Apparently Fat Betty Draper Francis is causing an uproar on the internets. I’ll have more thoughts on this once my eye-rolling muscles recover.

Did you see me on CNN this week? And then The Daily Mail? Kinda surreal seeing myself in the Fail sidebar. And for all of that, I only had two troll comments to delete here. HAVE I CONSIDERED DIET AND EXERCISE? Thanks to you both, y’all should join forces and start a TV show or something.

I’ll be at PAX East in Boston this weekend, and I know I say this all the time, but seriously: say hi. I’ve met so many awesome readers at past PAXs, but only because they said hi. YOU’RE AWESOME, AREN’T YOU? I know you are. So say hi, will you? Allow me the pleasure of your acquaintance.

I’ll probably be the fat one in a big poofy crinoline.

It’s sort of great that I can only say that about PAX and not have it be a particularly unique description.

I get a lot of comments about my writing making people cry. It used to happen here periodically, and it now happens on xoJane with an impressive regularity.

I’m never sure how to respond. Though I can honestly say that I never set out with that purpose in mind, I take this as the highest possible compliment to my work. I take it as such because it means I have made someone feel something, and is there anything so immediately resonant of the importance of human connection than being made to feel something — to the extent of being moved to tears — by another person? That is communication working. That is my invisible hand reaching out through the ether and touching yours. That is all of us feeling less alone.

I am not a frequent crier myself. It takes something enormous to make me cry, although once it happens the effect will often last for a day or two. The last thing I cried about with such untempered sorrow was the loss of Oberon, my excellent kitty soulmate of almost 14 years, and I cried over that for almost a week, with breaks for getting work done and leaving the house. The most recent thing, as of this weekend? A video game.

*****SPOILERS HENCEFORTH*****

Some of you are aware of my deep deep love for the Mass Effect series of video games. My obsession began when I watched my husband play the first installment in 2007, and has not flagged since. It comprises an epic (both the noun and the adjective) heroâ€s journey, a monomyth set in the distant future where humans have extended themselves across the galaxy and found that even a universe filled with curious aliens is still damn familiar, riddled with conflict and war, some brand new, some thousands of years old.

It is a story told in millions of colors and shades of grey, but where nothing is black and white. No answers are right or wrong, and nothing is objectively good nor bad; there is only emotion, and circumstance, and experience, and legacy, and it is the player who finds their way through it all, bringing their own personality and perspective to the story like one might bring a torch to a cave. Those tunnels may be limited by the way the rock has formed, but every explorer will see them from a different angle, and no two will ever tread the same path.

This weekend, after years of participation in my own Mass Effect story, I came to the end of it. The very end.

The ending has not been without controversy. I may unpack the details of the mechanism that brought about this ending at another time, but for now, my response to it has not shifted one iota from the moment of its in-game revelation.

There were three choices. One choice involved enslaving the enemy Reapers to stop them from destroying all organic life, managing this possibly only temporarily, with no balance applied, no way to know what the long-term consequences would be, and making our hero Shepard no better than any of the enemies sheâ€d been fighting.

One choice involved destroying the Reapers and with them all artificial life, including life that I had, over the course of the game, come to be convinced had a right both to survival and to self-determination. Had you asked me, or my surrogate Shepard, at the beginning of this third installment what I would do if given the option to destroy all synthetic life in the galaxy, I would have taken it without a second thought. But by now, I wasnâ€t so sure.

That is an impressive, and subtle, narrative feat.

When the third option was revealed — synthesis, in which all life in the galaxy is fused into equal parts organic and artificial, albeit at the cost of Shepardâ€s life — I didnâ€t hesitate, but sent her, injured and bleeding from her final battle, hobbling down the middle path.

As she drew near the end, she stopped, and turned around. Thereâ€s nothing wrong with looking back, I thought, Iâ€m just looking back, just once, to where the catalyst stood, and I thought — She could just destroy them, you know, she could just destroy artificial life and live out the rest of her days, knowing that the inevitable cycle would not repeat itself for tens of thousands of years, and at that point would be someone elseâ€s problem.

Of course, sheâ€d be totally isolated from everyone she cared about by the necessary destruction of the mass relays, the system by which interstellar travel was possible. And sheâ€d have to live with the knowledge that leaving a final solution to someone else could create room for error. Sheâ€d have to live knowing that it had to be her; someone else might get it wrong.

And Shepard would never do that, would never leave a job undone just so she could live a little bit longer. After all, technically she’s already dead.

I looked around, in that moment, and in the windows overhead, just outside the Citadel, I watched a Reaper taking down an Alliance ship; I wondered if this small scene was placed there on purpose, to fortify my decision — it had to be. I thought, What kind of ending leaves room for this to continue?

I must have stopped Shepard a centimeter from where the story took control of her away from me again, because when I swung the camera back around, both distraught and certain, the final cutscene began to play, with Shepard throwing herself, confident as ever, into the beam and being slowly disintegrated, in her final moments remembering her friends.

The result, naturally, is that Shepard dies, but she also lives, as her sacrifice puts a piece of her in every living thing in the galaxy. Watching Shepard die is devastating, because while Shepard is a character in a story, for some, Shepard is also us, a better version of ourselves, the hero we all want to believe weâ€d be if we found ourselves in similar circumstances.

But she was always going to die; in the third installment alone, we spend thirty or forty hours (or, in my case, sixty) intermittently talking about the ruthless calculus of war, the simple fact that not everyone can be saved, that some will die so that others can live. That sacrifices will have to be made. The story tells us that absolute freedom is an illusion, or at least it was — and although Shepard may have cheated the Reapers of another harvesting cycle, there is one reaper no one escapes.

Thereâ€s been a lot of deep thinking and desperate analysis from people who needed a happy ending, who needed an option in which Shepard and her love interest FTL-jump into the sunset, needed it with the same single-minded passion that we all need connection and closure and for the things we do to have some meaning and purpose — they needed answers. Some are very, very angry about it. Some have concocted an alternate explanation and I donâ€t begrudge anyone that. Some are actively lobbying Bioware for a new ending “fix” and I donâ€t begrudge them that either.

This entitlement is rooted in the fact that we donâ€t want games to be realistic, many of us. We want games to give us control; we want games to tell us the stories we want to hear, not the ones we are forced to live every day, and we want games to give us clear ideologies and straight answers, not pepper us with more questions that terrify us with their unanswerability.

But no matter how invested we are, no matter how much we want things to go a certain way, we are no more the author of Shepardâ€s fate than we are our own; at some point life will present us with difficult choices, and inevitably, we will someday die, and if we are very lucky, we will lie back in that moment and know that our life meant something.

Who wants to be reminded of this simple truth — that we all end — in a game? I do. I wept — an embarrassing sort of crying, not a quiet welling-up, but an overwhelming convulsion of sorrow and relief, replete with shuddering sobs and maybe even a subdued wail or two — throughout the ending, because Shepard knew she was not going to walk away from this, and I knew it too.

As benign and pleasant as a happy-ending option might have been, I like that this game made me cry; I like that this series forced me to invest so deeply in a story and in characters that their loss is something I feel almost as keenly as I would that of a living friend.

I like that my response was to feel a tidal wave of emotional need, a longing to grab all of my family and friends and even strangers in wild enthuiastic hugs, to tell them all how much I love them, and that our time is too short to do anything but fight to be the best people we can be, and to fight to make our world the most just and sacred and beautiful place we can imagine. To take risks. To treasure every moment, to remember that when tragedy strikes — as it inevitably will — there will be no time to spare on regrets, things we should have said, promises we should have kept.

I was sharing this video around all last week; it illustrates the oft-quoted idea that we are all made of stardust, which is a literal truth: the atoms that comprise our very bodies came from the exploded stars of long ago. In it, Neil deGrasse Tyson says, “We are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us.”

As a result of Shepardâ€s sacrifice, a piece of her lives on in every single life form in the galaxy. This is not an idea unique to Shepard, nor to the fictional world of Mass Effect where she resides; we are all connected in ways both meaningful and mundane, we all share this world together, and the best of all of us is in us already — we just have to find it and hold it up for others to see.

That is why I cried. I cried for the ending of a story that was made all the more meaningful by its definitive conclusion; I cried for all the time I waste not being loving and kind to everyone I meet, and I cried because I sometimes forget how marvelous and incredible life really is, even when itâ€s drowning in sorrow and loss.

We only mourn the loss of what is meaningful and dear to us, and for all the sadness the void brings, I would never trade the joy that makes the pain inevitable. My Mass Effect story is over, and lucky me, I got the ending I needed: the one that reminded me how precious our time here truly is.

Hey folks. It’s been awhile.

Obviously I’ve been elsewhere… since October. I’m vaguely embarrassed by this, as historically I’ve gotten peeved with bloggers I liked getting too busy to blog — and here I’ve received what can only be described as a well-deserved comeuppance.

If you’ve been following me on xoJane you’ll know I haven’t been idle, bringing the good news of self-acceptance, rampant fattery, and my unabashed weirditude to the wider population. (Can I just take a moment to note how nice it is to write a series of concepts like that and know that nobody’s going to steal my Oxford comma because this blog doesn’t fucking keep to fucking AP style? Ahhhh.)

Also, I have this book coming out. Have you heard about it? I need to put a thing in the sidebar that goes HEY BUY MY BOOK, WHICH COMES OUT ON APRIL 10, 2012. Amazing-but-true bit of trivia: they had to stop the presses, literally, when a last-minute blurb from Camryn Manheim came through. WILD, RIGHT?

Self-promotion has never been my strong suit; I do the tiniest amount and immediately assume I’m being way overbearing. But I’m also learning that a huge part of writing for a living is cultivating one’s fucking hustle.

Also also, I’m saying fuck a lot because I’m used to having curtail it. Fuuuuuck.

So. Until I get that sidebar business resolved, here are an enticing array of pre-order links:

• On Amazon.com
• On Indiebound.org
• On Powells.com
• On FeministPress.org

If you’re in New York City, I will be in your area on April 17th and 18th! On the 17th I will be at Barnes & Noble Upper West Side with the excellent Diana Cage. On April 18th I will be at the legendary Bluestockings bookstore.

If you’re in Boston, you’re gonna give up your Friday night for me on April 20th, when I descend upon the Harvard Book Store, with a little help from Women, Action, & the Media.

If you live somewhere else, then tell me where and why you want me to show up there. I’m gonna try to make this shiz happen.

There will be other cosmetic changes around this joint — I’d like to get some damn cakes in the header — and I really do intend to get back to blogging on a regular basis, I just need to let go of my need to always turn everything into a meticulously researched two-thousand-word epic.

Anyway, how have you been?

Cheers,

Lesley

Sesame Street has added a new muppet: Lily was introduced in an hour-long special entitled “Growing Hope Against Hunger”. Her purpose is to give kids in food-insecure households someone to relate to, as well as to draw attention to the issue.

…In the special, Lily is prompted to make a revelation when one of the more popular muppets — Elmo — remarks that he “didn’t know there were so many people who didn’t have the food they needed.”

Lily then confesses to him that she doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from and that times can be difficult.

Food insecurity is defined as the lack of a consistent access to food for active, healthy lives, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The USDA says 14.5% of households were food insecure at least some time during 2010 and that 5.4% of households experienced very low food security the same year.

Obviously, current rates of food insecurity are a side effect of the economic climate and continued unemployment or underemployment, although obviously this is a problem for some families even when times are good for the majority of folks.

Last month, the state of Georgia launched a childhood obesity campaign that uses striking photos of fat kids as cautionary tales, candidly relying on stigma as a body-shaming tool. There are billboards and commercials and it’s all very, very sad. (Thanks to Kyle for the images.)

In one commercial, a young girl says, “I don’t like going to school, because all the other kids pick on me. It hurts my feelings.” She is shot in stark greys, her expression blank. When she finishes speaking, a legend appears onscreen with a somber, booming flourish: “Being fat takes the fun out of being a kid.”

The next suggestion? “Stop sugarcoating it, Georgia.”

Meanwhile, in my home city of Boston, a campaign against “sugary” drinks (I have never fully understood how much sugar must be necessary for a drink to qualify as “sugary”, myself) features a commercial designed collaboratively with teens.

In it, a young man stops for a soda after seeing a girl walk by with a sports drink. As he takes his first sip, a blob of curious yellow material — it looks like lemon jello — flies into the frame and slaps him on the face. The commercial instructs, “Don’t get smacked by fat!” and then notes that sugary drinks cause obesity and type 2 diabetes.

There is one comment on the YouTube page, and it reads: “The thing is… it hasnt caused any of this to me…. so [I’ll] just keep enjoying my soda.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone taking childhood hunger seriously in the current atmosphere, in which childhood obesity is the popular drum to beat, but these issues are not so far apart as we might assume. It is certainly true that you cannot tell a child from a food-insecure household simply by looking at him or her. It is also likely, statistically speaking, that at least some of the children in these households are above the assigned weight for their age.

