Laurie and Debbie say:

Maven has started a new fat website, and it is spectacular!

The Fat Experience Project® is an oral, visual and written history project which seeks to be a humanizing force in body image activism.

By collecting and sharing the many and varied stories of individuals of size, the Fat Experience Project® seeks to engage with, educate, empower and enrich the lives of people of size, our allies and the world at large. …

We believe that, at the root of discrimination and judgment, there is often an unfortunate lack of basic understanding.

We believe that sizeism, racism, classism, ableism, sexism, transphobia and homophobia are related issues whose intersections may best be understood through the exploration of personal impacts.

If you haven’t already gone there and stopped reading …

The site collects individual stories and posts them in categories: Celebration, Childhood & Family, Labels & Language, Self-Love & Actualization, The Shame Game (and perhaps more, or more to come).

Anyone can submit a story. The site welcomes:

* first-person, non-fiction, autobiographical essays.
* first-person, non-fiction, autobiographical video entries.
* Topical spoken word pieces (via text, video or mp3)
* Representative photographs (artful nudity OK.)

Here’s a bit from Stacy Bias in the self-love & actualization category:

I find myself in wonderment at people who are able to motivate themselves to simple tasks like gardening and cleaning their house and grocery shopping on a regular and consistent basis. I have nearly completely divorced myself from my skin. I feel as if I’ve almost completely moved out of my own body. I don’t wish to challenge myself. It’s like, I’ve broken so many promises to myself that I don’t even believe me anymore, so it seems somewhere along the way I stopped trying to even pretend like I was a capable individual.

This is and always has been a huge part of my fat experience — this disconnect between my hyperactive mind and my nearly ignored flesh. My body has been a shameful reminder of my failings, and so for the most part, I have ignored it as a tool for my survival. It has been under-used, abused and all but abandoned. …

So, my solution then, is to challenge myself for 20 minutes every day.
I don’t care what it is. Taking out the trash. Doing dishes. Scrubbing my toilet. Going to the store. Dicing vegetables. Going for a walk. Sorting papers. Organizing a room. Picking up clutter. Pulling a few weeds. Cleaning out my car. Whatever. Something that involves movement. Something that involves the kind of self-care that I seem to consistently avoid.

And another, from an mp3 by Liv McClellan (audio files are transcribed on the site):

We have a lot of fatties in my family. My mom is fat. My mom kind of fluctuates between a size 12 and a size 20. She just kind of fluctuates in between there, depending upon what’s going on in her life. My dad actually has now got a gut on him, you know, later in life. When I was younger, I was definitely the only fat kid. … And my dad was a PE teacher. So, you know, it was a very interesting sort of relationship with the expectation that you were active. I played soccer when I was little, t-ball, swam from the time I was five until I graduated from high school, competitively. Always, was always doing something. … And what I, as an adult now, this Health at Every Size sort of philosophy that I embrace — that wasn’t there. It was just sort of - you’re fat, so you’re unhealthy. … We had a nurse practitioner that I hated; who wanted me on every diet ever and was always telling my parents that I needed to be on a diet. Then I finally moved over to a pediatrician when I was 13 or 14 and she was an adolescent pediatrician, and she was like “Yeah, you swim twice a day, five days a week, and a 6th day you swim for 2 hours. You do all sorts of activities, you play soccer, this that and the other. You’re healthy. You’re overweight, but you’re healthy.”

This is the kind of site that can only get better as more and more people contribute to it. You know you have an anecdote, a story, a success, a memory … a fat experience. Maven wants you to share it, in the right kind of context, for the right reasons.

Check it out.

Laurie says:

BlogHer invited me to be a guest editor and write a “Letter to my Body” for their Body Image topic. Women have been writing these letters since they began on Valentine’s day. Deb wrote hers a while ago.

===========================================

It’s hard for me to think about writing a letter to my body because I don’t feel separate from it. So I’ve decided to visualize talking to myself in the mirror. I think out loud a lot so that’s not hard.

I’m going to talk about “being present in my body” even though that phrase still feels a little separate, but I don’t have a better words to say it in. I didn’t start out this way. Learning to be present in my body most of the time was a mixture of joy and hard work that happened after I grew up. And since I’m sixty-six, it’s been going on for a long time.

I’m grateful for the physicality of my life, both in it’s intensity and all it’s subtleties. Feeling the air on my skin on a warm day, seeing the world as I walk through it. I like the patterns in the cement, the leaves on the trees, I like the faces as I go by.

