So based on a combination of what I want to write about and reader feedback, I’ve decided that I’m going to blog about my marathon training on Sundays.  I know that for some people posts about sports and such are triggering or just not enjoyable, this way people who don’t want to read that kind of thing can skip the Sunday posts (and who knows, maybe those who are interested will look forward to the Sunday posts…)

Things are different this time around. For my first marathon I trained to walk with the goal of finishing in 8.5 hours.  Some of you may remember that in a terrible, painful long day it took me about 13 hours to finish the Seattle Marathon with my Best Friend.  This marathon has an 8 hour time limit but they open the roads at 6 hours so it’s 8 hours while contending with traffic lights, no port-a-potties etc.   So this time I’ll be doing a run/walk combination, and Kelrick has once again volunteered to do this with me.

One of the things that I promptly forgot when I finished the first marathon, (when I was so sure that I would never ever do another one) was how freaking boring the training is. I train alone late at night (it’s always interesting to me that people congratulate those who get up at 4am to run, but freak out that I go out at 2am) and a lot of times it’s just a grind.  I’m doing this marathon for a lot of reasons that I’ll get into in later posts, but a love of running/walking is not one of them. I’ll take this opportunity to remind everyone reading that I’m not trying to be any kind of role model here, nor am I interested in being part of the bullshit good fatty/bad fatty dichotomy  This is about my desire to do a marathon and nothing else.

Music has been a really important part of my training, so much so that I actually rescheduled a run last time because my iPod wasn’t working.  It helps me to have some ritual around music as I do my run/walks, especially as they get longer. This time around it’s:

Beginning:  Mama Told Me Not To Come (In honor of a hilarious e-mail from my awesome mom)

Half-way:  Hold On, I’m Coming by Sam and Dave

End:  Rebel Beat by the Goo Goo Dolls

Outside of that one of my favorite past times is creating playlists for different training run/walks- for this marathon I have different ones for speedwork, tempo runs, and hill repeats so far.  If you have ideas for inspirational songs please feel free to drop them in the comments!

So I have 43 weeks of training until I show up for my next ass kicking.  Cross finish line, get medal.

Like the blog?  Consider becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.

What do member fees support?  I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

Are you looking for a way to do some fun movement this summer (and get prizes for it?)  Consider a Fit Fatty Virtual Summer Vacation!

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for detail

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post

Marilyn Wann made me aware of a project by artist Anna Gensler.  She decided that it was time to do something about the objectifying messages that she was getting from guys on Tinder and Ok Cupid.

Awesome!

She decided that “I’m an artist, so my weapon of choice is art,”

Cool beans!

She “wanted to find a way to make these men feel objectified in the same way that they were making women feel.”

Ok.

So she decided that she would create naked drawings of them, created based on their picture but drawn to be “fat and not very well-endowed.”

Aw crap.

So what Ms. Gensler decided to do is attempt to make guys who are being jerks feel bad by drawing them to look more like guys she assumes they stigmatize for how they look. Basically, she’s trying to combat sexism with sizeism.  The idea of drawing guys who are being jerks to look more like guys who aren’t being jerks but do deal with a bunch of societal crap for the size of their bodies and the size of their dicks is seriously problematic.

The argument I’ve seen in support of this is that art, and especially art combined with humor, needs leeway.  I would argue if even if we agree with that, we should consider the use of what I’ve always heard of as the “Court Jester Rule” (though I don’t know and can’t find who to credit for the terminology) which is to say that in mocking someone as a form of humor – especially for activism –  you want to move up the chain of social power, not down it (such that it’s one thing for the Court Jester to mock the King, another for the King to Mock the Court Jester because of the balance of power between them.)  I think that the idea for the project is great, I think that including weight bigotry/sizeism is not.

In general I would suggest, no matter what their transgression, it’s not cool to try to make someone feel bad by comparing them with, making them into, or wishing them into, a group that is oppressed, even in an attempt at humor.

Marilyn wrote a beautiful e-mail about it that she agreed to let me share here. If you would like to e-mail Anna with your thoughts, she can be reached at gensler.anna@gmail.com (as someone who gets tons of hatemail everyday and someone who has definitely committed all kinds of -isms (racism, ableism etc.) out of ignorance and been (rightly, of course) called out on it, I would request that you consider writing from a place of education, but of course we each get to choose how we deal with oppression and The Underpants Rule applies here:

Hi, Anna:

I came across the Buzzfeed story today about your clever response to online-dating creeps.