Like food insecurity, obesity is something that happens more frequently in poor households, although the precise reasons for this remain unknown. I would argue that it is related to a lack of access, both to affordable foods necessary for a balanced diet, as well as safe places for kids to be active. In the Georgia advertisements, these heartbreaking kids talk again and again about being picked on, and frankly being picked on does make it difficult to participate in group activities that might result in fun exercise.

In my own experience as a fat kid, I stopped playing sports not because I disliked them, and not because I could not play them, but because I was repeatedly told by my peers that I was not entitled to enjoy sports, or to be good at them. Because I was fat, and fat kids get picked last.

Georgia’s ad campaign is especially destructive because it underscores the very mechanisms that keep kids from being happy, healthy, and active, no matter their size — it reinforces stigma by portraying these kids in their dull grey worlds with their depressing words and their firm belief that no one likes them. Being fat does not take the fun out of being a kid, but being bullied by peers and adults certainly does.

The Boston “Fatsmack” commercial is equally troubling, for different reasons. It implies that consuming sugar actually causes type 2 diabetes, when there is no scientific evidence to support this claim. Indeed, you cannot simply eat your way to diabetes; while fatness is an associated factor, it is not a universal one, as vast numbers of fat people never develop the disease, and many non-fat people do develop it. A lack of physical activity is a much clearer risk factor for type 2 diabetes, but it’s far easier and more satisfying to scapegoat a particular food as the source of the diabetes scourge, isn’t it.

And of course, with the solitary comment, we see that such campaigns unwittingly send the message that sugary drinks or the smacking “fat” is only of concern when it results in obesity.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a pyramid-shaped psychological model that specifies the things humans need to thrive and be healthful, in order of importance. [Edit: Certainly, there are many criticisms to be made of this theory, but I’m going with it for the visual and to get us thinking.] The base of said pyramid is comprised of physiological needs: the absolute minimum requirements a human requires to survive. 

It includes food. According to Maslow, food comes before security, before family, before friendship, before self-esteem, before creativity. If we are to do anything else other than simply exist, first we require food, specifically enough food, in order to keep ourselves alive. Ideally, we should be secure in our food sources.

Kids in food-insecure households are stuck here, at the base, because not being sure of where or when your next meal will come, or what it will be — that distracts a person from focusing on much more than that. Especially a child with a limited ability to acquire food independently of a parent or guardian.

But many fat kids are stuck here too. They are stuck here because they are being repeatedly told that they are not consuming food in the proper way, or that they are eating the wrong kinds of food. Fat kids in food-insecure households may well be overeating when food is available because they are not sure when they will have that luxury again, and fat kids who do have reliable access to food sources are encouraged — or even forced — to resist their hunger (or whatever drives them to eat) in the name of “improving” themselves so they will no longer warrant being picked on — when really the problem is with a culture that allows fat kids — or disabled kids, or sick kids, or poor kids, or any kid who is persistently different — to get picked on in the first place. This is not how you teach a child to value him- or herself enough to eat in the way that makes them feel good, and healthy according to their own experience thereof.

By raising our kids to be obsessed with food, either the lack of it or the overabundance of it, we are stunting their development. We are holding them at the base of that pyramid instead of encouraging them to climb. No child should go hungry, ever, but nor should any child be made to feel stigmatized or guilty for eating. It does not work. It only produces kids who cannot fathom a world in which they will ever feel safe, and loved, and accepted, and real.

When the opportunity arose to review Nordstrom Rack, I was a little dubious. To be honest, I didnâ€t actually know that they carried plus sizes. Turns out they do, and starting September 15, they’ll be carrying more of them in the store where they already exist, and adding plus sizes to 15 additional stores. Yay! See, Iâ€ve gotten accustomed to all my favorite discount stores (who shall remain nameless) limiting or removing their plus size selection, as so many have done in recent years, so rather than get my hopes up, I tend to presume that I wonâ€t find anything to fit me, and sometimes I get to be pleasantly surprised.

Thereâ€s little to recommend my local Nordstrom Rack as a destination insofar as decor is concerned; the space is purely practical. On arrival, I spent several minutes wandering the big open floor in confoundment, wondering, oh no, maybe they DONâ€T have plus sizes in this joint. Or maybe they do but there will be three things and Iâ€ll hate them all.

I neednâ€t have worried. Once I located the plus racks — which are integrated within the store, and not hidden in a back corner as is typically the case — I spent half an hour picking out cardigans from the racks of separates before I even found the dresses.

Longtime readers know that I donâ€t wear pants, and indeed I donâ€t even wear skirts — dresses and sweaters are my uniform of choice, all year round. Plus size dresses that are both high quality and pretty to look at are a rare resource indeed, rare enough that I usually rely on internet purchases to satisfy both requirements.

So I was pretty shocked when Nordstrom Rack had literal armloads of dresses in my size. (I may even have done a little dance of victory. Maybe.) I tried on ten different dresses, at least. I actually couldnâ€t tell you the last time I was in a store that even had ten different dresses that were both in a size that might fit me AND that I liked as well. It was glorious. They even had great music playing. (These are things I notice when Iâ€m shopping. I have a much better time if Iâ€m singing along — quietly — to “Inbetween Days,” Iâ€m just saying.)

While I was greedily savaging the racks of dresses, I overheard an older woman and a younger woman — probably a mom and daughter — walking by. The older woman said, “Do you want to look at dresses?” and the younger replied, “No, summerâ€s almost over anyway.” LIKE DRESSES ARE ONLY FOR SUMMER. As if.

I left an hour and a half later (much to the chagrin of my husband, whom I had left waiting in the car while I ran in “for a few minutes”) with two dresses, three cardigans, a scarf, and a pair of shoes (which Iâ€m going to have to return because they donâ€t fit — thatâ€s what I get for being lazy and not trying them on in the store).

On to the stuff I bought!

Outfit the first:

The dress is by Donna Ricco, one of my favorite dress-makin†brands, in a gorgeous blue-violet watercolor print. It has POCKETS. Who doesnâ€t love a dress with pockets? Cardigan is by Sejour. The scarf is Fossil. I do dig my pattern-mixing.

Outfit the second:

I did not have my photographer on hand for this one, and my tripod is broken, still.  Again, with the Donna Ricco dress, this time in an abstract floral in pinks, purples, blues, and white. Folks, I was so happy to find these dresses not at full price, if theyâ€d had ten of them I probably would have bought them all. The cardigan is by Sejour. Belt is my own, as try though I might, I couldnâ€t find any plus-size belts in my local store.

Overall I had a really fantastic experience at Nordstrom Rack, much better than I expected as a jaded and bitter plus-size dress-wearin†lady.

As part of this review, I get to give away a $100 gift card. EXCITING, right? So! To enter, comment below and tell me what youâ€re looking forward to for fall. (It doesnâ€t have to be fashion-related, either — “apple cider donuts” is a perfectly good answer.)

On to the fine print:

Sweepstakes will run from 9/15-10/31. Visit the Promotions & Prizes section. Here are the Official Rules.
No duplicate comments.
You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry
methods:
a) Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post
b) Tweet about this promotion and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment
on this post
c) Blog about this promotion and leave the URL to that post in a comment on
this post
d) For those with no Twitter or blog, read the official rules to learn about
an alternate form of entry.
This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older
Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail.
You have 72 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be
selected.

I got a new job! After nearly ten years at my previous employer — which I now feel totally comfortable saying was Simmons College — the crazy kids over at xoJane.com seduced me away by offering me a job as an associate editor. After a lot of thinking and soul-searching, I accepted. My last day at Simmons was September 2, which feels strangely far away now.

In less cheerful news, on Monday of the same week, my kittycat companion of thirteen years embarked on his Viking funeral, having fought several cancers and other ailments valiantly for a year. He was fifteen, which is average for a cat, but it still seemed too soon. This loss was actually far more difficult than I expected, as he was not doing well by the end, but as always seemed to happen in these cases, he went downhill so gradually that it was only later I realized how sick he truly was.

Oberon, in younger/healthier days, lounges on the living room rug.

So, between the loss of the cat I’ve had since the year I reached the legal drinking age, and the change from my job of a bazillion years to a new position in a new field working from home…. it’s been emotional. And whiplash-inducing.

While I’m writing lots of stuff at xoJane.com now, I also intend to return to regular (weekly, at least) posts here, since I’ll have time to do so again. Tomorrow there will be a review of Nordstrom Rack’s plus size department, plus a giveaway (thanks to the kind folks at BlogHer, which you may have noticed is now serving ads on this site).

I also intend to get back to posting missives from Your Beluga Best Friend, who I have to admit is quite cross with me for being so unavailable lately. Have you ever seen an angry beluga? It’s adorable.

That’s all for now.

I know, it’s like all I am doing lately is quick little article-debunkings. Soon, my pets, I will have time for blogging again. Like roughly two weeks from now. Ahem.

Let’s start with the bad. Today’s Boston Globe has an article about trying to tell our kids how fat they are. And how it’s, like, hard. For one, the parent in question is often the mom, who, being female and human, usually has her own raft of body issues, many of which she has probably modeled for her kid. That’s what we call a vicious cycle, friends. Mom inherits emotional issues with body size and food and eating from her mom, then passes same on to her own kids.

The sensitive card.

The sensitive card.

I daresay this reaction sounds a little dismissive. As though the teen in question is being intentionally manipulative by daring to cry and to state that a parent — A PARENT — should love their child no matter what that child looks like. Unfortunately, the teenager is in the right here, and that’s not something you’ll hear me say very often.

There is also a Token Asshole, because you need one in such articles to deliver the Hard Truth, when everyone is busy wringing their hands over their child’s stupid dumb feelings.

A weekend ago I collaborated with the amazing Nancy Haque to deliver a workshop on radical fattery for Western States Center’s Community Strategic Training Initiative. It was a pretty excellent time. The day-long workshop went surprisingly great — I am always astounded when people seem open to these ideas, and don’t fight me on them — and I got to explore a bit of Portland besides, although my impression is that Portland is probably a more compelling place when you have a handy local to show you around.

I spent the better part of Sunday at Powell’s epic store of books, the only real break being when I figured I’d better check out some other places downtown and walked to Fat Fancy, which was closed. I took this as a sign and returned to Powell’s for another couple of hours. Later, I ate a donut with bacon on it, because pretty much everyone was all “GO EAT THE BACON DONUT!” It was less life-changing than I might have hoped, but an interesting experience nonetheless.

What else? I was on NPR’s Morning Edition today, talking about fat characters on TV. This bit was recorded back in January, so I had to read the transcript to remember what I said. You can read (or listen) here. And, of course, there’s lots of new stuff from me on xoJane, including this post about street harassment, the comments to which are cuckoobananas in their awesomeness and their rage.

But enough about me. On to the most amusing links of the past month.

Last week the NYT had an article about celebrity diet spokespersons which really says nothing all that new on the subject:

Famous people, however, play out their weight struggles under glaring lights. Itâ€s hard to forget commercials of the actress and former Jenny Craig spokeswoman Kirstie Alley lustily drooling over the programâ€s sanctioned fettuccine, or of her triumphant disrobing on “Oprah” to reveal her new bikini body in pantyhose.

[…]

Last year, another diet program, the Fresh Diet, parted ways with its famous “spokesdieter,” the pop singer Carnie Wilson, after she gained weight while under contract.

“It didnâ€t work out with Carnie,” said Zalmi Duchman, chief executive for the Fresh Diet, which delivers fresh meals daily across the nation. “She dropped like 20 pounds in the first three months. Then she, I mean, she had to go off of it. Thereâ€s no question. She might have eaten the meals, but she ate the meals with a lot of other stuff. She started a cheesecake company.”

Poor Carnie Wilson, man. I don’t want to laugh at her endless struggles, nor do I want to lend credence to the idea that the Fresh Diet “works” as a long-term weight-loss solution any better than any other overpriced diet shenanigans, but “She started a cheesecake company” is kind of hilarious. As though simply being a fat lady in the proximity of cheesecake is going to further enfatten her.

But no, the real reason I’m bringing this article up is because it includes two before and after pictures of Carrie Fisher, one of many current celebrity spokespeople for Jenny Craig. Here, check them out:

Dude, that purple shirt probably weighed at least a pound.

Oh shit you guys, look how much weight Carrie’s Second Life avatar has lost! Or don’t, because I kinda don’t see a difference, aside from the before image showing Carrie in a loose overshirt, and the after image without. It doesn’t help that Carrie’s face and body have both been photoshopped right into the uncanny valley. Does Jenny Craig now come with Botox? I just don’t get how anyone can see these images and take this shit seriously, y’all.

In other news of the absurd, a couple weeks back, there was a brief bit on The Today Show featuring a lady with a new! diet! revolution! Oh, I’ll let her speak for herself:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I had to watch this twice to make absolutely sure that it wasn’t an Onion parody.

