Tag Archives: fat-shaming

Men Making Women’s Decisions: In Person, In Sport, In Politics

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Laurie and Debbie say:
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We started with a story we found on Twitter. Here’s Meg Elison, author of (among other books), the highly-recommended The Book of the Unnamed Midwife:

Motherfucker comes to my table, unbidden. I assume he’s a waiter; he’s not. I’m having a drink and a snack. I look up and he’s got Fake Concern Face on. Without preamble he says, “If you took better care of yourself, you’d find somebody to love you.”

She shows off her wedding ring, gives him the finger and tells him to Leave Her Alone. But he can’t.

“I didn’t mean anything offensive by it. I just think we have these moments of clarity–“

I tell him if he needs to make a fat girl cry so he can have something to jack off to, then he better pay by the minute for it because there are professionals who provide that service. I am not one of them, and this is not an appropriate place to solicit me.

We’ve heard, and made, some pretty tough comebacks in our time, but this is one of the truest ones ever.

He still can’t leave, but she finishes him off:

He has the NERVE to “Namaste” me as he slinks out of this place where I was having a peaceful moment by myself. Friends, I yelled GO FUCK YOURSELF at his cringing back.

She also makes it completely clear that she was shaking and rattled, because she was verbally assaulted with no provocation. And you just know that guy went home and felt sorry for … himself. The best part is that he may never do that to anyone again.

He’s a small-time, basically trivial, example of a man thinking he both knows what’s best for a woman he doesn’t know, and that he has the right to interrupt her life to give her the benefit of his wisdom.

He matters for two reasons: first, because there are millions of him all over the country and the world, trying to make fat girls cry. Second, because he’s an individual example of wielding toxic societal power.

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Who do you think made the decision to turn down Castor Semenya’s appeal regarding women and testosterone in Olympic sports? The Court of Arbitration for Sport, which (if you can tell by names) is definitely majority male. They made this decision even though they know it’s difficult, if not impossible to implement. They also ruled that athletes who wish to compete in women’s events, but whose testosterone is over an arbitrary level, will have to take drugs to reduce those levels. The World Medical Association has urged its members in 114 countries not to cooperate with this:

We have strong reservations about the ethical validity of these regulations. They are based on weak evidence from a single study, which is currently being widely debated by the scientific community. They are also contrary to a number of key WMA ethical statements and declarations, and as such we are calling for their immediate withdrawal.

But again, men not only feel they can make decisions on women’s bodies, they are formally authorized to make those decisions, and they don’t have to respond to, for example, doctors who think their decisions are unsafe and unethical.

For some history on this controversy, read this post from about a year ago. We hoped things would get better after that.

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Ohio state representative John Becker, however, has managed to outdo both random San Francisco harassers and Court of Arbitration biased judges with his proposed “anti-abortion” bill. Ohio already has one of the most restrictive laws in the country (miserably superseded in the last week or so by Georgia’s indefensible law), but it isn’t enough for Mr. Becker, who wants to eliminate rape and incest exceptions, and also (while claiming this isn’t what he means) ban most forms of birth control. But then he completely loses touch with any reality:

The bill excludes treatments for ectopic pregnancies from the insurance coverage ban, which seems like a good thing—we should try to treat ectopic pregnancies!—until you realize that Becker’s notion of treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is fucking nonsense: “Part of that treatment would be removing the embryo from the fallopian tube and then reinserting it in the uterus so that’s defined as not an abortion under this bill,” Becker said.

The bill says the term “nontherapeutic abortion” does not include a “procedure for an ectopic pregnancy, that is intended to re-implant the fertilized ovum into the pregnant woman’s uterus.” Presumably, Becker envisions a world where doctors are trying to “fix” ectopic pregnancies by reinserting wayward embryos into the pregnant person’s uterus.

Except that’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.

“That doesn’t exist in the realm of treatment for ectopic pregnancy. You can’t just re-implant. It’s not a medical thing,” said Miracle.

Mr. Becker doesn’t, it would seem, know what a woman’s anatomy looks like, let alone what can and can’t be done medically, surgically, or even magically. All he knows is that “he’s no expert” but he is willing to try to convince his fellow legislators (most of whom are almost certainly men) that they all know what’s “right” and what’s “wrong,” and are more than proud of themselves for exercising their power on the living bodies of the women they feel compelled to control.

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Men aren’t going to stop tormenting women in restaurants, telling women whether or not we are women, or telling women what we can, or can’t, do with our own bodies, any time soon. So let’s all take up Meg Elison’s rallying cry and stand up against them.

