Lynne Murray says:

What is the diet talk blues? How is The Fat Studies Reader like a box of chocolates? How (and when) can a book rescue you? Bear with me and I’ll tell you.

Over the holidays in the dining room of an assisted living facility my friends overheard two elderly women at a nearby table discussing how they had gone off their diets during the holidays and needed to watch what they ate to get on track.

My friend said, “They’re in their late 80s, why can’t they just relax and enjoy their food?”

Her husband said, “They’re not talking, they’re singing together.”

His insight made me think about how ritualized diet talk is, even though it’s spoken rather than sung, it is much closer to song than speech and I realized a lot of the anxious and sorrowful feeling that holidays can evoke may be drowned by post-holiday diet talk.

People sing sometimes to cheer themselves up (I know I do) and rather than think about all the emotional issues some people sing the old familiar diet songs to reassure themselves. We all know the lyrics of these songs, not that the actual words matter much:

Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky,
Gotta diet
Since the holidays I’ve run riot
Seems like I’m falling way behind….

Apologies to Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler

Interrupting someone’s diet talk duet with a non-diet health suggestion would get you the same reaction you would get if you tried to strike up a conversation with people singing a duet. They would regard it as a rude interruption.

I also realized that these two elderly women were bonding by turning to a ritual conversation over the shared frustration of a virtually impossible task, which they have been conditioned to believe is essential.

Many, possibly most, people spend much more time exchanging highly ritualized verbal “songs” to themselves and others. The “gotta diet” talk often functions as a kind of social cement based on agreeing with the Hallelujah chorus of popular opinion that”fat is bad,” “losing weight is necessary” and “dieting makes you healthy.”

There are just a few windows of opportunity to accept new information before the songs become a substitute for thinking. Youth is one time when minds can be opened to think.

I hope to see more and more young people questioning the lies that have served us all so poorly. That spark of hope burned brighter when I heard about The Fat Studies Reader and Fat Studies conferences and programs such as the one at San Diego State University. Here’s a quotation from:

Advocates say the field reached a tipping point in 2006, when three national conferences addressed fat studies.
“It’s a field that believes all people should be treated with respect, regardless of body size,” said Esther Rothblum, a San Diego State University professor who is considered a leading scholar in the field….

“People are suffering terribly due to weight prejudice,” said Sondra Solovay, a San Francisco attorney who co-edited The Fat Studies Reader. “Weight prejudice can mask many other forms of prejudice that we already consider to be undesirable,” Solovay said, noting that many employers discriminate against heavy people who are also minorities, lesbians, women and elderly. “What difference does a number of a scale make when we’re talking about civil rights?”

Here’s one more reason I rejoice to see The Fat Studies Reader and fat studies being taught at colleges and universities–scholarly folks (and students who want to get good grades) will actually read the research that backs up each essay. Reading footnotes is like varsity sport in higher education and critical thinking is their job.

When university scholars stop, read the footnotes and actually think about scientific data and things like the sociological and psychological effects of prejudice, they can present the evidence to their students and encourage them to think as well.

Footnotes are optional for those who, like me, only occasionally read them. John Barrymore is famous for saying that reading footnotes was like going downstairs to answer the door while making love. However, I found a link that suggests it may have been Noel Coward who said that. They may both have said it–and this link, the computer equivalent of a footnote is optional

The irrepressible Marilyn Wann, who wrote a rousing Foreword to The Fat Studies Reader, told me the book is “Like a box of chocolates, each one has a different yummy filling.” Okay, I wasn’t taking notes, I do recall that she said “yummy” it’s the kind of word I could imagine her using. But if she didn’t say it, I will. Thought-provoking and yummy. A rare combination

Aside from civil rights issues, medical myth-busting, access and gender-related issues, The Fat Studies Reader also delves into popular cultural portrayals of fat people in books, movies and television. Other essays describe unique challenges faced by fat people in employment, dating, health care and out on the street in real life in a wide range of social contexts.

It’s a very accessible book, sometimes entertaining, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes enraging. I love that the Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran’s 1973 Fat Liberation Manifesto is included as Appendix A!

See what I mean? Like a box of chocolates, and yet strangely empowering.

Debbie says:

I am completely in love with Prof. Susurro’s Black History Month project at Like a Whisper.

