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Yes, Kiddos, Another One of Those Rants!
I know it's a little late, but I stumbled upon "Confessions of a Fat Girl", which led to a rant by a nausea-inducing columnist who chided people like Chloe Marshall for "glamorizing obesity".
In my opinion, Chloe Marshall is absolutely stunning.
That's peripheral.
Ignoring the fact she says she doesn't take any pleasure attacking the 17-year-old (with a title like "Miss England finalist is fat, lazy and a poster girl for ill health", I wonder why on earth she would feel the need to defend herself!), the columnist argues that people complain about the media convincing teenagers to starve themselves, but clearly the opposite is true. She points out the rise of obesity, and asks how many of us know a "size 4".
I think she's missing the point. I believe the media has royally screwed everyone's body issues up and continues to do so. Airbrushing, constant tips on how to diet, then an article gushing about how nice it is to see curvy models nowadays--like Salma Hayek. Salma Hayek is curvy? Right. And Kate Moss is a size 14. No, the media may not be convincing every teenage girl to run to the bathroom and throw up their last meal, but it's doing something much more insidious. Women (or men) who espouse ideas like these then choose to publicize them in a column that amounts to little more than a rant can't seem to focus on anything but the outside. The media doesn't just have an effect on girls' bodies, but their minds. That's the scary part. Women are already taught to analyze themselves, cut themselves down, and are constantly torn down by men; the scary part is that we've accepted this and now we're doing it amongst ourselves. Simone de Beauvoir points out in "The Second Sex" that women are unique in that respect. When a revolution comes around, women take sides by their classes--not their gender. Races, classes, religions all stick together--but women almost never side with their gender. If you don't believe me, pick up a women's magazine, then pick up a men's magazine (yes, one of those). The women's magazines will have tiny models who bear an unnerving resemblance to 12-year-olds, while a men's magazine has women who could make Sophia Loren jealous. A recent online survey in Australia showed men pictures of a size 8, size 10, size 12, and size 14 model and asked which men preferred. Most votes went to the size 12, then the size 14, then the size 10. Size 8 came in last (for the record, Australia's sizing is one up; their size 12 is a US size 10). Men like women who have curvy figures, which leaves the women as the ones who are doing this amongst themselves. Not a pretty thought.
So the media keeps telling us to look at ourselves closer. They pay lip-service to being confident no matter what size you wear , running articles on how happy they are there's role models like Queen Latifah and America Ferrera, but flip the page and there is a fashion shoot with stick-thin models. Past those gaunt faces with clothes hanging off skeletal frames, there's a page on how you can lose those last pesky ten pounds. Wait, what? I'm confused. I thought they were just telling us not to obsess over our weight.
I have nothing against being healthy, but I have a personal theory on weight. It may not be scientific, but it's held true so far. Ever hear about those women who lose a hundred pounds, or more? Then you hear the statistics, on how nearly 90% of those women gain it back. My personal theory is that everyone has an ideal weight, and you may get ten or twenty pounds above or below it, but any more and it's not natural unless you really work for it. This includes going up--even when I give up on dieting and binge on ice cream, burgers, and french fries, I have never gone above 170. I am 5'8" or so and used to weigh 167 pounds. I now hover around 155 or so. Despite my best efforts including going to the gym every morning and restricting myself to less than 800 calories a day, I could never, ever get under 150. The only time I ever managed to see 149 on that scale was when I had the flu and didn't eat for four days.
Before you point out, "Kitty, 800 calories a day is not healthy": yes, I know. I knew it then too. See, that's the scary part, the part that judgmental columnist never took into account. Even well-adjusted, normal girls start to become paranoid and do things they know are unhealthy, just to achieve this standard the media holds them to. The same girls who abstain from smoking, drugs, and alcohol because they know it's unhealthy will do something just as dangerous to achieve their perfect weight. I consider myself a fairly intelligent young woman and even I have done supremely stupid things in the name of weight loss. I have finally mostly shaken free from that and am happy with the way I look. I can don a bikini, look in the mirror and think, "Hell yeah!" or model a tight dress and bless genetics for letting me fill it out just right. Make no mistake, I occasionally have bouts of insecurity and doubts, but for the most part, I'm okay.
