Introducing this video, Atrios says:

And bring back New Coke!!! Of all of the recent mostly pointless wingnuttery, the lightbulb fixation has been the most amusing/bemusing.

What makes the lightbulb thing the bestest of current wingnut obsessions is that it's a perfect summation of what makes up the modern wingnut. Should you need to craft a future panic to gin up a bunch of wingnuts, I suggest carefully studying this list, because it's a pretty great blueprint.

1) Bullshit. This is one of the most important aspects. For some reason, they can't get quite as whipped up over something that's true. In some cases, that's beause reality is boring, but clearly that doesn't explain all of it, because even if their claim was true---that the government is banning incandescent light bulbs---that would still be roughly the stupidest thing to get upset about, possibly ever. No, I believe they get more excited over lies than the truth is that believing something that's not true makes them feel like they're in a secret, special club. That other people disagree with them because of our tedious adherence to facts and reality increases their sense of specialness. It also helps feed their sense of victimization. They're oppressed by the facts and all those stupid liberal fascists who insist on them. Because of all this, bullshit is way more interesting to the average wingnut than facts. 

2) Pettiness. What's weird is that even if it were true, and the entire country was being forced to move to CFLs for daily use, the rational response would be, "So what?" The wailing from wingnuts on this is that CFLs are "ugly", but what's interesting about this is that they're really not. I have nothing but CFLs in my house, and they work great. You could probably even do some empirical research showing that your ordinary American can't tell the difference between a new incandescent and new CFL. They flicker a bit more when being turned on, and that's it. Small price to pay to reduce our nation's energy usage and forstall global warming, right? But pettiness is where wingnuts find their home. They love turning a molehill into a mountain, because that means that every time they flip on a light, they can burn with rage at the evil liberals who are controlling their lives through light bulbs.

3) Selfishness. They really do find it mildly arousing to say, "Screw the planet, I like my light bulbs the way they are." Sure, they rationalize this by pretending not to believe in global warming, but feigned disbelief is just an extension of the larger selfishness problem.

4) Near-psychotic fear of change. They like the world the way it is, and any change is taken as a personal affront, no matter how inconsequential to their personal comfort.

5) Paranoia. This goes back to pettiness. They love to sweat the small stuff, because it makes the grand conspiracy of liberal fascism they believe in seem omnipresent. This is why wingnuts in the past got so attached to fears about fluoride in the drinking water, and now are crapping their pants over fears of mandatory CFLs. They like to feel that the Illlumnati even have their fingers in how you light a room. 

But most importantly of all:

6) It pisses off the liberals. It honestly should. This petty, selfish, idiotic, childish, paranoid behavior should piss off anyone with an ounce of decency. But what's funny is that they've been crying wolf so long that it fails to anger anymore, and instead causes mockery. I mean, they're willing to act like paranoid idiots just to get a rise out of us. Don't they have anything better to do with their time? Get a hobby, like replacing all your incandescent light bulbs with CFLs, and then starting a photoblog showing how nice the light is. But Wingnut America is so committed to the "pissing off the liberals" mentality that they'll try to pretend the peals of laughter aimed in their direction are wails of anger. It's sad, really. 

In response to my post below, a reader sent me an email exchange she had with Skechers, who not only has a "Shape Up" line of get-your-back-out-alignment-for-mythical-toning-benefits shoes, but also has a line for girls, so they can get an early start on fucking up their backs and knees in the name of achieving a literally impossible physical ideal. The reader specifically pointed out that there's no "Shape Ups" for boys, and this is the reply she got:

The whole message behind Shape-ups is to get people moving, exercising, and getting fit. Skechers' advertising for Shape-ups for Girls contains the same message as the First Lady's Let's Move initiative, which is aimed specifically at children. American children are more sedentary now than at any time in our history. Shape-ups are intended to get people moving and being fit. We think that is a good thing for adults and kids -- and hope others understand the intent.

The reason we do not have a Shape-Ups line at this time for boys is simply a matter of how our company's research and development works for Shape-ups. The Shape-ups line was first created for women and, once it became clear they were popular and there was a demand, the line for men was developed and marketed. The same is true for the kids' lines. Shape-Ups for Girls were rolled out first. The success of this line and the need in the market will guide us in deciding if we will create a line for boys. Other lines may start with Men's.

Regardless of what you may think of Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign, I think it's safe to say that the First Lady is not endorsing snake oil products that promise physical effects they can't deliver. On the contrary, a quick perusal of the website will show that it sticks to scientifically sound ideas about nutrition and exercise, with an emphasis on safety. In fact, the reason that children became the focus of the campaign is that there's overwhelming scientific evidence that people who are already-fat don't get thin, so the idea behind the campaign was to prevent the weight gain in the first place.  Again, I'm not saying that you have to agree with that goal---though I do think it's going to be a side effect of improved nutrition and exercise in children---but it's just a fact that this is the goal.  This has nothing to do with snake oil sneakers promising to give you a supermodel's butt just by running your errands.

It's worth noting that Obama has received a lot of attention---and a lot of it has been nasty as hell---for not fitting the fashion model version of beauty, but instead being a strong, fit woman who has visible muscles. 

I will add that presenting little girls with unachievable ideals of beauty is contrary to real-world fitness goals. It encourages eating disorders in some, but also causes others to despair. A person who is in despair because they'll never be perfect isn't someone who is motivated to go to the gym to be well. 