Every day, she’s bringing us mini-biographies of black women, including (so far) Melba Tolliver, the first black woman to anchor a network news channel’ Lou Jing, half Chinese, half African-American actress in China; Josefina Baez, a street theater and stage performance artist, Afra-Latina from the Dominican Republic; Marisa Richmond (pictured below), an African-American transwoman who holds public office in Tennessee; and Aud L. M. Secard, a Haitian business owner and Haitian rights activist in Chicago. I knew a little about Tolliver, nothing about the others.

But that’s not all. On February 2, Susurro wrote about “Why the Blog Celebrates Black Herstory Month”:

When we, N. Americans as a nation, discuss Black her/history, I think we often shrink it down to key figures in moments that ultimately celebrate dominant narratives. In other words, instead of highlighting the long term struggles of groups across time, we pinpoint leaders and events that tend to highlight what a good country the U.S. is for abolishing slavery or embracing civil rights or making millionaires at of illiterate former slaves, etc. And even women’s history is guilty of this dominant construction of the past in which black women working on traditional women’s rights issues are highlighted over those who are thinking intersectionally about them or whom the movement abandoned for causes that expressly abused or otherized black women and their rights. The exception to this rule is often the canonization of a handful of fiery speakers who came in direct conflict with society from a place of extreme rage, Turner, Malcolm, Sojourner, etc. And I would argue that while most of these people came through the rage of daily dehumanization to use the power of what they learned to change the world, the narratives surrounding them often stop and start at the moment they are raging, reinforcing dominant stereotypes about who black people are and how they communicate. You can see the same day in the spikes this blog gets on the rare occasion I lose my temper on the blog rather than the years of writing that address women’s issues from an analytical and historical framework

Participating in BHM then is less about conforming to compartmentalization that permanently otherizes black his/her/story but rather takes a moment in time when people who would otherwise not consider us are doing so and uses it to educate about the women and girls, critical moments, unsung movements, collective action, and ongoing needs of black women and girls that are otherwise ignored even in February. For me, as long as black women and black women’s history is largely absent from daily discourse, refusing to take hold of this moment and shape it in the hands of black women for the interests and advancement of knowledge about us is a mistake. Silences surrounding our herstories will ultimately be filled not by us but by those who claim we are always tangential without our corrective voices. Worse we lose our collective power to not only celebrate groundbreaking black women everyone already knows about but also to insert the names, voices, and moments that so many do not. For me, BHM is critical intervention that occurs in a concentrated form to bolster existing year-long commitments to address women of color not a capitulation to the idea that all of black history can be & should be addressed in the shortest month of the year.

There’s more. Read it all.

Just in case that’s not enough, Susurro also found time to poke at Vanity Fair’s February feature on “Young Hollywood,” showcasing a group of (don’t tell me you’re surprised!) white actresses. Susurro gives us pictures and short bios of thirteen young actresses of color. I hope (against hope) that the folks at Vanity Fair are paying attention.

She’s a fabulous writer, she does good work all year round, and this is a particularly wonderful series. So don’t miss a day. I won’t.

Thanks to onyxlynx for the pointer.

Laurie and Debbie say:

(crossposted to FWD/Forward)

Following up our post here and at FWD/Forward late last year about “disability and aging,” we’ve been thinking about the phrase “temporarily able-bodied,” a mainstay of disability community language which we’ve both been using for 30 years or so.

In Annaham’s Disability 101 post on this blog, she says:

“AB” is an abbreviation for able-bodied; “TAB” is a slightly more to-the-point abbreviation meaning “Temporarily Able-Bodied.” TAB refers to the inevitable—namely, that most of us will face disability at some point in our lives; whether it comes sooner or later varies depending upon one’s circumstances.

We have the highest respect for the use of TAB and “temporarily able-bodied.” Using it is a way for a disability activist (or anyone discussing disability) to quickly and effectively bring all of her/his listeners into one group: some of us are disabled now and many of us will be sooner or later. It’s a phrase that builds community, that reminds people that the needs of some are really the needs of everyone. It’s akin to “universal design” as a phrase reminding us of what brings us together, rather than what separates us.

At the same time, like any catchphrase, it’s oversimplified. Disability is not inevitable. Only two things are always temporary: life, and youth. Everything else is conditional, contextual, and/or statistical. Definitions of ability/disability are exceedingly complex; even definitions of “aging” are less obvious than they might immediately appear.