This columnist overlooks, maybe deliberately, the fact that Chloe Marshall isn't glamorizing obesity, she's glamorizing confidence. I have a hard time believing that the columnist really wants teenage girls to all be chronically unhappy (then again, she seems to be suffering from it, so who knows?). That's the main problem. Not that media's images of women are destroying female's bodies, but that it's destroying their minds.
I spent a lot of time thinking I was fat at a size 12. Even when I lost weight and was slipping into a size 8, I still felt unhappy--I wanted to be smaller, never mind that it is probably physically impossible for me to ever fit into a size 4.
For those who haven't met me, I'm a curvy gal. "Curvy" nowadays often means "overweight", but I'm normal BMI. I've just got an hourglass figure. I've worn a DD since high school and my bottom half, despite a depressing asslessness, isn't exactly slim.
What does this mean, other than a possible future career in burlesque dancing?
It means that I wasn't happy at a size 8, even though it's probably the smallest size I will ever wear. It means I used to want to cry when I had to buy an XL shirt just because my boobs made anything smaller look like I led a double life as a Hooters waitress. It means when I was healthy, I still didn't feel pretty.
So don't tell me you're a fattist like it's something to be proud of. You're judging someone by how they look, instead of who they are. You do that to someone who is another ethnicity than you, that's racist. That's a big no-no, but being fattist is okay, because you're worried about their health.
"But people can't change their skin color," columnists like her whine. "Fat people can help it."
Maybe, maybe not. Is it really your place to judge, though? Is it really your place to say it's okay to destroy someone's confidence and mind, to cut them down without ever knowing them, and make them constantly question their self-worth because of what some numbers on a scale say?
No.
I'm judging this columnist by who she is, not what she looks like. She judges Chloe Marshall by what she looks like, not who she is. It doesn't take a genius to figure out which is the more shallow.
I wrote this mainly because I've seen a bunch of self-identified "fat bloggers" bash it, but I think its offensiveness transcends weight differences. There's a truly great response here in case some of your rage against this woman needs an outlet. I know mine did.
People continue to amaze me--and not in a good way, either.
100% People's response to Chloe Marshall
(Anonymous) 2008-06-18 10:19 am (UTC)(link)http://www.100percentpeople.com/articles/index.php/monica-grenfell-who-do-you-think-you-are/
Plus check out Monica's personal response, in the comments posted below the main article.
Cheers!
www.100percentpeople.com
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The other thing that gets underreported is the horrifying numbers on what happens when those folks who dieted off that 100 lbs--90% of them not only gain it all back, they regain a huge chunk *more*, because they convinced their bodies they were starving while they did it. Stress hormones, everything. This is supposed to be healthy?
It's a lot easier to sell sugar-bomb cereal, blame the victim, and repeat diet industry lies than to actually unravel *why* people want to eat that many pounds of sugar in a year. That's aside from arguments on where the cutoff is between "fit but fat" and "unhealthy".
Often diet liars blame it on a failed metabolic feedback loop--this is the one that goes, "there were no evolutionary reasons why your body should pick up a shutoff to make you stop craving sugar!" Which is bull. Lots of organisms live in nutrient-rich situations where they need that shut-off part of a metabolic loop. This is called, "I have enough now, I stop collecting energy and I start doing something else I need to do."
There's some suggestions that a virus that makes chicken strains gain weight faster (aka more profitable) is related to one found in human twin studies where one twin is fat and the other isn't. Suggestive, that. Some of the articles in Scientific American have been real eye-openers. Until that sort of diabetic/obesity complication is unraveled, I think we won't really know what's "normal" for humans, we'll just have some guesses.
My guess is that the range is wider than current social standards want to allow. I know this is true for either end of the bell-curve, as I'm not just queen-sized, I'm lumberjack-sized myself, my very appearance undermines the collective emphasis on people who can sit in cheap airline seats. I understand the idea that we don't all come the same way out of the box. I don't like the current overemphasis on egg-crate uniformity because I think it's going too far. A wider diversity gives us us folks who can physically accomplish very different tasks.