For obvious reasons, ads for those various kinds of sneakers that have weird soles and promise to "tone" your ass and thighs were ubiquituous in New York City before they were really rolled out to torture the rest of the country. If you designed a computer program solely to irritate me, it couldn't come up with anything better than those ads, which were sexist and preyed on women's insecurities to sell them a bunch of pseudo-scientific garbage that would probably just result in an injury. Of course, they went nationwide because they hit that sweet spot of promising the impossible to women, which is that they could skip the gym and still get perfectly "toned" asses simply by walking around on these stupid shoes. And so I was pleased to see that Reebok, at least, is getting in trouble with the FTC for these shoes, and has had to pay $25 million in refunds. (That the shoes sold at least $25 million shows how desperate women are to believe.) The ads got a lot of attention for being so sexist, but for me, the "your boobs will be jealous of your ass" stuff was the least offensive part of this whole campaign. It's that they were building new pseudo-science to ride on the back of old pseudo-science that existed only because our society has put a completely impossible demand on women to be "tone", which is to say to have the firmness of being muscular without having the threatening masculine definition of being muscular that you get if you're actually muscular. I mean, look at this ad:

WTF, "increases muscle activation". That is classic pseudo-scientific bullshit. It means basically nothing. I don't think even biologists have the ability to measure "muscle activation" and Reebok sure as shit doesn't. But they're not going to go with the slightly more plausible claim that the shoes build muscle, because that would also turn off their target audience. Women with the insecurity this is aimed at don't want to build muscle, they want to be "tone". I mean, these shoes don't do diddly-squat except increase your chances of turning an ankle, but it's interesting that even in their fallacious claims to be achieving some sort of fitness goal, they bring up a fitness goal that doesn't actually exist for real women in the real world, but is a myth constructed by Photoshop: that there's such thing as a workout routine that can achieve "tone", i.e. firmness without building muscle. That you can lift your ass up an inch without pushing it out two as you build muscle. That you can somehow work out your way to having the body of a 20-year-old model who herself doesn't even have that body because they airbrushed all the sag out of it.

I'm glad Reebok is paying the price for falsely claiming that their shoes can tone your body, though the FTC hasn't banned them, as far as I can tell, from making these fallacious claims. (They really should have that power, or fines will just be part of the price of doing business.) But one of the reasons products like this sell is that people believe in this myth of the toned female body. I see sad cases of women who are chasing that brass ring at the gym every day; doing endless, tedious reps with super low weights in hopes that they can somehow make their bodies firm but not muscular. The result is generally just skinny but not particularly firm, and certainly not looking like they stepped out of the pages of a magazine, due to the fact that this is impossible. 

It's weird, because to my mind, the muscular female body is hardly considered unbeautiful in our culture.  You see lots of images of women who have visible muscles on their thighs or definition in their arms.  Not only are many female athletes viewed as beautiful, but there's also movie stars and pop singers who look strong and fit. But it's clear that this is still only considered a second rate alternative of beauty, and that the frail-looking skinny-but-magically-tone body is still considered the ideal. You're not going to see someone who looks like Beyonce strutting the catwalk.  And as the ads for these shoes show, even when something is being advertised as a fitness product, the body ideal being portrayed is firm but with no muscle definition. And that's only achieved through computer technology, because again, the "tone" female body is basically a myth. Women really aren't any different than men in this regard; if you're skinny with no muscle definition, you're still going to be saggy, especially as you age. You can do some amount of firming up, but mainly by building muscle and losing fat, which has a tendency to make you look more solid than like a lithe fashion model. And there's no magic product or behavior---no shoe, no barbell, no amount of reps with a 10 pound weight---that can really change these facts. 

Of course, that's the point, isn't it? To put a literally impossible beauty ideal in front of women so that they keep buying useless products, hoping the next one is the one who gets them there? 

I have quite a bit of work to do that will take me off-blog today, but I did want to share with you a passage I read from David Denby's New Yorker review of "Crazy, Stupid, Love" that I found quite scintillating as I jogged in place at the local gym.  Describing a scene where Ryan Gosling's character takes Emma Stone's character to his bachelor pad for the first time, Denby writes:

[A]nd arriving at his wrap-around-glass bachelor pad, demands that he remove his shirt, which he does, revealing a chest and abs so perfectly sculpted that she's revolted.  She says, "Seriously? It's like you're Photosopped!"  Men in the audience may be relieved to hear that at least some women find the perfection of a gym body too close to narcissism to be a turn-on, and Stone gives the line, and many others, a quick, precise, tart delivery.

Women in the audience, on the the other hand, took their relief in the realization that should they be bold enough to achieve physical perfection, no one will hold it against them.  I, for one, would like to thank the two male directors and the male screenwriter of "Crazy, Stupid, Love" for this revelation.  I had been up late at nights recently worried that perhaps I should lighten up on the gym and diet routine, but now I can go after it worry-free.  

In all seriousness, there should be a special Oscar for rom-com actresses who manage to sell odious dialogue like that.  At least the screenwriters should send them flowers with cards thanking said actresses for rescuing their careers from their own hackery.

This article at Salon exposing Proactiv as a sham made my morning, as I’m sure it will any of you who, for whatever reason, are exposed to a lot of cable television and therefore relentless ads for Proactiv.  (In my case, it’s mostly because Marc is a soccer fan, and every time some game is on, we have to endure the ads.  If you were judging on ads alone, you’d think that most soccer fans are suffering epic amounts of acne.)  I mostly hate the ads because they’re relentless and the worst kind of celebrity endorsement, but I always suspected that they’re selling overpriced crap that you can get for cheap at the drugstore.  And sure enough:

Make a few clicks around Proactiv’s website and you’ll find out the active compound is benzoyl peroxide. That’s the same stuff in Stridex, Clearasil and just about every nonprescription acne medication available in drugstore aisles across America. A tube of the same compound costs $5.25 at my local pharmacy.

Since writing about this stuff invariably brings out a true believer or two or a dozen in comments, I will add that the doctor who wrote this, Rahul Parikh, doesn’t disagree that some times it works better than the cheap stuff, but not because it is better.  It’s because the expense and the “system” they create gets clients to be more consistent with use.  Spend less money, but contribute the same diligence and Clearasil would work just as well.  (I’m a fan of Neutrogena’s stuff, just because it’s less thick, but not because it’s better in any chemical sense.)  As a perennially cheap person, I figured out the trick to flip stuff over and check the ingredient list a long time ago, much to the dismay of anyone trying to sell any of the various products that cost four or five times as much for exactly the same stuff.  Right now, a big scam is glycolic acid, which is the active ingredient in a lot of first rate exfoliating masks.  I’ve seen places like Bath and Body Works try to sell tubes of the stuff for $60-$100, which you could get it from Oil of Olay for $20.  (I’ve looked for it even cheaper than that, but sadly, there does seem to be a bottom in this department that’s set awfully high.) 

