I’m under no delusion that I get to actually make these decisions for everyone, of course. But there was recently a lot of commentary on how I should take my responsibility seriously, after all, and, well, I’m responsive. Maybe not in the way people want me to be but no one got that specific.

Just in case I’m ever granted the power, it seems like a good idea to have a little something prepared. That’s why I’ve taken the time to write this down, in convenient ten commandment formatting. One hopes I do not have to do a satire disclaimer but…. I do not really think I am the boss of anyone else, much less god.

2 I am the Rotund, your fatty friend, who walked with you out of the land of self-hatred, out of the house of self-deprivation;

3 Do not have any other blogs before me.

4 You shall not make for yourself a blogroll, whether in the form of anything that is in livejournal, or that is on the dreamwidth, or that is in the yahoo groups.

5 You shall not bow down to them or favorite them; for I the Rotund, your favorite blog, am a jealous blog, punishing fat children for the iniquity of fat parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me,

6 but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who buy Lessons From the Fatosphere and keep my fat acceptance commandments.

7 You shall not make wrongful use of the name of Fat Acceptance, for the Rotund will not acquit anyone who misuses the movement.

8 Remember to eat and enjoy it.

9 For 7 days shall you practice HAES (or not because health has no moral value).

10 But whatever day you like is a day of rest and if that day of rest includes exercise then that is okay, too; you shall not believe in the good fatty/bad fatty dichotomy.

11 For in social justice movements of all sorts, the Rotund found allies and became an ally; therefore the work of anti-oppression must be approached from an intersectional framework without a hierarchy of oppressions to derail our conversations.

12 Honor your father and your mother, for theirs are the genetics that have been passed on to you.

13 You shall not diet.

14 You shall not pursue weight loss surgery.

15 You shall not wear Spanx.

16 You shall not say crappy things about what your fat neighbor wears.

17 You shall not covet your neighbor’s thinness; you shall instead, accept your body and live your own damn life.

Now, this isn’t going to fly as a mission statement for the movement, obviously. But it’s where I’m starting. What’s important to YOU? What do you think is vital to the movement?

I don’t want to be part of a fat acceptance movement that doesn’t take other oppressions seriously. I don’t want to be part of a fat acceptance movement that is only for “healthy” or “acceptable” fatties. I don’t want to be part of a fat acceptance movement where we have to all disagree and play nice.

I want to be part of a fat acceptance movement that represents a variety of viewpoints, that has room for a variety of methods and tactics and approaches and concerns. I want radicals and not-so-radicals. I want thin people to be part of the movement. I want fat people to change themselves and thus change all of us.

What do you want?

I was also kind enough to lend my voice to NYU Press blog in a post "Tricks, Treats and Shattering Stereotypes." 

Fat Studies, thankfully, has gotten some notice in the press.  A blog from conservative website Campus Reform questions the need to have Fat Studies (or any studies that isn't WASP studies).  Being actually accepted enough to be challenged makes me proud!  It also got a kinder review in Ms Magazine.

Those in the New York Area, join us at Re/Dress on December 4th at 8pm for a reading. (Books will be available.)

This is not because there are not awesome fat people. It’s because if I dressed up as Lesley (which would crack me up no end, honestly, I think it’d be the funniest thing ever if fatties from the blogs dressed as each other), no one who doesn’t know Lesley would know who I was.

The theme at work this year was rock stars. I could have been Mama Cass. Or Meat Loaf.

I considered being Beth Ditto.

But in the end, I dressed in some of my more outlandish clubby clothes and I was a groupie.

I didn’t want to wind up doing what one of my coworkers spent the day doing – explaining that I was the fat version of someone.

She was the fat Lita Ford. As Lita Ford kicks ass, I thought it was awesome.

But I didn’t want to be the one having that conversation over and over and over again. As it was, I know there were snickers because fat goth groupies? Really? But yes.

It’s the same dilemma every year. Do you go as a fat person or do you make the vaguely apologetic comment about how you’re the version of Debbie Harry that gained weight?

That gets old to me.

Throw in the way women are relegated, for the most part, to playing “slutty” ________ (fill in the job description here) on Halloween, and it’s just a recipe for me sitting on my sofa kind of hating one of my favorite holidays.

THAT IS NO FUN.

So, what’s a fatty to do?

On a practical level, I’ve found going for a more creative but less specific costume helps a lot. “I’m a flight attendant” does not require a fat disclaimer.

That’s the kicker, y’all. I am sick of having to give the fat disclaimer.

But beyond that practical level, remember that, if you’re dressing up, this is a time designed for visibility. Standing out in a crowd is not always easy, especially if you are just getting into the whole body acceptance game. But Halloween is such a good time to play with that.

It is, of course, totally cool by me if you aren’t into costumes at all. Lots of people are not.

But I thought I’d mention: Playing around with another identity, even just for a night, can be super liberating and a lot of plain old fun. Especially if that identity is not competing with some thin ideal of itself.

This goes back to my post from July about the flawed concept behind BMI.  We really do categorize people in a very narrow range of what is considered healthy without paying attention to history, genetics, or physical characteristics.  Considering that a study just came out that suggests kids born today can live to be 100, it doesn't seem like obesity is putting a dent in life expectancies.  Of course if we include those children in the third world, the ones that die of actually preventable diseases, that life expectancy drops.