 

Everything We Know About Obesity Is Still True

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copyright (c) Laurie Toby Edison

Debbie says:

When you’ve been doing the same activist work for thirty years and more, it’s hard not to be all “Oh, well, here we are again” when someone new comes out with a hard-hitting article that says all the things you’ve been saying for years.

At the same time, each of these new articles is fresh to the writer, and fresh to many of its readers, and makes a dent in the walls around your ideas. So after one deep sigh, I really welcome Michael Hobbes’ “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong,” published in the Huffington Post.

Hobbes starts with what he calls “scientific myopia,” a quick review of how hard it is to get scientists to step away from their dominant paradigm, and then goes on to make his key point: “Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.”

After that, the piece follows what fat activists will recognize as a familiar path: how much social prejudice against fat hurts people, how diets don’t work — I wish he had credited Gina Kolata’s 11-year-old landmark book, Rethinking Thin, which I reviewed as “old news” when it was published — and then gets to his first core point, which is that fat and health are not inextricably entwined. I see that every time I go to the doctor, and the medical tech is slightly surprised at my perfectly reasonable blood pressure, which goes hand in hand with my perfectly reasonable cholesterol numbers. However, Hobbes is good and clear on these points:

individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room.

He doesn’t mention the famous “nurses’ study,” which demonstrated that “moderately obese” people live longer than people whose weight is “normal” or “appropriate.”

Next on the roadmap of this kind of article is the issue of medical misuse and abuse, beginning with a profile of a fat victim. Again, Hobbes is clear-eyed and thoughtful:

Doctors have shorter appointments with fat patients and show less emotional rapport in the minutes they do have. Negative words—“noncompliant,” “overindulgent,” “weak willed”—pop up in their medical histories with higher frequency. In one study, researchers presented doctors with case histories of patients suffering from migraines. With everything else being equal, the doctors reported that the patients who were also classified as fat had a worse attitude and were less likely to follow their advice. And that’s when they see fat patients at all: In 2011, the Sun-Sentinel polled OB-GYNs in South Florida and discovered that 14 percent had barred all new patients weighing more than 200 pounds.

Hobbes gives lots of examples of how doctors misuse fat patients, and how they are taught to do so. None of it is new, but all of it is useful fuel for the fire. Then he goes on to the mental, emotional, and social toll all of this takes on fat people, again with real-life stories and useful statistics, and the obligatory quotations from therapists who work with fat patients.

The only place he goes off the rails is in his — often true — argument that

perhaps the most unique aspect of weight stigma is how it isolates its victims from one another. For most minority groups, discrimination contributes to a sense of belongingness, a community in opposition to a majority. Gay people like other gay people; Mormons root for other Mormons. Surveys of higher-weight people, however, reveal that they hold many of the same biases as the people discriminating against them. In a 2005 study, the words obese participants used to classify other obese people included gluttonous, unclean and sluggish.

Of course, this happens. But I personally know so many groups in which fat women gather to discuss our experiences, and to fight the system together, so many blogs, so many websites, so many meetups. I’m sad that Hobbes didn’t find any counterexamples to his theory, and I don’t think he looked very hard. I’d be curious about whether that 2005 study (which, by the way, looked at only 46 people!) would be different in 2018.

Then, he goes to some of the real scientific roots of both increased obesity and increased health issues which don’t relate to weight: issues of the food system. The only thing in the article which surprised me was his claim that people who eat nuts four times a week have statistically significantly lower diabetes incidence and lower mortality. More nuts for me!

And finally,

Our shitty attitudes toward fat people. According to Patrick Corrigan, the editor of the journal Stigma and Health, even the most well-intentioned efforts to reduce stigma break down in the face of reality. In one study, researchers told 10- to 12-year-olds all the genetic and medical factors that contribute to obesity. Afterward, the kids could recite back the message they received—fat kids didn’t get that way by choice—but they still had the same negative attitudes about the bigger kids sitting next to them. A similar approach with fifth- and sixth-graders actually increased their intention of bullying their fat classmates.

And here he does get to fat activism, although he still doesn’t seem to see that fat activism requires that fat activists like each other and work together. His fat activism quotations are mostly from a journal editor; I’d love to know how many fat activists he spoke to. I’m right here, and I’m hardly alone!

I salute Michael Hobbes for researching and writing this article. I hope thousands of people see it and lots of people share it and discuss it. And I long for the day when the next one of these isn’t in the pipeline somewhere, because the point has been made.

Follow me on Twitter @spicejardebbie . Thanks to @ribbonknight for tweeting this link out.