Susan Cheever, a random person with no apparent past writing credits than I can find, nor an identifiable background as an authority on anything other than her own life experience, wrote an article for Self about what she calls “The Mean Diet.” She lost 25 pounds by being “mean”, or in other words, practicing perfectly reasonable self-care. Then they put her on The Today Show. Where she said:

I realized that being overweight and eating protected me. I had a kind of suit of armor. A friend of mine said obesity is the American burqa. I was a little bit invisible. I was a little bit protected. If I accommodated the world all day I could go home and soothe myself with food. Once I saw that, I started changing my behavior and in a lot of discussions with my brother we worked at what we call “the mean diet.” I started saying no to people. I stopped answering the phone. I started being mean.

Yes, yes, that lady called being fat “the America burqa,” which is one of those things where I have to laugh, laugh uproariously and even a little deranged-ly, lest I totally lose my mind about it. How to unpack such a notion? For one, the burqa — the actual fabric burqa — is not an oppressive evil force, and painting it as such not only erases the agency of the women who choose to wear it, but also insults a culture and religious tradition that frankly gets enough shit already. For another, even IF the burqa WERE a smothering horror, the assumption here is that all fat people are buried — dehumanized, even — under an obfuscating layer of fat that “protects” them is preposterous.

My fat doesn’t protect me from shit (well, maybe from dying from a stab wound from a short-bladed knife, I suppose) but more often makes me an obvious target. And while one can be fat and invisible, invisibility is not an intrinsic aspect of fattery. One can also be fat and very, very seen.

You know that Susan Cheever lacks bona fides because they had to pair her with a psychiatrist to nod and agree. And you know, it’s cool if she has worked out a method of self-care that works for her — that’s not the issue here. Susan Cheever can do as she likes when it comes to her own body. The issue is that Susan Cheever has decided to basically package this as a universally-applicable idea. The fact that Today gave any time at all to a woman who — let’s be honest — just made some random shit up and called it a “diet” speaks to the persistent and defiant absurdity of diet culture.

Finally, an intentionally-funny link: Mary Jo Pehl, late of Mystery Science Theater 3000, currently of Cinematic Titanic, author of the forthcoming Employee of the Month and Other Big Deals, and seriously one of my funny-smart heroes going back many a year, has taken up the bloggering on a regular basis. I am so happy about this I must share it! Here you go.

Got any links I missed? That’s what comments are for.

The following was originally printed in the Summer 2010 “Body Issue” of Geez Magazine, a Canadian publication dealing with progressive spirituality. I just learned last week that it actually won something: 1st place opinion piece in the Canadian Church Press awards. Wild, huh? Anyway, that reminded me that the full text of the piece never did make it online, so I’m reproducing it here. 

When I was in the sixth grade, there was a boy in my class who was continually trying to put his hand up my shorts.

It was like a compulsion. His desk was beside mine, in the very back of the classroom, so we were largely unsupervised most of the time. I’d be sitting at my desk and I’d feel someone touch my knee, or the bottom part of one thigh. At the time I was too young, or too naive, to know that I should report this to a teacher. I was however old enough to believe I was somehow at fault, and that his efforts to touch me were embarrassing, even shameful. I took to surreptitiously punching the boy whenever his hand inched toward me. He was small for his age, smaller than I, and why he chose to harass me in this way, I’ll never know.

One day, after many months of foiling his groping attempts, I was called on in class, and had to stand beside my desk to give my answer. As I began to speak, I sensed his hand creeping toward the hem of my shorts, and up my leg. In one smooth movement, ferociously intent on keeping this problem from becoming the public knowledge of the whole class, I stepped backward, crushing his hand between my considerable rear end and the edge of the desk. He cried out in pain, and only when the teacher inquired as to what was going on back there did I turn to look at him with a calculatedly blank stare.

He went to the nurse’s office; I believe he may have had a minor fracture. I occasionally wonder what he told them by way of explanation. At any rate, he didn’t try to touch me after that.

I spent a lot of time as a kid, as many girls do, negotiating the boundaries of my body — the ones I could set, and the ones others would try to set for me. Growing up as a fat kid made this all the more complicated, as I also had to negotiate cultural messages about the abnormality and abhorrence of fatness, and the attendant idea that fatness in a person is ultimately a symbol of a lack of self-control and/or moral character. As a fat kid, I knew my fatness made me bad, but I wasn’t clear on what I had done to deserve my fate. I’m not proud of the violence I perpetrated against that boy. It was the instinctive course of action, sparked by a rage I felt but couldn’t name. With violence, I might succeed in drawing a line. After all, by the sixth grade I’d already spent several years of my life perpetrating a kind of violence against myself, and my body, for failing to conform to my expectations, and the expectations of the culture in which I was living. My body had long been a site for battle.

I was dieting by the time I was eight years old, and though we now shudder in disbelief when we read studies in the news about kindergarteners who think of themselves as fat, and wonder what this world is coming to, it was already happening to me in the mid-1980s. Indeed, I had a keen awareness of my size even before that, but it was around age eight that I came to understand that there were few things in the world as terrible as being fat. As a child I’d sit in the bathtub, look down at myself, and envision neatly slicing away the small rolls on my belly. They were so unnecessary. Why couldn’t they just go away? I learned body-loathing early and I learned it well, well enough that it would take me into my twenties to learn to do without it. I dieted, and when my growing body unfurled knifing pangs of hunger through my every cell, I felt satisfied that I was succeeding. Certainly, the pain meant it was working. I was drawing a line.

We are all participants, willing or no, in a culture that promotes and glorifies this kind of violence against ourselves, and which revels in that violence’s effects. Even the language we use in discussing our body fat is steeped in violence; our fat parts are to be burned, blasted, destroyed, dissolved, eliminated, eradicated, or otherwise abolished. Let’s think for a moment about the broader effects of regarding our bodies—even an aspect of our bodies—with such language and imagery. This thinking divorces us from ourselves, and from the wonderful mechanism which enables us to experience the world. It creates a divide where none should exist. It turns our bodies into enemies, or antagonists, or discrete objects to be controlled and restrained. It denies us healthful connections between the thoughts in our heads, our interactions with the world around us, and the physical form that enables us to connect and communicate. It does us harm.

When I first discovered the idea of fat acceptance, one of the most powerful aspects was the reclamation of sovereignty over my body, and the radical notion that hating myself for failing to be thin was not compulsory, but optional. The alternative was acceptance. Certainly, acceptance is not the popular choice. Being a fat person who is no longer invested in weight loss is choosing a life as an affront to nearly everything culture teaches us about “taking care” of ourselves. Fat people are accused of letting themselves go, failing to take interest in their appearance, or even, with the ultimate dramatic flourish, flirting with suicide. All of this takes place in an atmosphere in which our bodies are increasingly considered public property, open to criticism and debate by an entitled populace. People get angry about fat folks. Very, very angry. I’ve never understood the anger, but it’s there. Once you’ve thrown wide the windows and doors to this anger, the importance of acceptance becomes vividly apparent.

Fat acceptance is not simply about individual choices, though that is an important aspect, and it’s the one that tends to draw people in at first. For some of us, those who would identify as fat activists, it’s also about changing culture, and confronting the social pressures that seek to either depress us into fruitless dieting, or shame us into living as invisibly as possible. Every day that I get up, get dressed, and go out into the world, I am making the case that fat people have a right to exist, to participate in life, and to be seen.

Over the holidays last year, I was walking through the parking lot at my local mall. As I tried to hustle between the slow-moving cars to get inside and do my shopping, I was cut off by a young driver who had decided I wasn’t worth stopping for. A voice from the carful of teens shouted at me: “Jesus, you’re fat!” People love to yell these things from cars. I expect it’s the drive-by aspect that’s so appealing; even if I am of a mind to defend myself, they can deny me the opportunity, because by the time I’ve spoken my response, they’re already gone. This, too, is violence of a sort, a shot fired at my self-esteem, my right to be out in the world, unashamed, meant to take me down a peg or two, to remind me that some portion of the people whom I assault with my corporeal presence on a daily basis are disgusted by me.

This is just something I have to accept, if I’m going to go about my life being fat and persistently visible. It’s a part of my day. But because I know these comments are explicitly intended to drive me underground, they actually serve as inspiration for me to be more ostentatious.

In this case, in that mall parking lot, the teens’ escape was cut off; the car in front of them had stopped to allow a mother with two young children to cross the street, in that slow, thoughtful way that young children do. The kids in the car who’d thrown their insult had nothing else to add; once you call someone fat, you’ve played your hole card. What is there to say after that? Everything else pales. I smiled. I walked around the front of their car slowly. I swung my hips. Then, once I had my back to them I planted a deliberate and unhurried smack of my hand on my own ass. Grinning at first, and then laughing audibly, I entered the mall.

If I am to value myself, and my intelligence, and my contributions to the world, I must also value the vessel that enables me to engage with that world, and that helps me to experience everything that makes me the person I am, no matter how anyone else may try to tear me down. And if I am going to expect others to respect and value my body and my choices, I must value the tremendous diversity of all bodies in return. Fat acceptance isn’t just for me, or just for fat people; everyone needs fat acceptance, because this is a lesson that benefits us all.

Fat acceptance doesn’t simply advocate in favor of fatness. Fat acceptance is also about rejecting a culture that encourages us to rage and lash out at our bodies, even to hate them, for looking a certain way. It’s about setting our own boundaries and knowing ourselves, and making smart decisions about how we live and treat ourselves, and ferociously defending the privacy of those choices. It’s about promoting the idea that anything you do with your body should come from a place of self-care and self-love, not from guilt and judgment and punishment. It’s about demanding that all bodies, no matter their appearance or age or ability, be treated with basic human respect and dignity. That’s the world I’d like to build. For all of us.

It's dick-tacular!

Several of you have emailed me about this today, so here you go.

Some dudes are planning a LAN party in Austin, TX to coincide with the release of Battlefield 3. Pretty much every FPS gamer I know is super-psyched for this title, and honestly, the LAN party in question sounds pretty boss. Until you get to the section that originally said:

Are there other restrictions? Yes. Nothing ruins a good LAN party like uncomfortable guests or lots of tension, both of which can result from mixing immature, misogynistic male-gamers with female counterparts. Though we’ve done our best to avoid these situations in years past, we’ve certainly had our share of problems. As a result, we no longer allow women to attend this event.

Since it’s been picked up by some blogs, the text has been changed to describe the event simply as a “gentleman’s retreat”, with a link to this site, in an effort to either elicit hilarity (that said men are trying to be better people by playing Battlefield 3 together) or to earnestly reframe the male-exclusive space as a positive thing. There is also some weird drama in which possibly-imaginary female attendees describe harassment at prior LAN parties put on by this group that may have never happened.

Ultimately, the question of whether women have been egregiously harassed at past events — although it would seem to be implied by the original wording — is irrelevant to this post. All I want to unpack here is the original language in the original pre-drama announcement quoted above, because I think it demonstrates a lot of what is wrong with games culture in an especially clear way.

The encoded, indirect message behind that text is this:

We donâ€t want this to be difficult. We just want to play our games and not have to worry about forcing people to behave. We donâ€t want to think critically about what kind of ground rules would need to be laid down, how we would make them clear, and how we would enforce them, because that seems like a lot of work without any worthwhile payoff. We donâ€t want to be distracted by having to police our participants. We just want to play some motherfucking Battlefield 3, and have fun doing it. Because dealing with misogyny, racism, homophobia, or any kind of hate speech? Itâ€s just not fun. So in the interest of making this event fun for the men and safe for the women, weâ€re just going to require that the women stay home.

The idea that it is somehow “safer” to make the event male-only is problematic in that it reinforces the assumption that men are feral fucking animals who are incapable of controlling their allegedly natural chromosomal need to be assholes. It presupposes that getting dudes to treat women and other non-dudebro people like human beings is, at best, a huge imposition, or at worst, an impossibility.

But even the most rancid douchebag takes his actions by choice — men can choose to be assholes, but being an asshole is not an inherent and unavoidable aspect of being male. Said men can also choose not to be assholes, and can choose to think about their shit-talking before they do it, and can choose to recognize that their words and actions contribute to a toxic game culture that explicitly excludes anyone unwilling to ally hirself with a particular white hetero male perspective.

When men choose NOT to behave like reasonable and thoughtful adults, itâ€s because they just donâ€t feel like it. And they can get away with that because men have the option (dare I say the privilege?) to refuse. Because they hold a disproportionate amount of cultural and social clout, especially in games culture.

A woman who engages in misogynist harassment while gaming is also being an asshole, though her assholery is not necessarily a function of privilege, but is rather a matter of internalized misogyny. In so doing, she is allying herself with those who assert that this is just how you talk when you play these games, and the fact that it comes from a woman does not make it any less misogynist. Men donâ€t own misogyny, and misogyny is not the exclusive domain of men. Misogyny is everywhere. It is culturally ubiquitous, and we are all part and parcel of its poisonous ideology.