I certainly share your vexation at these energy-drain wankers, from both personal experience and feminist principle. And I applaud your public critique of them.

However, I am opposed to your choice of using weight variation as a putdown in this project.

I’ve been a fat rights activist for 20 years. It’s a classic form of weight bigotry to imagine that being fat makes people who identify as men less manly and people who identify as women less “feminine.” That’s a great example of the intersectionality and mutual reinforcement of sexism and weight prejudice.

I see that you’re quoted in Slate as saying your drawings were “all based off of these guys’ profile pictures, so their faces and their general positions are the same, but from there I tried to make them look a little chubbier or scrawnier or just not particularly well-endowed.”

By using stupid mainstream ideas as a putdown (i.e., fat people can’t be hot or sexy; men should be big, not “scrawny;” men have to have big dicks to be good lovers), you’re reinforcing the same system of yuck that prompts men to be creeps online.

I’m sure that you can find a creative way to overcome such unnecessary and hurtful concepts in your art.

As my friend Jonny Newsome says, “The freedom bus doesn’t leave until we all get on.”

Wheee! – Marilyn Wann, author of FAT!SO?

Like the blog?  Consider becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.

What do member fees support?  I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

Are you looking for a way to do some fun movement this summer (and get prizes for it?)  Consider a Fit Fatty Virtual Summer Vacation!

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for detail

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post

First of all, just to let you know today’s blog might be triggering, it’s a discussion of some bigotry that I saw surrounding fat people with disabilities.

I saw a picture on Facebook today.  It was a disabled parking sign that said “Parking for disabled persons.  Not for fat people.  You should have a parking spot 3 miles away and be required to do jumping jacks all the way to the store.”  It didn’t look photoshopped but I hope that it was.  What I want to talk about is the discussion around it.

To my great joy many of the people on the FB thread were calling this the bullshit that it was.  Others seemed to divide fat people with disabilities into two groups (I want to be clear that this has nothing to do with actual fat people with disabilities, this is how people were discussing them) so I’ll frame my discussion from that perspective.

The first group, as they defined it, were people whose disability is unrelated to, or the cause of, their fat.  Perhaps they have a disease, or had an accident, or they started to have mobility trouble and then got fat.  This group has something specific to point to as the cause of their disability that is very specifically separate from their body size.   Most of the people in the conversation seem to be in agreement that these disabled fat people should not be required to do three miles of calisthenics in order to deserve to shop, though many of them also wanted to point out that – based on absolutely no information or evidence – these people do not comprise the majority of fat disabled people, and they want us to know that there’s still “no excuse” for being fat.

The other group are fat disabled people who have nothing that they can “prove” made them disabled that isn’t related to their fat.  By the logic of people who want to punish disabled people for being disabled, these people’s obesity is their fault, thus their disability is their fault, thus they don’t deserve the same accommodations that other disabled people get.

The idea that people should have to pass some kind of test to prove that their disability isn’t “their fault” in order to be  accommodated is absolutely horrifying.  For one thing, who gets to be the decider?  If someone was disabled because they were driving drunk do they get a parking spot?  What if they fell mountain climbing or blew out their knees running (or doing jumping jacks for three miles trying not to be fat)?  I hope the obvious truth here is that it shouldn’t matter – people with disabilities should be accommodated, not interrogated.

Bottom line: Specific to this situation – the idea that you know more about a person’s disability based on their body size is ridiculous and one of many types of bigotry faced by fat people who also have disabilities. In general –  how dare anybody think that they are entitled to know the source of someone’s disability, let alone that they should get to judge it as worthy or unworthy of a parking space or any other accommodation.  As far as I’m concerned the entire discussion about accommodations for people with disabilities should revolve around the best ways to accommodate the most people possible from a place that is fiercely anti-shame, driven by the desires of people with disabilities. The idea of “fault” should never, ever come up.

Sadly we are not the jackass whisperer so we can’t stop people from posting this kind of drivel, but we can work hard to not be part of the problem, to educate ourselves and be intersectional in our activism, and to speak up and speak out against it.

Like the blog?  Consider becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.

What do member fees support?  I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

Are you looking for a way to do some fun movement this summer (and get prizes for it?)  Consider a Fit Fatty Virtual Summer Vacation!

