?” head-fake. And that was *before* he cast aspersions on Michael Moore’s facts in “Sicko” but couldn’t actually back them up once Moore cornered him.

I’d plead illness, but mostly it was just the placement of the byline over the inexplicable photo of a woman’s back with her lacy black bra still on while a male hand holds a stethoscope to her back rather than just above the story.

Visible bra straps = jerking off in public

Published at August 24, 2007 in Pantysniffing, I see fat people, Anxious masculinity, Woman-Hating and Dipshittery. 5 Comments

At least, that’s what a city councilman in Atlanta thinks.

ATLANTA - Baggy pants that show boxer shorts or thongs would be illegal under a proposed amendment to Atlanta’s indecency laws. The amendment, sponsored by city councilman C.T. Martin, states that sagging pants are an “epidemic” that is becoming a “major concern” around the country.

“Little children see it and want to adopt it, thinking it’s the in thing,” Martin said Wednesday. “I don’t want young people thinking that half-dressing is the way to go. I want them to think about their future.”

The proposed ordinance would also bar women from showing the strap of a thong beneath their pants. They would also be prohibited from wearing jogging bras in public or show a bra strap, said Debbie Seagraves, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.

The proposed ordinance states that “the indecent exposure of his or her undergarments” would be unlawful in a public place. It would go in the same portion of the city code that outlaws sex in public and the exposure or fondling of genitals.

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Felon!

Melissa McEwan did a brilliant post at her now-down site, Shakesville, which illustrated the white male privilege that a similar ban in a town in Louisiana demonstrated: she not only noted that visible underwear never seemed to be a problem before it was displayed by young black men and young women rather than white men, she illustrated it, IIRC, with a photo of, essentially, white man’s plumber’s crack and boxers peeking over the top of a young black man’s pants. One was not the subject of legislation, the other was. Guess which was which.

I have to be honest — I find it endlessly amusing when I see young men with their pants belted around their thighs. Because, seriously, it’s just stupid, and doesn’t seem very practical. Though, frankly, I haven’t seen that going on for a while. Maybe it takes a little longer for these things to filter down to Atlanta or something.

Even though this is cast as some kind of neutral thing, it’s clearly targeted to certain populations. I even got a taste myself of the kind of selective enforcement of these things when I went to Louisiana to volunteer after Hurricane Katrina. I stayed in a camp run by FEMA and staffed with armed Wackenhut guards. We were not to cuss, or fuck, or do anything that might offend the sensibilities of the churchy folk who comprised most of the camp. And one of those things that offended the sensibilities of the churchy folk was low-riding pants and visible underwear.

But of course, this was not enforced in any kind of even manner. Personally, I’d bought pants that were a size too big because I thought I was that size, they were on sale, and what the hell, not gonna try on pants that were five bucks. So on the job site, I used duct tape to make a belt. But at the camp, I used shoelaces or nothing, which meant my old, fat ass hung out with visible undies for all to see. Did anyone care? No. Or, not that anyone told me.

But my 18-year-old, thin, blonde teammate? I was following maybe 10 feet behind her as she walked by an armed guard while wearing pants that were slightly loose and a top that showed a slight bit of her midriff. And he admonished her for her temerity at showing flesh. I walked by not five seconds later, showing even more flesh if you’re going to measure by the square inch, and nothing.

Gosh, could it have the slightest bit to do with who makes white guys uncomfortable, whether racially or sexually?

Might.

Be yourselves, girls: order what you think he’d approve of you eating in front of him

Published at August 9, 2007 in Food, Female trouble, I see fat people, Anxious masculinity and Dipshittery. 28 Comments

Dating plus food plus the New York Times’ gender-role fuckery. A perfect storm of idiocy!

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MARTHA FLACH mentioned meat twice in her Match.com profile: “I love architecture, The New Yorker, dogs … steak for two and the Sunday puzzle.”

She was seeking, she added, “a smart, funny, kind man who owns a suit (but isn’t one) … and loves red wine and a big steak.”

The repetition worked. On her first date with Austin Wilkie, they ate steak frites. A year later, after burgers at the Corner Bistro in Greenwich Village, he proposed. This March, the rehearsal dinner was at Keens Steakhouse on West 36th Street, and the wedding menu included mini-cheeseburgers and more steak.

Meat, the magic marriage bullet! Oh, if only I had thought to order a steak or a hamburger on my first dates, I, too, could be married to a smart, funny, kind man who owns a suit (but isn’t one), and we could have winked at our mutual love of meat by having just the cutest little mini-cheeseburgers at the wedding!

Oh, wait. Except for the part where I *have* eaten steak on a first date, having been taken to a steakhouse.

And I’m single anyhow. Hm. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe Martha will tell me what it is:

Ms. Wilkie was a vegetarian in her teens, and even wore a “Meat Is Murder” T-shirt. But by her 30s, she had started eating cow. By the time she placed the personal ad, she had come to realize that ordering steak on a first date had the potential to sate appetites not only of the stomach but of the heart.

Red meat sent a message that she was “unpretentious and down to earth and unneurotic,” she said, “that I’m not obsessed with my weight even though I’m thin, and I don’t have any food issues.” She added, “In terms of the burgers, it said I’m a cheap date, low maintenance.”

Silly me! I’m not thin, and Martha is. She can eat cow; I’m just compared to one. Continue reading ‘Be yourselves, girls: order what you think he’d approve of you eating in front of him’

Get ‘em while they’re young, and they’re yours for life

Published at August 7, 2007 in Corporatocracy, Advertisers want to suck your brains, Food, Marketing mania! and I see fat people. 16 Comments

That’s been the marketing strategy of McDonald’s for years, and a new study shows that it’s paying off in spades with preschoolers.

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Preschoolers preferred the taste of burgers and fries when they came in McDonald’s wrappers over the same food in plain wrapping, U.S. researchers said, suggesting fast-food marketing reaches the very young.

“Overwhelmingly, kids chose the one that they perceived was from McDonald’s,” said obesity prevention expert Dr. Thomas Robinson of the Stanford University School of Medicine, whose work appears in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

While prior studies have looked at the impact of individual ads on kids, Robinson and colleagues set out to study the overall influence of a company’s brand — based on everything from advertising to toy premiums and word of mouth.

Continue reading ‘Get ‘em while they’re young, and they’re yours for life’