Tag Archives: BMI

Debbie says:

etta_candy

Etta Candy deserves an entire blog post of her own, but the only things I know about her come from Rob Bricken and James Whitbrook’s piece at io9:

Created by William Moulton Marston only an issue after Wonder Woman’s debut, Etta Candy appeared like she should be the heroine’s comic relief. She was a goofy cartoon character who loved candy (carrying it everywhere), and she shouted strange catchphrases like “Woo woo!” and “For the love of chocolate!” But if you thought for a second that Etta was merely a joke character, she would have quickly corrected you, probably by punching you in the face.

Lucy Davis will play Etta in the upcoming Wonder Woman movie. If she’s portrayed one-half as bad-ass and radical as she is in the panels Bricken and Whitbrook show, she will completely eclipse Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman — and I’ll be in line to watch her do it.

Laurie and I both blogged about the 2008 Newsweek cover showing Sarah Palin’s real (or nearly real) skin, and it’s interesting to see that people are still talking about it in the context of women running for office. Julia Baird takes it on in the New York Times:

The real question here is about perfection: the standards by which women are judged, and the seemingly ever-present, imposed need to airbrush the images of women. Even vice-presidential candidates. This is something we must ask if we want to shrink the too-long list of things that distract people from what women actually say when we try to speak in public.

Perfection is also at issue in the discussion of Zoe Saldana’s casting as Nina Simone . Samantha Cowan at TakePart examines the controversy:

A new official poster and trailer for the movie shows Saldana wearing a prosthetic nose and dark face makeup, reigniting the controversy surrounding the decision to cast Saldana as the titular character in Nina. Saldana has faced criticism since news surfaced in 2012 that she would replace Mary J. Blige—who had to drop out owing to scheduling conflicts—to play the High Priestess of Soul. Saldana addressed the situation in 2013, telling Allure, “It doesn’t matter how much backlash I will get for it, I will honor and respect my black community because that’s who I am.”

Saldana, who is of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, has alternated between saying that people of color don’t exist and identifying as a black and Latina woman. Regardless of how Saldana identifies, many believe the role should have gone to an African American woman—or at least a woman with a darker skin tone and features that more closely resembled Simone’s.

When everyone is talking about how people (but mostly men) use Tinder and its ilk for faceless sex, a completely different kind of anonymous sex designed for women is apparently a new craze in London. Dominique Sisley reports at Dazed:

The process is simple. You head to the class, strip off from the waist down, and lie across an unknown, fully-clothed man while he strokes your clitoris. The aim? A shared meditational experience, and “the deeply human, deeply felt, and connected experience of orgasm”. …

Although [orgasmic meditation] is mostly marketed towards “free, hip, powerful” women, TurnON Britain (the official UK branch of the movement) also offers classes to men who feel a “willingness and desire to know the feminine” – or in other words, guys who could do with a little more guidance in that area. As the course summary eloquently puts it, “learning how to handle her pussy is equally important as learning how to handle the rest of her. Imagine what would be possible if you learned to do both?”

Leaving aside the unfortunate choice of “handle” in that quotation, this sounds like something from the 1970s, come back in a new guise. The article says that tens of thousands of young Londoners are participating; I hope they’re having fun!

In a completely different aspect of human sexuality,  uterus transplants are now a thing, and a good thing.  The procedure is designed for women with uterine factor infertility (UFI). I can’t help but wonder if and when it will become part of the suite of trans surgeries, and change the landscape of how pregnancy relates to gender.

etta_candy_2

We have, of course, been railing about BMI for decades. I’m still fond of my description of it as “braindead, meaningless, insidious” from 2007. Premiere statistics and data site fivethirtyeight.com is jumping on the bandwagon with this article by Katherine Hobson. Hobson is  too focused on “waist circumference” for my money, and I think she’s still deep in the belief that fat is bad for you, however it’s measured. Nonetheless, she goes against the grain of journalists everywhere by ending with a fat-positive quotation:

There’s another camp that doesn’t care about finding a better measure of excess body fat at all but would prefer to move beyond metrics of extra fat. “Sure, waist circumference is better than BMI, but the focus on fat and on body size has done us a disservice,” said A. Janet Tomiyama, a psychologist at UCLA and first author of the recent International Journal of Obesity study on BMI and health indicators. “It’s thrown off the focus on actual health markers.” And, she said, it has contributed to a stigma against the overweight.

She’d prefer to see a strategy that focuses instead on changing behavior. “If you’re eating healthy, exercising and sleeping well, I don’t care how much fat you have,” Tomiyama said.

And in that context,  Hobson should read Linda Bacon on fat ambassadors, allies, and detractors. Sadly, Bacon wrote this column because of how hard Sarai Walker, author of Dietland, is finding her new life as a fat ambassador.  Bacon has nothing new to say about allies and trolls: she just tells the truth well and clearly.

… a message to those who persist in “concern trolling” about health: Recognize this: respect should not be contingent on health or health habits. Educate yourself. Weight stigma and discrimination are much more health-damaging than fat tissue can ever be. If you are truly concerned about the health ramifications of someone’s large body, be part of the solution, not the problem: show others respect and compassion, rather than shaming and blaming people for their weight or suggesting they change it.