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for detail

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post

I wrote yesterday about my issues with the idea that fat people should have to pay twice as much as thin people for the same customer service experience (in this case, transportation from one place to another in a seat that accommodates them.)  I got one response so much that I wanted to blog about it.  A good example came from Vicky:

While I understand why it is unfair to expect a larger person to pay more to fly, how is it fair that when I fly larger people take advantage of my size and take up part of my seat? I paid for the exact same ticket so why do I get less space? Once, a larger person even tried to convince me to fly with the armrest raised since they told me I didn’t need that much space.

Hi Vicky,

I appreciate you agreeing that it’s unfair to make a larger person pay more, and I can see where you are coming from in your question – I suggest it’s a matter of perspective and would ask that you consider the following:

Let me start with a quick discussion of what I think the problem is and then I’ll answer your question more directly. From my perspective the airlines arbitrarily created a seat size, ignoring the fact that many people wouldn’t fit in them.  They created shared space (like the armrests in the middle), and different planes have different seat and seatbelt sizes.  In general they’ve created a bad situation and left it to their passengers to sort it out amongst ourselves, suggesting that we blame each other and not them for the problems that the airline created. I think the problem is that the airline doesn’t have seats that accommodate everyone.

I think the choice for each of us to make is how we want to deal with it. You and I are in the same position -we both fit into an airplane seat.  There are other people who don’t fit into a seat and sometimes we’re seated beside them. The difference between us is that you choose to assert that it’s not fair to you, and that’s your right.  While I don’t love touching strangers I think what I paid for was travel from one place to another in a seat that accommodates me, and I all I really need is the amount of space that I take up – I have no need to claim empty space as “mine” and insist that it go unused regardless of whether or not someone else needs it in order to have the same experience I’m getting.

I choose to do everything I can to help give everyone the same experience that I get, because I recognize that the airline has put both my seatmate and me in a bad situation, but their situation is likely worse because they may be dealing with a ton of anxiety (and perhaps have been since they booked the ticket – another thing that you and I don’t have to deal with.)  Also, they know that if I complain and make the argument that I deserve a seat that accommodates me but they don’t because they are heavier, hip-ier etc., people will likely take my side and they could get thrown off the plane.

So if I’m seated next to someone who doesn’t fit (whether they are fat or their shoulders are broad or whatever) I do everything I can to make sure that they know that they aren’t the problem, and that I’m happy to do whatever it takes to make them as comfortable as possible. I might lean into the aisle, offer to raise the armrest, not complain about them touching me, treat them in a pleasant and respectful manner etc.

Case in point – once a guy with long arms in the middle seat told me that he was super stressed because he was on a deadline at work and he couldn’t wait until we could use our laptops. When were in the air and he got out his laptop we realized that he was going to have to be elbowing me in the side the whole time in order to work. It sucked, I don’t like touching strangers and I don’t like being elbowed in the side for three hours but I understood his situation and I chose to smile and tell him it was no big deal.  I’m telling this story to illustrate the point, I don’t want a cookie for doing it – I think it’s just basic human respect.

I’ve seen people pout, sigh, roll their eyes and declare that it was unfair that they had to sit next to a fat person. That’s certainly an option that you can choose.  Recently on a flight as I sat down, the very thin women who would be my seatmate said “If raising the armrest is more comfortable for you, feel free to put it up.” Though I declined because I prefer it down, I thanked her profusely and she shared with me that she had seen a fat person abused by their seatmate once until she was reduced to sobbing, and decided then and there that she would never act like that and that she would make flying as comfortable as she could for anyone she could.

I can’t make the airlines give everyone the experience I get (or, at least, I haven’t gotten it done yet) but I can damn well choose what kind of traveler I’m going to be and I’m going to choose compassion over “fairness” every time.

You and I currently enjoy a nice experience – we buy a ticket for travel from one place to another and know that it will include a seat that accommodates us.  I don’t know about you but I would rather fight to make the airlines give everyone the experience that we get, rather than complain that the fact that they don’t forces other passengers into a bad situation.  As always it’s your choice.

~Ragen

Like the blog?  Consider becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.

What do member fees support?  I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

Are you looking for a way to do some fun movement this summer (and get prizes for it?)  Consider a Fit Fatty Virtual Summer Vacation!

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for detail

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

Reader Pauline let me know about a conversation on the site Etiquette Hell about flying while fat.  The conversation is indented and may be triggering, you can skip it and still understand the point of the blog:

Question:

I travel to the US twice a year. I would absolutely love to be able to afford first class or business seats, but I can’t. I always fly coach. The problem is this: I wear American size 22 pants, not because of my stomach; it’s because of my hips. They’re large and I have huge saddle bags. I always book an aisle seat to make sure only one person will be bothered by my saddle bags. And even though I try to lean to the opposite side as much as I can, part of my thigh still spills into my unlucky seatmate’s seat, making me very embarrassed. I read airlines/flights forums where people who could have easily been my seatmates complain about the passenger of size who should have booked a first class seat and let me tell you: Do I feel guilty! but I just can’t afford it.