Ability is not always temporary. Two large groups of people are able-bodied until they die: first, those who age able-bodied (not just 90-year-old hikers but also people over 80 who walk to the grocery store every day and clean their own homes). Second, and harder to see, are the people who die able-bodied at any age. In a culture that tries not to admit that people die at all and is especially resistant to admitting that young people ever die, it’s important to remember that death and old age are not synonymous. And, of course, disability is not always permanent either: the world is full of people who are temporarily disabled.

To return to our catch-phrase, “temporarily able-bodied” is often used as a reminder that disability can come to any person at any time, that you can wake up able-bodied and go to sleep disabled, just as you can wake up alive and never go to bed again. In this meaning, it’s both true and useful. But it’s also used, somewhat more sloppily, as a prediction: you, the individual I’m talking to, will not always be able-bodied. And among the things that are disturbing about that usage is that it encourages the cultural conflation of “disabled” and “old,” so that people in their 30s or 40s who are in some kind of body pain say they “feel old,” when what they feel is pain.

We’ll both keep using “temporarily able-bodied” in conversations about disability. And in those conversations, when we have the time and space to elaborate, we’ll explain how we’re not using it.

Laurie says:

I’m back from Boston and more or less recovered.  Leaving again much too soon.

In October, I saw a Luo Ping exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  I was very struck by his abstract cherry blossom ink drawings.  Trunks almost abstract with sometimes precise but very stylized blossoms. This image of his work is close in feeling to what I saw. (Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find something more precisely like what I saw.)

This is a photo of a jewelry commission that I made, which his images inspired. I started working with these watch parts in small ways about 6 months ago.  Working with antique beads in steampunk designs.  There was something about their precise symmetry that was very inspiring, probably because I usually work with far more organic shapes. Then I started slowly using them in my lost-wax sculpted work.

This sculpted cherry tree pendant was clear in my head almost as soon as I saw his drawings.  Then making it took a very long time.  It required a lot of very precise carving. I was fortunate that it was commissioned within a week of my conceiving it.

The piece is silver, bronze, marcasite, and rubies. Image is about twice actual size

Debbie says:

I’m not so much of a comics fan, though I delve in here and there. That makes it a little harder for me to fully appreciate the fun people are having recasting basically white comics with actors and actresses of color. You can find some of the high points here, with links to lots of others.

Even comics semi-illiterates like me know Spider-Man, of course. I don’t know Danny Pudi’s work, but this pic by st_aurafina makes me want to.

And since this kind of meme never stays in one place, Marion, who blogs as entwashian did a casting of most of the major characters from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, a show I do know reasonably well:

Among lots of others, we have Gabrielle Union as Buffy:

and Rosario Dawson as Faith:

But I like my choice for Rupert Giles. This is Michael Potts, who plays Brother Mouzone on The Wire.

Obviously, this game is lots of fun, and the possibilities are endless. Poke around on the links: you’ll find everything from Star Trek to Harry Potter.

I wish we could have the fun without the message behind the fun, but the two are inextricably intertwined. Most of this work is done by people of color who are damned hungry to see themselves in the fiction, comics, TV, and movies they love. Laurie and I talk all the time about making the invisible visible: this is a new medium for doing that. Here’s to the day that it’s completely unnecessary!

Debbie says:

I wish I wasn’t surprised by this breaking news about Whole Foods. Sadly, I think we’ll see a lot more of this kind of wrong-headedness in the next couple of years. Which means we have to be as clear, as vocal, and as convincing as we can to stem the tide.

Whole Foods will offer steeper employee discounts to people with lower BMIs.

If your BMI is above 30, you’ll get to keep the original 20% employee discount, but you’ll paying more than your thinner co-workers, who can knock as much as 30% off.

Don’t miss John Mackey’s letter to his employees at the link. Some of you may remember Mr. Mackey for his especially nasty, wrong-headed, and elitist screed against health care reform last summer. Well, now that it looks like he’s going to get at least some of his way, he’s got fish to fry closer to home.

I don’t have to remind Body Impolitic readers that BMI is a bullshit measurement that means nothing, do I?