For some reason, exploiting people’s anxieties about their skin to sell them overpriced products pisses me off more than most scam-y things like it.  I think it’s because having bad skin makes you especially vulnerable to hucksters, because it’s so hard to conceal and it’s the first thing people notice about you, since it’s on your face and all.  People with bad skin will take drastic measures to have nice skin, and therefore they’re easy to convince that drastic measures—-like spending tons of money—-are necessary when they’re not.  To make it worse, unlike other appearance-based problems, like bad hair, bad skin doesn’t even go away once it goes away!  You can fix the zits, but you still have the scars.  Proactiv ads are especially vicious in this department, with the exploitative lighting and the glowing skin of heavily-made-up celebrities.  You’d have to be made out of stone not to look at that and feel a tug of envy and desire, especially if you struggle with bad skin.  Just the hope that this could happen for you has got to weigh heavily.  They must be making a ton of money, too.  According to this article, the company that owns Proactiv spends $12-$15 million a year on celebrity endorsements alone. 

I almost feel bad giving this attention, but I’m really not in the school of “ignore wingnuts who have audiences of millions of people and they’ll just go away”, so I’m blogging it.  As noted before on this blog, Rush Limbaugh has declared holy war on Michelle Obama for what is largely an uncontroversial First Lady project of trying to promote good nutrition and exercise.  Limbaugh clearly has deep-set mommy issues, and believes his audience does as well, because for him, someone gently suggesting that you eat more fiber is tantamount to tyranny.  He literally refuses to see the difference between giving advice and forcing someone at gunpoint, though I do imagine he’s continuing to eat all the crap he wants without going to jail, so I’m not sure how he figures out that has happened if we really do have a Food Police.  Maybe he figures his wealth guards him like it guards him from doing time for drug use. 

Anyway, now he’s decided, in his desperation to tell Mommy that he’ll eat what he wants, wah, he’s gone and called Michelle Obama fat.

She is a hypocrite. Leaders are supposed to be leaders. If we’re supposed to go out and eat nothing—if we’re supposed to eat roots, and berries and tree bark and so show us how. And if it’s supposed to make us fit, if it’s supposed to make us healthier, show us how.

The problem is—and dare I say this—it doesn’t look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary, dietary advice.

He then goes on to whine that she had a single meal that was kind of junky.  Of course, those of us who are actually about nutrition and exercise as lifestyle choices instead of dieting will be the first to tell you that you should allow yourself treats, because if you don’t, then what happens is you “fall off the wagon” one time, and decide you’ve failed, and then eat nothing but junk.  But it’s in Limbaugh’s interest to push this all-or-nothing mentality; he’s deep into defending the worst aspects of American culture, especially those that keep people in a state of perpetual insecurity (which helps keep his audience restless and easy to drum up into a state of resentment), and boy the binge-and-starve cycle Americans are encouraged to live in sure is that. 

The all-or-nothing mentality really amps up with Limbaugh here:

What is it - no, I’m trying to say that our First Lady does not project the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, or of a woman Alex Rodriguez might date every six months or what have you. I mean, women are under constant pressure to look lithe, and Michelle My Belle is out there saying if you eat the roots and tree bark and the berries and all this cardboard stuff you will live longer, be healthier and you won’t be obese. Okay, fine, show us.

So, basically Limbaugh is saying that women fall into two categories: underweight and obese.  And that’s it.  If you’re not a size 0, you’re fat. 

I’m not noting this to fat-bash, and in fact the opposite.  I’m with fat acceptance people on accepting that there’s a broad range of human bodies and body sizes, and that health is about more than being just stick-thin.  I do think it’s interesting that Michelle Obama was criticized by fat activists for starting this campaign as a non-fat person, which created concerns that she would come across as a thin person shaming the fat kids.  Obviously, fat activists are right—-Obama is not fat.  She’s what you’d call stately.

But this is a reminder that, in a patriarchy, the word “fat” has two meanings.  The most obvious is that it’s a word that’s applied to people who actually are fat, and this is the sense that it’s being reclaimed by fat activists, who insist it should be just a descriptor and not a loaded word.  (I agree with them.) 

But then there’s the other way the term is used, and that’s as a free-floating insult that can be applied to any woman at any point in time, regardless of her actual body fat percentage.  In a patriarchy, all women are “fat”, i.e. they take up too much space and have physical bodies that are coded as Other and therefore disgusting.*  I would argue—-though this isn’t original to me but something I’ve picked up from fat activists—-that this is part of the reason that “fat” is so stigmatized.  There’s a continuum between the “all women are fat” mentality and the “fat people are disgusting” mentality.  I’ll leave that to more thorough thinkers on this to discuss, but this here is a prime example of it.  I’ve even seen women who are world class athletes and probably have like 5% body fat called “fat”.  Anorexia has many causes that are complicated, but the dysfunction certainly latches onto this notion that any flesh at all makes one “fat”. 

I’ll point out that none of this has anything to do with Michelle Obama’s stated goals for her campaign, which are about health, and getting kids eating right and exercising young to build lifelong habits.  The framing is around obesity, and that’s controversial on the left, but the goal—-to teach health as a lifestyle choice, and to keep kids from falling into the gain-weight-diet-lose-weight-go-off-diet-gain-it-back vicious cycle—-is one I think we all agree on. 

I do think that while Obama is indifferent to the more radical politics of fat activists, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that a woman of an Amazonian build is taking a leadership role as a preventive health activist, because it does destabilize the all-or-nothing mentality around diet and weight in America, at least to a degree.  Most mainstream discourse around nutrition is about losing weight, and it takes as a given that all weight loss is good, and that there is no such thing as a person (especially a woman) who doesn’t need to lose weight or that there’s a weight loss plan that’s bad for you.  Nor is there ever much indication that you can’t diet yourself into tininess—-every woman is presented with basically the same goal, to get to a lithe shape that her genetics may not actually allow for.  That Michelle Obama is out there saying you can eat right and be healthy and still weigh more than 100 pounds isn’t radical, but it’s a difference in the mainstream media where actual eating disorders are promoted as “healthy” and yo-yo dieting is taken as the norm.