So I have a few questions for all of you fellow E-hell readers and Ms E-Hell Dame: what should I do? What’s your opinion on the issue? Do you have similar stories? Have you been the “offender” or the “offended”?

Just for the sake of information: I’m 5″7 and weigh 270 pounds. When I weighed 230 I still had huge saddle bags. 0510-14

Answer:

When I fly, being a BBW, I always go first class on an aisle seat.   That is just the cost of travel for me, imo.   In the pre-boarding seating area, I can tell which passengers the other flyers are secretly wishing they are not seated next to (squirming children, wailing babies, and big people) and I prefer to be as accommodating as possible to my fellow travelers so that I am not perpetuating stereotypes and prejudices.  In other words, I never presume I am entitled to more seat than I paid for and if any body part of mine has the potential to spill over into someone else’s purchased space, I need to make sure I pay for enough room to contain my body within the zone I “own”.   That may mean flying first class or buying two plane seats side by side.

That isn’t the advice you were probably hoping to read but it’s one I firmly believe in.   And I don’t think this just applies to fat people but physically fit and athletic men or tall people can also easily usurp more space on a plane than their ticket allows.

Let me start by saying that she, and every other fat flyer, is allowed to believe and do whatever she wants.  If she believes that “not perpetuating stereotypes and prejudices” means paying more than a thin person for the same customer experience that’s her right. My issue here is that she is saying that, as an etiquette expert, she “firmly believes” that doing so is good etiquette.

First of all, the idea of choosing our behavior so that we don’t “perpetuate stereotypes and prejudices” suggests that if people choose to stereotype us or hold prejudices against us, we are responsible for “solving” that by mollifying our bigots with our  behavior.  The problem with stereotyping and prejudice is the stereotyping and prejudice, not the victims of it.  The solution to prejudice is neither weight loss nor paying twice what our bigots pay for the same service.  People are allowed to hold personal stereotypes and prejudice but they should not be allowed to institutionalize them and the groups who are the victims of their bigotry are not required by the rules of etiquette to participate in our own oppression to make them happy.

To agree with her, we have to believe the idea that some people deserve seats that they fit into and others don’t- such that those who are fat, muscular, tall, broad-shouldered etc. should have to pay more than people who aren’t fat, muscular, tall, or broad-shouldered to get the same customer experience – specifically transportation from one place to another in a seat that accommodates us. (I’ll point out that while many fat people have been thrown off planes or forced to buy a second seat for being fat, there is no policy about tall, broad-shouldered, or muscular passengers and I’ve never heard of one of them getting thrown off a plane or asked to purchase a second seat for taking up “more than their space”)

I happen to fit in one seat (my fat goes front to back more than side to side.)  That gives me some privilege when it comes to flying and I think the appropriate use of that privilege is to say “Why aren’t all the passengers getting the same experience that I get, and how can I hep them fight for that”  rather than saying “obviously people my size and smaller deserve a better/cheaper experience than people who are larger than us or shaped differently.”

This argument seems to me to also be an extension of the “good fatty/bad fatty dichotomy.”  “I am willing to pay twice as much as the person next to me for the same customer experience so that I don’t perpetuate stereotypes and prejudices” sounds very much to me like the way that many fat people feel that we have to justify our requests to be treated with basic human respect (ie:  I have a juicer, I exercise, and I only eat vegetables that were dried with a towel knitted by someone’s Nana, so I deserve to not be bullied.) Both are a version of “I’m not like those other fat people so I deserve to be treated better than you would treat them”  I think that’s bullshit in any guise.

The belief that fat, tall, muscular or broad-shouldered people are obligated to buy two seats or pay for first class or we don’t deserve to fly, has a number of ramifications. If an employer wants to fly candidates to a job interview it will cost them twice as much to interview one of us, if a job involves travel it will cost the company twice as much to hire one of us, if we want one of the jobs that helps us engage in activism or puts us in front of people (speaker, performer, stand-up comic etc.) it will costs venues twice as much to book us.  People who make this argument are saying that it’s acceptable not just to say that fat, tall, muscular or broad-shouldered people need to have twice as much money as others to take a vacation, but also to do our jobs, attend a wedding, graduation, or even a funeral.