As a result, we must all take responsibility for combating it.

I can actually sympathize with the event organizers. I donâ€t want to spend time and energy nearly every day being confronted with this shit, and Iâ€m pretty bummed when Iâ€m having a good time — playing a video game or doing anything else — and some shitstain comes along and feels entitled to wreck my fun with a specifically sexist or racist or homophobic comment. The difference is, I donâ€t have a choice. There are no safe spaces for me. I am frequently dismissed for failing to be the mythological dick-worshipping brainless tart some men desire. I am attacked for refusing to see any value in the ability to say “FAGGOT” every thirty seconds without anybody harshing on your savage wit. I am harassed for daring to commit the crime of being a politcally outspoken nerd-lady fatass. And what can I do about that? I can stand up for myself when it happens and I can write on a damn blog about it, but I am ultimately a pebble trying to resist the rockslide.

So while I can sympathize, I can also say fuck you. Fuck you for being part of the problem.

These poor sad boys will still have their LAN party and do their dick-checks at the door, and many of them will be righteously angry that stupid thinky people with their stupid thinky thoughts had to make this into a complicated thing that takes the gloss off their excitement. But that anger will be misguided: the anger should be directed at the minority of men who choose to be unrepentant assholes and therefore make such policies sound like a good idea in the first place.

Why are you protecting the assholes among you, gentlemen? Why do you value their participation so much that itâ€s worth creating a space so “dangerous” for women that they must be banned from the premises? What do the assholes bring to your experience that is so irreplaceable? Is the game better when you can throw around vicious descriptions of rape and sexual assault? Does winning feel more awesome when you can hammer your opponent with anti-gay slurs? Is your good time dependent on being able to use the word “nigger” without getting your face bashed in?

I’m not the target audience for this LAN party, nor would I be inclined to attend a similar event in my own city, even if it were a multiply-gendered space. That’s just not my scene. But this isn’t about women wanting to attend; it’s about the fact that games culture is an environment in which building explicitly anti-female spaces is considered acceptable and even “safe” for women. Encouraging men to believe that they cannot control their every impulse — indeed, that they are SO dangerous that they need to be isolated from women lest they lose their composure and go on a mad raping spree — is about the least safe idea I can think of.

So way to go, Austin LAN boys: you’ve further contributed to the stereotype of men in general and male gamers in particular as hairy-palmed knuckle-dragging barbarians, all in the name of your good time. I hope you get exactly the kind of monsters attending that you imagine yourselves to be. Maybe then you’ll realize that you don’t create safety by dragging everyone down to their basest urges, but rather by raising the quality of your own behavior, and requiring the same level of decency from those with whom you associate.

Shannon from Fierce Fatties tweeted a link at me earlier this week, to a report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) about the obesity scourge.  The RWJF, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, is a massive “philanthropic” organization specializing in public health. The organization’s titular founder is, yes, the guy who also brought us Johnson & Johnson, the bazillion-dollar international megacorporation that makes everything from prosthetic joints and blood glucose monitoring systems, to that orange bar of Neutrogena facial soap melting away in your shower, to the tube of KY Jelly you used before you knew there were better lubes out there, to the “No More Tears” baby shampoo your mom washed your little noggin with when you were a wee bairn. You want a list of subsidiary holdings and consumer brands? Wikipedia’s got you covered.

It is not overstating the matter to say that Johnson & Johnson looms over all things healthcare like a towering and inescapable monolith. So it’s little wonder that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation should rank as the ninth wealthiest charitable organization in the world, outmatched by such notable competition as the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Ford Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and coming in first, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. These are all organizations that deal in billions and billions of dollars, and many of them do quite a bit of good.

This, of course, is not one of those cases.

Why am I am telling you about the background and fiscal resources of this foundation? To make clear that this is one of the most well-funded and highly-respected organizations on the planet. What the RWJF publishes matters. So when they put out an annual report entitled “F as in Fat” on the state of national rampant fattery, people pay attention. The media that shapes our culture and our discourse pay attention. This is the kind of thing that influences news coverage of obesity, which influences how we talk about obesity, which influences what we think we know about fatness and fat people, which ultimately impacts all of us — fat, thin, and bell-curved.

I’m not going to pick apart the whole report, as that would take ages, and frankly, it’s unnecessary — there is so much doublespeak in there that doing so would rapidly become redundant. It frets over rates of diabetes and hypertension seemingly without accounting for the effects of improved diagnosis of such ailments, plus an aging boomer population reaching the stage of life where such problems are hardly unusual. It does usefully identify differences in obesity rates based on gender, race, and class, but doesn’t do much with this information aside from make obvious platitudes about encouraging poor families to eat more salad. You can download the whole thing, for free, as a PDF file to read at your leisure.

For my part, I am just going to draw your attention to a couple of points of interest, to illustrate why we should all be a lot more critical of the panicked rhetoric around obesity paranoia.

For one, the RWJF has a particular interest in the currently trendy social terror of childhood obesity. This is explicitly named as one of their seven program areas. Their report is riddled with dire predictions about the future consequences of so many fat kids, and like most of the media discussing this topic, uses the cultural fear of out-of-control weight gain amongst children to bolster the need for action. And yet, on page 7:

Recent studies have shown that the number of obese children and adolescents may have leveled off since 1999, except among the very heaviest boys ages 6-19, but the rates remain startlingly high.

Here’s a personal memory: in 1999 I was a graduate student in developmental psychology, specializing in the development of media literacy for kids age 6 to 14, particularly as it impacted the body image and self esteem of girls. I spent a truly absurd amount of time analyzing and decoding both teen and women’s magazines, as well as television, film, and news media. I have no recollection of there being half as much “childhood obesity” panic at that time, and as a fat activist, if there was even a whisper of the level of modern day news coverage on this topic, I can assure you I would have picked up on it. And analyzed and written about it.

So. Why weren’t we panicking back in 1999, especially if the rates were “startlingly high”? Why haven’t we seen a decade of ominous warnings? If rates of childhood obesity (except amongst the fattest boychildrens, which represent between 4% and 7% of the total boy population) have been flat for the past twelve years, why are we all talking like the kids are suddenly exploding, when the hard evidence indicates they are not?

Maybe we were too busy demonizing smokers. I have no idea. Honestly. I have used the scapegoat analogy before; part of me thinks we just need to fix on some public ill as the source of our problems, to name it as the blight on our future. But the reality, even according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, would seem to be that the childhood obesity bombshell is a big dud.

The second point to which I would like to draw your attention is a chart. Well, part of a chart. I’ve cropped the interesting bit below; clicking the image links to a full-size image of the whole chart.

This chart tracks the current obesity rates for all fifty states from 2008-2010, ranks them, and then shows the percentage difference — in other words, the rate of change — compared to rates from 2007-2009. I want to point out the rate of change, but also the margin of error, displayed in parentheses next to the current obesity rate in the first column. I even circled them for you.

The margin of error is the amount by which the results may be off, owing to random sampling error. You find it on all sorts of polls, as it influences the quality of the results — a big margin of error means the poll was poorly designed or administered. Usually there is a direct connection between the size of the sample and the margin of error: a sample consisting of 10,000 participants will have a lower margin of error than one only using a sample of 100.

All of the margins of error above are pretty low. But when we compare them to the rate of change, there’s an interesting convergence. Alabama, the second fattest state, shows an obesity rate increase of 0.7% between the 2007-2009 results and the 2008-2010 results. However, the margin of error is plus or minus 1%. If we apply this margin of error to the rate of change, both adding it and subtracting it, we get a different picture. It is statistically feasible that obesity rates in Alabama have not changed at all, or have even decreased by 0.3%. It is also possible that the increase was as much as 1.7%, but even then — it’s a hypothetical increase of less than two percent. Hardly an epidemic.

If this was only true of Alabama, then maybe our hysterical wailing could be forgiven, but no: scroll down the list and you’ll find that nearly all the rates of change are within or near the margins of error.

So where is our missing epidemic? Is it possible it could just be in our heads, some strange mass psychosis brought on by sheer repetition? An acquaintance recently commented to me, upon my mentioning that people my size only comprise roughly 5% of the population: “But it sure seems like people are getting bigger.” It seems that way because that’s what we’ve been told. Even studies that do claim to show a clear increase in fattery over the past few years are illustrating a mere handful of pounds, spread across the entire population, something which can, again, be at least partly explained by my parents’ generation getting older and putting on a bit of weight, as older people often do.

You can disagree with my read on this. That’s fine. I’m just asking you to be critical of the anti-obesity handwringing; do not trust that it’s true simply because you read it on CNN. Read the results and draw your own conclusions. They don’t have to mirror mine, but you should be capable and even inclined to seek out this information for yourself. Because how we think about our bodies and our health affects our whole lives.

This was sent to me by several readers, plus it was on my local news this morning. MSNBC has an opinion column on the subject from yesterday evening, which manages to argue against the idea while still being absolutely ghastly at the same time, talking about “the epidemic of blubber” and “porky youths” and uncritically blaming all this rampant fattery exclusively on overeating. Given that the column’s author is on the porky side himself, some of this language may be intended to be humorously glib, and to his credit, he does also note: “There is no proven cure for obesity.”

However, when I talk about the overwhelming focus on childhood obesity contributing to a culture that punishes fat kids, this is exactly what I mean. The article authors argue that their suggestion is not about assigning blame to parents, but it is difficult to see it as being about anything else — if you are removing a child from their home under the guise of protecting them from imminent, life-threatening harm, you are essentially arguing that the child’s parents are incapable of providing that child a safe and nurturing environment in which to live. Even if there are no criminal charges filed against the parents,  on a purely social level, who else’s fault could it be?

State intervention “ideally will support not just the child but the whole family, with the goal of reuniting child and family as soon as possible. That may require instruction on parenting,” said [Dr. David Ludwig, an obesity specialist at Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital Boston], who wrote the article with Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and a researcher at Harvard’s School of Public Health.

“Despite the discomfort posed by state intervention, it may sometimes be necessary to protect a child,” Murtagh said. (Source)

Possibly I am being a tich oversensitive here, but I think that state intervention involving the removal of a child from their home, even against their will, is a little more than a discomfort, and I am frankly horrified by the dismissive tone of this language. Placing a child in foster care is not a minor inconvenience, and yet here we are in a world where researchers can frame it as “discomfort” and nothing more. I am inclined to blame a cultural ideology in which fat children are not identified as individuals requiring personal attention and support, but are instead simply an embarrassing problem to be solved — or eradicated.

The focus on childhood obesity at the expense of focusing on health for all children creates a Machiavellian situation in which fat kids are to be slimmed down by any means necessary — even if it means taking them away from loving and attentive parents. Meanwhile, average-sized kids who also subsist on fast food and a lack of exercise are ignored, because these “risky” behaviors are evidently only a problem if the child is fat.

Placing fat kids in foster care only serves to punish both kid and parents in a brutally public way, as the child will undoubtedly internalize the reasons for their removal as being their fault (and who will pay for the years of subsequent therapy they may require?), and the parents will be socialized as monsters who are slowly murdering their offspring. This is even more of a risk in cases of “extreme” obesity, in which the kid in question is likely already experiencing social and emotional issues, and possibly bullying.

Simply put, if a fat child is gaining weight rapidly and developing health issues as a result, it does not serve the child to remove them from their existing support system — psychologically speaking, this is as likely to make things worse as it is to improve anything. An ideal solution would diversify and improve the dietary choices and eating habits for all kids, especially kids in urban and low-income areas who are most at risk, and provide space for all children to engage in fun and safe physical activity. Unfortunately, advocacy in favor of subjective standards of health and well-being for everyone lacks the scary keywords that draw attention to irresponsible articles like the JAMA example above. It’s a damn shame too.

Hat tip to Devin and several other readers for the heads up.

Hey kids! I hope every last one of you is having a marvelous weekend. I have been spending the lionâ€s share of my free time the past few weeks working on the first round of edits to my upcoming but as-yet-untitled book, which I must now dutifully remind you will be published by The Feminist Press early next year. This is also why I haven’t been blogging as much lately. Book-editing is challenging — though markedly less challenging than book-writing –and most of the challenge comes from trying to anticipate the reactions and questions people might have while reading the text.

See, writing a blog, or really any kind of comment-enabled online material, is a pretty distinct experience because if I say something badly, or use a problematic term, I can get near-instant feedback about it, and can then quickly follow up with further thoughts on the resulting conversation. A book is less of a conversation and more of a lecture, in which my audience is prevented from asserting their queries and criticisms, and I am likewise blocked from responding to them. Being a bit of a perfectionist by nature, I am faced with trying to anticipate all these criticisms. Which is not useful and frankly does not make for a very good book, as I can get so distracted by trying to make my language as correct as possible that I am sometimes hamstrung from actually writing with the kind of impassioned fervor yâ€all have come to expect from me.