I already don’t shop at Whole Foods, because I care about union issues. Also because, as Anna at Jezebel puts it so well at the link above, I don’t need to pay $37 per organic oyster mushroom.”

I know three people who work at Whole Foods. Two of them are a couple, which is amusing, because the wife’s BMI is way over 30 and the husband’s is way under. So they can save money by having him do the shopping. The other is a man whose BMI is also over 30, so he’s out of luck on the discounts.

Anna nails it at the end of her post:

“If public health research has taught us anything, it’s that reducing people’s buying power totally makes them healthier. Stay classy, Whole Foods.”

Laurie and Debbie say:

In the United States, the trappings of Orthodox Judaism are only familiar in a few large cities and a few particular neighborhoods of smaller cities. If you live in New York City, or St. Louis Park, Minnesota, or parts of Palo Alto, California (to name a few), you’ve probably seen Orthodox Jewish men praying with their “phylacteries” or “tefillin.” Otherwise, you might not recognize this ritual.

Debbie has clear memories of her grandfather putting them on every morning.

The level of terror pervading our airplanes makes us less than surprised that a young man who put these on last Thursday on an airplane caused a stir and some fear.

To … the flight attendant it looked ominous, as if the young man were wrapping himself in cables or wires.

And in a time when in-flight thinking is colored by the brutal knowledge that passengers have hidden bombs in underwear or shoes, she told the officers in the cockpit.

The pilot decided to divert the Kentucky-bound plane to Philadelphia. In less than 30 minutes it was on the ground, police officers were swarming through the passenger cabin, and the Transportation Security Administration was using terms like “disruptive passenger” and “suspicious passenger” to describe the boy.

This plane left from New York’s LaGuardia airport, which means that even if the flight attendant had never seen tefillin, many passengers certainly had. Diverting the plane to Philadelphia instead of Louisville is an over-reaction; aiming guns at all the passengers (including the polite young man who put on the phylacteries, and his sister) and handcuffing them both to take them off the plane is a gross over-reaction.

Why does this matter? First of all, because it is inconceivable that this would have happened to a passenger with a rosary, even a big rosary as potentially dangerous as the phylacteries. This is partly because the U.S. is a predominantly Christian country, but more because rosaries are familiar: those of us who don’t see them in our everyday lives see pictures of them on the Web, at the movies, on the news. (Inexcusably, pictures of anything Arab or Muslim-related, or even things we inaccurately think of as specifically Arab or Muslim-related, such as a turban, are common, but they are almost invariably shown in a negative light, so they reinforce fears.)

It’s absolutely not in the mass media’s interest to minimize fear: fear sells. But if they wanted to make us feel better and not more scared, they could make a point of showing pictures of unfamiliar religious materials, being used by pious people who pose no threat to anyone around them. Never going to happen.

Another reason this is important is that this young man’s community has taken the cultural fear into their own hearts. All of the responses by religious Jews are about how he showed bad judgment: “You can’t expect the whole world to know what this ritual is all about,” said his rabbi. “Nobody would have assumed it would create panic,” he said, “but in today’s environment, I guess everything creates panic.” A religious New York politician said “you might as well strap yourself with hand grenades.”

Doing anything exotic or unfamiliar on an airplane is going to push everyone’s buttons, and lead to over-reactions. On the other hand, accepting it as the way things are reinforces the silent presumption that it is also the way things should be.

We think the way things should be goes like this: In the more than eight years since 9/11, there have been many false alarms on airplanes and very few real ones, all of which were dealt with without loss of life or major danger to planes or passengers. In that same period, there have been hundreds of incidents where innocent people were harassed or worse because of perceived dangers. In this light, TSA employees and flight crew should be taught to give passengers the benefit of the doubt:

“Excuse me, sir, what is that you’re putting on?” (this is what she apparently did say)
“It’s religious. I’m an Orthodox Jew and this is how we pray in the mornings.”
“Thank you. That’s interesting to know.”

And then she could ask to see them, and this young man who is described as “as docile as you could imagine” would have handed them over. She would then see that they were leather. She could have asked other passengers if they knew what these were.

We can never be 100% safe. So let’s use good sense, and everyone’s knowledge, to decide what’s dangerous.