Also a recent article about a 2008 study indicates that fat people can be healthy.  I'm perfectly willing to accept gaining weight as a symptom (not a cause) of a disease, just as losing weight can also be one.  What I don't agree with is the arbitrary decision that being at the magical BMI number will make you healthy or that even losing weight will make you healthy.

OMG, y’all, I could not disagree more!

And my reasoning is even related to body politics though not specifically fat. *grin* I’m so excited to get to explicate this.

A douche is a device that, in theory, cleanses a woman’s vagina via a nozzle that is inserted. The douche bag portion of this program holds whatever liquid is being used, whether it is water or some water/vinegar/perfume mix or, historically, an antiseptic like Lysol.

But what a douche really does is wash away the natural secretions of the vagina and totally fuck up the ph of, if you’ll excuse the term, your pussy. The vagina has a self-cleaning process and messing with that opens you up (no pun intended) to everything from yeast infections to bacterial vaginosis.

The “benefit” of using a douche product regularly is that you can perfume the general area and, during your period, prevent a certain amount of the mess that happens if you’re going for some penetrative action.

I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather just clean up than risk bacterial infection. Because omg, no, thank you no.

So, douches are bad for you. Douches themselves are cloaked in this concept of health but are, in reality, kind of dangerous.

And that’s why, as a general rule, it strikes me as a feminist term when used as an insult or warning.

I don’t call people bitches. That is an anti-woman term in my opinion. I don’t call people pussies or cunts or any other common term based on women’s genitals. Because there’s nothing inherently bad about genitals, yo.

But I will surely use “douchebag” if there is something going down that purports to be harmless or even good for you and is instead, in fact, kind of dangerous.

As a final note, while there are always exceptions, I’d just like to say: Let’s keep douchebags away from our vaginas, in every sense of the word.

There, do we all feel warm and fuzzy? I KNOW I DO.

*grin*

So, harsh realities. The harsh reality is that, while we might all want it, there isn’t really any such thing as a safe space on the internet. What we can do, however, is try to make some spaces safer. That’s why there’s no diet/weight-loss talk here. I mean, dude, we get enough of that shit almost everywhere else.

But at Wiscon earlier this year a women named Ladyjax had something to say about safe spaces that seriously stuck with me – that safe spaces are not comfortable. They are some of the most challenging spaces around. And I think she’s right about that. We’ve created a space that is safer so we can talk about bodies and fat and oppression and social justice and clothes. But those conversations are not going to be easy and they are not always going to end with every single one of us holding hands and singing.

I am so freaking glad of that, too.

One way to look at this: when we are comfortable, we are too busy relaxing to get things done. It is not time to relax yet.

Like I said earlier, we are not obligated to be nice. I LIKE being nice – I don’t feel good in snarky environments. But it is not a requirement and, frankly, sometimes it is a liability. We think that if we are just nice enough, just pretty enough in a mainstream sort of way, just “fatties can be healthy, too!” enough about our message, that we will be more palatable, that eventually we will be embraced. I hate to compare social justice movements but, damn, y’all. Have we learned nothing from watching other oppressed groups? Have we not learned that, yes, it is good to be nice and have reasonable discourse with people. It is also good to sometimes just raise a damn ruckus. Internally to the movement and externally with the rest of society.

Wow. I think I just became an actual agitator. *grin*

I’m not sitting here saying you have to be rude to people. We’re adults here, even those of us who aren’t yet legally. You can judge for yourself when a bit of the angrypants is necessary. And if you can’t wear clothing with a specific emotional purpose in a safer space, where can you?

Angrypants – wear them well

posted by meowser

Unfortunately, much of the discussion of privilege focuses around shaming those who are perceived to have it, rather than trying to strategize about how to empower those who may not. – Octogalore, “Entitlement”

Even before the latest dustup, I wanted to write about privilege versus entitlement (that is, a feeling of entitlement). So what better time than now, since we’re sick of it already?

Octogalore’s post is an old one, but she made me think about some things that I think sometimes get lost in discussions of privilege. Namely, that feeling entitled to success (i.e. what you want out of life) is something that isn’t so neatly distributed along “privileged”/”not privileged” lines. Some people with fewer advantages on paper experience more feelings of entitlement, and some people who seem to have more advantages are held back by the feeling that they not only don’t deserve success, but actually deserve abuse. (I’m not going to claim that everyone who is abused believes they deserve abuse, but it’s a pretty safe bet that everyone who thinks they deserve abuse is bound to get plenty of it.)

How much entitlement you feel, in fact, probably doesn’t come down to a formula of any kind, but a lot depends on upbringing, environment, neurobiology, and how all those things cook together over the years. Like Octo says, too much entitlement can curdle into arrogance, which can not only make an intractable pain in the ass of you, but it can actually backfire when it comes to getting what you want (e.g. you think the traffic laws, metaphorical and actual, don’t apply to you because you rule). Does feeling entitled to success trump privilege? I don’t think so, and Octo doesn’t either. (Seriously, that post is amazing, I highly recommend it.) In fact, privilege often reinforces entitlement; if you expect characteristic X to help you in the future because it has in the past, you are less likely to sandbag your future efforts because you don’t want to deal with the roadblocks. (“Why bother applying for that job? They won’t like me.”)

Do I think it’s possible to accomplish things even if you think you’re a useless dirtbag? Yeah, I do. But I’m going to guess that people who succeed despite feeling little or no entitlement don’t enjoy it a whole lot. And aside from relief to have survived, can anything beyond that be considered “success” if you don’t really enjoy it?