So I am really trying NOT to do this, but it is difficult.

Elsewhere! Marianne and I are working to get back on a regular Fatcast recording schedule. The theme of our most recent episode is “Risk Management” and it is available on iTunes and your favorite podcast server-upper. Over on xoJane Iâ€ve discussed my inexplicable love for survival series Man Vs. Wild, given ferevent but unsolicited advice against buying diet books, and hailed Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex as one of my personal heroes.

I am getting well and truly schooled on statistical research by a real live scientist in comments to my last post, so check the comments over there on where the number-crunching portion of my analysis went off half-cocked.

When you read statements about paper findings you think are meant to be factually accurate (i.e. not a newsmagazineâ€s or newspaperâ€s interpretation of the bottom line rather than report on the bottom line as stated) you always have to read it very specifically and literally. The reason it can take you MONTHS to write a 5-page paper is that you have to be very specific with the words, the implications of those words and the sentences they form, EVERYTHING. You CANNOT leave it up to the reader to assume or feel or jump to conclusions the way you can in the humanities. Poor scientific papers are often poor not because their experiments were poor, but because EXACTLY what they did or concluded is not clear – there are too many ways to read the word choices or sentences to be sure of exactly what they are saying.

Curiously, to some extent I fell into the same trap so many media outlets do, that is, using an overly superficial read of a study to make broad proclamations.

Have a delicious Sunday yâ€all.

LOGIC: A sugar diet? Sure, why the hell not.

Time has published an article about a marvelous new study out of Penn State on how the behaviors necessary to lose weight differ from those needed to keep said weight from returning. Theyâ€re not the same! Penn State knows, because they did a telephone survey.

Letâ€s have some fun with definitions, shall we?

First, the researchers surveyed more than 1,100 people who had achieved significant weight loss and maintained it. The researchers identified 36 weight-loss and weight-maintenance practices that at least 10% of the group used.

Then the researchers conducted a national telephone survey of overweight people (with a BMI of 25 or higher) who had tried to lose weight and keep it off with varying success: about 11% reported successfully losing weight, defined as losing at least 10% of body weight, and 21% were able to maintain that loss for at least a year.

Call the hyberbole police because, my friends, we have stumbled upon the BEST DIET SURVEY EVER. Unfortunately Time doesnâ€t specify what counts as “significant” in the first group, and the study is going to be published in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, which means I canâ€t actually go and read it yet. Indeed, odds are good that neither Time nor any other media outlet covering this story will have read more than a press release.

But letâ€s look at what weâ€ve got here. The researchers pinpoint 36 techniques used by 10% of the group modeling successful weight loss. I have been on many diets in my life, but Iâ€d be hard-pressed to come up with 20 individual “techniques” I used, much less 36. The fact that this number is so large would seem to indicate that the “techniques” for long-term diet maintence are diverse and varied — in other words, that there is no handy list of simple rules to follow for assured success. Add to this that these 36 techniques were only used by 10% of the surveyed losers, and… well, what useful information is this imparting, really? That one in ten successful long-term dieters do the same 36 things? We are still looking at a 90% share having different experiences.

Then we come to the phone survey! Phone surveys are great, because they rely on self-reported figures, and I should not have to tell you that if you ask a stranger on the phone about their weight and their eating habits, they are probably going to fudge the truth a little. Unfortunately, as a culture we have invested so much of our self-worth in these numbers and behaviors, itâ€s almost inconceivable that the narrowest majority would be fully honest on this point — even people who have “successfully” lost weight.

To put the percentages in context, hereâ€s an example. According to current BMI standards, a 5â€6” woman weighing 186 pounds has a BMI of 30 and counts as “obese”. Weâ€ll just ignore all the massive failures of the BMI as a useful measurement — such as its disregard for body fat percentage or overall fitness — for the moment. Letâ€s imagine that among the telephone-survey respondents, weâ€ve got a hundred ladies who are about this size. Ten of them would have reported a loss of around 18 pounds, which would actually still keep them squarely in the BMIâ€s “overweight” category. Of those ten women, only two would have reported maintaining that loss for at least a year. (Take it out to three years and other studies of long-term diet efficacy suggest that only one of those two will still be maintaining the loss.) Two, out of a hundred.

Success!

Still, say many nutrition and obesity experts, the basic underlying principles of weight loss and maintenance are the same: you have to eat a healthy diet and increase your exercise. People who lose weight and keep it off tend to eat significantly healthier foods and do a lot more exercise than the average American.

But if this is true — if it is simply a matter of oft-cited thermodynamics — why do only 10% of the survey respondents report a whopping thirty-six shared techniques? Why donâ€t 100% of successful long-term weight-loss maintainers agree that they all do two things: eat healthy and exercise? And why do so many “overweight” and “obese” people do these things in real life without instantly experiencing “significant” weight loss?

The studyâ€s author has a charming analogy:

“It seems somewhat similar to love and marriage,” study author Dr. Christopher Sciamanna, a professor of medicine and public health sciences at Penn State College of Medicine, told WebMD. “What gets you to the altar is likely to be quite different than what keeps you married in the long-term. [And] not recognizing this transition and adapting with different practices will also get you in trouble.”

Basically, in order you succeed at long-term weight-loss, you need to marry your diet*, to recognize and accept that the rest of your life will be spent making compromises with your metabolism — and that may not even work past that first year post-loss anyway. You know, I am not opposed to long-term effort for the sake of building something good. I have a human marriage of my own that is built on an enormous amount of love and sacrifice from two incredibly stubborn individuals. But the fact is the overwhelming majority of these diets will fail, and not because of individual inadequacy, but because some folks are never going to weigh 120 pounds for any appreciable length of time.

Ultimately what we have here is a study that tells us little of value, aside from the fact that the scant few individuals who manage to lose weight and keep it off for a year all seem to have their own unique methods and circumstances for doing so. Which we already knew. Thanks, Penn State! For nothing.

—

* OMG THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LET THE GAYS GET MARRIED!

Love at first sight, OMG.

First, let’s talk about me. Over on xoJane, I’ve written about dudes’ urge to take pictures of their junk, and a really annoying Yoplait commercial (talk about redundancy!), and storing stuff in my bra, and my ongoing sadness over the loss of Huge, and the disgusting misogynist and homophobic rant from a Southwest pilot. Also, on Gaga Stigmata I wrote an analysis of the video for “The Edge of Glory”, using its emphasis on individualism as a theme.

Oh, what’s that picture, you ask? It’s just me and Savannah Dooley, the giant awesome brain behind the aforementioned Huge. I got to have lunch with her and my new West Coast Mom Winnie Holzman while visiting Los Angeles earlier this month, and I am not overstating the matter when I say that they are two of the smartest and nicest people I have ever had the privilege to meet.

—

Commenter Medea has pointed out this fascinating NYT article about identifying the sex of spotted hyenas. Did you know that female spotted hyenas have erectile appendages that look — and function and even feel — just like a penis and testes? It’s true.

In contrast to a vast majority of mammals, including other hyena species, female spotted hyenas are substantially more aggressive than males, and they are also socially dominant over males. Females are roughly 10 percent larger than males, and this too is a pattern reversed from that seen in a vast majority of other mammals. In these and many other respects, spotted hyenas appear to violate many of the accepted “rules” of mammalian biology… In contrast to other female mammals, including female striped and brown hyenas, the female spotted hyena has no external vaginal opening. Instead, the femaleâ€s clitoris is greatly elongated to form a fully erectile “pseudopenis” that is nearly indistinguishable from the maleâ€s phallus.

…Astonishingly, the female spotted hyena urinates, copulates and gives birth through her pseudopenis.

Nature is fascinating, y’all. Medea points out a commenter’s criticism over the use of the term “pseudopenis”, and I have to agree — it sure seems like a functional organ to me. More to the point, this is a wonderful example of how cultural ideology about sex and gender is forcibly applied even in circumstances that seem to defy everything we assume we know about these subjects. We can’t call it a “real” penis not because it doesn’t work like a “real” penis, but simply because it exists on a female animal, and females can’t have penises. It’s almost nonsensical, but it demonstrates how attached we are to our comfortable methods of classification, even when dealing with freaking hyenas.

—

In Stupid Medical Tricks news, commenter thirtiesgirl has brought us an article on a British study showing that they can “cure” type 2 diabetes by starving people for eight weeks. I mean, they can “cure” some of them, for three months at least, as the researchers only followed the results for that long.

Machiavellian medicine at its finest, folks. Any health issues caused by starvation are irrelevant, as are any long-term effects on metabolism. It is totally cool to abuse the bodies of fat people because obviously fat people can’t be trusted with their bodies in the first place.

There is a colonialism joke in here somewhere, but I’m too depressed to make it.

—

Diet Coke-heads, be sad: your beverage of choice apparently makes you fatter and may put you at greater risk for type 2 diabetes. This is an interesting companion piece to another recent report showing that faux fats — like the anal-leakage-causing Olestra — also make people fatter.

The data didn’t say why diet sodas might play a role in weight gain, but previous research suggests it has to do with the disconnect between the taste of artificial sugars and their lack of calories. The brain is wired to expect a big load of calories when foods taste sweet or fatty. But because diet foods fail to deliver, it throws the brain out of whack. Studies in animals suggest that artificial sweetener consumption may lead to even more eating and weight gain, perhaps in part because it triggers the body to start storing more calories as fat.

To be clear: I am not into policing people’s food choices for any reason, not even their hypothetical health consequences. However, I do have a problem with diet foods, and my problem is that by buying and eating them, we participate in a culture that disdains good food eaten in self-determined portions, and support an industry that profits by its exploiting customers’ guilt and shame over what they eat and, by extension, how they look. That said, I’ve never been much of a soda-drinker or chip-eater, so it’s fairly easy for me to be principled on this front.

The recent exception to this is Mexican Coca-Cola, which is made with real sugar instead of gross high fructose corn syrup, and which I only just discovered on my last trip to Los Angeles earlier this month. I’ve since learned my local grocery store has them too. So right now I’m drinking like three or four of these a week, which feels deliciously self-indulgent.

Got any links I missed? Drop ’em in the comments.

I kinda took a bullet for y'all to find this image. Some fan art cannot be unseen.

Whenever I bust out the Big Theory guns and aim them at a video game, thereâ€s always commenters who respond with “blah blah limitations of medium” or “blah blah coding error” or “blah blah unintended mistake”, and so on. While I understand this perspective, itâ€s irrelevant to my analysis. The criticism I write is not directed at the gameâ€s developers (although Iâ€m happy to see them read it) or the coding of the game itself.

Taking my previous post on race as an example, itâ€s easy to argue that a game ignores the characterâ€s race not because itâ€s consciously trying to be radical, but because designing a game that responded differently to every possible combination of appearance choices would be impossible. And thatâ€s probably true. The notion that a game is written to both privilege and assume a “default” white male perspective is hardly outrageous; most of our culture is framed this way.  However, some games — Mass Effect being one example — create room to sidestep this “default” ideology by allowing a player to experience its story from a privileged perspective even when playing with a character whose appearance or identity would lead to their being marginalized in the real world.

The many narrative and gameplay points that make Mass Effect subversive may or may not be intentional from BioWare. Their intention doesnâ€t matter in the context of my analysis, as I am examining how the game concretely functions in culture — not how it was hypothetically meant to function. Arguing that intention overrules reality is like arguing that I cannot possibly kill you with a kitchen knife because the knife was meant to slice vegetables. Of course I can kill you with it. I just have to subvert the knifeâ€s intended purpose.

Thus, BioWareâ€s intention is less important than the reality, which is that Mass Effect 1 & 2 can be played in a manner that subverts cultural assumptions and marginalization.

If we waited around for games — or any media, for that matter — to purposely transmit the representation we wanted to see… well, weâ€d still be waiting. In The Celluloid Closet (an excellent documentary looking at the history of GLBTQ representation in film), Susie Bright talks about looking for “crumbs”, the willingness to sit though a whole movie just for the chance that some character might wear an outfit that might mark them as gay. This is what marginalized people often do as consumers of media — we zero in on little clues, tiny implications, looking for the faintest reflection of ourselves. Media is a powerful cultural influence, ostensibly the most powerful in Western culture at least, and so a lack of visible representation functions to erase the lives and experiences and identities of those who do not fit the mainstream expectations of what is “normal”. In so doing, media actually helps to reinforce these limitations of “normal”, if not create them.

Games, of course, are different creatures than films. Whereas film may begrudgingly lend itself to alternative readings — and heaven knows audiences and academics have seized upon the narrowest slivers of suggestion for as long as film has existed — games require their audiences to take an active role in the trajectory of the experience. We make choices, and we are helping to tell the story. The Mass Effect series is one example of a game that also creates room to shape our own representation, to rewrite the standard idea of what a hero looks like.

