Lynne Murray says: I have measured out my life in coffee spoons… T.S. Eliot was in his early ’20s and his spoons in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock probably meant something a little different to him than what I’m about to discuss. I was searching for information about fat-friendly children’s fiction when I [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: We knew we wanted to write about Toyota’s “Your Other You” campaign the minute we heard about it, but it took us a long conversation to tease out exactly what we wanted to say. The campaign is now past tense, for reasons we’ll get to in a minute. Basically, the premise [...]

Laurie says: I was planning to blog about something completely different, but last night I dreamed about Tee. She died three years ago in August and she’s been on my mind. I dreamed that she was still alive but quite ill and I was going to visit her.  I did visit her in Oregon several [...]

Debbie says: I was just cruising the Internet, looking for something interesting to blog today, but I didn’t expect this … Yahoo has apologized for its use of scantily clad lap dancers to entertain mainly male software developers and engineers in Taiwan last weekend. The Internet search company Monday acknowledged its politically incorrect step. “I [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: We’ve been thinking about the story of Alex Lange, which was in the news earlier this month. Alex is a four-month-old baby, entirely breast-fed, 99th percentile in height and weight. He’s a big boy. But in the cold, calculating numbered charts of insurance companies, he is fat. That’s why he is [...]

In 2006, I wrote a post here called “Fat Cat Fight” about a run-in I had with a fatphobic veterinarian over my big, shaggy, black cat El Nino, who had an abscess. When we arrived at the emergency pet hospital, the vet found that Nino, who most certainly has some Maine Coon cat somewhere in [...]

Debbie says: Feministing is a feminist group blog about which I have mixed feelings: they put up a lot of good stuff, they point out important issues, they pay attention to what’s going on and help me do the same … and at the same time, they’re frequently called out for being a home for [...]

Debbie says: As some of our readers know, Laurie and I (and our collaborators Mika Kobayashi and Rebecca Jennison) have been working for many months on a long, detailed article on “Body Image in Japan and the United States” for the online Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. The finished article is finally here! You don’t want [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: We’ve just discovered the work of Jennette Williams, who won the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. This prize is given to a photographer who has just published a first photography book, and the winner is selected by well-known photographer Mary Ellen Mark. Williams won for a book [...]

Marlene says: Last night, I went with my friend D to see the drag king show at a local queer bar. I wasn’t really expecting to get my dose of transphobic bullshit. Before the show, I met some of my friend’s friends. This included a really sweet young trans man who I wound up playing [...]