I have always had a serious entitlement deficit. Okay, that’s an understatement; I have had serious problems my whole life maintaining a feeling that I deserved to exist. In fact, the way I found fat acceptance, as I’ve said before, was that my therapist in the mid-’90s recommended I get myself a book on self-esteem, figuring I’d live longer if I actually had some. And I wound up with this one. I’d heard of FA principles before, but post medication weight gain, what Carol Johnson said just made way too much sense. “No, it really IS totally illogical to discriminate against people because of their weight! Yes, it really IS about more than calories calories calories! Yes, I really SHOULD dump the boyfriend who’s been acting like I’m corroded because of my newly Zoloft-padded tush!” I had to be feeling at least some sense of entitlement to get that message, yes? I believed, at last, that I was entitled to eat what I was hungry for, to not weigh myself, to actually live and pursue the goals that were important to me, whether I lost an ounce or not.

This was seismic. We all know that most fat people don’t feel entitled to those things, right? (And probably even more so in 1996, when I bought the book, than now that there’s a Fatosphere and everything.) So you’d think that acceptance of my outsides would soon lead to feeling more entitlement about my insides — in other words, that who I was on the inside deserved my respect as much as my outsides did, that I should feel perfectly free to go after exactly what I wanted in life.

Hooboy would you ever be mistaken about that.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I didn’t have to deal any longer with hating myself for being fat on top of hating myself for everything else. That combination might have killed me. But I still could not, for the life of me, figure out why I did or said certain things the way I did, why people just stopped talking to me and told me “you should know, everyone knows” when I asked what the problem was, why I kept getting booted out of homes, jobs, lives, so unceremoniously. Here’s where neurotypical unprivilege comes in and how complicated that can be, folks. Until two years ago, I didn’t have the privilege of having a diagnosis of Asperger’s, partly because such a diagnosis didn’t exist until 1994, and partly because none of the shrinks I saw after that knew jackall about it. So all I could think was what’s wrong with me? what’s wrong with me? what’s wrong with me? on an endless goddamn repeating loop. When you feel that way, you don’t persevere through rejections; you get one rejection, or maybe two if you’re feeling feisty, and then go hide under the bed for a few years, until the pain of not having what you want becomes so severe you try again, and it’s the same damn thing all over. They said no. That proves I suck.

Maybe self-esteem is privilege too, in a way.

Believe me, I’m not going to be all smug about understanding the whole privilege issue better than some people do. I had a terrible time with it, actually. Because I didn’t have a handle on my basic right to exist, when I first started reading about it, it sent me into a terrible downward spiral. How can having privilege not make me a bad person? If I’m costing other people their safety and health and dignity just because I exist, doesn’t that make me a murderer and a thief? I really did believe I deserved to die over that, all because of my belief that life had to be a zero-sum game where one person gets to live and one gets to die and the one who had to die should be me, that nothing could possibly change to distribute things more equitably unless I took my own life. That way, there’d be one less useless white body in the world, right? It would make white people that much less of a majority, right? Yes, I actually did go there, and the fucked-up thing about it was that I knew how fucked up it was to have that reaction, and that just made me feel that much worse.

Mine was an extreme and wildly inappropriate response, I’ll admit, and I’m pretty sure it’s rare for anyone to actually think that way. (My psychiatrist, when I first presented to him, had no trouble confirming my therapist’s diagnosis of Asperger’s, on the grounds that “your depression pattern is extremely atypical.”) But if that episode taught me anything, it’s that ideas can go through people’s filters in a way you can’t necessarily control from the outside. I can see where the defensiveness about privilege comes from; it’s about the belief that there have to be winners and losers at everything, and if you’re not one of the winners who has an advantage over someone else (earned or not), you have to be the loser, and in America being tagged a loser can cost you everything, including your life. Is this a matter of too much entitlement, or not enough? I think it’s a little of each; maybe you feel entitled to your own comfort, but not entitled to a world where you don’t have to be scared to fucking death of losing it for no good reason.

I think I’ll let Octo have the last word here:

At any rate, it strikes me that the endless carping about privilege is mostly for the benefit of the privileged. It allows a shame solution to a problem that really isn’t about whether or not the relatively privileged shamed person takes pride in herself. And therefore lets her off the hook easily, for the price of a mea culpa. Well, fuck that. It’s not that easy.

Fuckin’ A. Okay, I lied, the last word is MINE MINE MINE! Because it’s my blog, and I’m entitled.

I’ve got a day job that means I’m not online much during the day so I have not caught up on the whole controversy. But let me just say this:

We’ve got this cultural thing where women are supposed to be all nurturing and not get angry. I am…. not so down with that.

I am sure, because ultimately I want to believe the best of people, that the ZC women are lovely people in many ways. But that doesn’t make that post okay. And it doesn’t mean I have any obligation to not call it out as an example of the type of shit that ought not be done.

It’s been a couple of years now and I’ve spent a lot of time having the same arguments. We talk, over and over again, about why diet talk is not allowed, about why weight loss surgery is not fat positive, about why FA needs to be more inclusive, and about why it is important to acknowledge our privilege. We keep having these conversations because they are so incredibly important. It’s easy to get tired of them but, hey, everyone has to start somewhere.

But I’ll be damned if I am OBLIGATED to make nice with people who are saying stupid stuff, y’all.