Now, a tiny bit of theoretical context. I promise it wonâ€t hurt.

Queer Theory evolved in the early 90s, driven mostly by the work of Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, two scholars who were bloody masters at breaking down everything you thought you knew about sex and gender (while making you weep at the needless density of their jargon-heavy prose… oh wait, that was just me). Like most post-structuralist theories, it happened as a reaction against another approach. Prior to this point, most conversations about sex and gender identity took place in an essentialist framework. Essentialism assumes that sex and gender are “essential” categories, things that are naturally-occurring and even biological. The Queer Theorists came along and said NAY, these are ideas invented by culture and discourse!

An easy example comes from Michel Foucaultâ€s History of Sexuality, in which he notes that, in Western culture, the whole idea of having a unique word to specify men who have sex with other men is only a couple centuries old. Itâ€s true! Prior to that point, this was a behavior that some dudes engaged in, and some dudes didnâ€t, but which was no more in need of a special name than any other non-universal behavior. Some people install the toilet paper roll with the loose end facing out, some in. We donâ€t have a name for that, because weâ€ve decided itâ€s not important. Similarly, men having sex with other men was considered largely unimportant for a lengthy portion of human history. However, when we apply a name to something, we give it power to become an identity, which then shapes how we interact with the world, and how the world interacts with us. Naming something gives it power to define us, or marginalize us.

So Queer Theory comes along and says, hey you guys, all these categories are bullshit! Binaries are bullshit! What if we looked at sexuality as being about more than what kind of genitalia a person prefers? What if we looked at gender as being more than two options? This is the part that loses a lot of people, and understandably so — itâ€s so easy to be repelled by the idea that gender and sexuality are fluid concepts that defy simple names, and this speaks to the power that these names hold over us. How do we even think about these things, if not with ideas like male and female and masculine and feminine and gay and straight? What if “queer” is not exclusively a behavior, or even an identity, but an action — something we are, but also something we do?

The answers to these questions are evolving even now. And the Mass Effect universe provides one arena in which that evolution can be… pondered. Debated? Spectated!

Working with aliens opens up worlds of possibilities for reexamining sexuality. When we break with standard ideas of what people look like, we gain room to interrogate the conventional wisdom about gender and sexuality, without losing our audience. We assume less about an alien than we do about a relatable human. We are still likely to assign gender, based even on the thinnest of markers, because gender is such a huge influence in how we relate to people, be they aliens or humans.

(As an aside: I spent the first ten episodes of Farscape, which at the time I was only half-watching because my husband dug it, thinking Pilot was female. For whatever reason, I just labeled him “female” in my head from the first encounter. When I finally noticed the crew using masculine pronouns for him, I was astonished. To this day — several seasons later and years after the show was cancelled — I am still inclined to think of him as feminine and I am as likely to refer to him with “she” or “her” as I am “he” or “his”. Given that Pilot has no sex drive and no human gender markers — no mammaries, no hips, no hair — plus a voice that I STILL think sounds vaguely womany, itâ€s not terribly surprising that his gender could seem fluid to me.)

Of Mass Effectâ€s many queering agents, the asari are most frequently discussed. The asari are “monogendered”, which is to say they are all ladies. This would be more interesting from a queering perspective if they werenâ€t also explicitly “hot” according to popular beauty standards, at least from the neck down. Though the asari have normal faces and slender sexy lady-bodies, instead of hair, they have tentacles. Oh, and theyâ€re blue. In the first game of the series, Lady Shepard can romance an asari squadmate, Liara, in a pairing often read as “lesbian”. I think this reading is incredibly simplistic. Calling Liara feminine or ladyesque is entirely understandable, but calling her female is inaccurate. “Female” as a concept relates to biological sex, sometimes to chromosomal makeup (though not always, as chromosomes are actually tricksier than your high school Bio teacher ever told you), but mostly to reproductive capacity. The female is the sex responsible for supplying eggs, and/or for bearing young. The asari can do this, and much is made of the asariâ€s non-traditional means of reproduction, but important bit here is that the asari can also father offspring. Which would also make them male.

Yes, the asari are a bunch of hot chicks with a galaxy-spanning reputation for promiscuity. But they are also hermaphroditic*, having the reproductive capabilities of male and female biological sexes. (EDIT: I have since learned that “monoecious” is a less problematic term here. The more you know!) Even with their sexy lady-bodies, the asari queer our assumptions about biological sex as it connects (or rather, doesnâ€t connect) to gender identity. The asari present as female and are explicitly coded as feminine, and yet…. thereâ€s more going on under the hood than we might expect.

It is only in Mass Effect 2 that we see the first hint of human-lady-plus-human-lady lesbianism, by allowing Lady Shepard to romance her personal assistant Kelly, a pert redhead who is pretty straightforward about being attracted to all sorts of people, gender identity and alien-ness notwithstanding. Curiously, the romance with Kelly does not unlock the “Paramour” achievement** gained by a romance with a male-coded squadmate.

The romance with Kelly goes formally unconsummated, unlike those with the male-identifying options (consummation is not explicit but implied by a short cutscene prior to the final mission of the game), and arguably this is why the Paramour achievement is not applied. However, this raises as many questions as it does answers. Why isnâ€t there a consummation cutscene for Kelly? Why have it as an option at all if the game wonâ€t recognize the romance with an achievement in the same way? Kelly is unique in that she is the only romantic character whom Shepard (male or female) can later invite up to the captainâ€s cabin to dance for her, with Kelly wearing the same skimpy outfit worn by the asari strippers at Afterlife on Omega.***

No matter the reason for the lack of achievement and the missing cutscene, the effect is that Female Shepardâ€s relationship with Kelly reads as less “real” than a pairing coded as male/female. This is problematic given that sexual relationships between women are often culturally understood as acceptable and “hot” insofar as they appeal to hetero men, or are dismissed as less legitimate “experimentation” a woman might try out before settling down with a nice proper penis. The idea that two women cannot possibly get everything they require in a relationship without the involvement of a dude is a common one, and so even if this lack of acknowledgement is simply an error or oversight, the effect is the same: the absence of the same legitimacy afforded the other relationships reflects these unfortunate cultural attitudes about female-female relationships.

Of course, even without the achievement, romancing Kelly as a Lady Shepard manages to inject some queeritude under the radar, like a big gay Easter Egg. The intent ultimately matters less than the result, which is the implication that Lady Shepard can fuck her secretary. Damn, that Lady Shepard is a bad, bad man.

Though there is a lot of emphasis placed on the opportunity to hook up the ladies, the male romantic options are also subversive in their own ways. The sole human male romance option is Jacob, a Black dude. As easy as it is to get distracted by the alien opportunities, the fact that the only possible human male romance option is a Black guy sets a pretty excellent example in terms of promoting characters of color as more than mere cannon fodder. In science fiction in particular, itâ€s rare to find men of color in primary roles, much less as romantic leads, so Jacobâ€s positioning here is tremendously refreshing. (Do you remember the complaints that the female romance options in another BioWare game, Dragon Age 2, were too “exotic”, i.e. non-white? Do you remember lead writer David Gaiderâ€s epic response, also at that link? Did you know that this shit actually happens, in which players mod non-white characters to Aryan them up and make them more “attractive”? Did you know that anytime someone says to me that Iâ€m “overthinking” things like race and gender in video games, my first inclination is to pistol-whip them with my Xbox controller?)

There are two other male-coded romance options in Mass Effect 2 besides Jacob. One is Thane, who is shaped like a human male — aside from being green and vaguely reptilian — and therefore evocative of a “normal” sexual partner for a(n ostensibly straight) female Shepard. If you lean back and squint, Thane is essentially a regular — if super tragic — guy in a weird outfit. Like much of Mass Effect, Thaneâ€s difference can be read as an allegory for race, so while he isnâ€t particularly encoded for queerness, his presence does underscore the lack of a standard white male role.

Finally, I have saved my favorite for last.**** Garrus is a turian, and a character and squad member in both Mass Effect games. Physically, Garrus is a birdlike metallic-plated wasp-waisted alien who is about as non-human in appearance as a bipedal creature can get, and who is coded male only by his voice and the pronouns everyone applies to him. His basic body shape evokes both human genders, with the v-shaped chest considered ideal for human men, paired with a narrow waist and broad hips, as one might expect to see on a human woman.

I discovered the possibility of romancing Garrus on my first collaborative playthrough with my husband (we often play narrative-heavy games like Mass Effect “together”, which usually means my husband handles the combat while I shout instructions). There was a moment, after Garrus tells a story of hooking up with a former crewmate, where one of the resulting dialogue options was suggestive. We were both astonished, looking at one another open-mouthed, unsure of how to proceed. Why was this shocking? Because there is nothing overtly sexual about Garrus, physically-speaking. Whatever interest exists for Garrus comes as a result of his personality, his history, or his wit — or all of the above.

Maybe a minute passed before I burst out, with no reservations at all: “Oh, we are so going with this.”

The romance with Garrus is arguably the queerest pairing Iâ€ve ever seen in a video game — even moreso than Lady Shepard grinding with a hot asari — because unlike the asari, who are coded feminine in every conceivable way, the imposition of a gender assignation to Garrus feels purely superficial to me. It isnâ€t simply that the relationship can be read as gay; it is that the relationship can be drawn in a manner untouched by any traditional human concepts of gender, which is ultimately what queering does — it deconstructs gender and sexuality as we currently understand it. This reading is helped by the fact there are no female turians in either Mass Effect game, a product of limited time to create new character models and animations. Until I found this out, literal years after playing the games, I had just assumed that some of those turians walking around were female, but that the race just didnâ€t have physically-obvious sexual markers.

Regardless of the reason behind it, the effect of the lack of distinctly female turians is to make Garrus†gender even more transient, as we have nothing to compare him to. It queers him: the result is that turians seem not to be bound by human ideas of gender and sexuality, and in fairness, why should they be? Arguably the masculine identifiers placed on Garrus, and the feminine ones on Liara and the asari, are not inherent to those races but rather something humans with limited imaginations impose upon them to make their motivations and relationships somewhat clear. Are we so arrogant as to assume that even fictionalized life throughout the galaxy would naturally mirror our own conventions, which seems unlikely given the diversity even of life on earth, or that they would do so simply for our convenience and comfort? Why would we assume that an alien race would even understand the concept of binary gender in the first place?

This is one possible critical reading of the Mass Effect games; it is by no means definitive. “Queer”, after all, is necessarily a subjective concept. I know lots of folks will have trouble thinking of the Shepard/Garrus relationship as queer, just like they will balk at the notion of Liara as anything other than a straight-up lady. I understand. Itâ€s not an easy perspective to take. I also get that many people will have difficulty thinking of the world of Mass Effect in general as an intrinsically queer environment. The purpose of these analyses is not to argue about whether a certain character is a certain gender, or not. Nor is it to convince anyone that any of the above was intentional or consciously wrought by the gameâ€s creators. Can you play it and ignore these big questions? Absolutely. But for me, itâ€s a hell of a lot more interesting with them. Mass Effect offers an opportunity — and an uncommon one — to break up our deeply held beliefs about gender, and what is “normal” or “natural”, and what is not. For now, itâ€s easier to deconstruct these ideas with aliens than it is with us, even though they are just as negligible among humans as any made-up tentacle-headed race.

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* For my more advanced readers: I am unwilling to identify the asari as intersex, although this term is far preferable to “hermaphrodite” in human terms, because they have no sexes to be “inter”. There is one asari sex, or arguably, if we wanted to get philosophical about it, we could say there is no asari sex. Either way, “inter” is inadequate, and “hermaphroditic” is appropriate when trying to understand asari sex in human contexts, because all asari have those characteristics necessary to reproduce in a manner human science would label as “male” or “female”. Thatâ€s my story and Iâ€m sticking to it.

** Achievements are these little awards one gets on Xbox Live for completing certain in-game tasks, like finishing a mission, or shooting people in the head X number of times. They serve no real purpose and gain the player nothing save the satisfaction of having a little digital award associated with their gamertag, but lots of folks are REALLY INTO achievements and so they seem to matter.

*** You can call up other romantic partners, but theyâ€ll just sit on the couch or lie on the bed with Shepard — Kelly is the only one who dances.

**** TEAM DEXTRO 4EVER. Okay I got that out. Whew.

Blah blah blah controversial provacative blah blah

Ladies, gentlemen, readers and friends of all genders, gather round, as The Sun wants to tell us a story. It all started when former UK pop star Claire Richards gained some weight, and decided to commemorate her unhappiness with her body by… posing nude in a magazine.

Claire told Closer magazine about her yo-yo weight: “I’m obviously disappointed that I’ve put weight back on and I’d be lying if I said I was more comfortable being a size 16, but I’ve got to stop beating myself up.