I think that if you don’t want civil rights, then you fight for everyone to have them, and once they do you choose not to avail yourself of them. Nobody is saying that if airlines give all passengers the same experience regardless of size that she has to take them up on it, she is still welcome to purchase two seats or a first class seat.  I think what isn’t  cool is to make a decision that just because you can afford to pay twice as much, or because it’s ok with you that you don’t get the same customer experience as people who don’t look like you, you suggest that good etiquette requires that everyone who looks like you agrees with that.  It seems to me that she might be getting internalized oppression confused with etiquette.

As a member of a few groups that many people choose to stereotype and hold prejudices against I understand that those people would prefer that I at least shut up and, even better, if I wouldn’t mind being participating in my own oppression by doing whatever they think I should do.  In this case that includes paying twice as much as them for the same experience, or acting like the problem is that fat, tall, muscular and broad-shouldered people exist, and not the fact that they built planes as if we didn’t, and make policies as if we don’t deserve the same experience they give passengers who aren’t fat, tall, muscular or broad-shouldered.   As an activist, I’m completely unwilling to do that.  People are allowed to be prejudiced and suggest that they deserve a different experience than I do because we look different, but I do not have to participate in that, and I won’t.

For the record, I fly all the time for speaking engagements and I cannot recommend Southwest Airlines enough. They did some super shitty things in the past, they were asked to make changes and they did.  I boycotted them until they made the changes,  and now I fly with them as much as possible and recommend that my friends support them as well (no, I don’t get anything for promoting them, I just appreciate that they are committed to giving me the same experience as their thin passengers.)  Their passenger of size policy can be found at http://www.southwest.com/html/customer-service/extra-seat/index-pol.html

Like the blog?  Consider becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.

What do member fees support?  I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for detail

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

I hear these kinds of things all the time:  I know that fat people eat this way because it’s what I did when I was fat, or because I’m fat and I eat that way, or because “everybody knows” that.  I know that all fat people are sick because everyone who comes to my medical practice who is fat is sick.  I gained 20 pounds after a bad break-up and lost it with Slim Fast (or whatever) therefore someone who has been fat their whole life and has been on 15 diets can lose 200 pounds by doing what I did.

This is going wrong on a bunch of levels. The first thing to do is to separate personal experience from research.

The mistake that I see most often is people confusing their own experience with everyone’s experience. Each of us can only speak for ourselves and what we think and our own life experiences.

This also leads to some issues wherein people’s personal sample is limited – I once had a counselor who specializes in Binge Eating Disorder say that I must have BED because in her experience everyone who looks like me has it.  I reminded her that her experience included a sign on her door that indicated that she was the person to see if you have BED.  By her logic I could say that everyone who wears a sweater vest had BED because everyone she sees in her practice who wears sweater vests also has BED.

It also leads people who simply have no understanding of a situation try to figure out how they would solve it if it were them, based only on their own experiences.  Depressed?  Snap out of it.  Alcoholic?  Stop drinking.  Anorexic? Start eating.  Fat?  Get thin.  These “solutions” aren’t evidence-based, they are what people think based on their limited understanding, and perhaps lacking the emotional intelligence and intellectual humility to understand that they may not have any frame of reference that would allow them to understand someone else’s experience.

It also leads to the false conclusion that if one person has an experience – everyone who is “like” that person in some way can also have that experience.  So saying that one fat person losing weight and maintaining the loss means every fat person can do it is very much like saying that one person surviving going over Niagara Falls in a barrel means everybody can do it.

In the end, our experiences are a great way for us to learn about ourselves, and a horrible way for us to learn about other people – and the more different we are, the worse our experiences are as a tool for understanding others (which is really important as we work to make our activism intersectional.)  It’s also one reason why there is so much power in talking about our lived experiences as fat people – and hearing from as many fat people as possible.  Recently in a panel discussion of people who work on “childhood obesity” we were asked how to do that work and avoid stigma.  I said that I didn’t think there was any way to call for the eradication of every child who looks a certain way without stigmatizing them (as in:  I don’t want to stigmatize fat kids, I just want to make sure that within a generation they don’t exist.)  The woman beside me mentioned that she had never thought of it that way.  Often when someone sees me working out and asks how much weight I’ve lost they are completely shocked to find that I’m not interested in weight loss – they literally didn’t know that there are fat people who aren’t trying to become thin.