There’s a reason why my blog doesn’t see a lot of drama – I go out of my way a lot of the time to dance around calling people out. But you know…. I’m not always going to do that. And, honestly, if I could not get angry about this stuff I’d make a pretty piss-poor activist.

Wallowing in privilege is gross. Perpetuating oppression by dismissing legit anger is gross.

Irreverence does not actually make either of those things okay.

Ultimately, I want to change the world. I want y’all to change the world with me.

ETA: HA! Having caught up just a tiny bit – I am apparently just so mean! *hand to forehead* The problem isn’t that Bianca hasn’t figured privilege out – the problem is that Bianca is pulling out the same tired shit that has been pulled out time and again. People have genuinely asked, also time and again, to have privilege explained and what they can do about it – and that has been answered, over and over again by so many people. It will continue to happen, because genuine questions are always going to be answered.

Also, there’s a difference between “don’t be a douchebag” and “Bianca is a douchebag.” I don’t know Bianca, I’m not in the habit of making blatant statements like that. I’ll say her post is an example of what not to do but I’m not going to go quite that nuts, yo.

So, what’s shakin’? What’s shakin’ is that being “edgy” or “irreverent” about privilege reads as “being passive-aggressive and offensive” to a lot of people.

But, you know, I’m just a pissed-off fatty with a blog. *grin* What do I know?

posted by meowser

I sent my letter to Sen. Wyden.

It should go out in Wednesday’s mail.

I sent it to the Washington, DC office.

I wrote it out in blue ink (PaperMate Eagle pen, not expensive, but not so cheap it leaks) instead of just printing it, figuring it might otherwise get lost among all the other black and white computer-generated pages. I printed, because my cursive looks like a first grader’s. (My handprinting at least makes it to fourth grade.) I used lined paper because I can’t write straight on unlined paper to save my life. (When I tried it, I actually wound up with part of a sentence on one piece of paper and part of it on another. Yargh.)

I made some minor changes (cleaned up an editing glitch in the second paragraph), but otherwise it’s what you saw here. It wound up being 5-1/2 handwritten pages (I print pretty big). I even put an extra stamp on the envelope, just in case.

Just reminding y’all, I’ve never, ever done this before. So if I can do it, so can you, if you think you might want to.

If I hear anything, I will update, even if it happens on my official blog hiatus next month.

Inevitably when we talk about privilege, someone asks, very sincerely, what to DO about it. HOW to acknowledge it and there’s usually some discussion about that.

This?

People, this is what not to do.

THAT is reveling in privilege and saying how, really, it doesn’t make THAT big a difference even though, oh wait, it really does.

I’m sorry – I should be doing a better job of unpacking this but I want to go to the mall.

And, yes, that is another example of IRONY.

Here’s the thing – acknowledging your privilege should not be an assault on other people’s lived oppression. Their oppression does not negate the shit you as an individual have experienced. Your shit does not negate that you have privilege. Acknowledging privilege can be really uncomfortable because it really goes against the whole by-your-bootstraps-success-is-a-reward-you-earn ethos. But that isn’t actually reality – we don’t all start on a level playing field. Me being raised in middle-class, white America means I have a very specific frame of reference. That frame might vary in small ways from person to person – individualism being what it is. But acknowledging that doesn’t have to be a big defensive maneuver on my part. I can own it without feeling put upon, without feeling like acknowledging it further oppresses me.

Owning my privilege does not oppress me. It makes it easier for other people. I don’t know, maybe that isn’t everyone’s goal. But I’d rather make it a bit easier for someone else when so many other things are harder.

Don’t be a dick, y’all. Don’t do that.

The best of Igigi: Dealing with Doctors

We’ve all been to the doctor.  We’ve all had the weight talk.  We want to trust the doctor because they’ve been to medical school and we haven’t.  And by and large, if something I can’t understand is going on in my body, the doctor is the first person I want to ask about it. But the truth is doctors don’t know everything. I know someone with Crohn’s Disease who was misdiagnosed for nearly 20 years as having a nervous stomach and Irritable Bowel Syndrome.  So doctors look at your symptoms and make their best guess.  This same thing comes from weight.  Doctors are not immune from the message fat=bad.   So when a fat patient comes in complaining of what is considered a “weight related disease”  (or in some cases, any ailment), they will tell you to lose weight. It’s how they’ve been trained to think and as any competent ad man can tell you, that level of training dies a hard, ugly death.

    That being said, you still need to visit a doctor at least once a year for a physical and blood tests.  Women need to visit a gynecologist yearly as well.  Early detection of a number of maladies can be a lifesaver.  We can’t put it off because we fear the doctor will tell us to lose weight.  So here is some practically advice on dealing with the doctor.  Doctors can be a pain.  I have yet to find a good internist; the one I have is satisfactory and for many of you that might be the best you can hope for.

    The most important thing is to educate the doctor.  There is a difference between an ignorant doctor and a fat-hating one.  An ignorant doctor parrots the diet industry line because he or she doesn’t know better.  A fat-hating one may refuse to touch you or treat you.  That is a good way to gauge the difference. Be wary of a doctor who refuses to treat you until you lose weight. With patience and persistence, an ignorant doctor can be educated.

    If you are seeing a new doctor, be sure to either contact them first or speak with them before they examine you.  Let them know right away that you are quite aware you are fat; you are okay with your size; that you think that “fat” doesn’t mean “unhealthy” and that they are not to bring up your weight without your permission, end of story.  If you do Health at Every Size (HAES), be sure to share it with your doctor.  I did that with my chiropractor when he initially brought up my weight.  I told him I don’t lose weight and told him about HAES.  Not only did he never bring up my weight again, he started reading about HAES on his own.