I think that Obama’s ability to move people to thinking of food outside of the binge-and-starve cycle, and to think of bodies as being healthy even if they aren’t emaciated is what threatens Limbaugh, and why he’s obsessed.  Because he needs, as noted before, his audience in an all-or-nothing, constantly destabilized mentality.

*But, but, but Amanda!  Straight men who make the rules also crave women’s bodies, and claim to think they’re beautiful, so there can’t actually be a disgust reaction, right?  Wrong.  In reality, the line between disgust and attraction is thin indeed, and if you don’t think so, consider how a side of raw meat can, depending on the context, be the grossest thing in the world (road kill, human body opened up at an autopsy) or make people’s mouths water with desire (steak), even though they functionally look the same and are the same. Women’s bodies—-secondary sex characteristics in particular—-fall into the same trap, and it’s made worse by cultural misogyny.  Most women grasp early on that extremely minor differences in adherence to social norms will render a body part that’s considered exotic/beautiful/desirable into something that’s considered disgusting.  A breast can be the pinnacle of beauty, or it can cause massive disgust reactions, depending on if you pull it out for a man or for a baby.  A vulva is considered so desirable that entire magazines are dedicated just to showing it, but if it has a stray hair or labia that aren’t the exact required size, it suddenly becomes culturally designated as disgusting and women are coached to feel so ashamed they should spend tons of money waxing and even getting surgery to “fix” it.

I put this link up on Facebook, just because I saw it on Feministing, and my take was similar to Courtney’s.  (Her response: “This, my friends, is so not how we should be conceiving of effective anti-bullying work.”)  I decided to post on it because it got a lot of Facebook comments, but it was also interesting what shape they took.  Even we feminists and feminist allies sometimes fall into the trap of dropping a discussion about women’s behavior and responses to oppression (and what works and what doesn’t) when the topic of women’s bodies and what is permissible to alter about them is at hand.  So, even though the original topic was “responses to bullying”, the discussion quickly became “when is it okay to get a nose job?”

Barring an absolutist “no cosmetic surgery” position, I think it’s going to end up being subjective.  There just isn’t going to be a bright line between when a cosmetic procedure is a reasonable response to a physical flaw and when it’s an overreaction to oppressive beauty standards.  Or when it’s in-between—-an understandable but sad survival response to patriarchal oppression.  But I want to post on this here to talk not about this incident recounted to discuss bullying and what works and doesn’t work in response.

The story at hand:

High school senior Erica Morgo says she likes what she sees when she looks in the mirror, but that was not always the case. Erica was bullied horribly by her classmates in middle school.

“In sixth grade I was in the bus, and a lot of boys made fun of me for having a big nose,” Erica said. “They would call me Pinocchio. And in school, in class, people would point it out. I felt helpless. I felt like a loser.”

The situation grew so severe that Erica grew depressed and started missing school. She estimates she missed a total of month’s worth of classes to avoid the taunts of classmates. Finally, one night she says she couldn’t take the teasing any longer, and decided to take matters into her own hands.

” I tried breaking my nose once. I was so fed up with the bullying that I tried banging my face against the door,” she said.

After the incident, her mother, Dana Manzella, said she knew that she had to do something. She decided to allow her then 15-year-old daughter to undergo cosmetic surgery to shape her nose to her liking.

“I think that was definitely a good decision, because it brought her back—her self-esteem back up to be able to do activities that she did before, with comfort,” Manzella said.

I’m going to point out that it does seem the bullying declined, but correlation isn’t causation.  Right at her age, the bullying against me declined as well, and I didn’t change anything about myself.  Kids actually start to grow up in their later years of high school, and thus bullying loses a lot of its appeal.  Especially appearance-related bullying, though it’s often replaced with sexual harassment, especially for female victims. 

I just want to set aside questions of whether or not women should ever get cosmetic surgery, or whether or not minors should, and focus on cosmetic surgery as a response to bullying.  This has human psychology exactly backwards.  If you want a behavior to stop, the very last thing you should do is reward it.  A dramatic show of submission to bullying may stave off the bullying for a time, just as feeding a hungry animal will make it stop begging.  But if you feed an animal, you know what happens, right?  It comes back for food when it’s hungry again, and every time it’s louder and more entitled.  Bullies are demanding, pretty openly, shows of submission that shore up their own self esteem.  When the hunger strikes again, they know who to go for if you put on a rather dramatic show of submission, such as altering your nose to fit their demands.

One of my friends on Facebook told this story as an example:

Back in grade school there was a kid with big ears that stuck out and like any child with any trait that was out of the ordinary, he was mocked. I don’t think it was particularly horrible mocking, but then I wasn’t experiencing it. It was bad enough though that he got his ears tucked one Summer. Then people starting calling him “Tucker.” Kids are such assholes.

Beyond the ineffectiveness, I worry about teaching young girls that any random dude who has an opinion about your appearance should be taken seriously.  And let’s be clear, every example in this story was a girl, and I imagine that the plastic surgery rates for minors reflect those overall, which is that women get plastic surgery more often than men.  As any woman here can likely tell you, there are a lot of men who feel entitled to dictate the beauty and fashion choices of any random woman they see, no matter how little they know her.  I’ve had men whose names I don’t even know suggest I wear too much make-up and too little of it, that my hair should be shorter and that it should be longer, that I need to lose weight and that I need to gain it.  There’s a whole culture that teaches a huge percentage of men that women aren’t subject to the rule that says you should keep your opinions to yourself on these matters.  (Fun examples at this blog.  The best way to hit on a lady is surely to, before even introducing yourself, suggest that she alter her appearance to suit your arbitrary tastes!) 

Young women should be equipped with an early and frequent understanding that this noise from dudes should be laughed at, not taken seriously.  This is for two reasons, the first being that since no two dudes agree, you can drive yourself insane trying to meet all the conflicting demands.  The second is more in the WTF category: there is no reason to push girls into internalizing the misogynist message that they are subject to male authority on all matters, just because men are men, and that their own desires and wishes are irrelevant.  A lifetime of anxious worrying that you’re meeting arbitrary, ever-changing standards imposed by random dudes is not something you should reinforce.  There’s already enough pressure on women to put up with that.