That speaks to one of the problems that fat people face which is that, from diet companies to that ridiculous letter written to a fat runner,  people actively try to can speak for us – or shout over us – for their own reasons whether it’s about profit, ego, bullying or something else.  The more we talk about our own experiences, the more we educate not just those who might mistreat us, but those who might not be aware that they have options like Size Acceptance and Health at Every Size available to them.  That said, each of us can only speak for ourselves and our experience (and those who agree to have us speak for them) and it’s important to remember that as well.  There is power in our experiences – our stories –  and I think it’s worth it to fight to tell them, and to make sure that they are not told by others, and there is wisdom in knowing the difference between our experience and those of others and not confusing the two.

Like the blog?  Consider becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.

What do member fees support?  Between e-mails and Facebook private messages I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!) Interested?  Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for detail

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

 

I’m watching  a television show in which a thin, stereotypically “beautiful” woman is going through a break up and responding by eating huge spoonfuls of ice cream, then spraying whipped topping directly into her mouth from the can.  It’s time to play one of my favorite games – what if this was a fat woman?

Imagine a fat woman eating huge spoonfuls of ice cream punctuated with sprays of whipped topping directly from the can into her mouth.  If you answered that she would be the subject of shame, stigma, humiliation and ridicule, give yourself 20 points.  In fact, many of us have had our pictures photoshopped to look just like this in an attempt to ridicule us.

To review, for thin actresses these behaviors can be considered adorable, but for fat women the exact same behaviors are supposedly irresponsible, causing diseases that we “deserve”, and costing ALL THE TAX DOLLARS!  justified by stereotypes and the obesity hysteria that leads to poor reporting,   gross misuses of science, and “everybody knows” trumping actual evidence.  The fact that this happens isn’t news, but it’s still bullshit every damn time.

So what behaviors should we condone and for which people?

Trick question!!  The answer isn’t to stop “condoning” these behaviors in thin women or to start “condoning” them in fat women.  The answer is for each of us to get out of the condoning business altogether and mind our own damn business.  Each of us has the right to punch, but that right ends at the tip of someone else’s nose.  Probably not coincidentally our right to judge others works exactly the same way.  We are allowed to have all kinds of opinions, but nobody else has an obligation to care how we think they should live their lives. If we start thinking that people do have such an obligation, we soon find that this slope is just too slippery –  whose behavior do we get to choose and who gets to choose our behavior for us?  (I note that people who insist that they should get to tell me how to live are rarely interested in receiving the same treatment from someone else.)

While we’re at it, we could stop making assumptions.  Like not assuming that the way someone is eating tonight out at dinner is the way that they eat all the time. Like not assuming that we can look at someone and know what they eat. Like not assuming that it’s any of our business what people eat or how they look, ever.  Let’s stop creating a culture of guilt and shame around food, and we can also stop creating a culture of guilt and shame around bodies, mind our own business, make our own choices, and maybe live happier ever after.

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What do member fees support?  Between e-mails and Facebook private messages I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I also do my speaking gigs on a sliding scale so that any group that wants me to speak can afford it, and try to make as many things as possible pay-what-you-can. This is work that is incredibly important to me and I am very grateful to be able to do it, and the only way I can is because I do this full-time.  I get paid for some of my speaking and writing, but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for detail

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

So I’ve decided to do another marathon, specifically the LA marathon in 2015. The world’s best best friend ever, Kelrick, has agreed to do it with me again.  There are a lot of reasons that Team Never Again has decided to become team One More Time but that’s another blog post. For now what I know for sure is that last time I focused on just finishing and not getting injured.   This time I’ll be focusing a bit more on speed, and run/walking instead of walking.  I’m thinking about making Sundays “marathon update day” on the blog, we’ll see how it goes.  If you have a preference (anywhere from “I love marathon updates, totes do it!”  to “I don’t care about your marathon bullshit”) please feel free to leave it in the comments.

Before someone gets confused, this is not about the good fatty bad fatty dichotomy, and the good fatty bad fatty dichotomy needs to die.  My choice to do a marathon is an expression of my rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (or perhaps more honestly the pursuit of medals), it’s not a justification for those rights. Absolutely no justification is necessary because our civil rights aren’t size, or health, or healthy habit dependent by any definition (and let’s be clear as well that this is about me wanting a challenge, not about health).  It would be no more or less laudable if I chose to do the LA marathon, or watch a marathon of every Star Trek episode that ever aired, or knit a tree cozy out of plarn.