I’m not necessarily grateful for the fact that being present is about pain as well as joy. And when I hurt, I”ll feel the interruptive intrusiveness of quite small pains as well as the sometimes overwhelming power of strong pain.

I’m grateful for the pleasures of taste, for the repleteness sensation of eating, for orgasm and the more subtle pleasures of sex.

I’m an artist and I work with my hands. There’s the physical sensation of making something with them, something that didn’t exist before. And there’s the passion of dance - whether it’s just me dancing or when I’m teaching belly dance to kids and experiencing their intensity.

Then there’s my face in the mirror looking back with all the lines that tell the story of my life so far. I like that too.

Debbie says:

I’ve heard of restaurants turning away customers who they thought were too fat (fortunately, not very often). Last night, however, I dreamed about a restaurant franchise that turned away potential store owners because they didn’t meet the BMI and blood cholesterol standards of the franchise.

Let’s just hope life doesn’t imitate my dreams …

Laurie says:

Junko Fukazawa sent me this image of four women that she photographed at the Tokyo exhibition. She called it “Four More Women of Japan”

She said that Becky’s (Professor Rebecca Jennison) lecture on Women of Japan was very successful. Mari Kotani and Manami Tachibana also talked about their experience as the models. About 50 people attended the talk. She thought that most of the audience really understood the work.

I was great to get the photo and the report on the lecture. Hopefully I’ll talk to Becky soon and hear more.

Debbie says:

Unlikely as it may seem, I’ve been to two superhero movies in the last ten days. I saw The Incredible Hulk because I’m an Edward Norton fanatic. I saw Iron Man because several of my friends have liked it (with reservations) and it was 95 degrees out.

While I have lots to say about both movies, from a political perspective, from a theatrical perspective, and as entertainment, the Body Impolitic point that struck me seeing them so close together was how astonishingly similar their basic story lines are, and how they both center around the dream of invincibility.

For those even less comic-literate than I, here’s how these two movies work. The Hulk is an ordinary scientist (Bruce Banner) who gets somehow infected with a substance that, when he gets too angry, turns him into a giant, rage-filled fighting machine. He hates the Hulk persona and devotes his life to keeping away from enraging situations and learning mood management. Of course, it doesn’t work. The Iron Man is a billionaire scientific genius playboy (Tony Stark) whose money comes from weapons. He is captured by people “misusing” his company’s weapons and constructs an armored suit to escape. Back home, he constructs a much fancier, better armored flying suit and starts trying to dismantle the weapons empire he owns.

So we have two privileged white single men (both with love interests, of course). One achieves invincibility; the other has invincibility thrust upon him. Both are under attack by extremely strong forces: Banner is being chased by the U.S. Army, and in particular by a general who happens to be his true love’s father. Stark’s nemesis is the man who runs the weapons business.

Both stories move to a point where the good invincible guy is forced to hand-to-hand combat with a bad guy with the same or closely related powers. Banner fights another “hulk” created by the general; Stark’s opponent builds a new version of the original armored suit and battle is joined.

I couldn’t stop thinking of the ways we all want to be invincible good guys: big, potentially very destructive, immune to weapons, and yet with some moral compass, something that differentiates us from the monsters. In general and in this culture, men have a lot more pull toward this than women do. Women superheroes are rarely indestructible in quite the same way–for one thing, there’s just nothing sexy about being a hulk (although the Iron Man suit could have fashion potential), and girls are encouraged to dream of different things. Nonetheless, the temptation is probably pretty universal. “I’ll just step on them and they’ll run away screaming!”

As long as we dream of invincibility, as long as the little kids inside us know just how good it would feel to step on the big people who try to hurt us, this story (in its various forms) will continue to speak to us. The trick is to be able to enjoy the ride and then remember what isn’t true and isn’t useful about what we’ve just seen.

But the presence of the bad guy with similar powers functions as a reminder (made extremely clear in Iron Man) that the line between invincible good guys and invincible bad guys is very thin indeed. Comic book movies are satisfying because the invincible good guys always win, despite how close it may look, and there’s always some reminder of how and why they’re good guys. They stop to save civilians, or they cradle their girlfriend tenderly between two fingers.

How could we not dream of invincibility? How could the little kids inside us fail to imagine just how good it would feel to step on the big people who try to hurt us? This is intensified by the tenor of the Western news in this period: the headlines are more often about seemingly invincible “bad guys” facing our own flawed, not-so-heroic opposition, the attraction is unmistakable. This story (in its various forms) is bound to speak to us.

The trick is to be able to enjoy the ride and then remember what isn’t true and isn’t useful about what we’ve just seen.