So there’s been a dust-up between a guest blogger named Monica at Feministe and fat activists (mostly on Twitter that I’ve seen), with Maia actually posting on it.  I’m not interested in getting in the middle of it.  I think both sides make good points.  FAs are right that Monica is out of line suggesting their negative experiences with health care providers are figments of their imaginations, but Monica is right that the “but some highly muscular people are technically obese!” is a disingenuous argument.  I think people were too hard on Monica, but also that she was incredibly unfair in some ways.  I want to talk about the most glaring unfair assertion she made, one that was pulled out by Kate Harding on Twitter in particular.

Weight can signal a lack of activity or too many donuts, and that shouldn’t irk anyone. Yet, it does.

This was unfair, for the very simple reason that fat activists are 100% right that 95% of fat people are going to stay fat.  Drastic weight loss that stays off is incredibly rare, and is usually the result of weight loss surgery or a complete 180 in personal habits that is the sort of thing that is really not in human nature.  And when I say “180”, I mean 180—-the only fat people I’ve ever known to get un-fat without WLS went from being people who didn’t get much exercise to people who turned into jocks.  Moderate exercise—-which I still have no idea what that supposedly means anyway—-just isn’t going to cut it.  Losing weight is really, really hard.  I put myself on a gym regime when we moved to New York, on top of all the extra walking you do here, and I’ve lost weight, sure, but it wasn’t the kind of weight loss rate that would turn a fat person thin.  I can’t imagine what it would take to lose 10 times as much weight as I’ve lost, much less the 20 times that some people would have to lose to go from being fat people to not-fat people.  I hear people make cracks about soda and donuts all the time, as if merely giving up overindulgence would magically turn a fat person thin.  If you sit down and calculate the calorie shortages someone would have to endure to lose a whole lot of weight, you should see the mathematical issues in play. 

But it wasn’t just the “drop the donuts, lose 100 pounds” simplicity that was off here.  It was also the invocation of the concept of personal responsibility that makes me more than a little queasy.  Not to say that I think that people don’t have personal responsibilities to look after their own diets or exercise regimes, but to write it off to that and not look at the big picture is to miss the point.  Americans have been getting fatter in recent decades, and there have been rising rates of diabetes and heart disease to go with it.  To imply that the cause is simple lack of self-control is to suggest that Americans have magically become lazier or more impulsive.  I would argue that the culture has changed dramatically and puts immense amount of pressure on people to have habits that are simply counter-productive to their diet and exercise goals. 

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Well, this strikes me as the most irritating non-story I’ve read in a long fucking time.  I suppose I’m supposed to be shocked and mildly distressed at the release of a study (conducted by Nutrisystem) that shows that half of American women would “give up sex” rather than gain 10 pounds.  But I find the whole thing too suspect to take seriously.  And it’s not because, or at least just because, of what Tracy Clark-Flory pointed out, which is that 66% of survey respondents felt like they have to lose weight to feel sexy, which is a sad result of the widespread fat-shaming in our culture.  (The survey suggested the average amount that had to be lost to reach that goal was 23 pounds, which is such an abstract number as to be meaningless.  Is that a number that includes all the women that feel they’re 5 pounds away from getting into a size four averaged with people who want to lose 100 pounds, or is it just a lot of people who feel they need to lose 23 pounds?  No idea.)  But it’s because they poisoned the well to make sure they got the results they wanted. 

See, they didn’t ask if people would give up sex rather than gain weight.  They asked if you’d give up sex for the summer rather than gain weight.  Considering that’s only 3 months, I’m surprised more people didn’t say yes.  A lot of Americans go 3 month stretches without getting laid all the time, often even if they’re in relationships.  I’m sure people who’ve had 3 month dry spells outnumber people who haven’t many times over.  It’s not a super fun idea to go 3 months without sex, but most of us have plenty of assurance we’d survive.  (Unless they’re rolling masturbation into their definition of “sex”, which I’m almost positive they aren’t.) 

But what really pissed me off about this survey was that it’s indicative of the entire problem with the American diet industry, which is basically built to encourage yo-you dieting. You’ve heard the statistic that 95% of diets don’t work?  That’s because they’re designed not to.  The entire pitch of diet programs is, “Deprive yourself of pleasure for short periods of time, and then, when you reach a goal, go right back to your old habits.  In a few years, when you’ve gained it all back, come back and we’ll do it all over again.”  There’s no natural reason to connect sexual deprivation with weight control—-on the contrary, I’d guess frequent sex actually burns a fair number of calories—-but the diet industry’s logic is just this.  The whole notion is that you “earn” pleasure by being skinny enough to deserve it, and the only way to earn it is to lose weight.

Silvana has a really long, interesting post on the way that getting married can provoke body anxiety in even the most stalwart opponents of that kind of crap, and she mentions something that has always bothered me, too.

As a fat chick, I am well aware of the MUSTLOSEWEIGHTBEFOREWEDDING cultural imperative. I was aware of this before I ever knew what Fat Acceptance was. And I knew before I ever got engaged that I would be doing no such thing. Frankly, I wasn’t even tempted. I know people who have gone on serious diets in the year or so before they get married, women who have attended “boot camp,” and companies who have made a lot of money off of fueling those anxieties. I wanted no part of it.

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Having been the victim of not one, but two of the absolute most passive-aggressive tweets I have read in many moons (though not, apparently, the most of Emily Gould’s day!), I thought I would politely decline Emily’s suggestion to subject myself to more of this in private and at greater length than 140 characters, and instead address the actual issue at hand—-her annoying concern trolling of Jezebel .  Her argument is, well, let’s start with what she’s really saying and then go with the concern troll gloss.  Her main argument is, “Feminists are just jealous that they aren’t hot like Olivia Munn, and they pretend that’s sexism.”  Which is, of course, Rush Limbaugh’s definition of feminism, reworked into a less clever formation.  But she’s polished up that ancient turd with some concern troll shine.  See, she’s just worried that it’s bad for women that Jezebel has a lot of posts talking about the relentless stream of impossible-to-achieve beauty standards.  Of course, the only real problem that she seems to have with said impossible-to-achieve beauty standards is that they make other women act like jealous bitches.