When Kel, who is both my Best Friend and, for all intents and purposes, my adopted brother told our mom that we’d decided to do another marathon, she sent the following e-mail to both of us:

Subject:  Where have I failed you as a parent?

I thought I raised you better than that – Woe is me, to have failed so miserably………………

Have I not always taught you “No pain, YEAH!” Another marathon, REALLY?

Love you both and will be here for you always

My mom is awesome and hilarious and with Mother’s Day coming up I want to take this chance to thank her publicly for all of the support she’s given and continues to give me.  One of the things I do in my training is ritual around the music that I listen to.  I always listen to the same songs at the beginning, middle and end of each training session.  In honor of my mom, I’m beginning each session for this marathon with “Mama Told Me Not To Come.” And because I enjoy messing with song lyrics, I’ve re-written the lyrics to be a bit more relevant to the marathon experience.  (Of course any blog readers who are also singers and who feel inspired are very welcome to make a video or audio track and put it in the comments!) Either way, consider wishing me luck as I once again hit the streets with a marathon finish line looming!

Got some bodyglide on your hoo hoo?
Bib pinned to your T?
What’s all these crazy questions they’re askin’ me?
This is the earliest wake up that could ever be
Glad the sun’s not up ’cause I don’t wanna see

Mama told me not to run
Mama told me not to run
“That ain’t the way to have fun, no”

Drank way too much water, now I really have to pee
Twenty minute wait for a port-o-potty at mile three
And that aid station at mile ten, is all out of Gatorade
Less than halfway through, and it’s 90 in the shade

Mama told me not to run
Mama told me not to run
“That ain’t the way to have fun, hon”
“That ain’t the way to have fun, hon”

Elites already finished, they just run so frickin’ fast
I can’t believe there’s more hills, this is so kicking my ass
Finish line seems so far, I’m hungry, tired and sore
Once this race is over – I don’t wanna run no more

Mama told me not to run
Mama told me not to run
She said, “That ain’t the way to have fun, hon”
“That ain’t the way to have fun, no”

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What do members support?  Between e-mails and Facebook private messages I average about 800 requests a day (not including hatemail!) I also do my speaking gigs on a sliding scale so that any group that wants me to speak can afford it. This is work that is incredibly important to me and that I am very grateful to be able to do, and the only way I can is because I do this full-time.  I get paid for some of my speaking and writing, but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for detail

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

This has been coming up a lot lately so I thought I would discuss it again today.  Let’s start here:  the definition of oppression is “the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner; to burden with cruel or unjust impositions or restraints”.

The simplest explanation I can give is that as long as my government is waging a war against me (the War on Obesity) a war in which they are actively trying to involve everyone from employers to restaurants to healthcare providers and insurance companies in my eradication, against my will  – and as long as there are people who assert that we should all hope for a world where people who look like me don’t exist because things might be cheaper – I will assert that I am the victim of oppression.  I think that society’s attempt to police my body and rid the earth of me and everyone who looks like me, including but not limited to insisting that we risk our lives trying to become not fat, constitutes the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel and unjust manner. I don’t think you can say, “I want a world where no fat people exist” in a non-oppressive manner.

But let’s look at some other examples:

This article discusses workplace weight discrimination (which is legal almost everywhere) -trigger warning for possible victim blaming language

Here is a more scholarly article about workplace weight bias and wage discrimination

Professors who sit on admissions committees feel comfortable tweeting to the world that fat people can’t complete PhD’s based on their stereotypes of our eating habits.

If we work at Whole Foods, we wouldn’t get the same benefits package as my thin co-workers. Companies like Michelin  and CVS would be happy to charge health insurance penalties based on how I look.  No amount of healthy behaviors or metabolic health could get me the same benefits (which would still be massively problematic), I have to be thin, despite that fact that not a single study has ever achieved long term weight loss for more than a tiny fraction of people.  This idea of rewarding thin employees and punishing fat employees at the workplace (aptly nicknamed “Carrot and Stick” benefits) is gaining popularity.

Studies show that 24% of nurses said that they are “repulsed” by fat people. More than half of the 620 primary care doctors questioned described obese patients as “awkward, unattractive, ugly, and unlikely to comply with treatment.”