Debbie says:

In a New Year when Haiti was devastated (yet again), this time by a huge earthquake, the Democrats threw away a sure thing (yet again), and the Supreme Court asserted that corporations are more important than you and I (yet again), it’s not too surprising that Michelle Obama’s choice of a new cause didn’t get too much pixel attention. But here at Body Impolitic, we feel compelled to notice that First Lady Obama is formally taking up the torch of the nonexistent “epidemic of childhood obesity.” Yes, yet again.

Calling obesity an epidemic and one of the greatest threats to America’s health and economy, first lady Michelle Obama said Wednesday that she would launch a major initiative next month to combat the problem in childhood.

2010: It’s just like 2009, except less original.

First things first: there is no epidemic of childhood obesity. Yes, I know you’ve read about it in hundreds of articles, seen it on dozens of billboards, had thousands of office or street-corner conversations about it. Nonetheless, the emperor (or perhaps the First Lady) has no clothes.

Here are the 2008 numbers, an 8,000-person study published in the highly respected Journal of the American Medical Association:

Results Because no statistically significant differences in the prevalence of high BMI for age were found between estimates for 2003-2004 and 2005-2006, data for the 4 years were combined to provide more stable estimates for the most recent time period. Overall, in 2003-2006, 11.3% (95% confidence interval [CI], 9.7%-12.9%) of children and adolescents aged 2 through 19 years were at or above the 97th percentile of the 2000 BMI-for-age growth charts, 16.3% (95% CI, 14.5%-18.1%) were at or above the 95th percentile, and 31.9% (95% CI, 29.4%-34.4%) were at or above the 85th percentile. Prevalence estimates varied by age and by racial/ethnic group. Analyses of the trends in high BMI for age showed no statistically significant trend over the 4 time periods (1999-2000, 2001-2002, 2003-2004, and 2005-2006) for either boys or girls (P values between .07 and .41).

If that’s too many numbers for you (it’s right on the edge of what I can follow), here’s the paper’s conclusion:

Conclusion: The prevalence of high BMI for age among children and adolescents showed no significant changes between 2003-2004 and 2005-2006 and no significant trends between 1999 and 2006.

Oh, and if this wasn’t enough, 1999-2000 is when they changed the growth charts to reflect BMI, a completely useless measurement:

But the growth charts underwent a significant change in 2000 which has made them even more controversial. The new charts, issued by the CDC in May 2000, were based on BMIs, rather than weights and heights. … What didn’t make the news and few parents may know is that the new BMI-based growth charts meant children’s percentile on the growth curves changed. With the new charts, nearly two-thirds of children were suddenly at higher percentiles, with greater discrepancies among shorter children.

So even if kids are too fat (which they aren’t; keep reading), it’s not an epidemic, because it’s not growing.

Second, and perhaps more important, if there was a childhood obesity epidemic, none of the standard plans to counteract it have the least effect.

The U.S. Preventive Service Task Force, which reviewed nearly 40 years of evidence on screening and interventions for childhood and adolescent overweight — some 6,900 studies and abstracts … concluded that there is no quality evidence to support that overweight or obesity in youth is related to health outcomes or predicts fitness, blood pressure, body composition or health risks. The USPSTF found insufficient evidence to recommend routine screening for overweight in children and adolescents as a means to improve health outcomes. It did, however, note potential harms of screening programs. According to the USPSTF Childhood Obesity Working Group, no scientific review has been able to find quality evidence that any program to reduce or prevent childhood obesity — no matter how well-intentioned, comprehensive, restrictive, intensive, long in duration, and tackling diet and activity in every possible way — has been effective, especially in any beneficial, sustained way. Nor has any program been able to demonstrate improved health outcomes or physiological measures, such as blood lipids (“cholesterol”), glucose tolerance, blood pressure or physical fitness. Nor has any diet or exercise intervention in children been shown to lead to better health outcomes in adulthood. Not only did the USPSTF find no evidence to support the effectiveness of counseling for healthy eating in young people, it also found no evidence to support low-fat diets in children and, instead, found growing evidence for harm.

(If you click the link to the findings, be warned that the abstract is *ahem* not representative of the study’s findings. See “The Faith Sentence.”)

In a nutshell: the First Lady has picked a mythical cause which, even if it were real, supports no evidence of a problem, and no approach to the non-problem that has ever shown the slightest effectiveness.