    Remember the doctor works for you.  You are paying him to make you well.  If you don’t agree with their treatment, it’s fine to ask for another one to get a second opinion.  The doctor shouldn’t belittle you.  If I want to pay money to be insulted, I’ll get front row seats at a comedy club. I do not need that from someone who sees me naked.  Take control of your health.  We shouldn’t let a bully cause us not to enjoy life, and we shouldn’t allow a doctor to ruin our health.

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I did have to buy some gloves (screw you, Big Mitten), and I did feel like I was going to die about half-way up Lib Slope in the rain and the cold, but this was, hands down, one of my very favorite book-related trips.

One of the things that is always really evident after trips like this is how much FA is necessary for all of us, of all sizes – oppression hurts everyone.

I came to FA out of feminism (Susan Bordo, specifically) – and so bodies, particularly women’s bodies, and the space they occupy seem really naturally political to me. When you tell a woman she is too large, that she needs to occupy less space, there’s no real way to separate that from our cultural tradition, our enculturated misogyny, our patriarchy. Oh, but what if it is for her health? I can hear people asking it now.

The answer, of course, is that bodies are not public property and health is not a moral issue. As has been repeated a million times (and I’ll keep repeating it as necessary), when people cow-call me they are not doing so out of any concern for my health.

When advertising tells totally average-sized women that they need to lose ten pounds, that isn’t about health.

When increasingly smaller women are told they are too fat, that they need to get their bodies, their diets, their lives under control, well, that is not about health.

It’s about control and power and who gets to have it.

That’s what I hear when I talk to women I would class as having really very socially-acceptable (or close to ideal) bodies who are still being subject to the cultural messages.

Of course, this hurts men (and other genders), too. We’re starting to see these ridiculous beauty standards applied in ever-widening ways, to broader groups – oppression hurts EVERYONE.

I feel like we really need to recognize the power dynamic of body politics. There’s a lot of reasons why people’s bodies are different and there are a lot of different things we have to tackle in FA. I just don’t want us to forget about this.

Harris describes how nonjudgmental mindfulness meditation helped her cultivate compassion for her struggles with "mental illness" and no longer identify with disparaging thoughts and labels.

I learned that I do not have to believe or obey my thoughts. Even a thought that seems highly charged like "kill yourself" really does not have to be listened to. Cheri Huber, an American Zen priest who is herself the survior of a suicide attempt, talks about our thoughts as "voices," and identifies the "voice of self hate" that is intensely active for so many of us. She says, simply and clearly: "If the voice is not loving, don't listen to, don't follow it, don't believe it. No exceptions."

Harris adds that lovingkindness meditation (metta), was initially taught by the Buddha as an antidote to fear.

One of the hot new research topics in neuroscience is the power of lovingkindness meditation as a remedy for chronic pain of all kinds, emotional and physical. I don't really care about the science behind it: I have personally experiencing the power of the practice. It has been a tremendous purification practice for me -- burning away many layers of shame and trauma that I never imagined would leave me. Layers that all the psychotherapy and drugs in the world could not budge.

Read the entire article here.

That’s the only explanation for articles like this one:

RIP Mittens? Obesity May Threaten Mitten Industry

…

…

Really?

The theory is that, get this, fat people have higher body temperatures. This statement is not mitigated by any weasel words – apparently ALL fat people all the time everywhere have higher body temperatures. I feel like a freak of nature now because my body temp actually runs on the very cool side.

Maybe the mitten industry is threatened because mittens just aren’t cool anymore.

I mean, *I* love mittens. But I’m not a particularly cool person (despite my body temp and tendency to be freezing in most situations). And if I wore mittens, I’d probably knit them myself. Maybe the mitten industry ought to be blaming handknitters, actually – there are some seriously kick-ass mitten patterns available, I tell you what.

Sure, this article is meant to get you to go buy mittens. But let’s look at what that says – blaming things on obesity, blaming fat, is now such a common marketing strategy that it is being used to sell MITTENS.

Mittens, y’all.

I’d be pissed off but I can’t stop laughing. Because this is ludicrous.

Mittens, y’all.

All I can think of is the Three Little Kittens nursery rhyme:

Three little kittens they lost their mittens, and they began to cry,
“Oh mother dear, we sadly fear that we have lost our mittens.”
“What! Lost your mittens, you naughty kittens!
Then you shall have no pie.”
“Meeow, meeow, meeow, now we shall have no pie.”
The three little kittens they found their mittens,
And they began to cry,
“Oh mother dear, see here, see here
For we have found our mittens.”
“Put on your mittens, you silly kittens
And you shall have some pie”
“Meeow, meeow, meeow,
Now let us have some pie.”
The three little kittens put on their mittens
And soon ate up the pie,
“Oh mother dear, we greatly fear
That we have soiled our mittens.”
“What! soiled you mittens, you naughty kittens!”
Then they began to cry, “Meeow, meeow, meeow”
Then they began to sigh.
The three little kittens they washed their mittens
And hung them out to dry,
“Oh mother dear, do you not hear
That we have washed our mittens.”
“What! washed your mittens, you are good kittens.”
But I smell a rat close by,
“Meeow, meeow, meeow” we smell a rat close by…

posted by meowser

Right now, this is about as brief as I can make it without leaving anything out. I haven’t sent it yet, so if you have any feedback for me, I’d love to see it. If you were going to cut, what would you cut?