Access to medical care is a massive issue.  I’ve personally had doctors refuse to set my broken toe unless i agreed to go to a class about weight loss surgery, tell me that my strep throat is due to my weight (and admit the lie when confronted, but defend that no matter what was wrong with me I would feel better if I lost weight), try to lie to me about my blood pressure to scare me into weight loss (and try to justify the lie as “for my own good” when confronted).  I’ve been prescribed weight loss for anemia, a dislocated shoulder, and strep throat, and I’ve had experimental medicine practiced on me without informed consent or permission and so have most fat people.

I get so much hate mail for being public about loving my body and rejecting diet culture that I created a separate website for it.

We can get almost 400,000 negative messages about our bodies every year.

As a fat woman people feel comfortable making comments about what I eat, mooing at me out of cars, throwing eggs at me while I exercise, blaming me for everything from global warming to world hunger with absolutely no proof, and being unspeakably rude.

Behaviors that are considered unhealthy for thin people are encouraged for me.

People argue that I deserve to be shamed and ridiculed because my body proves that I’m not being personally responsible.

We have to be concerned that professionals who work with us will use their position to enforce their prejudices against us.

People who look like me are not allowed to have any success, except weight loss, without the ridiculous accusation that we are promoting obesity. This creates a situation where people try to make sure that I neither have role models who look like me, nor am I a role model to others.

People posit that because we are fat we are not capable of making decisions for myself  and, if not told exactly what to eat, will simply binge on Twinkies and call it healthy eating. Not to mention the fact what we eat is none of anyone’s business and that people who have no desire to have their eating behaviors policed feel justified in suggesting that mine should be policed because of how I look.

We are told that because we are fat we’re not a credible witness to OUR OWN experience and that other people know better than we do how we behave, what we think,  and what we truly want

Not to mention that studies funded by people who profit from selling weight loss that make ridiculous claims about fat people, from which they profit, are published as factual news

And again, even for fat people who want to try to sole oppression by giving our oppressors what they want, there is not a shred of evidence that any intervention will be successful at changing our weight long-term.

So yeah, these are my observations and they leave me to believe that fat people are being oppressed.  I’m not trying to say we are more or less oppressed than any other group.  I don’t believe in wasting time playing the Oppression Olympics. I believe in stepping up and getting involved which is why I do what I do.  I think the idea that oppression is too strong a word is one of the things that keeps us oppressed which is why I use it. That said, I don’t speak for all fat people, only myself.

Like my blog?   Here’s more of my stuff!

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for details

Become a member: For just ten bucks a month you can help keep this blog ad-free, support the activism work I do, and get deals from cool businesses Click here for details

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

Charles Barkley is a paid spokesperson for Weight Watchers.  He is also paid to be a commentator on TNT’s  Inside the NBA.  He decided to let those two worlds collide when the panel was discussing an upcoming game with the San Antonio Spurs and co-host Kenny Smith felt compelled to ask  “what kind of women are in San Antonio?”

Apparently not wanting to let an inappropriate question fail to live up to it’s full potential, Barkley went on a fat shaming rant that the rest of the guys seemed to find absolutely hilarious:

Big old women down there…That’s a gold mine for Weight Watchers….Victoria’s definitely a secret. They can’t wear no Victoria’s Secret down there…they wear big old bloomers down there, ain’t nothing skimpy down in San Antonio.

and on and on. And on.  Four grown men paid to talk about sports using their airtime to make fun of women because of how we look.  Keep it classy guys.

This is not ok.  Making fun of women for their appearance is never ok, and it’s certainly not ok as part of a show that is supposed to be about basketball, especially in a show that has decided not to have any women on its panel.   TNT should be denouncing this and Weight Watchers should be denouncing this unless they want people to think that they encourage their spokespeople to promote their product in this way (which, on second thought, might be the case.)

Meanwhile, a slew of commenters indignantly pointed out that what Charles said was wrong because not all women from San Antonio are fat. I’m sure that is true, but I don’t think it’s the best argument against Barkley’s hateful rant.  I think it would be cool if, instead of responding to fat shaming with “I’m not fat!” the response was “Fat shaming is not ok!”  or “Shaming women based on how we look is never ok.” rather than suggesting that it’s cool to shame women who look a certain way, as long as you’re clear that it doesn’t apply women who don’t look like that.

This whole thing, top to bottom, is bullshit and it never should have happened, and as far as I’m concerned it shouldn’t go without comment:

Activism Opportunity

Let TNT know what you think at tnt@turner.com

Let Weight Watchers know what you think.

Like my blog?   Here’s more of my stuff!

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for details

Become a member: For just ten bucks a month you can help keep this blog ad-free, support the activism work I do, and get deals from cool businesses Click here for details

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now!Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.