True and useful stories aren’t about amoral Middle Eastern gangs who can’t be trusted with weapons and white Westerners who generally can, unless they are corrupt enough to take money from those terrible Middle Eastern men. They aren’t about active manly men with superpowers and semi-independent women who either make a living taking care of their guys or drop their careers to do so. When the fun is over, invincibility just doesn’t make a story worth chewing on.

Laurie says:

May and June are being exciting months for my work.

In May, my portrait of Fukazawa Junko from Women of Japan was awarded “Most Feminist in the Art Show at Wiscon (the World Feminist Science Fiction convention). And Debbie, I and models Mari Kotani and Manami Tachibana gave a very well received panel on Women of Japan.

On June 17th an exhibition of my photographs opened in Tokyo. It’s at the Minato Women’s Center.

Photographs form Women En Large, Familiar Men and Women of Japan are included. It’s part of a Gender Equality Forum whose theme is Women’s Health and Body image. The exhibition runs from June 17-29, 2008. It is curated by Fukazawa Junko.

I am delighted about the exhibition but unfortunately, I was not able to go to Japan for it. I wish I could have been there.

Professor Rebecca Jennison from Kyoto Seika University will give a lecture about my work at the Center on June 21 at 6:30 pm. Kotani Mari will be speaking with her.

I just received these photos of the exhibition from Fukazawa Junko.

Laurie and Debbie say:

We’ve been giving a lot of thought to Internet attacks. This post certainly stems from the WisCon events of three weeks ago, but the questions it raises are much more general.

One thing we are thinking about is the urge to respond when people are saying nasty and harmful things about you and yours. It seems to be a more-or-less instinctive response to want to hit back. In the recent unpleasantness, many if not most of the people with the strongest urge to hit back hard were male partners of people who had been attacked, but direct targets of attack and people who perceive themselves as part of an attacked community also often feel that way.

One kind of response is to attack back–a range that veers from “identify the attackers and make fun of them on the Internet” to death threats, with challenges to people’s blogs, livelihoods, etc. all being on that spectrum. While we really understand the motivation for these responses, they seem to be almost invariably counterproductive: they add fuel to the fires and encourage the trolls.

Another kind of response is to try to reach the attackers and explain, either to say, “You are just wrong and here’s why” or “Please don’t do this because you’re hurting people.” These are also both understandable and counterproductive: whatever else is going on in the minds of the attackers (see below for some speculation), it is clear that they are extremely well-defended against any logical or emotional argument, and providing them with facts revs up the feeding frenzy (calls for mercy rev it up even more). In this context, it’s interesting to note that the second round of attackers in the WisCon story had the following things to say to the original attacker when she asked them to lighten up because her boss was getting too many complaints. “If we could get that bitch fired/expelled it would be fucking riotous” and “You aren’t much higher on the social totem pole than the fat-positive omniqueer intergender pansexual transhumanists you were ridiculing” and “On the other hand, if you post tit pics we might reconsider” but “Only if you’re hot, like 8/10, 9/10 or 10/10, else we’ll make fun of you for being worthless as a woman and human being and troll you harder.” (In case you thought these aren’t body image issues, well, look at that.)

Also, much as it would be good if they were, trolls are not deterred by spamming their sites with irrelevant posts; it’s a waste of time and energy.

A constructive direct response, if it applies, is to get the offensive material taken down, and to use any methods at your disposal to take legal recourse. It won’t disappear (the web is archived) and it may not end the attacks, but at least it’s a concrete action with a useful result. Similarly, if you get your attacker(s) kicked off their ISP, they will find other email accounts, and it’s another concrete action with a useful result. Beyond that, Laurie evokes the response of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which was basically, “These people are ignorant, and we pray that God will give them wisdom.”

The responses that really matter, we believe, are not the responses to the attacker but the responses to the targets. This is a chance for a community to really pull together and use its power. The two goals that seem to be important are (first and always) direct support of people who are enraged and/or have been hurt. Especially when it’s the first time, people can be very vulnerable to direct attack: it can undermine our sense of reality, hurt us, enrage us, traumatize us, bring up old self-doubts, etc. (People experienced with receiving attacks from idiots, on the other hand, can often shrug them off as the garbage that they are.) The community can provide a place to use rage, soothe hurt, and shore up reality and self-image. Doing those things also gets the second goal moving: reinforcement of community values. Posting on your own blog about your own rage, why your community matters to you, and your support for people who were directly attacked may in fact feed the trolls, but not the same way going to their forums and interacting with them does. Lots of visible statements of the value of whatever the trolls are attacking will help as much as anything can. (Everyone should judge her own level of risk when inviting renewed attack, of course.) Since one effect of trolling is to distract the targets from their goals, using the trolls as ways to redouble efforts is powerful. What’s more, continuing to do what you’ve been doing, and what you believe in, always works better than anything else.