Instead of mimicking the old directly anxiety-making model—for example, by posting weight-loss tips and photos of impossibly thin models like a traditional women’s magazine—Jezebel and the Slate and Salon “lady-blogs” post a critique of a rail-thin model’s physique, explaining how her attractiveness hurts women.

This, of course, is a straight-up mischaracterization of Jezebel’s commenting and blogging policies, as Michelle Dean explains.

Gould’s giving a pretty vague gloss on what it is that those blogs do, in my experience—Jezebel’s anti-”bodysnarking” rule is Internet-famous, and just yesterday they had a post explaining why Crystal Renn oughtn’t to be criticized for losing weight. Also, in general I think it’s important to be skeptical of grand theses based on sampling of Internet comments. Internet commenters (and I’ve been one! Still am!) are assholes; on this I think we can all agree.

Indeed, the original post that’s inspiring Emily is the one (sing it with me now) about “The Daily Show”, something I doubt Irin realized was going to be such a massive shit-starter when she wrote it.  Let’s see how Irin supposedly slagged on Olivia Munn and said that Munn is somehow a bad person and bad for women because she’s got such stellar physical measurements.

According to Nielsen, the Daily Show’s audience does lean male—about 60 percent. That’s who producers seemed to have in mind when they hired Olivia Munn. Though it’s far to early to assess Munn’s performance based on her few seconds onscreen so far, her previous career path has led some to criticize The Daily Show for hiring someone better known for suggestively putting things in her mouth on a video game show (seen here) and being on the covers of Playboy and Maxim than for her comedic chops.

Munn was hired after an exhaustive search for a female correspondent that included many professional comedians. (Kristen Schaal is already an occasional contributor, but not a regular correspondent.) Executive producer Rory Albanese told the Daily Beast that producers were previously unaware of Olivia’s drooling fanboy base: “We’re stuck in a hard news cycle and we’re nerdy. If she was on the cover of The Economist, we would have been like, ‘Yes! Of course!’” It’s hard not to conclude that looks mattered more for women than for men. Silverman jokes of Munn’s hiring, “I just hope it encourages Wyatt Cenac to take his top off more often.”

One female comedian who has auditioned multiple times for the show says, “Looking back, it was ridiculous of me to even prepare! Should I have gone to the gym more? Done Playboy? It’s such a joke.”

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It’s 2010 and black women are still being told their hair is “bad,” ugly, lacks class, etc. If you saw Chris Rock’s “Good Hair”—that’s all you need to know about the pain, the humor and the self-loathing pathology black women (and men) have about natural hair (see my post on it).

And now the style tide has turned in one strange circle, where the women with chemically straightened hair are now being called “trashy.” Sisters, you can’t win. In an article over at Gawker, “American Apparel: Internal Documents Reveal Uglies Not Welcome,” you have to wonder how many people would pass muster for owner generally, but for black women applying for work there, “nice hair” has a different requirement Dov Charney.

Another former [American Apparel] AA manager says that she received the following instructions as to what kind of black girls she should try to hire during the company’s open calls:

“none of the trashy kind that come in, we don’t want that. we’re not trying to sell our clothes to them. try to find some of these classy black girls, with nice hair, you know?”

i will remember that forever, especially the “nice hair” part. he was instructing another manager and i on who to look for during an upcoming open call, and i sat there dumbfounded, listening to him speak while the other manager made “uh huh, got it” sounds on her end of the phone. the other manager on the call with me later became a district manager, and at one point instructed me to tell two of my employees (both of whom happened to be black females) to stop straightening their hair. i refused to do this, but wondered if the mentality behind her request was related to what dov had said.

As everyone knows, I’m an advocate for women dumping relaxers, aka the creamy crack, because that stuff is f*cking toxic. The beauty aesthetic is secondary; natural hair can be beautiful, classy, etc., but as we know, the culture at large doesn’t celebrate the crazy curls and kinks.

More below the fold.

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Jezebel reprinted this blog post by Tasha Fierce called “As Fat As I Wanna Be”.  It’s more of a rant than a tightly argued analysis, but I think the gist of her argument is a critical one.  She’s questioning the centrality of the “Health At Every Size(HAES)” philosophy to the fat acceptance movement.  She comes out of the closet as a fat person who eats too much junk food and doesn’t exercise, and asks why it is that fat people insisting they have the health habits of long distance runners has become the centerpiece of the fat acceptance movement. 

And really, if it’s unacceptable to be a non-HAES fat then how can we say we’re accepting fat? We’re only accepting it if you make sure to do everything right but are still fat? We say fat isn’t a choice. Is it wrong if it is? I’ve gained roughly 10 pounds or so (I’m guessing by the way my clothes fit) since my surgery simply because I’ve chosen to not follow the rules. But that’s my choice and I am sure as shit not going to be shamed by either HAES enthusiasts or bigoted fatphobes.

It seems like whenever a fat person is included in a discussion in the media about the health risks of being fat they have to show their “I really do have healthy habits” card. I’m waiting for a fat person to sit there and be like, yeah, I have shitty eating habits, so what. Because really, it’s none of anyone’s business why I’m fat or what steps I take to “counteract” the fat with healthy choices.

I tend to think that much of HAES tends to be an albatross around the necks of the fat acceptance movement.  Some of the claims are perfectly scientific and useful, such as pointing out that dieting doesn’t work because the vast majority of dieters gain all the weight back that they lose, mainly because they return to their old habits as soon as they lose the weight.  Or pointing out that it’s actually really difficult and miserable to lose weight, and losing a lot of weight rapidly can be its own health hazard.  But where they lose people is when they start edging into denialist territory, denying or minimizing the link between obesity and health issues like diabetes and heart disease.  It’s true that thin people can develop these diseases through bad nutritional habits—-I’ve known a couple who have!—-but that just means the situation is complex, not that there’s no link.  The flip side of the “skinny person who got diabetes from inhaling sweets 24/7” is the uncomfortable reality the drastic and controversial measures like bariatric surgery often “cure diabetes, sometimes instantly.”  (Lest this seem far-fetched, this actually happened to the author who wrote this piece, Marc Ambinder.  It seems he’s still diabetic, but much less severely.)  And the interest HAES has in establishing that weight is a matter of genetics and not health habits will always butt up against the statistical reality that obesity is rising while American genetics stay the same, but American calorie consumption has risen to an average 2,700 calories a day, up from 2,200 40 years ago.  This, despite the fact that Americans are more sedentary than ever. 