Just think about the things she could be focusing on.

I think I’ll send a somewhat politer version of this post to her in a private letter.

A million thanks to Sandy Szwarc at Junk Food Science, where all the facts I need are always in one place. And Lynn Kendall was first with the pointer.

Marlene says:

I posted a little while ago about Dorian Katz’s panty chain-letter project. When I wrote it, I said that there had been no decision as to what would become of the panties. Now (at least some of) their fate has been revealed.

Thursday was the opening reception for the Stanford University MFA program first year student show. The show included The Panty Chain by Dorian Katz. Your panties may have been nailed to the wall. I know mine were.

In my earlier post (linked in the first paragraph), I talked about being uncertain of what was or was not comfortable or appropriate or too sexual or too personal about sending one’s panties to strangers. The same kinds of uncertainty persist in the work, with the addition of uncertainties between fine art and folk art, public and private, reputable and disreputable, and I’m sure plenty more.

Responses to the work varied. One viewer asked the artist if “the piece also functions on an olfactory level.” That’s as high-falutin’ a way as there is to say “Hi, can I sniff your panty collection?” Unfortunately (or fortunately), any scent tends to dissipate after a few days.

The installation featured a donation box and much fun was had by all as a few brave souls peeled off their panties in the middle of the gallery to drop them in the box.

Dr Carol Queen, author of Exhibitionism for the Shy, making a panty donation.

The text of the letter was rendered in the form of a giant pair of gold panties.

Individual pairs of panties had portraits made, often with other content related to the donor.

A group of postcard size drawings representational of the ones sent to folks who donated panties to the project were also on display.

Unfortunately, the lavender color Dorian painted onto the forty feet of gallery wall for her display makes color photography challenging. Please forgive the oddly gray pictures. (The first two photos are by D. R. Alfonso.)

While many things are going on in this work, on multiple levels, one thing always stands out to me about Dorian’s work: there is a fearless truth to it. She is expressing attitudes and ideas and experiences of her personal life and her community in a way that is completely unashamed. That might sound like a simple thing, but I think it is incredibly important.

All of us who are involved with the politics of bodies or gender or sexuality or most kinds of outsider status are fighting against shame. We are constantly facing fat-shaming, slut-shaming, outright attacks on the ways we define our very existences, hateful caricatures of any feature that might differentiate us from others, and a range of negative messages about ourselves that is so broad and pervasive that I have trouble naming them all. We are told we are dirty and ugly and unlovable. Sometimes, to see someone standing up against it all with a smile on her face is more powerful than all the analysis and theory and unpacking of cultural tropes that can ever be written. Apparently, sometimes all it takes is a bunch of dirty panties.

This is not the end of Dorian Katz’s panty adventures. If you have not yet gotten around to sending your panties and would like to, it is not too late.
Dorian Katz
PO Box 20461
Stanford, CA
94309

The show is up until February 21 at the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery, open Tuesday through Friday, 10 AM–5 PM, and Saturday and Sunday, 1-5 PM. Admission is free. The Gallery is located in the Stanford campus, off Palm Drive at 419 Lasuen Mall. Parking is free after 4 PM and all day on weekends. Information: (650) 723-2842, http://art.stanford.edu.

Lynne Murray says:

SJ at I, Asshole pointed out this link. It’s a news story about a dating service “for beautiful people only” that recently purged its site of 5,000 or more people who had posted pictures of themselves looking unacceptably fat. Presumably candid holiday shots. The Telegraph article quotes:

Robert Hintze, founder of BeautifulPeople.com, said: ”As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld.

”Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”

According to the site, managers have been kind in breaking the news to former members. Each is said to have received an email encouraging them to re-apply when they are back to looking their best. They have also been sent details of recommended boot camps.

Oh, goody, boot camps! Surely any pain is worth enduring just to be able to meet and who knows, maybe date, those wonderful people who have such full lives that they are able to spare the time to go on a fat witch hunt and prune the undesirables from their ranks.

All this self-righteous intolerance reminded me of the social underpinnings of Frannie Zellman’s Fatland, a novel in which fat people who do not meet mandatory legal guidelines are incarcerated in “Pro-Health Re-education Program” prisons. In, Fatland, irate fat people flee hatred and discrimination to establish a new country.