“For me, staying thin is like a full-time job.”

All right. Iâ€m all for realism. The Sun — is The Sun a tabloid? it looks like a tabloid to my American eyeballs, but Iâ€m not sure what the standards are in the UK — decided to use this opportunity to get three of its “big but beautiful” readers to copy the image. So the Sun can then exploit their feelings about the experience for a provacative fluff piece! Oh, good times.

“Big but beautiful” here means wearing a UK size 16, and the article reminds us about seven million times that over half the women in the UK wear a 16 or larger. A UK 16 equates to roughly a US 14, for reference.

First up is Rebecca, whoâ€s recently lost some weight. She says:

“…[A]fter seeing some holiday pictures I realised I needed to do something about my weight. I really wasn’t happy with what I saw in those photos.

“Initially I tried to crash diet and even spent three days nibbling my way through just one can of tuna.

“But I quickly realised that I couldn’t diet as I love food far too much.”

Dear, thatâ€s not a diet. Thatâ€s an eating disorder. I know, whatâ€s the difference, right? Joking aside, being unable to stretch a couple ounces of tuna over three days does not mean you “love food far too much”. It means it is really difficult to starve yourself. And you know what? Itâ€s supposed to be. Wanting to eat more than a single can of tuna in a 72-hour span does not signal weakness in the face of an overwhelming love of food, it rather signals the human bodyâ€s persistent instinct to survive. And damn, thank the maker that instinct exists, because some womenâ€s brains sure are failing to logically process the idea that starvation is unhealthy.

I donâ€t want to kick Rebecca too much, as she does seem to be the most confident of a dubious bunch:

“I felt wonderful posing naked for these pictures, just as I feel great lying by the pool in a bikini.

“But if you don’t have any self-confidence, no matter what size you are, you will never feel content about the way you look.”

Itâ€s great that Rebecca is happy with her food-lovin†body. Nevertheless, the fact that the Sun reports her can-of-tuna comment as though it is totally normal? Thatâ€s horrifying.

Next we have another Rebecca. Really, Sun? You couldnâ€t find three chubby-lady readers with different names? Other Rebecca says of her diet history:

“Last year I dropped two dress sizes on a protein shake diet and felt great about the way I looked. I felt people accepted me more and I enjoyed getting dressed in the morning with a slimmer body.

“But unfortunately I couldn’t keep it up and my love of carbs, especially bread, kicked in. Now I feel disappointed with myself and uncomfortable in my own body.”

Poor Other Rebecca. I donâ€t want anyone to feel disappointed with themselves over a really horrible and unsustainable diet, nor do I like the idea of people ever being uncomfortable in their own bodies. But again weâ€re seeing an inability to starve oneself framed as an individual lack of discipline. Other Rebecca couldnâ€t keep to a liquid-only starvation diet — keep in mind, this is the same kind of diet that even OPRAH FUCKING WINFREY, diet queen of the universe, has condemned as evil and blamed for her apparently-destroyed metaoblism — but she credits her “love of carbs” for her failure.

Generally protein shake diets amount to as few as 800 calories per day, well below the World Health Organizationâ€s threshold for starvation (and even below the average caloric intake of a concentration camp victim during World War II). The thing is, you crave bread when youâ€re starving because carbohydrates are most quickly processed into energy to keep you alive. Body fat is actually quite slow to break down into useable fuel; itâ€s intended for long-term storage. Other Rebecca may indeed “love carbs” but one can argue that every human “loves carbs” when they are being starved, because carbs will keep us alive.

Other Rebecca wonâ€t be looking at her naked pictures, as she really hates the shit out of her body. Which is a shame, as she looks lovely.

Finally, we have Alice, who provides a comment that serves as this articleâ€s coup de grâce. Alice is mostly cool with her size, though she worries about her long-term health. Thatâ€s not all she worries about.

“A decade ago I was a size 18 and couldn’t find jeans that would fit me. So while my friends were looking fashionable, I was wearing trousers that my mum had to make for me. Although this was awful, it made me lose weight and realise that I shouldn’t be that big.

“But now, some High Street stores stock clothes sizes up to 32. It makes it easier to be overweight, which isn’t right.”

Yâ€hear that, kids? It is WRONG for fat women to have clothing they can wear. By Aliceâ€s reckoning, we should abolish plus size clothing altogether, because the undeserved convenience of covering our nakedness is morally suspect because it enables us to be fat. Long we have wondered why so many fat people exist, and lordy lordy this young believer has SEEN THE LIGHT: we are fat because of plus size clothing.

This is an ancient argument. When Torrid first arrived on the scene, there was  an absurd amount of handwringing over whether the existence of plus size clothing aimed at young people would “encourage” teenagers to be fat. The argument fails on a million levels. For example, if the sizes in which trendy clothing is available dictate the size teenage bodies are, wouldnâ€t the majority existence of tiny trendy clothing mean all teenagers should be skinny, even now? Also, the implication that a manufacturer of clothing who has never met you — indeed, that isnâ€t even a person you can communicate with — could somehow intuitively know how big you are “supposed” to be, and transmit that knowledge to you via their available size range? I am dubious, kids.

The sum total is that Alice seems to think being fat should be more difficult than it is. Given the cultural loathing already heaped on fat bodies, Iâ€m hard-pressed to come up with ways that might happen. Maybe the beating of fat people on UK public transport should be compulsory and not just optional. Itâ€s a start, anyway.

What makes the Sun article unfortunate is that it could have been an interesting conversation about body politics and self-esteem. Instead itâ€s exploitative as fuck, rounding up women with distressing diet histories and lukewarm (if not antagonistic) relationships with their bodies simply for the purpose of putting them on display and manufacturing controversy, with no criticism and no commentary, and certainly no productive discussion. The only purpose this “article” serves is to document the sad conflict millions upon millions of women feel in regard to their bodies and their relationship with food and eating. What is the point? It tells us nothing; it only underscores the existing shitfuckery that is body culture, with a side of naked plus-size women, because plus-size women must always be naked when represented in media. Hooray. Good going, Sun.

At least there are naked fat ladies in it. Look at the pictures. Just donâ€t read the words.

I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite blog on the internets.

Back when I used to play the MMOs, the game characters I created always tended to look the same — pale-skinned, vibrant-haired, brightly-hued eyes. I am not sure why; I assume it was aspirational. However, when EverQuest 2 rolled around, I went a different way and impulsively created a heavy-set female-identifying character who was also dark-skinned with a gleaming mane of silver hair. She stood out in a crowd like a brightly-spangled circus pony in a sea of cattle. It occurred to me then that although my ability to change games culture as a monolithic juggernaut was limited, I could at least help reshape the visual landscape to be less uniformly white and conventionally “pretty”.

Some games even outside the MMO sphere have since taken the extreme character customization route. The Mass Effect series is one such example. Players can specify their own Commander Shepard’s gender and physical appearance with some precision, and even, to a degree, her politics and identity. My Commander Shepard is impatient, impulsive, committed to social justice, a survivor, and a queer woman of color. The character I impose on the game avatar is multiracial, which is likely to be the norm by the year 2183 when Mass Effect takes place, although thatâ€s not why I did it. I did it because I donâ€t see queer women of color as protagonists very often, not in video games, but not anywhere else in media either.

Fans of Lady Shepard often talk about how jarring it is to see Mass Effect promotional materials showing the default male character instead. And it is! The lady version of the character is so memorable and feels such a natural part of the story (thanks in no small part to Jennifer Haleâ€s fantastic voice acting) that watching a trailer only to see some dudeish lunkhead come barrelling onscreen is bewildering. Who is that guy? Whereâ€s Shepard? Shepardâ€s not male! Some 80% of players choose the male version of the character, so of course heâ€s going to get the marketing spotlight (although this will be changing soon).

On the other hand, how many big-budget games depict a woman of color as the protagonist? I tried to research this and beyond the obvious (Mirror’s Edge, the Portals) the results were too depressingly slim even to report. No matter Shepard’s skin tone, the Mass Effect series does a lot with race and racism/xenophobia within its narrative, some of it under the radar, some of it overt. The first game features a team member named Ashley, a human who is at best suspicious of aliens and at worst openly bigoted. I know lots of folks have love for Ashley, and to be fair, she represents a more realistic human response to a galaxy in which we are forced to work with often-condescending aliens for the good of all. But I donâ€t play games for realism. I could not get rid of Ashley and her offensive comments quickly enough. (I am so juvenile, in fact, that I refer to her as “Ass-ley”. If Iâ€d kept her alive, I imagine her character would have eventually arced in favor of alien acceptance, but I was not down with listening to her alien-bash that long.)

There are also lots of other examples in Mass Effect of human-alien tension and prejudice, interactions that criticize racism and human nature with a thin veneer of sci-fi narrative over top. These examples are vivid and apt in light of current discourse around immigration policies and the offensive laws being debated and passed in the American Southwest; as much as Mass Effect is about civilization-destroying monsters of unimaginable power, it is also about us, as humans, and how our inclinations toward distrust and bias affect our ability to make sound decisions, and to see circumstances as clearly as we might. Though the Mass Effect series features an individual savior — Commander Shepard — it is also about serving a greater purpose, and about sacrificing the individual for the good of the many. It is complex on all these points, and that is a whole other post of analysis.

This post, however, is about my Shepard.

I have spent the past several weeks replaying the first two games of the Mass Effect series with a new character, the version described in the opening paragraphs above, and the experience has been far more educational than I expected, leading me to do a lot of personal analysis of my expectations of characters and my own internalized prejudices and privileges. These games were not written specifically with a woman, much less a woman of color, as the protagonist. At best they were written to be gender- and race-neutral, or at minimum they were written as the cultural default (i.e., white and male). Either way, the story lacks the encoded racism directed at characters of color in even the best of media representations.

When Brown Lady Shepard is rude, or curt, or dismissive, the reactions she receives from others are not to her gender or her race, but to her words. Why? Because the character was written with the expectation that most people will play it as a white dude, a character for whom reactions based on gender or race are inconceivable. He’s “normal”, y’see. In real life, and in most media representation, we are culturally conditioned to respond differently to a big ol†white dude with no manners than we do a woman of color doing the exact same thing. The white dude is just a jerk, but thereâ€s often a built-in extra rage factor against the woman of color, for daring to be “uppity”, for failing to know her place. This distinction is often unconscious and unrecognized, but it’s there. In Mass Effect, no matter what my Shepard says or does, not only is the dialogue the same as it would be for the cultural “default”, but the reaction from the other non-player characters is the same. (The only exception to this is the handful of times that Lady Shepard is called a “bitch” — I suppose Dude Shepard may get called a bitch too, but I doubt it. I find it fascinating that they would record specific name-calling dialogue in this way.) Brown Lady Shepard waves her intimidation up in a dudeâ€s face and he backs the fuck down, just like he would if she were a hyper-privileged white guy. My Lady Shepard faces no additional pressure to prove herself because of her background; if she is dismissed, itâ€s on the basis of her assertions, and not because sheâ€s a queer woman of color from a poor socioeconomic background — even though thatâ€s exactly what she is.

I am not surprised real-life dudes donâ€t play as Lady Shepard.* Her character accomplishes something truly revolutionary, though whether it was intentional or not I cannot say. The most radical thing about Lady Shepard is that she does not exist for the enjoyment of heterosexual men. There have been plenty of female game characters who are fun to play and relate to for members of all genders — Lara Croft has her appeal, certainly; and you all know how I feel about Bayonetta. But these are females who are relatable and likeable to many women-identified people in spite of also adhering to those outrageous physical characteristics that appeal so strongly to your typical dude gamer; some women-identifying gamers ignore them, and some like them, but the truth is that they are there for dudes to ogle. Lady Shepard does not have a giant rack; she doesnâ€t shriek or prance. Lady Shepard carries herself like a soldier, reproducing Dude Shepardâ€s businesslike movements and stride, step for step — which is understandable, because the actual animations used for both are exactly the same.

Because Shepard spends most of her time running around and laying waste to her enemies while wearing armor, the use of one set of animations for both male and female characters really only becomes apparent in two circumstances. The first is when Shepard dances. Yes, Shepard can dance at some of the clubs, for a few seconds, and for the most part she does a decidedly unfeminine (but adorable) Dude Shuffle, punctuated with the occasional fist pump. The second is when Lady Shepard is dressed in “casual” clothing, specifically a sleek black dress used in “Kasumi – Stolen Memory”, a DLC mission. Lady Shepard strides around a cocktail party with purpose and comes across, unsurprisingly, like a butch in a dress: she seems uncomfortable and out of place. I found her wide-legged lurching hilarious, charming, and quite appropriate, as Shepard the character would not have much reason to wear a dress, nor would I expect her to relish doing so even in the interest of her mission. Butch dress-wearin†Shepard really bothered a lot of players, many of whom are lobbying for more ladylike Shepard animations in Mass Effect 3. But if there is a problem with Shepard marching around in her dress, Iâ€d argue this discrepancy does not call for a less-butch Shepard; it calls for no fucking dress. Put her in a hot futuristic tuxedo, or something. The lady does not need to wear a dress in order to be an effective leader. Iâ€m just saying.