****

Dear Sen. Wyden:

I am a constituent of yours from Portland, and I have been following the healthcare reform fight with great interest. I am in my 40s, am diagnosed with Asperger syndrome (a form of autism), and I also have polycystic ovarian syndrome (a metabolic disorder that affects an estimated 5% of American women) and take psychiatric medications for severe, life-threatening depression. The drug I am on is the only one that has ever worked to keep my depression in full remission, and in combination with my metabolic disorder, it has also ensured that despite a high-quality diet and moderate activity level, I am teetering on the borderline of “morbidly obese.” I am told by my doctors that this is more common than not for people taking this medication and, keeping my PCOS in mind also, they do not blame me for my weight. I am grateful for this.

However, what these conditions mean is that I am umbilically dependent on a job to give me health insurance, since there is no way on earth I could possibly qualify for individual coverage with my pre-existing conditions, even if I were to (improbably) become “normal” weight. The job I have is one that is being hunted to extinction — I telecommute for a national medical transcription company editing speech recognition files and doing transcription. My bosses and coworkers have, in fact, never seen me in person. These jobs, at least in the U.S., are becoming more and more obsolete as “front end” speech recognition (edited by doctors themselves) and offshoring the work to overseas transcriptionists who are grateful to do the work for pennies on the dollar compared to what they must pay U.S. workers, and even more so because American workers depend on their jobs for healthcare. I am not particularly confident that I will make it to “Medicare age” without having to find another way to secure myself insurance, and with my disability and age, the number of insurance-providing jobs I can qualify for is vanishingly small. Therefore, I hope with all my heart that we can figure out a universal healthcare solution that is affordable and accessible for all, and I admire the work you have been doing to try to make this a reality.

This is why I was particularly dismayed to see that you supported Sen. John Ensign’s amendment to the healthcare bill that would allow companies to charge an insurance rate differential of up to 50% (with HHS approval, which would be no obstacle that I could see) for people whose “numbers” — weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, etc. — fail to meet their standards. It’s pitched as a “discount” for people who “take care of themselves,” but in practice, with most companies having yearly open enrollments for insurance, it amounts to the “good” (i.e. genetically luckier) people being allowed to pay the old, lower rate, while the “bad” people (who drew the short stick for DNA) are charged the new, higher rate.

And yes, the way I see this, it does also add up to punishment for “bad” genes. Surely you understand that there is a huge difference between people who can, for example, lower their cholesterol 30 points just by switching to soy milk, and people who have to go completely vegan plus take three statins (which are risky drugs in themselves) to lower it by even 10, yet both are expected to meet the same numerical standard. And if even one number is “off,” one gets dinged the same as if all the numbers were “off,” leading to disincentive to make any positive changes at all if merely being “imperfect” is going to cost them just as much as being overtly self-destructive (the latter of which is, I think, relatively rare). It’s also worth noting that people who are lower income (and nonwhite) are more likely to have numbers that are “off,” and that “living a healthy lifestyle” as promoted by mass media is largely a prerogative of the financially comfortable.

This hardly seems just, and if the goal is truly to get people to take better care of themselves (as opposed to taking the opportunity to squeeze more money out of employees), it is likely to backfire. People who have less money in their paychecks have less money to invest in fresh fruit and vegetables and high-quality whole-grain products, and people who have less money also have increased stress, which in itself is known to be deleterious to health. And those who must take second jobs or work longer shifts to make up for the shortfall in their paychecks — which would be common for people who work low-paying jobs such as retail — would have much less time for physical activity and cooking.

I know Sen. Ensign’s amendment provides for a waiver in case of medically documented inability to “make goal,” which I would likely get with my history. I also understand that companies are currently allowed to charge up to a differential of 20% for “good” numbers, and that 30% (the allowed differential without the HHS approval) does not sound like much of a difference. But 50% certainly is, and would almost certainly tempt many more employers (like the one I work for now, which currently charges no differential) to start testing everyone’s blood and urine and saliva and weighing and measuring them in order to save money. Even if I qualify for a medical waiver, I can see no good coming of having to tell my boss I have Asperger’s and PCOS and depression bad enough I was once hospitalized for it in order to get that waiver. It seems like a great deal for them to hold over my head.

And while I have never smoked, and I understand the rationale for banning smoking at work since that affects the health of others, I fail to see how testing people’s saliva to make sure they have not had a cigar in the privacy of their own living rooms of late is going to accomplish anything except further eroding trust between employees and employers. It seems obvious to me that top-ranking executives will not be subject to these interventions, and thus my suspicion that this is merely a way to justify pay cuts among the rank and file — no more, no less — is especially keen. Given all this, I hope you will reconsider your support of this amendment.

Sen. Wyden, I am not in the habit of writing letters to politicians; you are my first. I know your reputation for considering all sides of an issue and being open to new ideas, and in considering the impact of the laws you work to pass on people who live lives very different from your own. This is a rare commodity in a Senator, and I treasure it. I also know that people are coming at you from all sides regarding the healthcare issue, and I realize that some people might regard the things I have written about here as mere trivia when considering the “big picture” of reform. However, I also would like any healthcare law that passes to actually be a help to people like myself, rather than a hindrance, which is why I am raising these issues with you here. Thank you very much for your time.