I can understand encouraging a national emphasis on eating healthier, which means less fat, less carbs, than the average American has. Better than it used to be, with the labeling available in the stores, but eating right is more expensive. Cheap food is going to pack the pounds on a peasant bod, always has. If you're careful, you find brand-name labels on food for merely sugar and HFCS and sodium are truly horrifying.
Getting more exercise to stay fit would help us reduce stress too, but it's hard to make time for that in an overtime-based slumping economy. It's very difficult to do it right in our current hardscape in most of our living situations. And these mags blame the victim for that, too.
I'm sorry, encouraging better habits, such as trying to steer people to eat more veg is not what those magazines are really doing. They're selling things by destroying your confidence in your self-image, so you have to buy the objects they advise you to get. Oh, and that's healthy too, I see!
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I agree with you on the egg-crate mentality. We're restricted to this very narrow BMI that's already been shown to not take into account very real differences in body types. Athletes, who are obviously very fit, are overweight. But everyone seems to trust this system implicitly! I know that for me personally, I'm hovering on the edge between "healthy" and "overweight" even at my skinniest, while my cousin probably couldn't ever get away from the "underweight"/"healthy" line, even though she eats the same as me.
And yes! I actually started laughing one more time when I thought about this. Because the American Heart Association and everyone keeps pushing healthy food, the demand goes up, as does the price. I mean, going to McDonald's, I can get a cheeseburger for .99, or I can buy a salad for $7. I really doubt that it costs McDonald's $7 to make a salad. So really, people who keep pushing this are making people eat unhealthy.
It's true. Everything's going up, but even vegetables and fruits are outrageous. When I'm down to my last $20, I'm going to buy 40 packs of Ramen, not just enough vegetables to make three meals.
I think we need to stop focusing on weight and more on what we eat. It was pointed out that heart disease, etc. has gone up. Okay, so maybe that's not because of obesity, but of what's causing that obesity: high sodium, high sugar, trans fats, you name it.
Ugh. Another thing is that one of those columnists mentioned that no one in history ever had issues with food. I wanted to scream. In ancient China, it was considered a sign of wealth if you were overweight--it meant you had enough money to buy more food and was considered very attractive. Or hey, look at the Venus of Willendorf to show that body types have changed. People making sweeping statements like that just bug me so much.
Chloe Marshall, Queen Latifah, America Ferrera and Jennifer Hudson are gorgeous. I'm just sad that they can see it when so many other people have trouble doing so, just because they don't fit into the standard Blonde and Skinny category.
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One of the signs of nutritional deprivation is failure to grow to full potential. She can't try telling me that people were healthier when their bodies had to stunt their growth because of rationing.
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I mean, I'm supposed to think Tony Soprano is sexy (ewww) but I can't think that that lady is pretty?
Sheesh, whatever.
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I actually read that men usually are 70 pounds overweight before they experience weight discrimination.
Women? 13. 13 pounds overweight.
I hope this all blows over soon, but I have a feeling it's going to get worse before it gets better. What scares me is all the people freaking out and restricting their kids' diets because they're so worried about their kids being obese, which just hurts them in the long run.
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I've seen that book and thought about buying it but didn't have the spare cash at the time. Obviously, it's worth getting, huh?
And, btw, I agree. Chloe Marshal is gorgeous.
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The Feminine Mystique is overrated, though.
I'm taking a class on Language and Gender and I really hope we read Simone de Beuvoir. She's seriously one of those authors that you read and you just know they were way above you intellectually? Like Harper Lee or Carl Sagan or something. Just awesome. I had to stop and cogitate about what she said just to properly soak it in.
I KNOW! I wish I looked as good as her, dammit.
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:)
You do look really good, so stop that.
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... she has a book? Interesting. Let me know if it's any good.
You're a doll--what would I do without you? (Besides crash and burn, of course?)