Lisa Hirsch sent us the Sarah Palin link. Otherwise, all are links from my regular reading, which includes Feministe, Shakesville, Sociological Images,, Feministing, io9, and TakePart, along with other sources. No, I don’t know why the background of this post is black; it happened during drafting, and my html skills don’t seem good enough to fix it.

An Open Letter to Liz Dwyer at TakePart

Debbie says:

Dear Liz Dwyer:

You don’t know me.

I subscribe to TakePart.com’s newsletter, which I find very useful in keeping me informed about a variety of social justice issues. I’ve taken to looking for your byline, or finding that when I read an article I like about body image issues, your byline is there. I love your interest in the same kind of wide range of body issues Laurie and I write about here. I love how you call out body shaming, over and over and over.  But interspersed with these fabulous articles, many of which are so clear about how wrong it is to body shame anyone, including fat people, you still write articles like “The Five Shocking Facts About Obesity in America.”

Hint: There really isn’t an obesity epidemic in America (or at the very least, not one that reflects people eating badly and not taking care of ourselves). Being fat (especially if we lived in a world without fat shaming) is not a major health risk.

It’s time you cop to those facts, and write about them. I’ll give you some resources.

Let’s look at your five shocking facts:

1. More Americans are obese than overweight.

This paragraph is based on BMI, which I hope you know was invented by a statistician with no medical training. The distinction between “obese” and “overweight” which you are giving credence to is arbitrary, and makes no distinction between a weight-lifter with a huge amount of muscle and a person with a large amount of fatty tissue. And study after study shows that “overweight” BMI is the category with the longest life expectancy.

Overall, people who were overweight but not obese were 6% less likely to die during the average study period than normal-weight people. That advantage held among both men and women, and did not appear to vary by age, smoking status, or region of the world. The study looked only at how long people lived, however, and not how healthy they were whey the died, or how they rated their quality of life.

The study abstracts don’t say how “underweight” and “normal” fared, but they do say that what they call “Category 1 obesity” (BMI of 30 to less than 35) is effectively indistinguishable from overweight life expectancy, thus making the categories even more ridiculous.

2. Overall, more men than women are too heavy.

Well, statistically, men have larger bones and more muscle mass. So if you use BMI as your criterion, that’s an automatic likelihood. It probably means nothing.

3. If they’re heavy, women are more likely to be obese than overweight.

I take exception to “Of the ladies that need to drop some pounds,” especially given the life expectancy numbers above. Also, BMI remains meaningless.

4. Black Americans are the most obese racial or ethnic group.

5. Latino Americans are struggling with the scale too.

You invoke Black Lives Matter here (we could not agree more) and you also invoke poverty. You say nothing about genetics, and nothing about food deserts. Closer to my heart, you say nothing about how being shamed is bad for your health, how internalized oppression expresses itself through the body. Black and Latino people are oppressed in so many ways; fat people are oppressed in other ways. Black and Latino fat people face double oppression. Black and Latino/a fat women, trans people, gay people,  disabled people, or Blacks and Latinos in more than one of the above categories) face additional oppression. And the illnesses that stem from oppression are the illnesses we attribute to fatness: high blood pressure, cardiac issues, stroke, and so on. You are so very capable of connecting the dots; why don’t you connect these?

You close this article talking about soaring health care costs and make the oh-so-common, oh-so-unproven claim that diet and exercise are the solution. Do you really still believe in dieting? Have you read Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin? Do you know David Berreby’s amazing article about leptin and ghrelin?

Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. … Allison, who had been hearing about an unexplained rise in the average weight of lab animals, was nonetheless surprised by the consistency across so many species. ‘Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,’ he told me.

That article links junk food not just to calories but to calorie retention. This, of course, would put the burden of weight gain onto the corporate food industry. It’s so much easier to blame individuals, but you are better than that.

One more reading suggestion, one I haven’t gotten to yet myself: The Big Fat Surprise, by Nina Teicholz. The Wall Street Journal, hardly a radical publication, had this to say:

It is a commonplace in public-health discussions of obesity to warn that the search for “perfect” or “better” evidence is the enemy of good policy and that we can’t afford to wait for all the information we might desire when there is a need to do something now. Yet Ms. Teicholz’s book is a lacerating indictment of Big Public Health for repeatedly putting action and policy ahead of good evidence. It would all be comical if the result was not possibly the worst dietary advice in history. And once the advice had been reified by government recommendations and research grants, it became almost impossible to change course. As Ms. Teicholz herself notes, she is not the first to point out that saturated fats have been sinned against by bogus science; and yet, the supermarket aisles are still full of low- and no-fat foods offering empty moral victories.

Teicholz’s book is near the top of my to-read list.

So please, keep up your remarkable work talking about race and gender, body shaming, and other political issues. And please think about how to address the “obesity epidemic,” BMI, and the American (and increasingly global) diet. I promise; I’ll keep reading your work even if you don’t change your mind.