Sincerely yours,

Meowser

And this week we have a dozy courtesy of the State of North Carolina who like Alabama is making you  pay extra in health insurance just because you are fat.   Even if there is nothing wrong with you.    

Plans like these who punish you for supposed bad behavior can be a dangerous slippery slope not just with health care coverage but your privacy.   I have said this before.  The media, the government etc always claim being fat isn't healthy, yet do what they can to block fat people from health care and services. 

And the Fat Studies Reader is almost out! And a nice write up in Publisher's Weekly (Scroll down to get to the review). 

It’s been quite an interesting time around here and I’ve got quite a bit to say about it. But I’ve also got a link so you get that first.

Beauty In the Eye of the Retailer

Oh, look, it’s an article in Comment Is Free. *grin* The usual warnings apply – if you’re feeling feisty, though, it really does make a difference in these comments.

Y’all, I love Comment Is Free.

I also have really missed this community and the interaction we have here. So I’m glad to see you. I want you to know that.

posted by meowser

Recently, something happened in the neurodiversity/autistic self-advocacy movement that made me feel right proud, although I had nothing to do with it. Autism Speaks — an organization that allows almost no autistic people to be involved in its operations, and is devoted to the goal of eliminating the presence of autistic folks from the face of the earth — recently came out with a film called Autism Every Day I Am Autism, which they posted on their Web site. Apparently, they solicited footage of autistic kids and adults participating in everyday life, and then overdubbed said footage (without the knowledge of the participants) with a voiceover that was rife with we’re-autism-we’re-coming-to-eat-your-children’s-brains-mwahahahaha cant. (Transcript here.) And it took about two seconds before the participant bloggers in the Autism Hub (a group of linked neurodiversity blogs not dissimilar to the Fatosphere) raised enough of a stink that AS took the video off their Web site. (It can still be found on their YouTube channel, though.) The gist of the protests came down to this: They don’t even talk to us. They don’t even ask us what we think, because they think we’re delusional. All they care about is getting rid of us. Fuck them. They can’t do that to us.

Sound familiar, Fatospherians?

“Nothing about us without us” is a saying adopted by many stigmatized groups, and especially by the disability-rights movement, of which neurodiversity (ND) is a part. But every frigging day we see examples of people talking mounds of shit about fat people, and very few examples of those same people having talked to us in any great numbers. And it’s rarely questioned by anyone but us fringe wackadoodles, although I’m pleased as punch to see there’s a lot more pushback now than there was even a couple of years ago. But it’s hard to pick up a book or read a magazine article or a Web site or see a movie or TV show on any subject without running into an example of fat-bashing. So much about us. Damn near all of it without us. After all, we’re not just physically sick, we’re crazy too, right? Nothing’s getting between us and our baby donuts, and we don’t care about anything else. We’ll run over kittens in the street to get to our donuts, so how can we possibly be believed about anything?

You’ll notice, though, the difference between how the ND groups were received when they protested, and how fat-rights people are received when they protest. No, AS hasn’t changed their minds about us; they still think autism is a scourge, and furthermore, that anyone who has the presence of mind to complain about it can’t possibly be autistic. (A neat trick, no? Way to create a permanent underclass, by claiming everyone who actuallly belongs to said underclass is incapable of self-advocacy.) But they did something. They’re getting the idea that more people are on to them, and they were forced to tone down the rhetoric. And I truly think a big part of that is that 1) autistic people aren’t blamed for being autistic, and 2) NT people haven’t been terrified to death that they’re two slices of pizza away from become autistic themselves, because that’s completely impossible. “Nothing about us without us,” it seems, only really applies when you have no — and I mean NO — chance of ever leaving the stigmatized group in question. If you can just stick to your diet and get out of the group and stay out, what do you have to whine about? So you don’t get your donut, fatty, get over it.

But there’s overlap, oh yes there is. When we protest that we haven’t had any donuts and don’t even particularly want any, that there’s a lot more to body weight than just food, and furthermore it’s hypocritical to tell people to butt out of everyone’s sex life if you’re just going to turn around and butt into their eating life instead, how can we expect anyone, even other fatties, to believe us? Those other fatties raise their hands and say, “Well, I eat whole boxes of donuts and I’d be thin if I didn’t, therefore all fat people who say they don’t eat boxes of donuts are liars,” and we’re sunk. Most fat people think they’re to blame for their weight, so those few of us who don’t buy it aren’t real fatties for the purposes of the argument and therefore don’t count. If we’re lucky, we’re acknowledged as “freak exceptions” who can’t get thin no matter what; if not, we’re lazy liars who don’t want to work for our social rewards like everyone else has to. When they’re doing a story on fatfatfat, and they decide to put on their lipase-repellent outerwear and actually talk to one of us for the few seconds they can stand to, of course they’re going to look for the folks who live on donuts and Pepsi, not the people with metabolic disorders, not the people on heavy-duty psych meds (actual mental illness being another thing that eats into mass-media credibility, of course), not the vegans who have been fat since toddlerhood, not even people who merely eat the omnivorous diet in the same amounts and get as much exercise as their considerably-thinner friends. Confirmation bias.