But what are these 5,000 excluded people really missing over at Beautiful People?

Here’s how the landing page describes their site:

Do looks matter to you, when it comes to selecting a partner? Do you want to guarantee your dates will always be beautiful? No more filtering through unattractive people on mainstream sites. Meet beautiful people locally and from around the world – now.
Attend exclusive events and private parties

Did I miss something, or does this sound like an escort service come on? I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that these are all (or mostly) amateurs looking for love in a particular kind of package.

Lovable? Well, let’s see–vicious, judgmental, arrogant and self-centered, the kind of person guaranteed to make you miserable. These beautiful bozos are living proof of the “beauty is skin deep” theory

Coincidentally, I read this news story just after reading an essay that somehow seemed oddly appropriate, “Fat Women as “Easy Targets: Achieving Masculinity through Hogging” by Ariane Prohaska and Jeannine Gailey, in The Fat Studies Reader.

“Hogging” is a practice in which men prey on women they deem fat or unattractive to satisfy sexual desires or compete with their peers. Hoggers, a self-imposed label, are groups of men who hang out at bars or parties and try to pick up fat women for sex or make bets with their friends about who can pick up the fattest or most unattractive woman.

Am I the only person who sees the same hatred, just expressed in a slightly different way?

Excluding people while looking for online dating matches is not necessarily a bad thing. Fat people are routinely told, right in the profiles of many online daters, not to bother communicating. When I engaged in online dating years ago, I would always search for ‘BBW” or “fat” in hopes of finding a fat admirer. (This happened once or twice.) But mainly the profiles that would pop up after the search would be men specifying “NO BBWs or fat women” so that no one fitting those descriptions would send them a message. I was just as glad to know because some of these people seemed as if they might be worth emailing and I was glad to know in advance not to waste my time.

Somewhere out there I am sure there are “Aryan Match dot com” dating sites that purge would-be daters who post candid Christmas pictures showing them linking arms with people of color. And no, I did not look for such sites, I would bet money that they exist but I wouldn’t want to see them or give them even one mouse click of web traffic.

So what do I think about the people so ignominiously kicked off the “I’m Beautiful and You’re Not” dating site? It’s a little hard for me to understand why someone would join such a site to begin with, so it’s hard to speculate on what they’ve lost by getting kicked off.

I’ll take out my novelist’s crystal ball–i.e., I’ll extrapolate from real life what I think might be happening. My theory is that many of the people who got kicked off joined the site during a post-diet honeymoon phase, in the flush of weight-loss triumph. “Now I can sit at the cool kids’ table and date beautiful people, because I am one of them.”

I’ve always thought dieting should not have simple Before and After pictures. There should be a truth in advertising requirement to post: Before Diet, One Year After Diet, Two Years After Diet, and Five Years After Diet (same as “Before Diet” but older).

So in my imaginary Beautiful People reject scenario, the successful dieter begins to regain weight (as you probably recall, the odds are 98% in favor of this happening within five years). But our newly beautiful person hasn’t yet realized how fragile their Beautiful People status is and so does not “get” what disgust will be kicked up by posting a fun candid picture to share with all those beautiful new friends.

Let me say it directly to the person who experienced it, who will probably never read this, but it’s worth a try:

“Those are not really your friends, my dear. They are there to criticize you, maybe to compete with you, or maybe just out of sheer bitchery, they get you kicked out.”

The question is, what to do about it. Maybe you’ll reframe this as “a wake up call” and desperately diet in an effort to once again reach the heights of shallowness.

Or maybe, just maybe, you’ll see exactly the unattractive nastiness hiding under those so-called beautiful exteriors and look for some friends and possible mates who value other people by the content of their character rather than the number on a tape measure or scale.

If the people who got kicked off this site were really looking for love, I think they’d have about the same chance of finding it with the abusive louts in that hogging gang as with that other group of self-centered, proud-to-be-weight-bigots who describe themselves as “beautiful.”

Imagine the amount of pain such a person could inflict on you if you accidentally got married during the lower weight dips in the diet yo-yo cycle. How wonderful to have them right in your own living space where they could attack you in person for any pound gained thereafter!

Oh, and by the way, beautiful people–yeah, I mean you–you’re getting older every day. Age-phobia exists as well as fatphobia. Enjoy.