Further, Lady Shepardâ€s sexuality is treated as a normal but ultimately secondary trait. She has the ability to flirt with and even engage in romantic relationships with members of her crew, but she doesnâ€t have to do so. She is neither oversexed nor frigid. When Lady Shepard gets fall-down drunk at Dark Star on the Citadel, and comes to on her hands and knees on the menâ€s room floor, a turian taking a leak in the urinal nearby, there is no judgement, no cautionary-tale morality to the scene. There is no sexual component at all, no harassment, no threat of assault. Shepard just gets up off the floor and goes back about her business (or back to the bar, if Iâ€m playing, because I find the whole getting-Shepard-drunk sequence hilarious — I told you I was juvenile). How many dramatic representations do we regularly see involving a woman and drunkenness that donâ€t also suggest something about her sexual availability?

No one ever blames Shepardâ€s moods on PMS and no one ever asks if sheâ€s on the rag, no matter how much of an asshole she is. No one ever suggests that Shepard is unhappy or excessively driven because she has not known the miracle of child-rearing and therefore her life is oh-so-empty. In a firefight, no one tries to protect Shepard from the violence, and afterward, when Shepard picks up a crate full of spoils, no one asks if she needs help with that. Thugs do not spare her feelings, nor do they fail to take her threats seriously. When other aliens accuse her of being overemotional, itâ€s framed as a human failing, not a female one, and when they call her crazy, itâ€s because she is actually doing some mad shit, and not because sheâ€s just some silly unbalanced female.

In almost any other storytelling medium, my Shepardâ€s ladyness and brownness would be critical plot points. Her superiors would belittle her and dismiss her because of these characteristics, and Shepardâ€s ultimate success would be a tale of strength through adversity and overcoming oppressive odds, not because she has managed to save the galaxy from certain doom, but because she dared to do so as a woman of color. We like to fetishize racism and sexism in our popular stories; they make convenient conflicts and obstacles for a compelling narrative without having to get too imaginative. Of course the brown lady is going to be downtrodden, and with effort and persistence and strength of character, she will rise up against her oppressors! While this is an important story to tell, itâ€s also extraordinary to see a story told in which Shepardâ€s place is the same no matter her gender or race; in which no one ever suggests Shepard got where she is only because of affirmative action; in which no one ever smacks her on the ass and calls her “baby”; in other words, a story in which we are not constantly reminded that Shepard shouldn’t be able to do what she has done. We donâ€t need Lady Shepard to verbally eviscerate a racist or punch an ass-grabber in the face to know sheâ€s tough. We know sheâ€s tough by her non-explicitly-gendered actions — the same way we know Dude Shepard is tough.

Throughout the second game in the series, Shepard is referred to as “the human” who saved the galaxy from the first wave of a continuing threat in the first game. Not the man or the woman, but “the human.” Even though functionally this means less additional voicework to accommodate a male or female character, itâ€s apt in a world that breaks beings down by alien race first, and all the rest of our small species distinctions fall in line. What does our quaint reliance on binary gender, and our social connotations associated with same, matter to a salarian or a turian?** They donâ€t share our narrow context. As Kelly Chambers, Shepardâ€s personal assistant, muses at one point, our character should be what is most important in how we relate to one another, not our race or gender. Intentionally or no, Mass Effect makes a convincing case for a culture in which this could one day be true.

—

* Edited to add: I based this on BioWare’s oft-mentioned 80% statistic — I am aware that lots of dudes do play as Lady Shepard! I know many of you! My language here was super-generalizing based on numbers, and I probably ought to have been more specific, so my apologies to any dudes who were all BUT WAIT I LOVE LADY SHEPARD!

** Excepting one particular turian. Eee.

The mess in the backyard.

In the seventh grade, I had a friend named Janine* who uttered the word “retarded” approximately every thirty seconds while she was awake. Kids at that age are terrible people — at least I was terrible and everyone I knew was terrible — and so Janine was really no worse than the rest of us, even if her odd verbal tic was particularly annoying. In Janineâ€s world, everything was retarded. Everything. Her shoes were retarded. Our math homework was retarded. This tater tot was retarded. The tree that dripped shit-colored liquid from seed pods after a torrential Florida downpour on a spring afternoon… was likewise retarded.

Lots of kids hook onto certain words as go-to expressions. Even as an adult, whenever I am nervous or distracted, I am known to nod repetitively and murmur “excellent” quietly to myself, over and over again, as if possessed by Professor Moriarty, or Mr. Burns. I donâ€t know why Janine loved “retarded” so much; likely there was no reason. Eventually she invented a shortened version — “ree-ree” — spoken in a nasal whine high in the back of the throat, as if issued from a crueler incarnation of Pee-Wee Herman. Only those of us who knew Janine knew that “ree-ree” was short for “retarded”, and she used both words interchangeably, all of the time.

It was via my annoyance with Janine that I grew to despise “retarded” myself. At that age, we had some vague concept that the word was used as a slur to describe certain people with certain disabilities, but it never really registered that our use of the word could have anything to do with those kids having a rough time. From first grade through seventh, I was compelled to take special speech classes once a week. (I had big problems with R, S, and SH sounds. Still do.) For a couple of years, one of my speech-class compatriots was a kid named Chris, who had some unknown-to-me cognitive disability, of which his speech issues were but a small part. When first we began the classes together, he was a nice kid, kind, extremely physically affectionate (uncomfortably so for me, who did not like to be touched), eager to like people and to be liked in return. He had none of our studied proto-adolescent guile; he didnâ€t know how to operate within the circles that the neurotypical kids traveled. In earlier grades this did not bother him, but as we all crept toward our teens his kindness faded and his explosive hugs turned to violent outbursts.

We wouldnâ€t necessarily have labeled him as “retarded” — we had the tacit understanding that using the word as casual slang was different from calling it as a name to someone for whom the word might do a real injury — but we would have regarded him as broken, and frightening in his unpredictability. As a child (and, to a slightly lesser degree, as an adult) who responded with extreme anxiety to sudden loud noises, I was always terrified of Chris, even in his nicer era, as he was prone to sudden fits of shouting — joyful or otherwise — that sent me into trembles of fear. I cultivated a near-constant anger at him for scaring me, even without meaning to. But I never called him names and I tried to be nice to him at the urging of our speech teacher.

By seventh grade I was watching Chris†behavior spiral out of control, his fall accompanied by the vivid symphony of teasing from square-jawed mean boys who called him faggot and idiot, and all the while I listened to Janine call everything she saw “retarded”. I never connected the events. Why would I? There was no direct connection. Janineâ€s obsessive repetition did not cause the boys to tease Chris, though both events stemmed from a social environment in which being like Chris was considered to be a bad thing.

It would be nice if I could say that I stopped using the word “retarded” because I had an epiphany of social conscience, but I didnâ€t — I was just sick to fucking death of hearing Janine say the word. She sounded unbearably foolish going on about “ree-ree” this and “ree-ree” that, and her total lack of self-awareness on the matter disgusted me to the extent that I had elaborate fantasies of stabbing her in the neck with my pencil where she sat behind me endlessly mumbling, “This is sooooooo retaaaaarded!” in our science class.

Chris changed schools halfway through the seventh grade; I donâ€t know where he went. He was just gone. Janine kept saying “retarded” and to this day whenever I hear someone use the word I see her face in my head and have to crush the urge to scream at them to shut the fuck up. These days so many of us feel compelled to scrub our vocabularies shiny-clean of all potentially-objectionable terms; with “retarded”, I never had to re-train myself not to say it, never had to guard against slip-ups. I donâ€t slip because itâ€s a word Iâ€ve not used since I was twelve. I could tell you that I donâ€t slip because the word is hateful and cruel, and this is true, but I really donâ€t slip because I canâ€t bear the idea of ever sounding like Janine, my aversion born not of an adult social  consciousness, but from a preteen loathing of a terrifically annoying peer.

I am better than the terrible person I was in the seventh grade, even if I am not thoroughly a good person, not yet, though I am trying to be one. Does it matter why I donâ€t say the word, so long as I do not say it? Iâ€m not sure. Mightnâ€t it be better if I were actively fighting the word in myself, all of the time? Fighting my own use of this word would keep its origins and meanings fresh in my mind; it would keep my thoughts directed at the systematic marginalization of people with cognitive disabilities, instead of recalling Janine, like a parrot, repeating “ree-ree” in her curious throaty cartoonish voice.

Part of me thinks that if I had relied on the word as slang, and then been forced to give it up, that experience would make me a better activist, and a kinder human — regardless of whether I still had moments of forgetfulness and negligence in which “retarded” would periodically slide out of my mouth like a forked tongue betraying my lack of self-mastery, an energetic reminder of all the work left to do, on myself, and on the world. There is value in the trying, maybe greater than in the achievement, and at this stage of my life, I believe that the trying is where we benefit most, even when we fail.

—

*Names have been changed.

EXPLAIN YOURSELF!

The Daily Mail is all up in Dawn French’s business. Let’s put our surprised faces on now. Evidently French recently turned up at the Glamour Magazine Woman of the Year awards looking decidedly…. different.

Gone was the heavy double chin beneath her heart-shaped face.

Instead, her cheekbones were in evidence. Her hair had been freshly coiffed by hairdresser Errol Douglas in Belgravia and was decidedly glossy.

It was clear that a substantial portion of the weight she had carried — proudly — for years was gone.

She glowed with a tan, which she explained had been picked up by sitting in the early summer sunshine in her garden in Cornwall.

Complimented on her weight loss, she smiled and said simply that she had been ‘trying to be a little healthier†recently.

The Mail seizes upon this opportunity to ruminate on the possibilities. Did she get a gastric band? Her reps say absolutely not. Was it the heartbreak of her recent divorce? Nope, apparently that made her fatter! There really is no story here, just a series of unsourced hypotheses about French swapping plates of chips for “an omelette and green salad” and giving up chocolate.

People who know Dawn say that she is in a defiant phase. She believes that reaching 50 has been a major watershed in her life and now feels ‘more powerful†and ‘wiser†than ever before. And so, after a lifetime of earnestly explaining why being overweight was her choice — and the right one, too — she has changed her mind.

Framing weight loss as “defiance” is a curiously common device in popular storytelling of successful weight loss, as though losing weight is deviant behavior up there with getting a neck tattoo, or dyeing one’s hair emerald green. But culturally-speaking, making oneself slimmer is not rebellious in the least; culture demands this behavior as a matter of course. If you are a fat person, and you tell a group of randomly selected strangers that you are on a diet, while there may be some debate as to whether such action is warranted (a la “You’re not [that] fat!”), no one is particularly surprised or scandalized by such a decision. Dieting is what fat people do. On the other hand, if you are a fat person and you announce to the same group of people that you are not on a diet, and are happy to remain at your current size — that is when the astonishment comes out. How could anyone be happy while fat? It flies in the face of all conventional wisdom.

French may well be in a “defiant” phase, but I suspect that has little to do with her weight loss. The article goes on to consult a “diet and fitness expert” who helpfully reminds us that “there is a difference” between socially-acceptable “curves” and being gross and fat. Of course French is “intelligent” enough to know that! Therefore diet! We can’t let her have too much happiness, though, so the Mail paints her as living a lonely existence in her big empty house in Cornwall. Like a dieting Mr. Rochester, with an attic full of uneaten chocolate serving as the secret mad wife.

French may have lost weight via any number of methods, and for any number of reasons. She has, apparently, chosen not to discuss it in detail in the media, and that is a welcome relief. So long as French does not adopt universal weight-loss evangelism, and keeps her body-related choices as her own, I can’t say I begrudge her this loss. French no more owes the world an explanation for her weight loss than anyone else would owe an explanation for weight gain; French’s autonomous choices are simply none of our business, and expecting such an explanation reinforces the idea that we have a right to police anyone’s body, for any reason.

French may yet take up diet-advocacy, and if that happens I will be sorely disappointed, as she has been one of very few consistently rebellious voices in her industry. For years French has been very matter-of-fact about her size and her confidence, so to lose that to a standard weight-loss narrative would be a sad thing indeed. But it is no more fair to demand she justify her body now than it was before, and I’m uncomfortable criticizing a decision she has made privately and chosen to keep private.

Should she eventually make it public? All bets are off. But until then, I’m happy to see Dawn French continue to be awesome as an antidote to every other celebrity who loses ten pounds and runs screaming to the tabloids to promote themselves as Diet Heroes. Until then, it really is none of our — or the Daily Mail’s — business.

Hat tip to reader Daniel for sending the link!