Just like people want to believe all autistic kids will spend all their days biting passersby and smearing their shit around the walls of their institutions forever, and therefore autism must be wiped off the face of the earth, they want to believe that all fatties are stupid and sick mentally and physically and could stop being sick and stupid if we only tried, or alternatively, if only Big Food didn’t have us under perpetual helpless hypnosis (just a different way of calling us sick and stupid, really). People need their boogeymen. They feel so lost without them that they’ll actually make shit up about them to justify keeping them around. Therefore, eating boxes of donuts is seen as a punchline, something nearly all fatties secretly do, and even a fantasy of the perpetually dieting classes, rather than a relatively rare but vexing illness that’s damn difficult to treat and really is not fun at all for the people who suffer from it. We can’t even pick on the donut-snarfers anymore? PEOPLE HAVE NO SENSE OF HUMOR!

All this is a lengthy prelude to the fact that I’m working on composing my first letter ever to my senator. Or any senator. Or any elected official, ever. The subject: The amendment to the health-care bill that allows employers to give a deeper goody-two-shoes discount on insurance than they’re allowed to now. U.S. employers are currently allowed to have a 20% differential between people whose numbers are “perfect” and people who fall short of the mark; the amendment, proposed by John Ensign (R-NV) would increase that to 30% and could even go as high as 50% according to “HHS secretary discretion.” It was approved by the Senate Finance Committee by a 19-4 vote; all four “no” votes were by Democrats (Schumer, Menendez, Rockefeller, Nelson). Kerry, Stabenow, Wyden, those great advocates of the downtrodden, all voted yes.

Ron Wyden is my senator. As politicians go, he seems like a fairly reasonable person who might be willing to listen to a well-crafted argument about why this bill sucks (and doesn’t actually contain the word “sucks,” in all likelihood). Here’s the main reason: We don’t have total control over any of our “numbers,” let alone all of them. It might not sound too radical to allow employers to give a 30% discount instead of 20% for the halo-wearers, but what it really amounts to is a fine on those of us who don’t 100% comply — you “good” people get the old rate during annual open enrollment, and you “bad” people who put butter and salt on your broccoli pay the new, higher rate! Yes, they provide a waiver for people who have well-documented medical reasons for not being able to comply; being someone with a metabolic disorder on psych meds, I have a pretty good chance of getting that waiver. And it doesn’t seem likely that if the difference is 30% as opposed to 20%, that it’s going to make that many more employers start nosing around in our britches. But if it goes up to 50%? What employer could resist? And at the rate things are going, it’ll be at 50% before we know it.

I fail to see how charging people more for health care is going to make them healthier. Taking more out of their pockets for premiums means they have less money available for quality food, not to mention that it essentially functions as a poverty tax, since many workers live in areas where obtaining quality food is nearly impossible. It probably also means that there is a possibility that people will have to take second jobs to make up the shortfall in income, which would leave them more tired, more stressed out, and with less time for “joyful movement” and “slow cuisine.” And if they think forcing people’s numbers down by any means necessary is going to mean a reduction in health care costs, they’re not seeing the big picture. More pills, more therapy, more tests = more doctor visits. Not to mention that it encourages more and more buttinskyism on the part of employers; not wanting people to smoke on the job is one thing, since that affects the health of others, but how is it anyone’s business if someone has a cigar in their own living room? And do I really have to tell my boss I have PCOS and Asperger’s and depression bad enough that I was once hospitalized for it? What’s next, are they going to get to read all my shrink’s notes, too?

Part of the reason I’ve never written to an elected official is because I have to crunch down everything I’m thinking about into two or three paragraphs. As you know, that’s not necessarily a natural gift of mine. But this is a first step, in trying to get people making the laws think a little harder about the people who are going to be most affected by them, people who are different from themselves in ways they don’t yet understand. I’d love to know if any of you have written a letter to a politician other than a garden variety fan or hate letter, and what the result was.

posted by meowser

I am. First time.

For anyone who doesn’t know, NaNoWriMo means “National Novel Writing Month.” The idea is you sign up (here) and during the month of November, you knock out 50,000 words, which amounts to about 5 or 6 double-spaced pages a day on average. Most people don’t finish. But enough do that the tradition continues, and since I’ve had this book (young adult novel) in my head for almost a decade, and it’s been nagging at me more and more lately, this might be a good time to get it going for real.

I actually had a near-miss on a different YA novel about 12 years ago; I was a finalist in a publishing contest with a book contract as the prize, and they didn’t pick a winner that year (they reserve the right not to). I revised it, got some more rejections, decided the problems were too big for me to fix, and gave up. Then I started to do some work on this book, brought my first few pages to a new writing group, and they got chewed up like an inexperienced tiger tamer. They told me it was awful, it stunk, kids wouldn’t like it, etc. So once again, I gave up. I’m good at that.

But it didn’t give up on me. All these years. So maybe that’s a fat hint that it’s mine to do, regardless of how it turns out. I am not going to say anything more about it (or offer it up for criticism, unless I have a specific question or issue I need help with), until I’m done with a first draft. I know better now.

So during the month of November, this blog will be on official hiatus. If you are doing NaNo and want to buddy up, feel free to leave me a message or email me privately.

The former choice is what most diets have to offer.  Most diets (yes even non-diet diets like weight watchers) encourage obsession with what you eat, hard-body exercise and fanatic devotion to the number on the scale.  (At one time during my dieting career, I weight myself every day, sometimes 2-3 times a day). The latter is Health at Every Size that focuses on eating well, moving to what you enjoy and of course healthy self-esteem.

When young women defined self-worth by their BMI, something needs to change. The APA actually has an article about Health at Every Size (HAES) and it's positive. Change is happening and HAES is becoming more accepted.

Oh and Chocolate cures everything.