I get why HAES has become such a centerpiece.  A lot of people use faux concerns about “health” as an excuse to bash people for being fat, and often it’s so transparent as to be comical.  For instance, there’s a certain cadre of male body nazis out there that are basically anorexia supporters, and whenever the disease they love so well is being discussed on a feminist blog, they swoop in and start trying to distract everyone by screaming about obesity, as if the only option besides starving yourself until you die of a heart attack is being fat.  (These guys creep me out, in case you can’t tell. I hope/pray they don’t have partners, because no matter how thin said partners get, I imagine it’s not good enough. Sadly, many of them seem to have positions of power in Hollywood, which is why I think some shows have the “incredible shrinking actress” problem worse than others—-rumor is that David E. Kelley, for instance, slaps the food out of the hands of his actresses.)  Or, I recall reading a music blog awhile ago and there was a thread about a Gossip show, and even though it had nothing to do with anything, a bunch of dudes showed up to express their “concern” over Beth Ditto’s “health”—-concerns that rose dramatically if Ditto did her old schtick of stripping down to her underwear on stage.  Is she less healthy with fewer clothes on?, I’d think to myself.  Imagine if someone had half as many “concerns” if someone was a suspected smoker!  If you think there would be, let’s compare the number of cheeseburger jokes that were made about Bill Clinton to the number of jokes about Barack Obama’s smoking—-yeah, they don’t even compare. 

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And he let the airline have it on Twitter:

What happened?

In a row played out on Twitter, Smith issued an expletive-laden series of messages aimed at the airline for ejecting him from a flight from Oakland to Burbank on Saturday because he was apparently too overweight to fit in his seat.

“Wanna tell me I’m too wide for the sky?” Smith asked on his Twitter account shortly after the incident. “Totally cool but fair warning folks: If you look like me, you may be ejected from Southwest.”

Smith had fallen victim to Southwest’s booking guidelines for a “customer of size” which say that passengers who are unable to lower both armrests when seated should book another seat because of complaints it has received from customers whose comfort has been ruined by the “encroachment of a large seatmate”.

The captain also deemed him a “safety risk” even though Smith was able to buckle up with the regular seat belt without an extender.

Now here’s where it gets insane—since Smith’s Tweets were causing a PR nightmare as other “passengers of size” chimed in on Southwest’s policy of ejecting them, the airline apologized! For what? That’s its policy!

Aware of the unfolding PR disaster, a tweet appeared on Southwest’s Twitter feed about six hours later, promising Smith he would get a call from the airline’s customer relations vice-president.

“Again, I’m very sorry for the experience you had tonight. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do,” a second tweet to Smith read.

The cover-your-fat-ass-removal-policy apology makes no sense. Either stand behind the fat-bashing policy or not. I’ll tell you why this is explicitly a fat-bashing issue—I find Southwest’s criteria for passenger ejection extremely flawed, since I’ve sat next to people, particularly broad shouldered athletic men who are not obese, who encroach into my space with their arms and shoulders, and many sit with their legs wide open as if they are relaxing on a couch. How is this not equivalent to “encroachment of a large seatmate?”

Now if Southwast want to charge someone more for a seat (or buy a second seat) because of weight, citing some sort of safety issue, that’s another matter, since balance of plane load could be floated in the realm of a legitimate policy, but that’s not what was stated to Kevin Smith. It may be weight/fat discrimination, but that’s a separate issue than the story at hand. To enforce that policy, Southwest would have to weigh its passengers at check in, or if it wants to be more proactive in its fat patrol, require passengers to send in their height, weight and body mass index at the time you book the flight so they can determine who is a safety risk, right?

Actually, if Southwest wants to ensure passenger comfort, they also need to take into consideration who has broad shoulders or wide hips and match everyone up so they fit in like puzzle pieces.

In the end, if size and seat encroachment is the issue Southwest is going to stick to, then there are a many more passengers of “size” who need to be booted from a Southwest flight besides the Clerks director.

What do you all have to say?

P.S. If an airline really wants to do something about passenger comfort, how about keeping the families with out-of-control, undisciplined children (and I’m not talking crying babies; that generally can’t be helped) into their own section of the plane or create “family friendly” flights, and eject passengers who won’t stop yammering on the cell phones after being told to shut them off.

File in the “interesting and useful if proven true” files: Research has come out showing that the health risks associated with obesity may be more a matter of fat-to-muscle ratios than just the number on the scale.  The spin on the article is that there’s a lot of fat thin people—-people who have a BMI in the normal range, but who have very little muscle mass compared to fat, and therefore end up having a lot of the same health problems related to obesity. 

This does reinforce the point a lot of fat activists make about how the health to weight thing is more complicated than you’d think.  It’s definitely true that a lot of thin people eat like shit and don’t exercise, and often with predictable results.  What is also interesting is that the converse might have some traction, too—-that a lot of people whose number on the scale indicates that they’re overweight or even obese may not be as bad off as predicted, because their fat-to-muscle ratio is in a healthy range.  Fat activists have pointed out exceptions to the BMI obesity rule for a long time, pointing out that well-exercised beefy men like Arnold Schwarzenegger or George Clooney are technically obese by the BMI standard, but they’re in good shape by the common sense standard.  This research may demonstrate how true that is.  That said, most people that tip over into the “obese” range on the BMI scale are probably still carting around more of their body weight in fat, and so I imagine they’re just going to be told by the doctor to lose weight, just like usual.

What makes this good news is that it might incline doctors to think about exercise’s role in all this more than they currently do.  Not that any doctor would deny that exercising is good for you, but in all honesty, most interactions involving these issues involve people stepping on a scale, and if their weight is in the normal range, the doctor says nothing, and if they’re overweight or obese, the doctor tells them to lose weight.  And in our culture, that gets interpreted as “go on a diet”. But diets mostly don’t work.  By measuring success and failure in this department strictly from the scale, we continue to encourage this ineffective strategy. It’s not that Americans don’t think exercise is a good idea—-we do—-but let’s face it.  It’s not really treated as important as dieting by a long shot, even though it’s way more effective at reaching the health goals that this is all supposed to be about.  Maybe this research will incline doctors to talk to all patients, no matter where they stand scale-wise, on the importance of exercise and specifically of strength-training.