***

In the context of how to respond, Malcolm brought up a related issue. Trolls who get genuine responses that affect their Internet access or other aspects of their lives often say some variation of, “Hey! It was just the Internet! How can you be following me into my real life?” We love Malcolm’s answer, which includes:

If you are going to troll me here or in Real Life, keep in mind that here, the Internet, is already Real Life for me.

If I call your boss or your HR department or if I forward your crap you were stupid enough to put in writing and send to me over the Internet (thus violating interstate telecommunications laws), to the FBI or to your ISP, I will have done so because you used a Real Life communications device to send me a threatening or harassing message.

In my experience of the Internet, the Internet is not a playground. It is not a get out of jail free place where you can be a fucking idiot and expect to get off scot-free. There are no grace periods. There are no free shots. My Internet, which I grew up with, is a telecommunications device, just like a phone, just like a written letter, just like a telegram. It’s a communications medium whereby you and I talk to each other.

Who am I on the Internet? The same person as who I am in Real Life. That’s because the Internet, to me, is Real Life.

And I will treat it as such even if you may disagree. So consider this your fair warning.

***

Beyond direct response, the situations raise another kind of question. Trolling-for-trolling’s sake groups are not hard to find on the internet, not to mention Encyclopedia Dramatica, which is nominally a wiki devoted to undercutting political correctness, and effectively an exploration of the range between snarkiness and cruelty. Checking out the WisCon entry there will give you an excellent idea of what we’re talking about, and there are hundreds of other examples on that site. We’re very curious about who is doing real sociology/psychology work on this phenomenon and what they’re learning. Here are two key questions:

1) Do most of the people who participate in these forums express the same kind of sentiments in encounters that aren’t anonymous? Or are they more mild-mannered and polite when they expect to be identified (”in real life”) and save their vitriol for the net?

2) What draws people into these groups? When people leave, why do they leave and what do they say about it afterwards?

Finally, being the target of ridicule is often a sign that your power is growing. Remember what Gandhi said: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

(Thanks to Steven S. for the tag line.)

Laurie says:

My friend Ctein told me about a remarkable exhibition in San Francisco of the work of Jim Marshall, a truly iconic photographer of musicians. The exhibition at Gallery 291 includes 70 of Marshall’s prints, spanning a number of years. It runs through July 4th weekend.

There are portraits of many major jazz musicians including Thelonius Monk, Coleman Hawkins and Miles Davis. I’ve seen and heard many of the musicians that Marshall photographed, which enhanced my sense of the quality of the portraits.

{Thelonius Monk by Jim Marshall}

In rock and roll his photographs include Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. It also includes great country singers like Johnny Cash. This begins to sound like a laundry list of famous musicians. It would be easy to get caught up in thinking about who the famous people are in the pictures, but what’s amazing is the quality of art and the images.

The work that impressed me the most was a series of portraits taken in Mississippi and Kentucky in the 60’s. None of the people are famous, and the images are complex and wonderful. They are in the context of documentary social change photography, and while that can be either distancing or condescending–or both–Marshall’s work is neither. Instead, it is powerful, immediate, respectful and beautiful.

These same qualities are present in his portraits of musicians - particularly the jazz portraits.

The exhibition is called Marshall in Platinum. The majority of the prints are platinum prints printed by Chris McCaw. This is a marvelously detailed, tonally subtle form of printing that really enhances Marshall’s work, as do the beautiful color dye transfers printed by Ctein. Dye transfer creates a range of colors and tones that no other form of color printing attains. Both McCaw and Ctein are master printers.

If you’re in the area see Marshall in Platinum.

Laurie and Debbie say:

When we started this blog (wow, three years ago!), we wanted it to be almost always about body image, but interpreted as widely as possible. The links that have come in from readers and from our reading over the last ten days or so are an excellent sampling if what we meant by that.

Lizzie sent us this link to an obituary for Beryl Cook, a painter whose delightful work with fat images we hadn’t seen.

Her paintings, which fetch up to £40,000, document familiar social situations like girls on a hen night, in a disco or shopping, men in the pub, at a strip club or at the market.

She is credited with capturing ‘moments of social history, portrayed with a playful streak of naughtiness.

