Good News for Fat Chicks!

Don't you just love it when people condescend to us, poor, miserable women who have the misfortune of not being stick-thin? The most well-meaning of them will go to huge lengths trying to persuade us that there might be somebody out there who will be noble enough to put up with our fatness and find us attractive.

Hugo Scvhwyzer, an otherwise progressive blogger, loves consoling the fat chicks (who never really asked him to do it) that not all is lost to them romantically. If a larger-sized woman tries to tell him that neither his pity nor his reassurance are needed since her size never had any adverse effect on her personal life, he gets testy and starts persuading her that she is wrong and men ridicule those losers who agreed to date her fat ass. A couple of days ago, Hugo returned to this favorite topic of his:

Men who are sexually attracted to heavy women are more numerous than we’re led to believe, Camile Dodero writes, and that has important implications both for our understanding of male sexuality and for our ongoing conversation about weight and desire.

Actually, the only source that ever tried to suggest to me that my size 14 is anything other than extremely desirable is Hugo's blog. Hugo needs to believe that

Many heavy women do have painful stories of men who were quite happy to fuck them in private but refuse to date them in public.

In order to convince himself and everybody else around that a woman's weight actually influences her personal life (and what a silly idea that is!), this progressive blogger keeps coming up with weird stories from his own dating life to prove that, since he used to try to gain acceptance from other men through his dating choices, the rest of men on this planet share this unhealthy way of dealing with their own sexuality.

There is good news, though. If we, the God-forsaken and lonely fat women, manage to demonstrate that we are "charming, funny, great in bed, and whip-smart" we can hope to have the great fortune of getting someone like Hugo to condescend to date us for a short while. Yippee!

Feminist Men

I love it when men berate me for not being a real feminist. Don't get me wrong, I love feminist men. Three of them brought me up, one of them I'm living with right now, and many of them are my close friends. And, of course, patriarchy hurts both women and men. Still, no man can experience the kind of oppression that women live with on a daily basis. Unless you get paid less because of your gender, feel fear while walking down the street at night, hear demeaning comments "just because" you are of a certain gender, are pawed by your professor, etc. you aren't going to feel what I do. You can understand but you will never feel it as viscerally as I do.

I hate racism but I would never tell an African-American person that their understanding of racism is less profound than mine. I hate ableism with a passion but I would never declare to a disabled person that their vision of ableism is flawed compared to mine. Racism and ableism hurt me too, but not nearly as much as it hurts them.

Just now in a discussion on Hugo Schwyzer's great blog, I had this interesting moment where I got accused of being a victim-blaming proponent of male rights activist agenda. In the fiercely patriarchal society where I was born, I heard this "you-aren't-really-a-woman-you-sound-just-like-a-man" line a lot, so this is nothing new. What's interesting, though, is the reason why Mr. Schwyzer dislikes my kind of feminism. It's because I suggested that the idea that men reject women because of their weight is false. It's what the patriarchal society wants us to believe as part of its fat-shaming agenda. Everybody has heard the statistics that the majority of American women wear size 12 and higher. So what, are we all single? Or is the suggestion here that our partners tolerate us because there aren't enough thin women for everybody? Simple logic tells us that this can't be true.

What I find disturbing is that this condescending stance of "You poor fat chicks, you must feel so rejected by men" is proposed as male feminism. As many times as I repeat that I feel neither poor, nor fat, nor rejected, I get the response that a man knows best and I must be a bad feminist, anyways.

Mr. Schwyzer's post is titled '“More to Love” and the tentative broadening of male heterosexual desire." As a woman, I believe I have more experience with being an object of male heterosexual desire than the author of the post. And I'm sure there are tons of women of my size and bigger whose only problem in this area is attracting too much desire. Sometimes, you want to be able to walk down the street and not be approached by men all the time. Men who worry (with the best possible intentions, of course) about how difficult our love lives are do nothing other than perpetuate this myth of our lack of attraction for men.

"More to Love"

My saga of waiting for the cable person to arrive and connect our television still continues. For this reason, I haven't been able to watch More to Love, a new show by Fox that models itself on the Bachelor but has regular looking women instead of the usual size 2 heroines of the dating shows. Still, I haven't been able to avoid reading about this show on many different feminist sites.

"Finally, a show that will prove that it is possible for size 12-18 women to find love, too," people on those sites say. My only question when I read this kind of responses to the show is: has everybody suddenly gone insane? Since when do we need to "prove" something that is an obvious fact of reality? Have we reached a point where television has suddenly become more real than what we observe around us every single day? How is it possible for people to forget that nobody in real life looks like the characters on TV shows? Even the actors who play them don't look like that in life.

I love television as much (or even more) than the next person. But if the moment has come when you need televised reassurance that it is in no way more difficult for a woman who wears size 16 to find love than a woman who wears size 4, then you need to step away from that remote control right now. Go outside, walk around the block, go into a bar or a coffee-shop. That's where the real people are. Reality television isn't actually based on reality. It's entertainment, it's finctionalized, it isn't real.

Fat-Shaming

Why does it happen that every time I attempt to read the New York Times I immediately encounter some truly outrageous piece that makes me angry? I keep asking myself why on Earth people keep insisting that it is a liberal newspaper?

Today, Maureen Dowd decided to repair her destroyed reputation and came out with a really snarky article that epitomizes fat-shaming. In her op-ed piece "Hold the Fries," she analyzes President Obama's eating habits in order to slip in her tired fat-is-bad message. The main idea of the article: when alone, Obama eats healthy, but when cameras are present he sometimes - oh, the horror, the horror! - consumes hamburgers to cater to the tastes of us, lowly fat people. She writes with reverence about how once "over a three-hour meal, he managed the impossible feat of nibbling only one French fry." The language of the quote is very telling. "Nibbling" is obviously a good thing for this journalist. You can just feel Dowd's admiration flowing. Forget about being elected as a first African-American president in history. The real feat is managing to avoid the fries.

The conclusion of Dowd's article is equally condescending: "Maybe when Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer come next week to broadcast a special on health care from inside the White House, the president should forgo the photo-op of the grease-stained bovine bag and take the TV stars out for what he really wants and America really needs: some steamed fish with a side of snap peas." See how this journalist knows exactly what we need to eat? Her disgust with "grease-stained bovine bags" is palpable. Actually, the word "grease" seems to be an important part of Dowd's vocabulary. A fast-food place for her is necessarily a "greasy spoon."

In short, the message is clear: nibbling good, eating bad. When the President "nibbles" he gets approval, when he eats more than one fry he's a self-promoting hypocrite.

Dowd must believe that without her valuable contribution there isn't enough fat-shaming in the media already. Not enough people suffer from anorexia and bulimia, not enough people hate their bodies and spend their lives looking for the next miracle diet. Let's help the dieting industry grow some more by promoting the image of a popular President as someone who "wants to stay skinny." Dowd has no interest in analyzing how and why the word "skinny" has come to be perceived as invariably positive. Obama wants to be skinny (which might not even be true), so we all should.

As we all know, there has been absolutely no proof that being "skinny" is beneficial to anybody's health. There is, however, more than enough data about the physical and psychological damage fat-shaming causes. Under the false pretense of worrying about the nation's health, Dowd's article (among many many others) causes a lot of harm and benefits no one. Except the companies that push diet pills, of course. I wonder if they thought of sending Dowd flowers. She's trying to boost their profits so hard that she definitely deserves some recognition.