Interestingly, one reason I think that our culture tends to favor crash diets over exercise is that the body type for women (who are, after all, the target for most weight-related attention, even though these health issues matter as much if not more to men) that is most celebrated is the anorexically thin one.  We’ve all heard women write off doing strength-training on the grounds that they don’t want to “bulk up”.  In her marvelous science book Woman: An Intimate Geography, Natalie Angier has a great rant about this, as a feminist and as a science lover.  In sum, she argues that the fear is paranoid, because women’s hormones usually prevent the kind of bulking up that can happen with men who lift a lot of weights, and that the bulky female weight lifters you see have usually been taking steroids to get that look.  Not that there’s anything wrong with being bulky muscular, but granting that there’s a reason that women might not want to look like body builders or start bulging muscles out of their clothes, it’s still a silly fear.  And I nodded alongside Angier, thinking that all these women are so afraid of an imaginary threat to their looks that they’re putting themselves at risk for osteoporosis and other ailments.

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In the New York Times, Adam Nagourney has a long profile on under-siege Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, covering his “light-skinned/Negro dialect” dustup, his behind-the-scenes political maneuvers, and his personal life. I’m reading along and then this jumped out at me:

By reputation and appearance, Reid, who is 70, is one of the blander elected officials in Washington. Upon closer inspection, he is deeply and deceptively interesting. He is a senator from Nevada who hates gambling (“The only people who make money from gambling are the joints and government”); a backroom deal-maker who does not drink alcohol or coffee; a Washington celebrity who sniffs at the dinner-and-party circuit. “Senator Daschle went to dinner almost every night with someone,” he told me. “I go to dinner never, with anyone, during the week.” He does find time, at least twice a week, to slip on a pair of black Lycra stretch pants to do yoga with Landra at their apartment in the Ritz-Carlton. He has an intolerance for fat people, manifested in asides to aides who seem to be getting portly and an office staff that is suspiciously slim.

WTF? Well, as we know, social prejudice against fat people is still perfectly acceptable, and it’s legal in hiring practices as well, as it the case in Sen. Reid’s office. And in fact, we’re not talking only about the morbidly obese, garden variety obese, or just “thick” folks. How many already painfullythin models or actresses have been told that they are too fat for a job?

But when it crosses the line into politics, fatphobia becomes even more egregious and irrational. It’s often used to dismiss or ridicule political opinions. I can’t for the life of me figure out how what one weighs has anything to do with the value of what one says or writes. But it happens all the time.

Sen. Reid’s personal problem with fat people reminded me of David Mixner’s recent brave column, “On Being Fat.” David is an accomplished man in several areas - as a civil rights activist, an author, a political strategist participating in over 75 political campaigns, and served as an aide to former President Clinton. Despite that remarkable work, Mixner has had to repeatedly deal with open prejudice against him because of his weight.

I asked David if I could repost his essay and he was thrilled to share it with others to open the discussion. I mentioned to him how I was moved by it.

You hit the nail on the head about how much derision those of us who are less-than-svelte experience. I receive hate mail with “fat” tossed in for extra effort all the time, as if obesity alone is responsible for generating an opinion of any kind, lololol. I brush most of it off because those folks aren’t very bright, but I always know that for every one of those turds, there are educated people who dismiss my essays for the same reason unconsciously.

When I was asked to appear on CNN for the first time (2007), Mike Rogers blogged about it afterwards and, one of the commenters actually said “I like Pam, I just wish we had a prittier face representing liberals. looks sell, sorry?” Another said:

“I cant believe the talking progressive heads dont go on diets and loose some weight so we can get more people to like us. PUT DOWN THE BIG MAC STEP AWAY FROM THE MAC AND CHEESE JUST SAY NO TO DEEP FRIED FOODS!!!!”

I already was tentative about doing TV, but it has had a lasting effect on my reticence and self-consciousness about doing it. I know it’s irrational, but one gets tired of people investing too much of their evaluation on what I say based on what I look like.

The irony is that bit on CNN was about 30 lbs ago; having shedded it not because of pressure to do so, but due to chronic illness. But enough about me; here’s David’s eloquent essay. I hope this generates an interesting and worthwhile discussion, not silence.

Hell’s Kitchen Journal: On Being Fat

By David Mixner

Over the years, through being both right and wrong on key issues, it never ceases to amaze me the number of people who seize my weight as an opportunity to discredit my ideas. Some of the most vicious and cruel responses to my speeches and writings have come from always anonymous lowlifes who taunt that I shouldn’t be heard because I am a ‘disgusting fat pig’ or ‘obese political whore’ or ‘horrendously ugly fat pig.’ One would like to think that those words have no power over you but the fact of the matter is they always do. Bigotry of any sort, always cuts right to the bone.

Now, in writing this column, some of my friends urged me not to broach this topic. “Why draw attention to your weight and away from your ideas?” Well, has anyone seen a picture of me? I am fat. I am also attractive and proud. There is no question that losing weight would be helpful for my health. None of the surgeries and intensive care visits were a result of my weight, but it is true that my recovery time was prolonged from these last three years of health hell.

Amazingly, total strangers feel they have the right to pass judgment on a personal health issue. They have no qualms about saying “You ought to lose weight.” People would be appalled if I walked up to an amputee and said, “Do you know you are missing a leg?” Honestly, I am quite aware of my weight and have put on significant amounts during these three years of health crisis. Right now, I am in the process of losing that additional weight.

Even if I get down to a more reasonable size, I am never going to have Paul Newman’s eyes, Hugh Jackman’s body nor the endowment of a famous porn star. I am what I am. A person with solid principles, values and beliefs. A kind person who loves unconditionally and has helped, I think, an enormous number of people over the years. The weight has not affected my brain nor any of my principles. I don’t think with my tummy. Oh yes, I do have a ‘handsome face’ and ‘beautiful eyes’ which I have heard over and over again.

More after the jump.

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