From there, it’s a pathetic jump to this story:

In this article about magazines that appeal to pre-teen girls, Toni Round, managing director of the youth and children’s magazine division at BBC Worldwide says, among other damning things:

“Around this age there’s very little that’s of interest to both boys and girls.” She doesn’t think that magazines drive this gender division - “It’s more deeply ingrained than that” - and believes the pre-teen magazines are just giving readers what they want. “There is a lot of pink,” she says. “But they respond to that. Girls do like these things.”

Then there is this absolutely superb keynote speech which Eli Clare gave at the Trans Health Conference in Philadelphia at the end of last month. It really is too good to excerpt, but here’s one taste:

I come to this gathering thinking about shame—that chasm of loathing lodged in our bodies, a seemingly impenetrable fog, an unspeakable and unspoken fist. Shame all too often becomes our home. … This afternoon I want to strike at the center, to talk directly about the raw, overwhelming mess that shame is: how it wakes us up in the morning, puts us to bed at night, whispers to us as we’re having sex, sitting in job interviews, pulling on our clothes to go out. Shame visits us in the bedroom and at the beach, in the medical exam room and at the therapist’s office. Shame lives in the mirror and the camera, and its impact is huge, ranging from low self esteem to addiction, from infrequent health care to suicide. This afternoon I want to talk about the ways in which shame inhabits our bodies and how we can resist that habitation.

Clare, who identifies as both genderqueer and disabled goes on to discuss the intersection between disability and trans, his passionate belief that nothing about him should be called a defect, and much, much more.

The scientists have also been active, this time demonstrating (with worms) “that the nerve messenger acts through independent channels to control whether you eat versus what to do with those calories once you’ve eaten them.” Or, in other words, how much a worm eats is not the only factor in how fat it gets. Good back-up data for what we already knew.

Here’s a very familiar story, more often told about women, but this time about a man:

For the last nine years, Christian Boeving has been a model for over-the-counter dietary supplements in Iovate’s MuscleTech division. Now the company is refusing to renew his contract after Boeving admitted on camera that his insanely toned body is not just the result of powders and potions–it might also have something to do with the steroids he’s been injecting since the age of sixteen.

The same site also posted this excellent interview with a fat female model who is taking on the whole fashion industry.

If people are only exposed to imagery of fat people as jokes in movies, TV, etc., then that limits our perception to degradation. So what then is the solution? Not to take the opportunity to proudly embrace my curves in a global venue? One must take advantage of these rare opportunities when presented by people who are willing to take the risk on you.

And let’s close with woofers, who takes fabulous self-portraits

There’s also fine text about masculinity and fatness at the link.

Links from Lizzie, Lynn Kendall, betsy, and more. Thanks for sending them, and please keep them coming.

Liz Henry says:

Kung Fu Panda is an animated movie about Po, a panda who gets laughed at a lot. He’s big, fat, and clumsy, and feels bad about himself. He doesn’t want to be a noodle seller like his dad. He wants to be a martial arts hero!

By accident, his dream comes true and he’s chosen to be the legendary Dragon Warrior, instead of one of his idols, the Furious Five. They laugh at him for being fat. His teacher Si Fun constantly beats him up to make him quit his training.

In one scene, Po explains that the brutal training and beatings are easy to endure, because they’re nothing compared to the pain he suffers every day being himself, as he says, “just being me”. As he speaks, his eyes roll downward while he sadly hefts his big stomach. It’s pretty clear he equates “me” with his fat body and that he feels a lot of shame. He also explains that when he’s upset, he eats.
The turning point in his training comes when Si Fun realizes that Po, motivated by a jar of cookies on a high shelf, does amazing acrobatic feats. They begin to train with food as a reward. Po does pushups over hot coals while trying to slurp noodles from a bowl of soup, and there’s an extended homage to Jackie Chan’s chopstick duel in Xiao quan guai zhao (Fearless Hyena), with Po and Si Fun battling over a bowl of dumplings.

Here’s the dumpling battle!

I couldn’t find the clip from Fearless Hyena. If anyone has it, please link from the comments.

At some point in Kung Fu Panda, I realized there was an expected narrative line where the hero would lose weight, become skinny, and then be happy and competent and respected — but that was not going to happen. Instead, Po becomes a kung fu master and the Dragon Warrior, while fat and fit.

The movie has a very clear message of respect for bodily differences. The Furious Five, a tigress, viper, monkey, crane, and mantis, all have radically different bodies. The mantis is notably tiny and fragile, and a great fighter. While there is a lot of humor and mockery based on fat jokes at the panda’s expense, he learns to believe in himself. He trains hard to become wise, fearless, and talented — not to lose weight. He becomes a hero, but stays a big fat panda.